If I (a 19 year old male) texted "www.readthesequences.com" to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like "seems interesting, I'll def check it out sometime", and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school's math team, and he scored in the 1500's (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.[1]
What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user's visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn't have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it's all quite hypnotizing.
The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok's algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I ("Map and Territory") of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn't have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I've got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)
Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.
No, not even the books assigned in English class. He used SparkNotes.↩︎
A thought as a fellow 19-year-old male: I feel like this format leads to a lower quality understanding of the text as opposed to reading it, a factor to the prevalence of text over footage is the interestingness of the text itself, combined with the footage for background. It makes it much easier to just tune out the whole thing and not pay attention. I personally haven't ever used tiktok so I'm not familiar with the nature of the platform, but I could see this format being useful as an entry, but less useful for actual comprehension of the topics contained.
However this may just be my lack of experience with audiobooks talking, I have a friend who almost exclusively listens to books, he explained to me that you get a lot better the more you read(?) that way, so it could just be that.
If I (a 19 year old male) texted "www.readthesequences.com" to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like "seems interesting, I'll def check it out sometime", and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school's math team, and he scored in the 1500's (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.[1]
Attention is one's scarcest resource, and actually reading something longer than a paragraph is a trivial inconvenience, especially for my generation.
What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user's visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn't have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it's all quite hypnotizing.
The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok's algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I ("Map and Territory") of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn't have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I've got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)
(Update 2: THE VIDEOS ARE HERE, CLICK HERE)
Predictably Wrong
Fake Beliefs
Noticing Confusion
Mysterious Answers
Interlude: The Simple Truth
Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.
No, not even the books assigned in English class. He used SparkNotes. ↩︎