Thread by @nickcammarata

Pretty crazy you can just reach out to anyone whenever you want

I feel like most people probably don’t leverage this enough

Like, want to build a swing set? There are probably literally a million people who have built one that would be happy to talk to you about it

Being able to reach out to any of billions of people — algorithmically at scale or by hand one at a time — is like rocket fuel, but I feel like most people don’t really know where to point the rocket

And anyone who can web scrape and do basic NLP can filter the internet for people to find the million people who have mentioned building swingsets, and send them an email that feels handwritten

In a weekend you probably get 1000 yeses for meetings to talk about swingsets

Or use gpt3 or any language model to get the logprobs of “this person is super good at building swingsets” take the top 1000 reach out to them and have a custom curated access to endless world class 3 sigma+ swingset builders to ask whatever you want

Like it feels like this probably should have changed everything, but not only have I never heard of anyone doing it, I haven’t received a single email on the other side of this

I guess I can start doing it but it feels too easy, like the $20 bill on the ground economics are joking about despite the fact that as far as I can tell there’s $20 bills on the ground everywhere as far as the eyes can see

Like you could have a little python script where you type “swingset people” go to sleep and wake up with a week’s worth of google calendar meetings for free with expert swingset enthusiasts eager to help you*

* you can logprob “they are eager to help me” and reject if not

Obviously most people don’t care about swingsets, but everyone cares about something, and finding the best people is key to accomplishing just about every something

eg find a million girls online between ages 20-35 that gpt3 thinks would agree with these 12 slightly controversial beliefs, have talked about these books or something like it, likely live within 3k miles of NYC. Ask them all of they’d want to chat about those books

I’m not really going to do this now but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work? And it’s not mean to them at all, I do love the things I’m asking if they want to chat about. And we’re probably outlier good fits, they’ve been selected from hundreds of millions of people to maximize fit

(This isn’t gpt3 specific you could use any language model or even just basic nlp would do a pretty good job)

Like fundamentally why would you use Match or whatever and use their prebuilt 40 questions and compete in a well-defined formal market when you can ask whatever questions and filter from the supply however you want, use the entire world as the supply, and compete in a market of 1

also personally I find dating sites and hiring sites etc kind of weird. I’d rather meet someone where it’s likely we’re a great for each others’ lives somehow, then figure out exactly what that relationship should look like later

Like I think it’s plausible you could write this and end up with 1000 planned dates in like 24hrs with people who are excited to meet you, who it’s fairly likely you’re a good fit to get to know in some capacity (even if it’s not necessarily romantic)!

Meeting a long term partner that you’re a good fit with is one of the best ways to up both your life satisfactions over the long term, and that’s only one way to use the reach out to people machine. If no one is doing this it seems like a pretty huge $20 bill laying on the ground

Repliers have said that romance is magic and no one knows (or at least I don’t) what makes a good fit and maybe topic interest isn’t a good predictor, and maybe they’re right. Maybe the best usecase are things that require topic interest

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1403063963940687879