Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 45 posts

Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

#1

Post by lemonade5117 »

Going to a big school and meeting people with different backgrounds and interests has made me painfully aware of how ignorant I am. I'd like to meet people who will challenge me intellectually and act as a catalyst for my growth. I'm thinking of reading some lesswrong posts and hanging around in the comments and perhaps exploring that part of the internet. It's not perfect but it's a start I guess. What are some of your experiences with meeting people on the internet and how does one go about meeting great people?

Re: Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

#3

Post by bckr »

Add depth, insight, and research to conversations and stick around for awhile. Send emails or DMs to people who are open to it. It's really just like meeting people anywhere, but your charisma comes through in your writing instead of your speech and appearance.

Re: Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

#5

Post by tomjakubowski »

I can't tell if you're still a student at the big school, but if you are I would definitely prioritize building local friendships and maintaining them above meeting new people on the Internet. It sounds like the locals are pretty smart and would challenge you intellectually the way you'd like.

Re: Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

#6

Post by advisedwang »

I recommend starting by reading. Read history, politics, fiction. Read banned books and popular books. You can expand your horizons much faster this way than trying to meet 100s of people, and it allows you to find a direction that appeals to you.

Re: Ask HN: How do I expand my worldview and meet smart people online?

#8

Post by jonahbenton »

Twitter is a place where interesting people doing interesting work in all kinds of fields with all kinds of priors from all kinds of perspectives post threads about their work generally for non-specialist consumption. Among my follows from intellectual perspective are animal studies folks, small book publishers, medieval studies, anthropologists, chemists, banking nerds, political scientists, contract lawyers, religious educators, sex educators, Native American advocates....

From cultural perspective as an older white northeast US man I pick folks to follow from as wide a demographic and timezone range as possible.

Lots of other stuff happens at Twitter too of course but this is what I use it for. Haven't found another soup like it.

And of course the VAST majority of the world is not on Twitter, maybe owns a phone but not a computer, and does interesting things unknown to the digital sphere. To actually EXPAND your worldview you have to travel. Go to the places, put your entire meatspace sensory apparatus in the environment. But the Platos shadow online version is I think what you were asking about.

There are LOTS of ways to optimize Twitter use but to start just make sure you change the algorithm to latest tweets, rather than "Home Tweets" and then start adding people. When you get up to 1000 follows you should have a steady stream of worldview novelty.

Addition: "meet" has multiple connotations and often the two way interactive meet with interesting people is hard/impossible because they are very busy and/or manage their time, etc. Twitter presents an opportunity for learning passively through osmosis, which is also not the same as two way interaction but can be worldview expanding all the same.

Post reply on HN