How I got 4.2M YouTube views without making a single video
post by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-03T03:52:33.025Z · LW · GW · 29 commentsContents
29 comments
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 [LW · GW].
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).
29 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2024-09-03T18:12:00.475Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: neel-nanda-1↑ comment by Neel Nanda (neel-nanda-1) · 2024-09-03T22:14:26.336Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-05T22:02:49.228Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
Replies from: Benito↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2024-09-06T17:16:23.133Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I believe the implied next step is for you to cold email a YouTuber you think is interested in that :-)
Replies from: neel-nanda-1↑ comment by Neel Nanda (neel-nanda-1) · 2024-09-06T18:46:47.518Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah, if I made an introduction it would ruin the spirit of it!
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-06T22:52:12.424Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.)
comment by romeostevensit · 2024-09-03T07:23:40.329Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: romeostevensit↑ comment by romeostevensit · 2024-09-09T21:40:50.266Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Found a great example of something needing improvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_scientific_inquiry
comment by Matt Goldenberg (mr-hire) · 2024-09-03T18:19:32.776Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sorta surprised that this got so many up votes with the clickbaity title, which goes against norms around here
Otherwise th content seems good
Replies from: erioire, neel-nanda-1, papetoast, kabir-kumar↑ comment by ErioirE (erioire) · 2024-09-03T19:43:35.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
↑ comment by Neel Nanda (neel-nanda-1) · 2024-09-03T22:16:05.702Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
↑ comment by papetoast · 2024-09-04T02:53:58.821Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: caleb-biddulph↑ comment by CBiddulph (caleb-biddulph) · 2024-09-04T20:05:15.079Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
↑ comment by Kabir Kumar (kabir-kumar) · 2024-09-04T00:29:55.625Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Clickbait still works here, just with a different language.
comment by ryan_b · 2024-09-05T15:18:14.428Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-05T19:07:15.089Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
comment by Brit Cruise (brit-cruise) · 2024-09-30T01:13:55.108Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-10-02T19:47:56.692Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).
comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-04T01:39:30.485Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: habryka4, Davidmanheim↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-09-04T01:56:33.463Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A... scandal related to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem?
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-04T05:13:59.813Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Y'know, I meant Wikipedia, but Arrow's impossibility theorem kinda works too
Replies from: habryka4↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-09-04T05:22:11.043Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lol, OK, that makes somewhat more sense.
↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2024-09-08T12:45:16.890Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-13T17:45:09.600Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think that would be great! I sent you a DM on Discord.
comment by Cleo Scrolls (cleo-scrolls) · 2024-09-24T09:06:05.907Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
May I suggest updating the post name to 4.2 million?
comment by Celenduin (michael-grosse) · 2024-09-18T07:49:05.515Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
comment by hunterglenn · 2024-09-30T12:37:07.523Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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
Replies from: Closed Limelike Curves↑ comment by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-10-03T01:41:47.233Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).
comment by Review Bot · 2024-09-03T17:08:27.613Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The LessWrong Review [? · GW] 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?