[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...