May, 2025
You find more of what you talk about. This has been one of the most obvious but extremely late realizations for me. I think it took so long to realize because the normal model of finding things is that you look for them and ask people about them. In real life, if you're looking for a good plumber, you ask people about plumbers. In no world, the best way to find a plumber is to talk frequently about plumbing. But the model is very different online and especially for finding people who share similar interests and obsessions. If you directly ask about people who are really good at their understanding of plumbing, you'll get a lot of people who think they have a good understanding of plumbing. But the overlap of those who think they're good and those who actually are is very little. So you just end up with people who have a bad understanding of something but think they have a very good understanding of it. Which is a very bad set of people to get honestly. You could try asking for people's referrals for the person they know with the best understanding of plumbing but if you don't know the first person's level, you won't be able to tell at what level the person they referred is either. The only way that seems to work for finding someone on the internet with a good understanding of plumbing is to talk about things in plumbing that require a good level of understanding in plumbing to grasp. Do not go to AI conferences in the hope of finding them. The weird thing with conferences is that people most people attending them are there not because they are working on something related to the topic but because they want to find other people who are. I once made the mistake of trying to find book readers by starting a book club. The idea was I wanted to find people who read non-fiction books and I figured a book club will have some people who read non-fiction. Not one did. Most were aspiring readers and some were there as a social activity while some were only there to find people to date. What worked instead was talking publicly about the books that I liked. Even found one person who had read my favourite book (which is ironically a fiction book but I count it more of as a philosophy book.) So, if you want to find people with similarly niche interests, talk about those niche interests on the internet. If you want to talk to people with a deep understanding of a topic, say something that can only be understood by someone with a deep understanding of the topic. If you want to find people who are interested in comparing AI models, you should share a comparison of AI models. I kind of once knew this rule but I had forgotten it. I played a lot of street cricket until 7th grade. And street cricket had a cold start problem where you would need to find enough kids available to have two teams. And if I went looking for individual kids (this is before most people had internet including me) the chances that the ones I went to could come out were low because someone would have tuition and someone's parents would not let them. On the other hand, if I just got one other kid and we started playing, in about 30 minutes we would have more people than we could play with.
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