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How I got 4.2M YouTube views without making a single video

by Closed Limelike Curves
3rd Sep 2024
1 min read
36

406

Community Outreach
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How I got 4.2M YouTube views without making a single video
96Ben Pace
134Neel Nanda
2Shayne O'Neill
5Neel Nanda
1Closed Limelike Curves
20Ben Pace
4Neel Nanda
2Closed Limelike Curves
66romeostevensit
8romeostevensit
18Matt Goldenberg
48ErioirE
29Neel Nanda
8papetoast
10Caleb Biddulph
8Kabir Kumar
11Wuje
2papetoast
2Wuje
2Ben
3Wuje
8ryan_b
18Closed Limelike Curves
5Brit Cruise
2Closed Limelike Curves
4Croissanthology
4Closed Limelike Curves
34habryka
9Closed Limelike Curves
4habryka
2Davidmanheim
1Closed Limelike Curves
3Celenduin
1hunterglenn
1Closed Limelike Curves
1Review Bot
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[-]Ben Pace1y9619

Semi-related YouTube news: the latest 3Blue1Brown video on language models (from 3 days ago) shows and scrolls through a post on the AI alignment forum, at about 1 and 2 mins in. It's at ~300k views atm.

Reply33
[-]Neel Nanda1y13424

Cold emailing Youtubers offering to chat about mechanistic interpretability turns out to be a way, way more effective strategy than I predicted! I'm super excited about that video (and it came out so well!). The video

Reply2681
[-]Shayne O'Neill1y20

Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might get a better result. Also, don't forget the social media channels. Twitter , uh X or whatever its called this week, does offer a conduit where directly approaching media figures is a little more normalized.

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[-]Neel Nanda1y51

Agreed, chance of success when cold emailing busy people is low, and spamming them is bad. And there are alternate approaches that may work better, depending on the person and their setup - some Youtubers don't have a manager or employees, some do. I also think being able to begin an email with "Hi, I run the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team" was quite helpful here.

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y10

Neat; would he maybe be interested in discussing social choice on his channel? I'm on the Summer of Math Exposition Discord with the name @statslime

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[-]Ben Pace1y2014

I believe the implied next step is for you to cold email a YouTuber you think is interested in that :-)

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[-]Neel Nanda1y41

Yeah, if I made an introduction it would ruin the spirit of it!

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y*20

I actually tried this on an unrelated topic earlier, but didn't get a response. (Which has been my general experience—little-to-no interest whenever I send people cold emails, apart from academics.)

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[-]romeostevensit1y6637

Okay this is a really good point about pedagogy. We can increase the influence of useful concepts simply by learning good pedagogical writing principles and applying them to Wikipedia.

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[-]romeostevensit1y80

Found a great example of something needing improvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_scientific_inquiry

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[-]Matt Goldenberg1y184

Sorta surprised that this got so many up votes with the clickbaity title, which goes against norms around here

Otherwise th content seems good

Reply2
[-]ErioirE1y4840

I don't think most of us mind clickbait so much as clickbait-and-switch, where the content is not what the headline promises. In this case, the 'bait' headline was more or less justified so I don't mind.

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[-]Neel Nanda1y299

I dislike clickbait when it's misleading, or takes a really long time to get to the point (esp if it's then underwhelming). I was fine with this post on that front.

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[-]papetoast1y82

The clickbait title is misleading, but I forgive this one because I do end up finding it interesting, and it is short. In general I mostly don't try to punish things if it end up to be good/correct.

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[-]Caleb Biddulph1y103

Yeah, you kind of have to expect from the beginning that there's some trick, since taken literally the title can't actually be true. So I think it's fine

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[-]Kabir Kumar1y84

Clickbait still works here, just with a different language. 

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[-]Wuje1y110

Very related is the finding that scientific articles being used as Wikipedia sources causally gives them an average of 91% more citations: "Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia".

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[-]papetoast1y20

The link is not clickable

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[-]Wuje1y20

Thanks — bonehead mistake. Fixed.

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[-]Ben1y20

I am sure that being cited by wikipeida is very good for giving an article more exposure. There is an "altimetric" thingy on some journals that is used to help funders see what other useful impacts an article had on the world beyond citations from other articles, and it thinks wikipedia mentions are high-value (it also likes things like newspaper coverage).

I suspect that  it is not that rare for the authors of a paper to go and put a link in wiki to their own paper. I have certainly seen wiki articles mention something with a cite, which, while true, feels weirdly specific.

