I don't know how to make Meditations on Moloch into a video. But it has shaped me deeply and I feel it contains a lot of important lessons that could make or break the future.
Closing paragraph:
He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.
As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.
Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.
I think this is a good suggestion, but I wouldn't do it as the first animation on a channel because I think the negativity would set the wrong tone for the channel. But a good early one to balance early positive tone.
Oh. There was no link and it sounded like a planned thing.
I found it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgqt1RE0k0MIr0LoyJRy2lg
indeed, it isn't actually that hard* to become extremely popular on youtube! the question is how to hit 10m or, imagine, even 100m views...
* compared to, uh, other types of, you know, small businesses one can start. it's a lot of work, and I'm really glad y'all are putting in the time-money to do it!
A full explanation of the replication crisis and how to evaluate scientific papers would be really nice. Most smart science-adjacent (and a lot of scientists!) still believe pop-science conceptions of studies like Dunning-Kreuger and Rat Utopia. Encouraging critical thinking, even of results from high-status scientists, would really improve the smart-normie memespace. It's pretty crazy how much my understanding of science has changed since I learned how the sausage was made. As things are, there aren't many ways for someone who isn't a scientist themselves to learn of the replication crisis and its consequences.
I'd be willing to write the script myself if prizes for the script contest are still being given.
(Cross-posting my comment from the EA Forum):
Considering how awesome your video on Prediction Markets is, I think it could be a great idea to make videos about some other institutional innovation ideas that are popular in the rationalist world -- charter cities / network states, alternate voting systems like approval voting and liquid democracy, and so forth. (If you want to take things in an even more political direction, you could produce animated versions of the Bryan Caplan arguments for open borders or YIMBYism.)
For some more traditionally rationalist / EA media ideas, here are two of my comments on some previous threads about the idea EA documentaries.
Craziest idea: make a video about HPMOR -- either a movie-trailer-style animation, or a longer more traditional youtube-y style summary of the early parts of the story, and hope that this works as a short hook to get more people reading the whole thing? Thus leveraging the amount of rationalist content you imbue per unit of animation effort. (I feel like the idea of video-as-hook would work well for HPMOR and other works of fiction, versus with other EA / rationalist content it is better to stick to "video as summary of the key message".) Idk about the copyright issues here though.
On the subject of fiction, how about illustrating some much-shorter-than-HPMOR stories from the (allegedly slim) pantheon of great EA & rationalist fiction works?
As for why I think these are good ideas / what you should be optimizing for:
There is a natural tradeoff between making videos that draw in lots of new viewers (for instance, videos about aliens!) vs making videos that aren't as viral but communicate more of the information that you truly want to impart (for instance about futarchy or longtermism). So you want to have the channel strike a balance between those two things, including by alternating between videos that are more viral-oriented versus more education-oriented.
For education-oriented videos, I'd be thrilled if you made some more videos about institutional innovations, but that's just my personal hobbyhorse because I think it's underrated within EA. The more obvious direction to go for education videos would be to basically just adapt the 80,000 Hours content into a series of videos. (Some of these could have viral potential, of course. Imagine a video about how you can do more good for the world as [counterintuitive career path like AI safety programmer or etc] than as a doctor --make sure to mention that fact about how the number of US doctors is essentially capped by protectionist regulations! That would seem like a very controversial take to most normal people, IMO.) Anyways, personally I think the goal of the educational videos should be communicating the core EA / rationalist worldview and thinking style. (Rather than, say, CFAR-style productivity tips, or object-level education about detailed EA issues, or random mind-blowing ideas about quantum mechanics and the universe.) I could talk about this in more detail if you are interested.
For the virally-oriented videos, it's presumably more about just figuring out what's going to be a big hit. Hence my thought that it might be good to recycle the greatest hits of the EA/rationalist movement, especially catchy fiction which might adapt better than abstract ideas. Although I certainly don't know anything about growing a youtube channel to 100K subscribers, so all of my ideas about the viral side of things should be taken with a grain of salt!
political is popular, especially if you can focus on policy suggestions error check as honorably friendly to people hatewatching. keep in mind, a lot of people expect most people to be lying when political topics come up, and you aren't going to get through to those people, but you can try to suggest things that they can tell aren't dangerous for their friends to hear, they're just disagreed with.
Here's an idea for a decision procedure:
An overview of the potential avenues for genetic enhancement of humans, their risks and benefits:
Ideally, it would briefly cover a myriad of topics, such as CRISPR, adenoviral vectors, gene drives, and less invasive options such as embryo selection.
