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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tips for asking people for things, published by Ben Kuhn on April 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I recently attended EAGxBoston, which was the first EA conference I attended since my employer, Wave, became reasonably high-profile. As a result, quite a few people were interested in talking to me. Mostly this was awesome! I got to have a lot of fun conversations with people who asked great questions. However, there were a couple recurring patterns where I think people would have gotten more out of it if they'd taken a slightly different approach to our interaction. I thought I'd write them up in case they're useful to future conference attendees. At a high level, the problem is that I got enough requests to do stuff that I could have packed essentially all my free time with them. But I wanted to maintain a lot of unscheduled slack time for serendipitous conversations etc., so when people asked me for something (e.g. to "chat"), I tried to triage these requests based on how much I thought it would improve the world if I did them. Unfortunately, most requests I got didn't include enough details for me to figure out how good of a use of time they would be, and so I just declined them. Although the advice in this post is motivated by the fact that I got lots of requests and had to triage, I think these practices are the right way to ask anyone for things, regardless of how busy they are. Even if the person you're asking isn't overwhelmed, they'll still be able to be more helpful to you, and use their time better, if you do the following: When asking for something, make a case that it's worth doing Mostly, I was using "how interesting does this project/person seem based on their message" as a proxy for how useful it would be for us to talk. Some things that I think are interesting: Having done interesting work (could be demonstrated by e.g. linking to an interesting blog post or a writeup of a past project that went well) Having passed a selective application process (e.g. working for an EA org) Being referred by someone trustworthy (e.g. " said I should talk to you") Some examples of messages that didn't give me enough to go on: " suggested I meet with you. I'm interested in . When would you be free tomorrow?" (hard to tell what the person expects to get out of it; I didn't know the referrer well so the endorsement didn't work) " . If interested & possible, email me with that subject line and I'll send you stuff to help s in distress" (no info about the project, potential effectiveness, why someone would want to do it, etc.) "I'm a . Do you have 15 minutes to give me some career advice" (no info about what kind of advice, how it would help the author, why they're good to help) [If you're one of the people who wrote these messages, please don't take this personally! I don't think you're an inherently uninteresting person—only that you didn't give me enough info for me to triage your request for a chat appropriately!] If asking to talk, specify the topic and context as concretely as you can A particularly important special case of the above: for many requests/meeting invitations, it was really hard for me to triage them because they included only a very vague topic, or none at all, in the invitation. In fact, some people sent meeting invitations without any text message at all as far as I could tell, although this happened so often that I'm wondering if it was an issue with the conference app UI. For an example of what a good request to chat looks like, here's one I wrote to someone who's given me a lot of engineering advice recently that I think worked pretty well: Hey Alex! Thanks again so much for the intro to a while ago—talking to both of you saved us from pursuing some pretty bad database scaling ideas, so it helped a ton! I'm reaching out again because I hav...