In the context of scientific academia, the reason we do webinars and conference presentations is that they’re way easier to put together than a slick youtube video. Our target audience is not the general public, it’s usually other scientists in the same narrow field as us. These are the people who will cite our papers, use our methods, collaborate with us, and potentially score us a job opportunity in the future (or sign up to us as a postdoc/student). Academic conferences are mostly excuses to network with these aims in mind.
Putting a ton of effort into a video doesn’t make sense in this context. The actual target audience can be as few as a couple dozen people, and if they want to know more they can just read the accompanying journal article when it comes out, which is where it makes more sense to put all our effort in order to get past peer review.
I don’t know how much of this is applicable to EA conferences as I have not been to any. Certainly it makes sense if presenting work that it highly technical and of little interest to the general public.
I’d note that I think there’s a very wide range between “webinar” and “highly polished youtube clip”.
If you don’t do it in real-time, there can be less pressure to get every part right.
Even 5-30 minutes of editing could go a long way. There are tools out there that use AI to do some of the cleanup for you automatically (I’m using Descript). And it’s easier to get high-quality audio and video for recording instead of streaming. (Live zoom/streaming setups typically have more compression than processed video)
While I respect this perspective, I think it’s likely post-hoc.
When it comes to spending hundreds of hours on a paper, especially some research which requires signifiant lab costs, what is a few hundred towards paying a freelance video editor? Would this lead to significant increase in citation factor—quite possibly—there’s been some studies showing papers are more likely to be cited after being covered in a major newspaper.
Which is lovely for the type of paper that could get covered in a major newspaper, but the majority of papers are not. If you look at the typical physics paper, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing someone to drop hundreds of dollars promoting “Degeneracy between even- and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-one-dimensional Hubbard model and implications for SR2RuO4undefined”. Also, a freelance video editor is not going to understand how superconductivity relates to the hubbard model. What are they going to do, put flashy animations on top of a few intro slides?
A large part of science is about hyperspecialists developing knowledge very slowly, in collaboration with other hyperspecialists. Eventually a lot of cool and useful stuff comes out of it, but most of the steps along the way are mainly of interests to other specialists.
Having said that, I’m not sure how much of this applies to EA, apart from the highly technical stuff. A lot of it is intended to guide a general audience, so i see the appeal in aiming towards said audience.
In the context of scientific academia, the reason we do webinars and conference presentations is that they’re way easier to put together than a slick youtube video. Our target audience is not the general public, it’s usually other scientists in the same narrow field as us. These are the people who will cite our papers, use our methods, collaborate with us, and potentially score us a job opportunity in the future (or sign up to us as a postdoc/student). Academic conferences are mostly excuses to network with these aims in mind.
Putting a ton of effort into a video doesn’t make sense in this context. The actual target audience can be as few as a couple dozen people, and if they want to know more they can just read the accompanying journal article when it comes out, which is where it makes more sense to put all our effort in order to get past peer review.
I don’t know how much of this is applicable to EA conferences as I have not been to any. Certainly it makes sense if presenting work that it highly technical and of little interest to the general public.
Thanks for the comment!
I’d note that I think there’s a very wide range between “webinar” and “highly polished youtube clip”.
If you don’t do it in real-time, there can be less pressure to get every part right.
Even 5-30 minutes of editing could go a long way. There are tools out there that use AI to do some of the cleanup for you automatically (I’m using Descript). And it’s easier to get high-quality audio and video for recording instead of streaming. (Live zoom/streaming setups typically have more compression than processed video)
While I respect this perspective, I think it’s likely post-hoc.
When it comes to spending hundreds of hours on a paper, especially some research which requires signifiant lab costs, what is a few hundred towards paying a freelance video editor? Would this lead to significant increase in citation factor—quite possibly—there’s been some studies showing papers are more likely to be cited after being covered in a major newspaper.
Which is lovely for the type of paper that could get covered in a major newspaper, but the majority of papers are not. If you look at the typical physics paper, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing someone to drop hundreds of dollars promoting “Degeneracy between even- and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-one-dimensional Hubbard model and implications for SR2RuO4undefined”. Also, a freelance video editor is not going to understand how superconductivity relates to the hubbard model. What are they going to do, put flashy animations on top of a few intro slides?
A large part of science is about hyperspecialists developing knowledge very slowly, in collaboration with other hyperspecialists. Eventually a lot of cool and useful stuff comes out of it, but most of the steps along the way are mainly of interests to other specialists.
Having said that, I’m not sure how much of this applies to EA, apart from the highly technical stuff. A lot of it is intended to guide a general audience, so i see the appeal in aiming towards said audience.