You Can Just Do Things (For Your Friends' Projects)

In 2012 I moved back home to Boston and got involved with the local Less Wrong group. The people were cool but the organization was moribund, with the organizers puttering along only out of a begrudging sense of duty. I started throwing some group events because there wasn’t much happening and I wanted more things to do with my new friends. Soon enough the leaders asked me to formally take over the group. I did. The next year, when I left Boston behind, I left the group in a much stronger position than when I’d found it.

I had returned to Boston in the first place because I’d decided to learn to code. At the same time I was getting involved with the local group, I took an intro programming course and did some online tutorials. On paper I knew the basics, but I wasn’t qualified to make real contributions to real software in return for real money. Instead I found a greybeard expert through a ridiculous string of connections—my mom’s dance instructor’s husband—who was willing to teach me informally while I worked on their codebase for free. A few months later the company got bought, and the owner made sure I landed with a junior position at the acquiring company. I learned that software isn’t for me, and I left that career behind when I left Boston, but the experience was instructive.

A few years after that, I met Samo Burja and we quickly became friends. He’s a well-known figure today, but back then he was another internet rando who’d moved to the Bay Area intellectual scene and was busy meeting all the people he’d been arguing with online. His research was very early-stage but I could tell it was the real deal, so I appointed myself to his project. The first time I told him this he nodded along but it didn’t lead to anything. The second time I told him was the same. But after our third conversation, something stuck. He made a serious effort to teach me his theories and methods. I extended his theories and applied them to some new subjects, especially industry and technology. Once his work was more developed and people started recognizing it, Samo started his company, and brought me on as one of the founding employees, where I worked for eight years.

The point I’m making here is also a big theme in Oliver Habryka’s interview we posted at The Students earlier today, much more dramatically in his case than in mine. Wherever there’s a valuable project, there’s always a lot of useful work that’s going undone. If you just show up, learn the lay of the land, and start doing the things that need doing, it’s usually a ticket towards the center of whatever group you’re looking at. This is much less true in sclerotic bureaucracies—in fact, the difficulty they have absorbing outsider talent is one of their major disadvantages. But for any group or team or community that isn’t locked down like that, it’s often a great way to contribute.