I'm competent in basic video editing and am willing to help you out. Contrary to some of the other comments, I think that there's substantial value in converting the sequences as-is to YouTube videos considering the size of the platform. Plenty of people use YouTube who don't read blogs or listen to podcasts. You could take the project and run with it, constructing animations, diagrams, and visualizations. But even absent those potential enhancements, I support disseminating the message as widely as possible.
Yep, "floating head" videos as they're called are actually quite popular. They are also by far the easiest way to start a channel and starting a channel is better than not having one at all.
I would also like to add animations, diagrams and visualizations, and find some other ways to make content much more engaging. Up until now most of my efforts were directed toward having the courage to publish this in the first place. Now, I can move on to actually getting down to the logistics!
Given that a podcast already exists, I think you might get more bang for your buck if you did some animation on top of it. Otherwise, the only thing you are adding is putting it on youtube and having a camera of your face. This would probably be (much) harder, but also probably much higher reward if it worked.
Maybe a collaboration with rationalanimations would help? Not really sure, but good luck if you try to do this!
Yeah, it's really important to avoid having it look like a lecture. You could also try learning animation yourself and seeing if you're decent at it (or even really good at it), that would make it easier to collaborate with rationalanimations/@Writer since they're bottlenecked (there's also tons of great Yud and Scott Alexander stuff, and rationalanimations has been growing/sped up lately but even 5 videos per quarter won't get nearly enough of them animated in time).
There's also galaxy-brained high-risk high-reward ideas like @dkirmani's attention-based "zoomer-friendly" format of the sequences. The Sequences are great material to work with in general because all you have to do is something that Yud didn't think of.
What I recommend is reading the CFAR handbook or tuning cognitive strategies and having this be one of the real-world challenges you test yourself against as you read and grow and test yourself, just like with the Sequences except you've already read them. Sequences-based optimization ideas are probably well worth pursuing on the margin, so don't get intimidated, but the final winning idea makes you and many others win big so it's worth it to iterate and try things and fail many times and learn many lessons until something incredible happens.
It's a lot of work to learn to create animations and then do them for hours of content. Creating AI images with Dall-E 3, Midjourney v6, or SDXL and then animating them with RunwayML (which in my testing worked better than Pika or Stable Video Diffusion) could be an intermediate step. The quality is already high enough for AI images, but not for video without multiple tries (it should get a lot better in 2024).
For ayone trying to keep up with AI for film making, I recommend the youtube channel curious refuge https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClnFtyUEaxQOCd1s5NKYGFA
Where is the podcast?
And is anybody aware of any other videos of the Sequences? Might make sense to start with those missing.
Here's the podcast (should be on any podcast app): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rationality-from-ai-to-zombies/id1299826696
1The first few videos will necessarily be terrible, especially, hopefully, by the standards of the 47th video.
Suggestion: do them out of order.
tl;dr: Do you have any thoughts/advice/warnings/ideas for someone who wants to turn the Sequences into a series of YouTube videos?
Naturally, this post also exists as a video.
I will be:
I'm looking for:
I have:
I'm doing this because:
Ideas that might work:
Warning:
That's all! Keep in mind that this is highly experimental: I really hope the channel can sustain some growth, but I don't have great calibration for predictions like this (*ahem* my Manifold profit is currently negative).