Hi, as other commenters said, I think that from a purely EA perspective, there might be better ideas to cover. But it’s really good that you published the draft here, as it is likely to help increase your positive impact and quality of production in general (they’re already top notch though). With the size of your channel it’s probably cost-effective for other EAs to help you anyway (it’s not common to leverage exposure to >100k people). Also not every idea you cover needs to be 100% EA, it’s very important to just do interesting stuff every now and then.
As for my suggestion, maybe you could have charter cities in the broader context of evidence based policy & desicion making- as charter cities being one extreme & interesting example of policy research. Taking about evidence based policy could also raise the question of effectiveness and intuition (obviously of value for EA), as social programs are near impossible to assess intuitively, and most don’t really work—https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-social-program/.
There are other good resources on evidence based policy, for example -
I agree that charter cities are very interesting and a likely good way to get people interested in policy in general. Although I don’t think this video 100% aligns with EA, it still seems of extreme potential and value, so good luck!
P.S. - y’all are doing a great job with the channel. You are really interesting and explain complicated subjects concisely and elegantly. Keep it on :)
Yes, I think RationalAnimations is actually planning to do an episode on GiveDirectly sometime soon, which is why I nod towards the idea of interventions like cash transfers and bednets at the very beginning of the script—the GiveDirectly video will probably come out first, so then in the beginning of the Charter Cities video we’ll be able to make some visual allusions and put an on-screen title-card link to the GiveDirectly video.
Well, I wrote this script and not the other one, and I think the idea of publishing draft scripts on the Forum just never occurred to RationalAnimations before? (Even though it seemed like a natural step to me, and indeed it has been helpful.) So naturally I will advocate doing it with future scripts. We already have a couple other ways of getting feedback including internal feedback, working with relevant organizations (eg for this Charter Cities script we got some comments from people associated with the charter cities institute, etc), but the more the merrier when you are trying to get something finalized before animating it for a large audience.
I agree, it seems like a very good idea to post it here. I assume it’s seen by dozen times more people than in your team. Also, the EA forum is definitely less biased about any thing than organizations that work for that thing. Just the way humans work.
Hi, as other commenters said, I think that from a purely EA perspective, there might be better ideas to cover. But it’s really good that you published the draft here, as it is likely to help increase your positive impact and quality of production in general (they’re already top notch though). With the size of your channel it’s probably cost-effective for other EAs to help you anyway (it’s not common to leverage exposure to >100k people). Also not every idea you cover needs to be 100% EA, it’s very important to just do interesting stuff every now and then.
As for my suggestion, maybe you could have charter cities in the broader context of evidence based policy & desicion making- as charter cities being one extreme & interesting example of policy research. Taking about evidence based policy could also raise the question of effectiveness and intuition (obviously of value for EA), as social programs are near impossible to assess intuitively, and most don’t really work—https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-social-program/.
There are other good resources on evidence based policy, for example -
Social Programs That Work—https://evidencebasedprograms.org/
The Campbell Collaboration—https://www.campbellcollaboration.org
I agree that charter cities are very interesting and a likely good way to get people interested in policy in general. Although I don’t think this video 100% aligns with EA, it still seems of extreme potential and value, so good luck!
P.S. - y’all are doing a great job with the channel. You are really interesting and explain complicated subjects concisely and elegantly. Keep it on :)
Yes, I think RationalAnimations is actually planning to do an episode on GiveDirectly sometime soon, which is why I nod towards the idea of interventions like cash transfers and bednets at the very beginning of the script—the GiveDirectly video will probably come out first, so then in the beginning of the Charter Cities video we’ll be able to make some visual allusions and put an on-screen title-card link to the GiveDirectly video.
That’s neat. May I ask why have you published this script, but not the script for the GiveDirectly episode?
Well, I wrote this script and not the other one, and I think the idea of publishing draft scripts on the Forum just never occurred to RationalAnimations before? (Even though it seemed like a natural step to me, and indeed it has been helpful.) So naturally I will advocate doing it with future scripts. We already have a couple other ways of getting feedback including internal feedback, working with relevant organizations (eg for this Charter Cities script we got some comments from people associated with the charter cities institute, etc), but the more the merrier when you are trying to get something finalized before animating it for a large audience.
I agree, it seems like a very good idea to post it here. I assume it’s seen by dozen times more people than in your team. Also, the EA forum is definitely less biased about any thing than organizations that work for that thing. Just the way humans work.