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gjm comments on LessWrongWiki User Pages Underutilized; Tag Proposal - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 23 April 2014 09:50PM

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Comment author: JoshuaFox 24 April 2014 03:29:00PM 1 point [-]

That's a good user page! I may modify my own accordingly.

I predict distinctly limited takeup for this suggestion, though.

Why is that? You think that people are not interested in the whole "networking" idea? That they are too shy? That they want to form connections but are simply too busy to fill out yet another profile on top of Facebook/LinkedIn/etc?

Comment author: gjm 24 April 2014 04:09:27PM 6 points [-]

I'm not sure I have anything so well thought out as any of that, but I think I think that ...

  • Most people will usually not actually do anything that seems like it'll take more than 10 seconds, unless they see a very definite benefit.
  • "Business networking" is a vague enough benefit that it usually won't suffice to outweigh that.
  • The benefits of an LW user page for that purpose (on top of ordinary LW conversations + things like LinkedIn) are far from clear. Or, indeed, for other purposes. ** Suppose someone reads your LW posts and thinks "This seems like a smart chap. I'd like to hire him / use him as a consultant / do business with his employer / ...". Or "This seems like someone interesting. I'd like to be his friend / meet up with him / have sex with him". They can already send you an LW private message, or reply to one of your comments. What real gain is there from having more information on your user page?

That doesn't mean there's no benefit to having good user pages -- but I think the benefits, such as they are, only come once there are enough good user pages that there's a general expectation that if you've seen someone possibly-interesting on LW it's worth checking out their user page to find out more. So making a good user page is a bit like cooperating in a prisoners' dilemma, except that it has a lot more than two players and most of them need to cooperate for any benefit to accrue. (So more like what Hofstadter called Wolf's Dilemma.)

Comment author: JoshuaFox 24 April 2014 04:39:14PM *  1 point [-]

Yes.

Networking through LW will take off, it it does, after a few people find specific value from it: a better job, an employee, a cofounder. Or, beyond business networking, they might find a romantic partner; or an apartment-mate.

This does happen in F2F meetups. But it does seem that the online community could also provide some valuable matchups. Let's see if one of these approaches makes that happen.

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