It doesn’t require you to know the right people, it requires you to expend effort to determine the right people, and then to convince THOSE less-busy people that the referral is valuable.
For many, they have assistants or employees who perform this as an actual task—filter the volume of contacts and handle most things, escalating those that warrant it. That’s great. For others, this is more informal—they have other communication channels like LessWrong, or twitter, or social network meshes, and you can get their attention by getting the attention of any of their friends or posting interesting stuff on those channels.
Either way (or ways in between and outside this), it uses the community to signal value of communication between individuals, rather than only discrete per-message signals that ignore any context.
Basically, there are two cases:
1) the recipient will want to talk with you, but doesn’t know it. In this case, you need to show that you’re interesting, not that you’re interested. Spending money isn’t interesting. Being interesting to people around me is interesting.
2) the recipient won’t care, even after reading. In this case, money may compensate for their time, but probably not and it doesn’t get you the attention you want anyway. A useless reply isn’t worth their time nor your money.
Note that I’m assuming you’re talking about trivial amounts of money (less than full-time equivalent pay for their time), and for more than a trivial form-letter response to collect the bounty. I’d be very interested in a SINGLE concrete example where any amount of money is a good value for both parties who wouldn’t otherwise connect. Ideally, you’d give two examples: one of someone you wouldn’t respond to without your $5, and one of someone who’s not responding to you, who you’d pay $X to do so (including what X you’d pay and what kind of response would qualify).
After some more thought, I think my main objection is that adding small amounts of money to a communication is a pretty strong NEGATIVE signal that I want to read the communication. I want to read interesting things that lead to more interesting things. The fact that someone will pay to have me read it is an indication that I don’t want to read it otherwise.
It doesn’t require you to know the right people, it requires you to expend effort to determine the right people, and then to convince THOSE less-busy people that the referral is valuable.
For many, they have assistants or employees who perform this as an actual task—filter the volume of contacts and handle most things, escalating those that warrant it. That’s great. For others, this is more informal—they have other communication channels like LessWrong, or twitter, or social network meshes, and you can get their attention by getting the attention of any of their friends or posting interesting stuff on those channels.
Either way (or ways in between and outside this), it uses the community to signal value of communication between individuals, rather than only discrete per-message signals that ignore any context.
Basically, there are two cases:
1) the recipient will want to talk with you, but doesn’t know it. In this case, you need to show that you’re interesting, not that you’re interested. Spending money isn’t interesting. Being interesting to people around me is interesting.
2) the recipient won’t care, even after reading. In this case, money may compensate for their time, but probably not and it doesn’t get you the attention you want anyway. A useless reply isn’t worth their time nor your money.
Note that I’m assuming you’re talking about trivial amounts of money (less than full-time equivalent pay for their time), and for more than a trivial form-letter response to collect the bounty. I’d be very interested in a SINGLE concrete example where any amount of money is a good value for both parties who wouldn’t otherwise connect. Ideally, you’d give two examples: one of someone you wouldn’t respond to without your $5, and one of someone who’s not responding to you, who you’d pay $X to do so (including what X you’d pay and what kind of response would qualify).
After some more thought, I think my main objection is that adding small amounts of money to a communication is a pretty strong NEGATIVE signal that I want to read the communication. I want to read interesting things that lead to more interesting things. The fact that someone will pay to have me read it is an indication that I don’t want to read it otherwise.