This is a nice service you’re offering, but aren’t there platforms to do this that would be more effective, more useful to a wider audience and for a longer time than a LW thread?
If you’re doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you.
What constitutes relevant? I’m always looking to work smarter, not harder.
If you want to donate work to the LW community, go for it. I’m not going to send you anywhere else. But I think some kinds of requests should be sent elsewhere. Why should you put effort into supplying journal articles when people could go to r/scholar? (though trivial inconvenience—I don’t have a reddit account) Also, it is more likely that libgen is harvesting r/scholar than this thread, increasing the value of contributions there. Moreover, I suspect that a high volume of such requests will discourage other kinds of requests; I’m glad that so far this year does not look like last year.
I guess “relevant” depends on what kind of help you want. If you just want a journal article that someone can download in under a minute “relevant” is going to be fairly broad.
If you want someone’s help proofreading a paper you wrote, the definition is going to me more narrow as that requires more work.
Just model the people on Lesswrong in your mind and ask: “Do I think they would want to help here?”
If the issue is relevant in a way that would embarrass you, you are probably good enough at modelling this community to avoid asking.
As asking is generally quite low cost, it’s not the end of the world if you do write a request that on the edge of being relevant and nobody wants to help.
If the issue is relevant in a way that would embarrass you, you are probably good enough at modelling this community to avoid asking.
Surely you mean “irrelevant in a way that would embarrass you”? If it’s embarrassing but relevant wouldn’t it be advisable to a) suck it up or b) PM someone or post under a sockpuppet or whatever, if it’s really that bad?
This is a nice service you’re offering, but aren’t there platforms to do this that would be more effective, more useful to a wider audience and for a longer time than a LW thread?
What constitutes relevant? I’m always looking to work smarter, not harder.
I’ve considered other places, but haven’t seen anything. Also, I specifically wanted to help people working on lesswrong type topics.
Relevant means working on some lesswrong type topic that you might share with the broader community.
If you want to donate work to the LW community, go for it. I’m not going to send you anywhere else. But I think some kinds of requests should be sent elsewhere. Why should you put effort into supplying journal articles when people could go to r/scholar? (though trivial inconvenience—I don’t have a reddit account) Also, it is more likely that libgen is harvesting r/scholar than this thread, increasing the value of contributions there. Moreover, I suspect that a high volume of such requests will discourage other kinds of requests; I’m glad that so far this year does not look like last year.
I guess “relevant” depends on what kind of help you want. If you just want a journal article that someone can download in under a minute “relevant” is going to be fairly broad. If you want someone’s help proofreading a paper you wrote, the definition is going to me more narrow as that requires more work.
Just model the people on Lesswrong in your mind and ask: “Do I think they would want to help here?” If the issue is relevant in a way that would embarrass you, you are probably good enough at modelling this community to avoid asking.
As asking is generally quite low cost, it’s not the end of the world if you do write a request that on the edge of being relevant and nobody wants to help.
Surely you mean “irrelevant in a way that would embarrass you”? If it’s embarrassing but relevant wouldn’t it be advisable to a) suck it up or b) PM someone or post under a sockpuppet or whatever, if it’s really that bad?