I’m a big fan of OpenPhil/GiveWell popularizing longtermist-relevant facts via sponsoring popular YouTube channels like Kurzgesagt (21M subscribers). That said, I just watched two of their videos and found a mistake in one[1] and took issue with the script-writing in the other one (not sure how best to give feedback—do I need to become a Patreon supporter or something?):
9:40 “If we really are early, we have an incredible opportunity to mold *thousands* or *even millions* of planets according to our visions and dreams.”—Why understate this? Kurzgesagt already made a video imagining humanity colonizing the Milky Way Galaxy to create a future of “a tredecillion potential lives” (10^42 people), so why not say ‘hundreds of billions of planets’ (the number of planets in the Milky Way), ‘or even more if we colonize other galaxies before other loud/grabby aliens reach them first’? This also seems inaccurate because the chance that we colonize between 1,000-9,999,999 planets (or even 1,000-9,999,999 planets) is less than the probability that we colonize >10 million (or even >1 billion) planets.
As an aside, the reason I watched these two videos just now was because I was inspired to look them up after watching the depressing new Veritasium video Do People Understand the Scale of the Universe? in which he shows a bunch of college students from a university with 66th percentile average SAT scores who do not know basic facts about the universe.
[1] The mistake I found was in the most recent video You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally) was that it said (9:10) that the diameter of the observable universe is 465,000 Milky Way galaxies side-by-side, but that’s actually the radius of the observable universe, not the diameter.
I’m a big fan of OpenPhil/GiveWell popularizing longtermist-relevant facts via sponsoring popular YouTube channels like Kurzgesagt (21M subscribers). That said, I just watched two of their videos and found a mistake in one[1] and took issue with the script-writing in the other one (not sure how best to give feedback—do I need to become a Patreon supporter or something?):
Why Aliens Might Already Be On Their Way To Us
My comment:
As an aside, the reason I watched these two videos just now was because I was inspired to look them up after watching the depressing new Veritasium video Do People Understand the Scale of the Universe? in which he shows a bunch of college students from a university with 66th percentile average SAT scores who do not know basic facts about the universe.
[1] The mistake I found was in the most recent video You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally) was that it said (9:10) that the diameter of the observable universe is 465,000 Milky Way galaxies side-by-side, but that’s actually the radius of the observable universe, not the diameter.
Found it! https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt > click on ”and 7 more links” in the little bio > click on “View email address” > do the CAPTCHA (I’ve also DM’d it to you)