gwern comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 December 2011 06:01AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2011 04:18:48AM 11 points [-]

Volunteer tasks? I wasn't aware you (I'm assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?

Or maybe they're just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .

Comment author: gwern 17 December 2011 04:29:45AM 9 points [-]

http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities Less engaging and visible, yes. I was going to quote http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/ back at Eliezer, but I don't think he's actually surprised, just lamenting the phenomenon.

Comment author: Bugmaster comment score below threshold [+] (2 children)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2011 06:30:42AM 3 points [-]

Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it's generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn't just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven't actually read the guides linked on that page, so can't comment on them specifically.)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2011 10:48:20AM 0 points [-]

Given that they're searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn't it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines' (rather than human minds') algorithms.)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 December 2011 09:00:45PM 1 point [-]

I wouldn't say so. For one thing, there's a substantial overlap between "business people" and "the general population," especially the portion of the general population that's likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.

A lot of "white hat" SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what's actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .

Comment author: Bugmaster comment score below threshold [+] (1 child)

Comment author: wedrifid 17 December 2011 07:18:26AM 6 points [-]

Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but "Perform Search Engine Optimization" (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?

SEO is rudimentary marketing. The analogy is absurd.

Comment author: gwern 17 December 2011 08:41:54PM 6 points [-]

Especially in our case - we do so little SEO that all the low-hanging fruit for us is white-hat SEO, SEO which genuinely helps people like adding references to Wikipedia and whatnot.

gwern comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong

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