Specifically for business, I do.
The general angle is asking intelligent, and forward-pointing questions, specifically because deep processing for thoughts (as described in Thinking Fast and Slow) is rare, even within the business community; so demonstrating understanding, and curiosity (both of which are strength of people on LW) is an almost instant-win.
Two of the better guides on how to approach this intelligently are:
The other aspect of this is Speaking the Lingo. The problem with LW is:
1, people developing gravity wells around specific topics , and having a very hard time talking about stuff others are interested in without bringing up pet topics of their own; and
2, the inference distance between the kind of stuff that puts people into powerful position, and the kind of stuff LW develops a gravity well around is, indeed, vast.
The operational hack here is 1, listening, 2, building up the scaffolds on which these people hang their power upon; 3, recognizing whether you have an understanding of how those pieces fit together.
General algorithm for the networking dance:
1, Ask intelligent question, listen intently
2, Notice your brain popping up a question/handle that you have an urge to speak up. Develop a classification algo to notice whether the question was generated by your pet gravity well, or by novel understanding.
3, If the former,SHUT UP. If you really have the urge, mimic back what they’ve just said to internalize / develop your understanding (and move the conversation along)
Side-effects might include: developing an UGH-field towards browsing lesswrong, incorporating, and getting paid truckloads. YMMV.
Fellow Hufflepuff / startupper / business getting-stuff-done-er / CFAR / Bay-arean here. Can we talk about the elephant in the room?
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution ← describes the idea of the role of parasites in subculture evolution; specifically, that once group-surplus achieves a threshold, it is immediately soaked up by parasites funneling it to agendas of their own
There are, by my count, at least 3 such parasites in the Bay community; and specifically they position themselves as the broken stair step right at onboarding, making the community feel “impenetrable and unwelcoming”. The way how this happens operationally, is when I admit to some level of operational surplus (language skills, software development, business building), from these specific persons I get immediately asks of “Would you like to do free translation for me?” / “Would you like to build $website-idea$ for me?” / “Would you like to donate to $my-cause$?”. I also notice that they don’t do it this overtly to long-term members.
Note, the problem here isn’t the ask. We do asks in entrepreneur-topia all the time. The problem is the lack of dealcraft: the asks are asymmetrically favouring the asker, and only offer vague lipservice-waving-towards-nice-things as return.
Presence of these parasites, and lack of dealcraft by these people reached equilibrium at having ‘a strong culture of “make sure your own needs are met”, that specifically pushes back against broader societal norms that pressure people to conform.’ , because people who have been valuepumped hard enough can not sustain themselves in the Bay.
You are attempting to increase the group-surplus of the community. This is very cool. My pre-mortem says, that any such surplus created by the sweat of your brow will be soaked up by this parasitic behavior, and hence fail to achieve long-term changes in admitted competence of the community.
There might be several ways to work around this problem. I want to be upfront about the evaluation criterias for it:
not talking, or taking action about this problem will not make it go away;
parasites’ aim is value-pumping: that is, closing deals in which they get the maximum amount of value with the least amount of work on their own;
parasites participate in the culture like everyone else; for this reason, any plan you might come up with must be reflection-complete: that is, it needs to work, even if everyone in the community knows that such plan is in motion.
A few candidate solutions which sticks out:
Level up dealcraft: cultivate, and enforce a culture of mutually beneficial asks.
Level up quantitiy of dealcraft: elicit members -all members- of their goals / objectives / needs, and focus on coincidence of wants. There’s a pretty cool model of this in the book Wishcraft: “Barn-raising”
Systematically post-mortem newbs, elicit list of parasites (“was there someone who made you uncomfortable, and describe the exact specificities of the situation”), and systematically intervene in the onboarding process.
Edit note: originally, this post used the word “sociopath”, incorrectly -thanks for Viliam’s comment below for pointing it out- fixed.