The Sequences on YouTube

post by Neil (neil-warren) · 2024-01-07T01:44:39.663Z · LW · GW · 9 comments

Contents

  I will be:
  I'm looking for:
  I have:
  I'm doing this because:
  Ideas that might work:
  Warning:
None
9 comments

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:

• Turning all 50 Sequence Highlights posts into 6-15 minute videos
• Hopefully 1-2 a week
• Just a guy talking into a camera, no fancy effects yet

I'm looking for:

• Someone who can edit videos. I can do it myself, it will only be slightly more complicated. (I’m running on a Chromebook.) I'll be searching for interim solutions and I'm not sure what I'll end up settling on, but the more options, the better. 
• Ideas. This community is supposed to be good at arriving at good idea through First Principles regardless of whether they end up looking weird or not. If you want to help, think about this for 5 minutes, by the clock. 

I have:

• Slack [? · GW]
• Zero experience in video. 
• (But I do theater?)
• (And I'm motivated.)
• A Blue Yeti mic

I'm doing this because:

• YouTube has a much larger audience potential than this website currently has. More people learning about the Sequences is good. 
• People who come here and haven't read the Sequences may do more damage than good. Only, not everyone is interested in sitting down and reading 8 hours of blog posts before being a-okayed to speak. 
• This project has been tried before using Minecraft railcarts and a robot voice [LW · GW], but it didn't curate many views. This is not the same project. There are plenty of longform high-views videos on YouTube (eg. video essays or RealEngineering videos) and this wouldn't even be longform. Short attention spans are not the perceived problem here. 

Ideas that might work:

• The Sequences are more than a decade old, and Eliezer and others have noted how they are flawed and outdated in certain specific ways. So: 
  • I might change the writing a little if better for video. The writing in itself isn't sacred to me, I'm just here to facilitate the transmission of ideas.  
  • Of course, I am pretty foolish and should be running any changes by the LW audience before doing anything drastic. (And Eliezer, if he deems this project worthy of some attention.) 
  • Having LW users write short afterwords to videos might be a good idea to address some problems and concrete applications of lessons without editing the original text. I could also plug CFAR. 
• It'd be nice to be able to ship new viewers into a space for discussion, but linking to LW might be a bad idea for garden maintenance [LW · GW]. Discussion seems good to me, and if it's not an LW post specifically bred for discussion written up for every video, then perhaps a Discord channel? Seems suboptimal. 
• I'm reaching out to the Rational Animations email to ask them if they would be willing to draw thumbnails for the videos. If that doesn't work, I'll get a Midjourney/Dall-E subscription. Thumbnails are really really important on YouTube. 
• I'll be using the LW font [LW · GW] for footnotes and title text on video. Currently there are no planned special effects or anything, just me speaking into a camera and some text appearing from time to time for footnotes, table of contents, and emphasis. If you have any idea for cool (and time-cheap) special effects, hit me with them. 
• There will be a general principle of experimentation here. If you suggest an idea to me, I will do it. God knows there’s a lot of posts in the Sequences. 
• I’m very pro-sponsorships. If I ever gain credibility enough, I can do EA org adverts for free. The plan is to get people interested who are not yet in the rationalitysphere, so these sponsorships would actually be useful. 

Warning:

• The first few videos will necessarily be terrible, especially, hopefully, by the standards of the 47th video. 
• So… just... keep that in mind. 
• Video will be filmed on a Pixel 6 phone, which should be fine given that means 1080p quality. People on YouTube care more about the quality of the audio than the visuals anyway, and the audio will be perfect.

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). 
 

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