Strong upvote great job (unusual for me for an AI safety post ha). I think within very specific domains like this, there’s no reason at all why you can’t do cost-effectiveness comparisons for AI safety. I would loosely estimate this to have similarish validity to many global health comparisons.
I love rational animations and show my friends their videos in groups—very subjectively I think you might have underrated their quality adjuster. But still I’m gobsmacked they have spent over 4 million dollars. If 80k can continue to produce videos even 1/10th as good as their first one for 100k though (about the same cost as each rational animations video), I would probably rather put my money there.
I also think 12x quality adjustment might be a bit of an overshoot for Robert Miles. Subjectively adjusting each view on one channel as being over 10x the value of another is a pretty big call and I can imagine if I was another video producer I might squint a bit....
I think that within AI safety, you can compare things to each other, even things as different as technical work and communications, and policy.
I think I may have done a poor job explaining the quality adjustments, the Qa quality adjustment is the quality adjustment of the audience compared to the average person in the world. I spoke to several people who told me they got into AI safety because of Rob and his audience is extremely nerdy and technical. Perhaps as an intuition pump, world GDP is ~12k and US GDP is about 86k per capita which could mean that the average American is worth ~7x the average person. Rob’s channel is fairly technical, a lot come from Computerphile, etc. In fact, I wanted to give this a higher Qa than I did. Of course, GDP/capita is a bit crude but I think it’s roughly correct for who we want to reach (though we want a bias towards say, computer science/math people). I think for any video that gets lots of views (>50k or so), it’s hard to give numbers >100 but 12x feels too low once you do analysis. I gave all channels at least a 2x on this, just because people who watch videos have internet access + free time to consume video content and thus are above the global average (since the world average includes those who do and don’t have internet and have free time) and clearly have some affinity to watch this kind of stuff
Strong upvote great job (unusual for me for an AI safety post ha). I think within very specific domains like this, there’s no reason at all why you can’t do cost-effectiveness comparisons for AI safety. I would loosely estimate this to have similarish validity to many global health comparisons.
I love rational animations and show my friends their videos in groups—very subjectively I think you might have underrated their quality adjuster. But still I’m gobsmacked they have spent over 4 million dollars. If 80k can continue to produce videos even 1/10th as good as their first one for 100k though (about the same cost as each rational animations video), I would probably rather put my money there.
I also think 12x quality adjustment might be a bit of an overshoot for Robert Miles. Subjectively adjusting each view on one channel as being over 10x the value of another is a pretty big call and I can imagine if I was another video producer I might squint a bit....
Thanks Nick!
I think that within AI safety, you can compare things to each other, even things as different as technical work and communications, and policy.
I think I may have done a poor job explaining the quality adjustments, the Qa quality adjustment is the quality adjustment of the audience compared to the average person in the world. I spoke to several people who told me they got into AI safety because of Rob and his audience is extremely nerdy and technical. Perhaps as an intuition pump, world GDP is ~12k and US GDP is about 86k per capita which could mean that the average American is worth ~7x the average person. Rob’s channel is fairly technical, a lot come from Computerphile, etc. In fact, I wanted to give this a higher Qa than I did. Of course, GDP/capita is a bit crude but I think it’s roughly correct for who we want to reach (though we want a bias towards say, computer science/math people). I think for any video that gets lots of views (>50k or so), it’s hard to give numbers >100 but 12x feels too low once you do analysis. I gave all channels at least a 2x on this, just because people who watch videos have internet access + free time to consume video content and thus are above the global average (since the world average includes those who do and don’t have internet and have free time) and clearly have some affinity to watch this kind of stuff