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[-]Wuje1y30

I'm even aware of some labs that have groups of students who routinely update Wikipedia articles relevant to their research. It sounds nefarious — and some activities might be, i.e. replacing sources from other labs with your own lab's papers — but really it isn't super far off from what OP is describing. The role of a scientist is to create and disseminate new knowledge, and there are few venues better than Wikipedia to make new concepts accessible to broader audiences.

There is also some conception of Wikipedia as "for laymen", which is true to some extent — I doubt number theorists often read the Number Theory article — but also misses the huge contingent of scientists who do use Wikipedia for cursory, high-level understanding of fields adjacent to their own — maybe a combinatorics researcher would read the Number Theory page for a quick overview before talking to a collaborator. I guess your Veritasium post is even a weak example of this! (Congrats on that btw :D)

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[-]ryan_b1y81

Could you talk a bit about how much time and effort you have invested into writing the wikipedia articles?

I think it would be helpful by making it easier for other people to judge whether they can have an impact this way, and whether it would be worth their time.

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y*188

The amount of time and effort you can invest into them is on a continuous scale. The more time you invest, the more impact you'll have. However, what I can say is if you invest any time at all into advocacy, writing, or trying to communicate ideas to others, you should be doing that on Wikipedia instead. It's like a blog where you can get 1,000s of views a day if you pick a popular article to work on.

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[-]Brit Cruise1y50

Hey i'm from YouTube (Art of the Problem) and working on a new series on Economics. Thinking about exploring it via evolutionary lens (making decisions about value)...if interested please reach out

Reply2
[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y20

This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).

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[-]Croissanthology1y41

May I suggest updating the post name to 4.2 million?

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y40

Oh, same goes for if anyone knows a (preferably investigative) journalist interested in breaking a related story—I happen to have a scandal on hand related to this subject.

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[-]habryka1y342

A... scandal related to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem?

Reply16
[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y90

Y'know, I meant Wikipedia, but Arrow's impossibility theorem kinda works too

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[-]habryka1y42

Lol, OK, that makes somewhat more sense.

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[-]Davidmanheim1y20

I know someone who has done lots of reporting on lab leaks, if that helps?

Also, there are some "standard" EA-adjacent journalists who you could contact / someone could introduce you to, if it's relevant to that as well.

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y10

I think that would be great! I sent you a DM on Discord.

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[-]Celenduin1y31

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

Link to the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem

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[-]hunterglenn1y10

If you show them this link, I suspect Rational Animations would be happy to talk to you! Lmk if you need help getting in touch!

 

https://www.facebook.com/rational.animations

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[-]Closed Limelike Curves1y10

This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).

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[-]Review Bot1y10

The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

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Just over a month ago, I wrote this.

The Wikipedia articles on the VNM theorem, Dutch Book arguments, money pump, Decision Theory, Rational Choice Theory, etc. are all a horrific mess. They're also completely disjoint, without any kind of Wikiproject or wikiboxes for tying together all the articles on rational choice.

It's worth noting that Wikipedia is the place where you—yes, you!—can actually have some kind of impact on public discourse, education, or policy. There is just no other place you can get so many views with so little barrier to entry. A typical Wikipedia article will get more hits in a day than all of your LessWrong blog posts have gotten across your entire life, unless you're @Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I'm not sure if we actually "failed" to raise the sanity waterline, like people sometimes say, or if we just didn't even try. Given even some very basic low-hanging fruit interventions like "write a couple good Wikipedia articles" still haven't been done 15 years later, I'm leaning towards the latter. edit me senpai
 

EDIT: Discord to discuss editing here.

An update on this. I've been working on Wikipedia articles for just a few months, and Veritasium just put a video out on Arrow's impossibility theorem, which is almost completely based on my Wikipedia article! Lots of lines and the whole structure/outline of the video are taken almost verbatim from what I wrote. I think there's a pretty clear reason for this. I recently rewrote the entire article to make it easy-to-read and focus heavily on the most important points (Arrow's theorem proves every ranked voting rule has spoilers). It's now very easily-accessible for someone like an educational YouTuber who wants to talk about this topic.

Relatedly, if anyone else knows any educational YouTubers like CGPGrey, Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, or whatever—please let me know! I'd love a chance to talk with them about any of the fields I've done work teaching or explaining (including social or rational choice, economics, math, and statistics).

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8A small improvement to Wikipedia page on Pareto Efficiency