Upvoted for an interesting idea that feels promising. I’d be down to try this experiment, though an hour a day feels like a large time commitment (and regular commitments like that are harder for me to maintain, since my schedule varies wildly).
Proposed alternative:
Once per week you receive an email with a link to a scheduling tool (something like Doodle), where you input your availability for that week. You’re matched with a random partner who has overlapping availability, and you both get an email with the date/time, and a link to a video conference room (perhaps using appear.in) where the call will happen.
I’m uncertain how long the call should be. An hour is not super long, if it’s the only call you’ll have with that person, but people might balk at a longer call. It could be configurable, but also choices are bad.
It would likely be good to have a fairly concrete set of suggestions for what to do on the call. Maybe something like a few minutes of introductions, followed by something like pair debugging? Or if the goal is more about networking, maybe prompts like “share what you’ve been thinking about lately” or “what are your most important goals?” would be good.
I could see value in staying in touch with your partner over email or something for a period of time after the call, but I’m not sure exactly what that should look like, and simplicity is good.
You are correct ― scheduling is a problem. Perhaps we can get around that by building something like Omegle but with only rationalists in it. It shouldn’t be too hard to hack together something with WebRTC to create some sort of a chat room where you are automatically matched with strangers, and can video chat with them.
In her recent post about working remotely, Julia Evans mentions donut.ai as a slack plugin that randomly pairs members of a slack channel for discussions.
LessWrong also has an existing slack channel, I don’t know if it is active ― I sent a private message to Elo on the old LessWrong to get an invite. It was created in 2015, back then only way to join was an email invite ― but now it is possible to get an invite link.
If I get an invite, I’ll try to convince Elo to install the donut.ai plugin and tell him to give out an invite link. I was about to create a new slack channel, but I remembered this relevant xkcd.
I agree that an hour a day is a large time comitment. I couldn’t agree to spend an our of my time on this project. I would prefer a smaller time increment by default. For example, calls could be multiples of 15 minutes with participants able to schedule themselves for multiple increments if desired. I’m sensitive to your point that choices are bad, but peoples’ schedules will be so widely varying that being able to choose if you want to talk for 1,2,3, or 4 intervals during any given week would allow this to reach a much wider group.
To your point that we should have a concrete set of suggestions for what to do on the call, agendas are essential.
Upvoted for an interesting idea that feels promising. I’d be down to try this experiment, though an hour a day feels like a large time commitment (and regular commitments like that are harder for me to maintain, since my schedule varies wildly).
Proposed alternative:
Once per week you receive an email with a link to a scheduling tool (something like Doodle), where you input your availability for that week. You’re matched with a random partner who has overlapping availability, and you both get an email with the date/time, and a link to a video conference room (perhaps using appear.in) where the call will happen.
I’m uncertain how long the call should be. An hour is not super long, if it’s the only call you’ll have with that person, but people might balk at a longer call. It could be configurable, but also choices are bad.
It would likely be good to have a fairly concrete set of suggestions for what to do on the call. Maybe something like a few minutes of introductions, followed by something like pair debugging? Or if the goal is more about networking, maybe prompts like “share what you’ve been thinking about lately” or “what are your most important goals?” would be good.
I could see value in staying in touch with your partner over email or something for a period of time after the call, but I’m not sure exactly what that should look like, and simplicity is good.
Thanks for your input!
You are correct ― scheduling is a problem. Perhaps we can get around that by building something like Omegle but with only rationalists in it. It shouldn’t be too hard to hack together something with WebRTC to create some sort of a chat room where you are automatically matched with strangers, and can video chat with them.
We do have a Discord channel. Given that Discord has video chat it would be a straightforward place to ask people for video chatting with rationalist.
There’s also the Lesswrong study hall that provides existing video chatting between rationalists:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Study_Hall https://complice.co/room/lesswrong/interstitial
In her recent post about working remotely, Julia Evans mentions donut.ai as a slack plugin that randomly pairs members of a slack channel for discussions.
LessWrong also has an existing slack channel, I don’t know if it is active ― I sent a private message to Elo on the old LessWrong to get an invite. It was created in 2015, back then only way to join was an email invite ― but now it is possible to get an invite link.
If I get an invite, I’ll try to convince Elo to install the donut.ai plugin and tell him to give out an invite link. I was about to create a new slack channel, but I remembered this relevant xkcd.
I agree that an hour a day is a large time comitment. I couldn’t agree to spend an our of my time on this project. I would prefer a smaller time increment by default. For example, calls could be multiples of 15 minutes with participants able to schedule themselves for multiple increments if desired. I’m sensitive to your point that choices are bad, but peoples’ schedules will be so widely varying that being able to choose if you want to talk for 1,2,3, or 4 intervals during any given week would allow this to reach a much wider group.
To your point that we should have a concrete set of suggestions for what to do on the call, agendas are essential.