I personally consider the sheer lack of enthusiasm for such technologies to be low-hanging fruit left to wither on the vine, damned by fear-mongering and a general aversion to trying anything not done a million times before (before becoming enthusiastically adopted, a lá IVF), as well as bad tropes and inaccurate ideas regarding their effects.
Gene drives for malaria eradication also screams out to me as a sinfully under-discussed topic, especially with the potential for ending one of the most serious infectious diseases that have plagued Mankind ever since we dwelled in Africa, malaria.
I'm a doctor, and while genetics is far from my specialty, I would happily volunteer my services if you wanted anything fact-checked or needed to pick my brains.
Certainly, malaria eradication is an important EA cause, what use for mosquito nets (barring getting bitten), when they no longer need to prevent potentially lethal illness?
I believe a measured, public-friendly overview of the subject would find plenty of takers!
I would be excited to see Rational Animations try to cover the Hard Problem of Corrigibility: https://arbital.com/p/hard_corrigibility/
I believe that this would be the optimal video to create for the optimization target "reduce probability of AI-Doom". It seems (barely) plausible that someone really smart could watch the video, make a connection to some obscure subject none of us know about, and then produce a really impactful contribution to solving AI Alignment.
It would be really cool to see a video on Newcomb's problem, logical decision theories, and Lobian cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma. I think this group of ideas is one of the most interesting developments in game theory in the past few years, and should be more widely known.
ELI5 of A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits. The way Neel speaks about it may serve as an inspiration.
I have not seen the Simulation Trilemma and anthropic reasoning mentioned in any of the other comments, yet I think those topics are pretty interesting.
Also +1 for FDT.
The Sequences. Surprised nobody mentioned this one yet.
While I am pretty sure you can't compress the length of the sequences much without losing any valuable information, the fact is that for most people it's just way too long to ever read through, and having some easily digestible video material would still be quite valuable. (Hopefully also by getting some people interested in reading the real thing?)
Turning the sequences into a set of videos would be a massive distillation job. On the high level it would ideally be something like:
Would making these videos be optimal in some sense? I don't know. Is trying to create more rationalists a good idea? Eliezer wrote the sequences with the express intent of creating more rationalists to help reduce AI risk. Is this still relevant? Maybe. AFAIK many people think that alignment is currently bottlenecked on good researchers. (Of course in this framing many other alignment relevant technical topics also make sense as video ideas.)
I think Coordination as a Scarce Resource (top 13 of the 2020 best-of) would make a good initial animation because it highlights a core problem of group rationality, and the post gives many specific examples that could be made into short animations themselves. Coordination is also easy to grasp and has a short inferential gap.
I nominate The Treacherous Path to Rationality because it uses a lot of visual analogies that could be built on top of in an animation. I'm not sure it is a good first animation, though.
I think one type of meme that I hadn't internalized well enough, and which other rationalists might also benefit from, is what Science Banana calls Indexicality. The masterpost for indexicality is Ignorance, A Skilled Practice; it has some flaws but I still like it. There's also some other writings on it by Science Banana scattered in various places; there was a time when they tweeted a lot about it but I think they have stopped talking as much about it now.
I think the way I would phrase the importance is, a lot of traditional rationalist tricks seem to emphasize the value of dimension-reduction, broadly-applicable rules, and other things like that. Meanwhile a lot of real-world rationality is just about absorbing enormous amounts of detailed closely relevant information to build a good base of knowledge, and then in each specific situation figure out what the relevant knowledge is and apply that.
The societal, cultural and demographic implications of longer lifespans (250-400 year lifespans). Including the uncontrollable population boom that might occur as a result.
I know Rob already made a video about Risks from Learned Optimization but I would also like to see a RA version.
Also, an explanation of FDT/LDT, Newcomb's problem, acausal trading etc
Positive psychology is important, and I feel like hearing about it from lukeprog back in the day really helped me. Practice gratitude. Act to spend more time with people you like. Spend money on experiences more than goods.
I want to know what you would be excited to see covered on the channel.
I'd especially like to know what videos you think would be optimal to make according to an optimization target you specify. It's more effortful, but more useful, to answer that question instead of just "what would be good video topics?".
Answers that go the extra mile and explain their reasoning in detail will be especially appreciated.
That said, I also welcome answers to the easier question "what would be good video topics?" and without much argumentation.