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!
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!