Epistemic Status: written in one take to try and break a bout of writer's block. Largely irrelevant and not deeply considered. 

Omegle! Talk to strangers!

Omegle (oh·meg·ull) is a great way to meet new friends, even while practicing social distancing. When you use Omegle, you are paired randomly with another person to talk one-on-one. If you prefer, you can add your interests and you’ll be randomly paired with someone who selected some of the same interests.

Omegle is a website for talking to strangers.

Please leave Omegle and visit an adult site instead if that's what you're looking for, and you are 18 or older.

Mostly horny strangers.

Use of bots of any kind to access or use the Services is prohibited.

 And chatbots. 

The Services may not be used to market, advertise or promote any goods or services.

The chatbots are also horny.

To help you stay safe, chats are anonymous unless you tell someone who you are (not recommended!), and you can stop a chat at any time.

I've lost track of how many people I've told my contact info. 

Users are solely responsible for their behavior while using Omegle.

And I have found it tremendous fun.

Caveat lector, friends. 

Why think that EA outreach on Omegle is competitive with other cause areas? 

Do not think that. There is no reason to think that. I do not think that. If at any point you find yourself thinking that, please reconsider.

Why do it then?

You may as well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 95 years ago, fly across the Atlantic. Why send cloned dinosaurs into space? The truth is that none of us know why we're fighting. We just woke up in these uniforms in this mysterious forest, knowing only that there was no way to get our names and memories back except victory. 

I do EA outreach on Omegle because I like it. Because it amuses an eldritch monstrosity that pages through worlds, watching from an orthogonal angle to the ultimate reality underneath reality. (Hi, by the way.)

It's fun. 

It feels good when things click for someone; the gameplay loop is tight.

I don't know how many of the handful of people who asked me for my contact info will become highly engaged EAs, it's too early to tell, but I think it's probably more than one--I'm not great at math, but that's gotta be at least twice what you'd see if I'd spent the resting-my-brain time reading webfiction.

(Though it's probably been harder on my wrists than reading webfiction would be.)

You're exposed to a cross section of humanity. It's good for learning things. I learned that Australian media is much more confident in the United States' willingness to defend Taiwan than American media/the American public is, and much less confident in the American public's willingness to defend Australia from an invasion (?! across the ocean?) than I would be. I learned heartbreaking things about things on the ground in Syria. I met ordinary people from all over, commiserated about relationship woes and scholastic drama, and feel a stronger affection than ever towards these awkward hairless apes around the globe.

It's good practice communicating. I'm noticeably better at explaining AI risk to people and fielding their questions than I was before I, uh, spent like ten or twenty hours over the past few weeks explaining AI risk to one person after another and fielding their questions. I'm not sure what the mechanism is there--I can only describe, not explain.

Why you shouldn't do EA outreach on Omegle

Reading webfiction would have been easier on my wrists.

You might not find it fun. My Omegle-hating friend, you should probably do something more productive with your working hours and something more relaxing with your resting hours.

I did absolutely zero research into whether Omegle is the best platform for unstructured conversations with anonymous strangers. 

People might be more impressed with you in a way you find disturbing. The same obsession you might have once directed towards 80,000 hours or your idea of Eliezer Yudkowsky can be disconcerting in the other direction. I am floored that there are people who want to read a pile of links I have for them or trade contact information so they can ask my advice about their education or careers. It's kind of a scary amount of influence over and responsibility towards someone to suddenly have. 

How to best use Omegle

As aforementioned, Omegle is mostly horny people and bots trying to sign them up for malware. That may or may not be your scene. 

There's a box for typing in your interests--Omegle will match you with people who typed the same thing--but they aren't chosen from a set of tags, you've got to pick words out of all of concept-space. I got the most success with the interest "politics"--it was common enough that I could reliably get into conversations, filtered to some extent for people who were predisposed to thinking about things and changing their minds, and trimmed away most of the chatbots.

Seguing into EA topics is inevitable enough--for me, anyway--that I did most of my outreach before I started thinking about it in terms of doing outreach. A common format was my asking someone what their strangest political opinion is (out of interest--find yourself some black swans, yo), and having the question mirrored back at me. I'd give them whatever alarming take on AI is knocking around my skull at that very picosecond, and before long I'd be linking Robert Miles or Yudkowsky and Soares depending on whether they preferred video or text.

Phrases like "I've learned so much" or "this is the most interesting conversation I've ever had, can we talk more later?" or "you're the smartest person I've ever met" are, in my experience, relatively common. You can say things like "I haven't done anything impressive yet, I just read a lot" but it'll mostly fall on deaf ears. 

At the end of some number of Omegle conversations there will be an attempt to stay in touch. I'd feel pretty sketchy if I were the one saying "I really enjoyed this conversation, do you have Discord?"--like I was pushing things on people--, and don't at all mind the self-sorting that comes from someone wanting to talk to me more enough that they have to overcome my reluctance. I don't have a principled reason for that, but can fall back on the ironclad defense of: I wouldn't find it fun, and if this weren't fun I'd be better off doing something else. 

There's more I could say, but not in one take--my wrists are starting to feel all the Omegling I've already done today. If you think it sounds fun to give it a try, let me know in the comments below how it goes!