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> You can put on your CV that you have such and such a reputation but it amounts to nothing in dollar terms for you. I have better things to do with my time [..

> You can put on your CV that you have such and such a reputation but it amounts to nothing in dollar terms for you. I have better things to do with my time [...] That's one way of seeing it. Another way it is that you're part of this hive-mind of people who can afford to occasionally help a random stranger on a topic you care about. Other people do crosswords or sudoku instead. As a consequence of helping that hive-mind to exist, you can also query it. But ultimately it is a limited resource, so attention and response quality can a be a bit random. Yes, SE is heavily gamified, monetizes your contributions, exploits your sense of status/vanity. But it's the place where I least mind it. I like being tricked into writing about a topic I care about (refreshing my knowledge instead of scrolling news and being politically manipulated). I like being tricked into writing helpful answers (instead of controversial comments). Personally, I only asked a single question on Math (but wrote a lot of answers on SO). Maybe knowing how it works helps, but I got an excellent answer (and the name of the problem I was trying to solve).

aldanor 4y ago
I've only asked a question once on Math SE without hoping for an answer (in regards to compactness of the set of densities of equivalent martingale measures, a very narrow topic), when I was completely stuck on it while writing my PhD thesis. To my surprise, I got a very detailed response and a rigorous proof that took me a while to grasp and, on its own, was worth publishing in a journal since this hadn't been previously researched in detail and some authors were even making wrongful assumptions about it. This not only let me finish the thesis, but I've eventually met the kind responder in person. (We were even thinking of eventually publishing this together but never got to finishing it as a standalone work, maybe we should...) // Fun fact: many years later, someone commented on the same mathse topic - "this has been already proven here - <link to the pdf of my thesis>"
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  Yes, one aspect I always liked about MathOverflow was it gave some of the experts in the field a low friction way of sharing their knowledge when compared with conventional publishing or even pre-prints. They have far more ideas and knowledge than time or inclination to write them all down. Of course, now that I work in tech, I’m thinking it’s not unlike how Snapchat and TikTok have led to far more “content creation”.

aldanor 4y ago

I've only asked a question once on Math SE without hoping for an answer (in regards to compactness of the set of densities of equivalent martingale measures, a very narrow topic), when I was completely stuck on it while writing my PhD thesis. To my surprise, I got a very detailed response and a rigorous proof that took me a while to grasp and, on its own, was worth publishing in a journal since this hadn't been previously researched in detail and some authors were even making wrongful assumptions about it. This not only let me finish the thesis, but I've eventually met the kind responder in person. (We were even thinking of eventually publishing this together but never got to finishing it as a standalone work, maybe we should...) // Fun fact: many years later, someone commented on the same mathse topic - "this has been already proven here - <link to the pdf of my thesis>"

kevinventullo 4y ago
Yes, one aspect I always liked about MathOverflow was it gave some of the experts in the field a low friction way of sharing their knowledge when compared with conventional publishing or even pre-prints. They have far more ideas and knowledge than time or inclination to write them all down. Of course, now that I work in tech, I’m thinking it’s not unlike how Snapchat and TikTok have led to far more “content creation”.