If I (a 19 year old male) texted “www.readthesequences.com” to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like “seems interesting, I’ll def check it out sometime”, and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school’s math team, and he scored in the 1500′s (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.[1]
What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user’s visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn’t have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it’s all quite hypnotizing.
The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok’s algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I (“Map and Territory”) of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn’t have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I’ve got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)
Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.
I Converted Book I of The Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format
If I (a 19 year old male) texted “www.readthesequences.com” to my roommate, the probable outcome is that he would skim the site for under a minute, text back something like “seems interesting, I’ll def check it out sometime”, and then proceed to never read another word. I have another friend, one that I would consider a smart guy. He would consistently rank above me in our high school’s math team, and he scored in the 1500′s (≥3SD) on his SATs. The same dude did not read a single book during the entirety of his high school career.[1]
Attention is one’s scarcest resource, and actually reading something longer than a paragraph is a trivial inconvenience, especially for my generation.
What, then, does manage to hold the fickle eyeballs of zoomers like me? Well, TikTok, mostly. However, there is one (very popular) genre of TikTok video worth investigating. In this genre of video, a Reddit post is broken into sub-paragraph chunks of text, and these chunks are sequentially rendered onscreen while a text-to-speech program reads them to the user. The text is overlaid upon a background video, which is either gameplay from the mobile game Subway Surfers, or parkour footage from Minecraft. The background gameplay provides engaging novelty to the user’s visual cortex, while the synthetic voice ensures that the user doesn’t have to go through the hard work of translating symbols into sounds. Really, it’s all quite hypnotizing.
The fact that these videos are often recommended by TikTok’s algorithm implies that they are among the most-engaging videos that our civilization produces. Therefore, to reduce the effort-cost of reading the sequences, I gave the TikTok treatment to Book I (“Map and Territory”) of Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
(Update: Circa 2023-02-09, all these links are dead. This was in response to an AWS alert notifying me that 85 gigabytes (or more) of data had been transferred out. I really shouldn’t have used a public S3 bucket to serve video in the first place, as it exposed me to an unacceptable amount of risk in the form of a denial of wallet attack. I’ve got a second batch of videos in the works, which I intend to distribute via a more secure mechanism.)
(Update 2: THE VIDEOS ARE HERE, CLICK HERE)
Predictably Wrong
What Do I Mean By “Rationality”?
Feeling Rational
Why Truth? And…
… What’s a Bias, Again?
Availability
Burdensome Details
Planning Fallacy
Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You
Expecting Short Inferential Distances
The Lens That Sees Its Own Flaws
Fake Beliefs
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
A Fable of Science and Politics
Belief in Belief
Bayesian Judo
Pretending to be Wise
Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Professing and Cheering
Belief as Attire
Applause Lights
Noticing Confusion
Focus Your Uncertainty
What Is Evidence?
Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
How Much Evidence Does It Take?
Einstein’s Arrogance
Occam’s Razor
Your Strength as a Rationalist
Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
Conservation of Expected Evidence
Hindsight Devalues Science
Mysterious Answers
Fake Explanations
Guessing the Teacher’s Password
Science as Attire
Fake Causality
Semantic Stopsigns
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
The Futility of Emergence
Say Not “Complexity”
Positive Bias: Look into the Dark
Lawful Uncertainty
My Wild and Reckless Youth
Failing to Learn from History
Making History Available
Explain/Worship/Ignore?
“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper
Truly Part of You
Interlude: The Simple Truth
Do whatever you want with these videos. I may or may not convert the other 5 books of R:AZ, and I may or may not upload them to TikTok. If you want another work of text converted to video, please pitch it to me in the comments, or DM me.
No, not even the books assigned in English class. He used SparkNotes.