How I got 3.2 million Youtube views without making a single video

post by Closed Limelike Curves · 2024-09-03T03:52:33.025Z · LW · GW · 23 comments

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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 [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 on Arrow's impossibility theorem! 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.

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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