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Louie comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong
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It's damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn't think mundane work was trivial, we'd get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".
As another example, I've had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do "anything" or "whatever helped the most". SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it... therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I've personally asked over 100 people to help with it.
I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren't engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.
General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you'd see instead are "no experience necessary" job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.
(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)
Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn't "oh, this is too mundane", but rather was "wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that "computer people" know how to do. Not something for me. I don't have the knowledge or skill-set"
With payroll taxes and insurance, I would expect this to cost at least $12000 a year.
Good point! I would still say it is worth it, though.
SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it's zero-sum. You're competing against all the other people doing SEO.
This is probably less relevant for "technological singularity" than it is for, say, "cheap air fare."
How many people who aren't already familiar with SIAI search for "technological singularity"?
Probably quite a few. Wikipedia records roughly 2,000 daily readers for that article; someone already familiar with SIAI probably isn't going to be going there thinking 'what was that "singularity" thing again?'
I don't know.
I do know that SIAI thinks "technological singularity" is a search string it's valuable to SEO for, since it's on their list of search strings to SEO for.
In principle, “good” SEO is not entirely zero-sum: it improves the quality of search results, by making sites, and pages within those sites, which are relevant to the user's query more likely to show up in results than irrelevant sites and pages, and the results for those pages to be more clear about what they’re about.
Successful SEO is zero-sum to the degree that it is done by sites competing against each other which are fungible to the searcher, as TheOtherDave hints. There's also a lot of advice and offers for doing this sort of SEO because that's where the perceived money is.
There's making your site look good (to the search engine), and then there's making your site be good.
Not really. The link-building tutorial page Louie links to at the Singularity Volunteers site contains several examples of link-building tasks that require little experience:
The other pages linked at the bottom of that page provide lots of other examples.
Also, Louie is entirely right about this:
I've spent enough time cleaning rooms and moving boxes and furniture and so on at Singularity Institute (including an entire day just last week) that I could have written and published 1-3 more papers by now if I hadn't done any of that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people get the idea that mundane work is "trivial."
If you want to do mundane tasks for me so I can write more papers on Friendly AI like this one, please contact me: luke [at] singularity.org.
Props to John Maxwell for being the latest person to actually do something mundane and high value for me, freeing up my time so I can work on an intelligence explosion book chapter tonight.
Have you thought about studying the persuasive and motivational arts in an attempt to increase this batting average? I'm always fascinated how watching videos by Internet marketer Eben Pagan makes me want to buy his stuff, forgetting the fact that I could probably get comparable knowledge from much cheaper library books. Sometimes I wish all of the advice I read came in an Eben Pagan format.
For what it's worth, I just submitted Less Wrong and its articles to 2 subreddits, 3 link directories, and Hacker News... and now I'm resting easy in the knowledge that I've saved trillions of future lives in expected value. (Only mentioning this in case anyone else is interested in saving trillions of lives, of course. Reddit is probably a good place to start, especially if you already have an account; my reddit submission rate is throttled severely.)
See what I tried to do there? ;)
I suspect the first step is to transition from blame-oriented language to opportunity-oriented language.
Ok, I've added you to joeant and "rateitall" directories. You were already in dmoz, and IPL2 is no longer taking submissions. The other ones don't seem as appropriate: thegoodwebguide is UK-only, craigslist requires you to post something that's more like an ad, and the others are blogrolls and "local business directories" - which singinst is not (neither local, nor a business).
Let me know if there are other, better lists of directories to which you should be submitted.
joeant submission has been approved. It'll appear in the directory when the weekly update occurs. I also added a link in the sidebar of my blog which occasionally gets a surprising amount of linkjuice... might as well spread the love around :)
Hello,
Is it too late to volunteer for SEO work? I have no experience with the subject. However, for the brief future, I will have a good amount of time.
Is SIAI putting any money towards hiring an SEO company? If SEO is really that valuable, it seems it should be worth putting some money toward.
I agree that intelligence is not needed to make useful contributions. However...
I doubt this. Standardized tests are common (tests for CTY, SATs, etc.), and usually include percentiles. If you see "99.9+%" enough times, you'll notice. And 1 in 10,000 is a lot. (400 college friends) × (5% of people smart enough to go to your college) = not enough people for a 1 in 10,000 person to know anyone brighter than they are.