LessWrong as social catalyst

I got a job via an internship via LW, and definitely lots of friends. Louie and I made online contact via LW, and he convinced me to intern with SIAI, and later I was offered a paying job there.

I made a good friend via LW private messaging. Together we started the Ottawa LW meetup group.

I use LW as a social networking device more than anything else.

• I got three jobs through the LW community, through a mix of job postings here and social networks, the succession of which has pretty much raised me from poor/lower class to middle class.
• The vast majority of my romantic partners since getting involved with rationality are through the LW community, often met at meetups or through related social networks.
• Almost all of my friends are through the rationalist community, especially if you expand that to include some of the related atheist networks.
• I've hosted two LWers when they were visiting the city I was in, and an internet acquaintance who only knew me through the atheist/rationalist community recently hosted me when I was visiting NYC.
• I'm currently looking for a rationalist apartment-mate (let me know if you're in NYC and interested! (and clean))

Everyone's posting evidence for this, which is great and LW is awesome, but I'm also interested in any rebuttals of the sort like "I expected it to hugely change my social life but it didn't really"

In particular, for me:

• I found out about CFAR from LW and attended a CFAR workshop
• I've attended a couple of meetups in the bay area
• I found out about 80000 hours, GiveWell, MIRI, and effective altruism in general, which has been a large force in my life
• I've met many interesting people working on many interesting things in spheres that I care about

Declaring pseudo-Crocker's rules...

Not soon after I found out about LW, I expected to e.g move into a rationalist community, immerse myself in the memespace, etc. But there's a distinct qualitative difference that I feel when I'm hanging out with my friends whom I've met from other more prosaic circles (house parties, friends of friends, college, etc) than when I'm hanging out with people at the meetups I've been to and even the CFAR workshop. I find it hard to really connect with most people I've met through LW in a way that gives me the fuzzywuzzies, even though many of us share similar values and are working towards similar goals.

Yes, my friends are stoners, entrepreneurs, weirdos, normals, hot people, people-probably-more-concerned-social-status-than-LWers, whatever. Some of them know about LW and are familiar with rationality concepts. But I just have a really fun time with them, and I haven't had that in my experiences so far with LW people. I suspect (at the risk of sounding insulting) that there's a difference in social acumen and sense of humor or something. I honestly found some of my social experiences with LWers kind of alienating.

Please note I'm not drawing a hard and fast line here, (and obviously there's a selection effect) but I'm just curious if anyone else has had the same experience.

At first I saw this and I was like "meh". But now, looking back, I feel like I could not be more thrilled with how much of a social catalyst LW has been for me.

In ascending order of importance...

...After writing "A Critique of Leverage Research's Connection Theory", Geoff Anders reached out to Skype with me. It was cool to meet him, and this eventually turned into me stopping by Leverage House for a day. Not much came out of that, but it was cool.

...After cross-posting "Why Don't People Help Others More?" on LW, I was reached out via PM by Giving What We Can. They had started a new blog and wanted to know if I'd be a volunteer writer. I said yes. Based on large part by this remote volunteering, I received a summer internship with them, where I met numerous important contacts in my life. This all started from one post on LW.

...After cross-posting "Initial Thoughts on Personally Finding a High-Impact Career", I received a lot of useful advice. But I also received a PM from a user who offered to mentor me in learning programming. Later on, through his help and advice, I've received a job in his company that I will start this summer after graduating. I went from unexperienced programmer to job-haver all because of him, and, by extension, LW. I'd very likely be working in a worse career if not for LW.

I was made aware of my current software job (it's a Quixey), which is infested with LW people, through LW. Two years ago I moved to the Bay Area to work at it and now most of my meatspace social circle is rationalist sort of people and I am dating one too. I am not super duper thrilled about this lack of intellectual diversity in my world, but it seems like a path of least resistance, and I am pretty happy for now.

I consciously thought of LW and applied the outside view in a job interview at a famously selective company when asked how confident I was of my correctness on a question. I gave a much lower answer than I otherwise would have. I got an offer. In the meeting where they explained the offer, my ability to realize what I don't know was cited explicitly as a key positive. I took the job, it being my best offer at the time.

• Did work for CFAR as the result of one of the old Skill of the Week posts (named a skill, requested designs for exercises)
• Went to CFAR workshop, subsequently worked for CFAR for a year (and volunteer now, when I can)
• Hosted Yvain at my house when he was doing his med interviews (meeting him in person for the first time)

I have acquired through Less Wrong online contacts without in-person meetups first the following:

• Roommates
• A job as a Fellow at Singinst back when it was called that
• Beta readers for fiction; audience for same
• Friends

I have also hosted couchsurfers about whom I knew only that they were "some manner of subculturey".

