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Comment by de_nied | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes, asking a question is not possible unless you personally find someone (or someones) qualified to answer it. Rather, you'd pick up a book and/or watch some YouTube videos regarding the subject. Then you can brainstorm and bruteforce attempts at understanding the topic until you finally achieve some level of comprehension of whatever it is you're trying to learn.

So most of this would boil down to RTFM, except it would be in published academic books or videos of "experts" discussing it. It would be up to you to define what an expert is. Choose carefully.

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>asking a question is not possible unless you personally find someone (or someones) qualified to answer it.

Ah, so we're at this old problem again (The you-need-to-know-the-right-people-problem). That didn't take long. How do I find experts that care about problem?

May seem pedantic but it’s important to add some framing here:

How do I find experts that care about helping a person they have no connection to with a problem for no reward?

There’s lots of easy to access experts on every subject, however, you’re asking for their time for free: that’s a very different proposition.

If you’re happy to pay, just tweet or post on LinkedIn asking for an expert and offer to compensate them fairly, you’ll have offers in no times.

I’d argue the problem is not that the forums are gone, it’s that people aren’t looking to help for free when there’s so many other ways to put value out into the world — better run a podcast about your favourite subject than answer emails about it.

You're right, but it's also not quite as dire as you make it. Experts generally speaking are vulnerable to nerd sniping. The key is to have an interesting problem to ask them about. (The definition of "interesting" is going to vary from expert to expert, though.) If you have that and you can find a place where they congregate, they will be eager to give you an answer. Not so much in order to help you, but in order to satisfy their own curiosity or demonstrate their own knowledge.

(concurring, not arguing) I've certainly learned more from a curated set of podcasts than I ever did spending too much time on forums.

First, spend decades building a big enough network to encompass every possible skill. Then, ask your question. It sounds like a coy dismissal, but it's true. You either spray and pray on public forums, or you build your own collection of someones who know someone.

>Dude, just turn old

In all seriousness, I can't believe that we still haven't solved this. Crazy advanced social media but no workaround for the "networking problem". No, not gonna suggest we need a "productivity social network" or another meetups.com but could our existing social medias at lest be somewhat biased towards promoting content that connect people over common interest in the real world? Why can't they? (The answer is obvious).

Tech can help, like with CRMs and email, but I don't expect to see a total fix in my lifetime. 40+ years into the personal computer era and we still don't have anything that does the legwork. ML is the latest thing to make those promises, and I'm not betting on it doing better than I can before I'm too old for it to matter. I don't plan to wait for some digital savior to fix a human problem.

Let's say I'm one of the few worldwide experts on X. Some random person on the internet wants to ask some questions about X. Sure, I've got time for them.

100 people on the internet want to ask me questions about X? No, I don't have time for that. (Yes, a few experts do. Emphasis on few.)

1000 people on the internet want to ask me about W and Y, which are kind of close to X, and about V and Z, which are farther afield, and want to rant to me about Brazilian jiu jitsu, and Yemeni politics, and time cubes, and how everything is Henry Kissinger's fault? I'm out. I'm changing my email and only giving the new one to people I trust.

At that point, if you want to ask me about X, you need to be one of the people that I've built up trust with over the years, to the point that I'll trust you not to abuse my email address.

So the problem becomes: How do we put (at least some) honest, interested seekers in connection with a few bandwidth-limited experts, without opening the floodgates?

I loved this[0] article by Sabine Hossenfelder, about her experiences working part-time teaching physics one-on-one to cranks and amateurs. I'd love it if there was a website where you could similarly book time/lessons/a video chat with academics in various fields. (For me, mathematics mostly, and I know who the half dozen people are I think could answer my questions.) They could charge whatever they wanted per hour, or decide what to charge you after reading your lesson request. Maybe they make enough money to mostly not be interested in that, or not have any spare time. Still... that would be amazing, a counterpart/complement to SciHub, for people outside the walls of academe.

As it is, I've had a lot of the same questions for 5 or 10 years, and just not known how to get answers. There are books/papers in those fields where I understand everything, and books/papers where I understand nothing, and not much in between.

[0] https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...

By delegating control to an algorithm.

> but could our existing social medias at lest be somewhat biased towards promoting content that connect people over common interest in the real world? Why can't they?

Aren't they already? I've made a few very good friends through social media and it was mostly through common interests at first.

Emphasis on "in the real world".

Meet people on social media and once you like them, meet them in the real world. It worked well for me. Social media allowed me to cast a larger net and be more efficient at filtering people I liked from people I didn't like as much.

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