Also, stepping back, I think you mainly need to answer two questions, which suggest different types of required data, neither of which is karma on the Forum/​LessWrong:
Will it be net positive for these videos to be widely viewed by people who aren’t (yet) highly engaged in the EA/​rationality communities? How positive? Can the upsides of that be increased or the downsides decreased?
Will these videos be widely viewed by people who aren’t (yet) highly engaged in the EA/​rationality communities?
I think Q1 is best answered through actively soliciting feedback on video ideas, scripts, rough cuts, etc. from specific people or groups who are unusually likely to have good judgement on such things. This could be people who’ve done somewhat similar projects like Rob Miles, could be engaged EAs who know about whatever topic you’re covering in a given vid, could be non-EAs who know about whatever topic you’re covering in a vid, or groups in which some of those types people can be found (e.g., the Slack I made).
I think Q2 is best answered by the number of views your videos to date have gotten, the likes vs dislikes, the comments on YouTube, etc.
I think Forum/​LessWrong karma does serve as weak evidence on both questions, but only weak evidence. Karma is a very noisy and coarse-grained metric. (So I don’t think getting low karma is a very bad sign, and I think there are better things to be looking at.)
This is very very helpful feedback, thank you for taking the time to give it (here and on the other post). Also, I’m way less anxious getting feedback like this than trying to hopelessly gauge things by upvotes and downvotes. I think I need to talk more to individual EAs and engage more with comments/​express my doubts more like I’m doing now. My initial instinct was to run away (post/​interact less), but this feels much better other than being more helpful.
Yeah, I think it is worth often posting, but that this is only partly because you get feedback and more so for other reasons (e.g., making it more likely that people will find your post/​videos if it’s relevant to them, via seeing it on the home page, finding it in a search, or tags). And comments are generally more useful as feedback than karma, and comments from specific people asked in places outside the Forum are generally more useful as feedback than Forum comments.
Also, stepping back, I think you mainly need to answer two questions, which suggest different types of required data, neither of which is karma on the Forum/​LessWrong:
Will it be net positive for these videos to be widely viewed by people who aren’t (yet) highly engaged in the EA/​rationality communities? How positive? Can the upsides of that be increased or the downsides decreased?
Will these videos be widely viewed by people who aren’t (yet) highly engaged in the EA/​rationality communities?
I think Q1 is best answered through actively soliciting feedback on video ideas, scripts, rough cuts, etc. from specific people or groups who are unusually likely to have good judgement on such things. This could be people who’ve done somewhat similar projects like Rob Miles, could be engaged EAs who know about whatever topic you’re covering in a given vid, could be non-EAs who know about whatever topic you’re covering in a vid, or groups in which some of those types people can be found (e.g., the Slack I made).
I think Q2 is best answered by the number of views your videos to date have gotten, the likes vs dislikes, the comments on YouTube, etc.
I think Forum/​LessWrong karma does serve as weak evidence on both questions, but only weak evidence. Karma is a very noisy and coarse-grained metric. (So I don’t think getting low karma is a very bad sign, and I think there are better things to be looking at.)
This is very very helpful feedback, thank you for taking the time to give it (here and on the other post). Also, I’m way less anxious getting feedback like this than trying to hopelessly gauge things by upvotes and downvotes. I think I need to talk more to individual EAs and engage more with comments/​express my doubts more like I’m doing now. My initial instinct was to run away (post/​interact less), but this feels much better other than being more helpful.
Yeah, I think it is worth often posting, but that this is only partly because you get feedback and more so for other reasons (e.g., making it more likely that people will find your post/​videos if it’s relevant to them, via seeing it on the home page, finding it in a search, or tags). And comments are generally more useful as feedback than karma, and comments from specific people asked in places outside the Forum are generally more useful as feedback than Forum comments.
(See also Reasons for and against posting on the EA Forum.)