[AnimalMuppet]

Let's say I'm one of the few worldwide experts on X. Some random person on the internet wants to ask some questions about X. Sure, I've got time for them.

100 people on the internet want to ask me questions about X? No, I don't have time for that. (Yes, a few experts do. Emphasis on few.)

1000 people on the internet want to ask me about W and Y, which are kind of close to X, and about V and Z, which are farther afield, and want to rant to me about Brazilian jiu jitsu, and Yemeni politics, and time cubes, and how everything is Henry Kissinger's fault? I'm out. I'm changing my email and only giving the new one to people I trust.

At that point, if you want to ask me about X, you need to be one of the people that I've built up trust with over the years, to the point that I'll trust you not to abuse my email address.

So the problem becomes: How do we put (at least some) honest, interested seekers in connection with a few bandwidth-limited experts, without opening the floodgates?

[yesenadam]

I loved this[0] article by Sabine Hossenfelder, about her experiences working part-time teaching physics one-on-one to cranks and amateurs. I'd love it if there was a website where you could similarly book time/lessons/a video chat with academics in various fields. (For me, mathematics mostly, and I know who the half dozen people are I think could answer my questions.) They could charge whatever they wanted per hour, or decide what to charge you after reading your lesson request. Maybe they make enough money to mostly not be interested in that, or not have any spare time. Still... that would be amazing, a counterpart/complement to SciHub, for people outside the walls of academe.

As it is, I've had a lot of the same questions for 5 or 10 years, and just not known how to get answers. There are books/papers in those fields where I understand everything, and books/papers where I understand nothing, and not much in between.

[0] https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...

[yeetard]

By delegating control to an algorithm.