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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Anyone here have experience hiring people on sites like Mechanical Turk, oDesk, TaskRabbit, or Fiverr? What kind of stuff did you hire them to do, and how good were they at doing it? It seems like these services could be potentially quite valuable so I'd like to get an idea of what it's possible to do with them.
MIRI has hired an artist, an LW programmer, and probably some others on oDesk. One person I heard about pays $1/hr people on oDesk to just sit with him on Skype all day and keep him on task.
That's pretty useful. I would definitely be interested to hear what works best and how such arrangements affect productivity.
I have used Fiverr to hire a professional voice actor to read short messages. For small scripting jobs or Photoshop work, I have always found reddit's r/forhire subreddit useful.
I've hired TaskRabbits for the following tasks, with the following levels of success:
Drive me from DC to Baltimore and back the next day - perfect & cheap
Assemble a Superintelligence owl costume and deliver it to me on the same day, with just a picture and a suggestion for the method - perfect
Pick up laundry from my back porch, have it washed, dried, folded, and return in in boxes - perfect
Make me an Anki flashcard deck for some faces and names from a business's Our Team page - perfect
Data entry - Good, though slow
Find me a good haircut place and style - meh
Find Toastmasters clubs nearby, schedule times for me to sit in on a meeting - okay, did most of it but the calendar invitations they sent me were in the wrong time zone so the times were off.
Find me a Rolfer - tried, but people didn't return their calls. However, I had immediate success when I made calls myself, so I have to wonder how hard they tried.
Assemble furniture, put privacy window film on windows - furniture ok, windows no
Pack and mail a bunch of books - nope. Took books, brought them back. Cost me time.
Experimental economists use mechanical turk sometimes. At least, were encourage to use it in the experimental economics class I just took.