I want to know what you would be excited to see covered on the channel.
I’d especially like to know what videos you think would be optimal to make according to an optimization target you specify. It’s more effortful, but more useful, to answer that question instead of just “what would be good video topics?”.
Answers that go the extra mile and explain their reasoning in detail will be especially appreciated.
That said, I also welcome answers to the easier question “what would be good video topics?” and without much argumentation.
I know you have the exact opposite position on this as me but It would be nice If you could try to do justice to the Negative Utilitarian Idea that terraforming far off celestial bodies and creating more bisopheres is actually the worst thing humanity could ever do.
Require people building biospheres to stick nanotech in the brains of anything that can feel pain to make sure it doesn’t get bad enough to stop being fun?
I don’t think this is the place that a soft negative utilitarian actually breaks with a soft total utilitarian transhumanist.
Interesting! One idea they could expand on is that spreading to other stars would mean that the probe we send could later come back to kill us all. Basically, “humans” or probes on other stars would evolve differently from us, and it would take crazy long periods of time to communicate with them. It would be near impossible to coordinate an interstellar civilization, even with light-speed travel.
Perhaps you can work together with one of the worldbuilding contest winners to visualize one of the stories https://worldbuild.ai/winners/
Worldbuilding contest #2 winner here, would be happy to collaborate! Here is an (AI-risk and “inadequate equilibria” focused) blog post summarizing my team’s entry: A bridge to Dath Ilan? Improved governance on the critical path to AI alignment. Although I note that FLI is already slowly working on producing some kind of media follow-up to the contest entries—at least podcasts, and maybe videos or other products.
Considering how awesome your video on Prediction Markets is, I also think it could be a great idea to make videos about some of the institutional innovations that my worldbuilding scenario is built around—charter cities / network states, alternate voting systems like approval voting and liquid democracy, and so forth. (If you want to take things in an even more political direction, you could produce animated versions of the Bryan Caplan arguments for open borders or YIMBYism.)
For some more traditionally rationalist / EA media ideas, here are two of my comments on some previous threads about the idea EA documentaries.
Craziest idea: make a video about HPMOR—either a movie-trailer-style animation, or a longer more traditional youtube-y style summary of the early parts of the story, and hope that this works as a short hook to get more people reading the whole thing? Thus leveraging the amount of rationalist content you imbue per unit of animation effort. (I feel like the idea of video-as-hook would work well for HPMOR and other works of fiction, versus with other EA / rationalist content it is better to stick to “video as summary of the key message”.) Idk about the copyright issues here though.
On the subject of fiction, how about illustrating some much-shorter-than-HPMOR stories from the (allegedly slim) pantheon of great EA & rationalist fiction works?
Fable of The Dragon Tyrant has already been done—but it got 9M views!!
The metaphor in “500 Million, But Not A Single One More” is very similar to “The Dragon Tyrant”, and it would probably work well with RationalAnimation’s style of illustrating ideas using monsters and leviathans (like in your “Transparent Tragedies” episode).
“The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle” isn’t a fiction story that could be transcribed word-for-word, rather it’s a thought experiment. But it would make for a great hook for a video that goes on to explain basic EA concepts.
Similarly, just illustrating the “paperclips” AI thought-experiment (detailed and realistic rendition here, shorter and less-realistic versions found in many places including the clicker game “universal paperclips”, which became quite popular) could be very valuable, and I feel like it would fit well with the tone of RationalAnimations’ existing videos about aliens, apocalypses, and other big-picture high-drama topics.
I feel like there are a LOT of different angles that you could take when making videos about superintelligence / AI. But this comment is already long so I will not try to enumerate them here.
Since your audience loves Robin Hanson content so much, give them a summary of Age of Em? Although this is not a super-relevant subject matter.
If the copyright issues around HPMOR are navigable, consider adapting the EA short-story “A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good”, which is like the rational-fiction version of this famous SMBC comic where superman turns a crank all day to generate power—in real life, superman could do good much more effectively than turning the crank!
Or how about a story where you use the vivid, apocalyptic details of the Toba Supervolcanic Eruption as a way to both inform viewers about the real history of humanity’s near-extinction 75,000 years ago, AND as a metaphor about the importance of longtermism and humanity’s vast potential? Again, I think this would fit well with the themes of other videos by RationalAnimati—oh, no! My comment has looped back around from helpful brainstorming to the very same shameless self-promotion with which I started off!!
Brief attempt to “go the extra mile” and explain why I think these are good ideas:
There is a natural tradeoff between making videos that draw in lots of new viewers (for instance, videos about aliens!) vs making videos that aren’t as viral but communicate more of the information that you truly want to impart (for instance about futarchy or longtermism). So you want to have the channel strike a balance between those two things, including by alternating between videos that are more viral-oriented versus more education-oriented.
For education-oriented videos, I’d be thrilled if you made some more videos about institutional innovations, but that’s just my personal hobbyhorse because I think it’s underrated within EA. The more obvious direction to go for education videos would be to basically just adapt the 80,000 Hours content into a series of videos. (Some of these could have viral potential, of course. Imagine a video about how you can do more good for the world as [counterintuitive career path like AI safety programmer or etc] than as a doctor—make sure to mention that fact about how the number of US doctors is essentially capped by protectionist regulations! That would seem like a very controversial take to most normal people, IMO.) Anyways, personally I think the goal of the educational videos should be communicating the core EA / rationalist worldview and thinking style. (Rather than, say, CFAR-style productivity tips or object-level education about detailed EA issues.) I could talk about this in more detail if you are interested.
For the virally-oriented videos, it’s presumably more about just figuring out what’s going to be a big hit. Hence my thought that it might be good to recycle the greatest hits of the EA/rationalist movement, especially catchy fiction which might adapt better than abstract ideas. Although I certainly don’t know anything about growing a youtube channel to 100K subscribers, so all of my ideas about the viral side of things should be taken with a grain of salt!
Short productivity videos. For example: “what is a TAP”, “what is Murphyjitsu”, “what is goal factoring”, etc.
This, alongside your current “worldview expanding” content, curates an audience who is interested in tackling big questions and also cares about optimizing their personal impact.
Expanding on the “big questions” side, I would like to see more content which inspires altruism (example).
I recently heard the Radio Bostrom audio version of the Unilateralist’s Curse after only having read it before. Something about the narration made me think that it lends itself very well to an explainer video.
I recently searched “solar sails” on Youtube and saw no Kurzgesagt-like animation on the topic. It could be an interesting idea!