Has anyone / does anyone know anyone who's cold-emailed a professor at a random university to say "hey I think your research is cool, I have skills/knowledge/connections I can bring to the table here, interested in teaming up?"
If so, were they receptive? Did anything come of it? What help did they need?
Upvoting this interesting post, but strongly disagree that it's positive-EV to hold off on eliminating factory farming. There's a chance that holding off could result in larger long-term gains for sentient-being-welfare by forcing us to more explicitly codify moral reasons for getting rid of factory farming. But I think this is almost certainly outweighed by the much lower chance of actually getting it abolished for moral reasons alone.
Also, re: how future generations are likely to view factory farming elimination - I think the strong tendency is for most humans to ascribe a moral dimension to historical events that actually had more complex economic/political/geographic causes.
Interesting about Tourette's! I'm not able to find any empirical confirmation of a relationship between Tourette's and reaction time, but I do see an association between ADHD and longer reaction times, with stimulant use lowering them to control levels.
(Incidentally: as a person with ADHD, this really just illustrates how multi-dimensional time perception is, though, as Filip Sondej below mentions. When I'm on stims, time might feel slower on a moment-to-moment basis - the opposite of how, late at night when I'm tired and have low alertness, music feels a lot faster. But I don't feel like stims make the entire day feel slower, when I'm looking back on it. In fact the opposite is often the case, since the entire point of them is to make it easier to focus on one activity for a long period of time - which means less variety in the day.)
Unfortunately, founder effects are all too strong. MIRI was looking to decamp from the Bay to Bellingham, Washington a year or so ago, to save money and encourage people to move to a lower-COL area, but ended up quietly abandoning this because having the established community was just too important.
I do think it'd be good to have a "cheaper" alternative EA city to avoid turning away EAs who have/want kids. Maybe Philadelphia or Chicago would be a good place for a few orgs to coordinate to move to, especially with both cities having top-tier universities?
+1 karma but disagree.
As I see it, the purpose of networking is to tell someone, "Hey, you seem cool. It looks like we share a non-zero amount of goals / values. No promises, but maybe I'll find out about a cool opportunity later that I'll share with you - although I don't have one at the moment."
Supposedly, you're more likely to get introduced to a career opportunity by a casual acquaintance - maybe someone you had a college class with and are now friends with on LinkedIn - than a close friend. (Although of course this is weighting all of your acquaintances against just a handful of friends, but the implication is still that more acquaintances = more opportunities.)