In my experience, when I Facebook message or email EAs I have met in person, bringing up conversation topics I think are substantially higher value than the median topic we would probably wander into during casual chitchat at a party, my message is ignored a large fraction of the time. I don’t think this is specific to EAs, I think people are just really flakey when it comes to responding to messages. But it is demoralizing and IMO it destroys a lot of the value of the EA network.
I guess what I’m saying is, maybe keep your expectations low for sending people cold emails and cold messages...
And err on the side of responding to messages that people do send you. It’s quick & easy to reply and say something like “Sorry, I’m not interested”, which increases the probability that the person will send you another message later that you are interested in later (as opposed to deciding that “it would be awkward/humiliating to message Person X again since they ignored my last message, so I will refrain from doing so even though this new message might be really important for them to read.”)
In my experience, when I Facebook message or email EAs I have met in person, bringing up conversation topics I think are substantially higher value than the median topic we would probably wander into during casual chitchat at a party, my message is ignored a large fraction of the time. I don’t think this is specific to EAs, I think people are just really flakey when it comes to responding to messages. But it is demoralizing and IMO it destroys a lot of the value of the EA network.
I guess what I’m saying is, maybe keep your expectations low for sending people cold emails and cold messages...
And err on the side of responding to messages that people do send you. It’s quick & easy to reply and say something like “Sorry, I’m not interested”, which increases the probability that the person will send you another message later that you are interested in later (as opposed to deciding that “it would be awkward/humiliating to message Person X again since they ignored my last message, so I will refrain from doing so even though this new message might be really important for them to read.”)