With in-person meeting between the rationalism and the formation of relationship: Basically all of my in-person friends who I currently see on a regular basis are rationalists (albeit principally for geographical reasons), as are all my romantic partners and what I think amounts to a majority of my exes at this point. There's a rationalist choir now (let me know if you want in, especially if you sing soprano or alto) and it meets at my house. I have at least 95% convinced Eliezer to officiate my wedding as long as I don't make him write the ceremony too.

• Went to CFAR.
• Several friendships (including current roommate) from the local LW meetup.
• Met quite a number of people visiting other meetups while traveling for business or family reasons.
• Hosted a LWer visiting Austin for SXSW.

• Almost went into business with a few LWers 3.5 years back. Didn't, but kept strong contact with one of them, he ended up founding a startup, I connected him to a high-profile presentation venue (and possible investors)
• Switched to a better group at my previous job via a reference from a LW reader
• Got good advice about my current job via a LW contact

At the moment, "friend" is probably too strong a word, but I've had a very meaningful connection with someone I met through the LessWrong-sphere over Skype. I've discussed something with them that I hardly talk about with anyone.

I also believe I have a standing invitation to have a drink with someone in Israel who I've met on the /r/HPMOR subreddit.

I got a couple of job offers from people who knew me through my online activities.

My online interaction with the Singularity Institute led to my collaboration with them.

I was introduced to a potential customer by someone I contacted, whom I knew only through their online presence.

For Singularity Summit 2012, I got some generous couchsurfing offers and ended up staying at Vassar's place.

(There was some minimum F2F time for some of the above, but everything got started online, and the great majority of interaction was not F2F.)

I got a frequent LessWrong contributor a programming internship this summer.

Location: Vancouver, Canada

I was introduced to Less Wrong by a long-time friend who had been reading the website for about a year before I first visited it. Over time, I've generally become more integrated with the community. Now, a handful of my closest friends are ones I've met through the local meetup. Also, with related communities, the meetup does a lot to give presentations between people, and facilitate skill-sharing, and knowledge bases.

I know that several of my fellow meetup attendees also made great friends through the meetup. There has been at list one instance of two of them becoming roommates, and now a few of my friends are trying to put together a 'rationalist house' this summer.

For those not in the know, a 'rationalist house' is a group home based around intentional meatspace communities that have risen around this website, so as to create a better living environment where new domestic norms can be tried. There are several in the Bay Area, at least one in Melbourne, probably one in New York(?), etc...

The founder of our meetup, who doesn't visit this website much anymore, but is generally in contact with the meetup otherwise, made connections with a successful financial manager who more-or-less became a mentor for him. Based upon the mentor's advice, this friend of mine is now trying to launch his own software company.

Several of us from the meetup have attended a CFAR workshop, including myself, and my friend who introduced me to Less Wrong has done continually ongoing volunteer work for them for the last year. As a result, we've become friends, and acquaintances, of much of the rationalist community in San Francisco. Additionally, a few of my friends have been spurred involvement with other organizations based in the Bay Area (e.g., YCombinator, the MIRI, Landmark). He also started an ongoing swing dancing community in Berkeley while he lived there, because memes.

Less Wrong introduced my friends, and I, to the effective altruism community, which infected a few of us with new memes for doing good, spurring at least one of us so far to have donated several thousand dollars to organizations, and projects, like the global prioritization research currently being jointly executed by the Future of Humanity Institute, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.

For the sake of their privacy, I'm not posting the names of these individuals, or their contact information, directly here on the public Internet, but if you'd like to get in touch with them to ask further questions, send me a private message, and I can put you in touch with them.

The results of this could be made into a LessWrong sucess stories post, which might then be used for outreach e.g. in handouts or as part of the meetup manual - if the commenters agree to that.

I've found a couple of software development internships through the bay area LW network, lived for a few months in housing shared with other LWers, and made lots of friends. Also my current startup cofounder.

Weak evidence so far, but then I'm active only for half a year:

• I got specific advice for community building (LW and Giordano Bruno foundation) from someone I met on the Berlin community event,

• I was coach surfing host for two inter-meetup guests who approached me via email purely based on my LW posts. This led to very interesting discussions but not more yet.

No, it hasn't at this time.

(I fear that your post will generate a lot of positive bias.)

Online stuff:

I have several friends in the DC area who I met because I made this post.

I found my job because I applied to a CFAR workshop, and that led me to attend the Effective Altruism Summit instead (funny story there), which is where I first met the team I work with.

Phil and Eliezer have critiqued my fiction, and I've done the same for Phil and Vaniver.

Meatspace stuff:

I met about a dozen good friends in Boston through LW meetups and lived with several of them before I moved to SF.

These days, my primary social group is maybe 50% self-identified rationalists and 100% people who are serious about existential risk and laugh at jokes about fundamental epistemology.

About 50% of my day to day friends are LWers. All 3 of my housemates are LWers. I've hosted Yvain and another LWer. Most of the people I know in SF are through LW. I've had a serious business opportunity through someone I know via LW. I've had a couple of romantic interests.