One of the things I found extraordinary about MrBeast videos was how it seems like viewers come for the extreme content on the thumbnail, and then stay to see the details of how exactly people succeed at doing extraordinary things.
On an economic basis, it looks like it scales really well to find ways to do really big things (unambiguously net positive) that you can also bundle into an entertainment product that also inspires other people. I don’t know what the median viewer would think of this, but I found it really vivid to see the videos “ramp up” with more and more people getting helped per minute of the video.
Have you thought of other ways you could set up something where the complexity of the situation or the number people helped gets “ramped up” over the course of the video, or where the subjects of the story find increasingly extraordinary ways to overcome increasingly extraordinary challenges? Showing people shine brightly, being their best self and then winning for it, seems to be a common theme for the channel.
Do you know about your cameo in Scott Alexander’s novel Unsong? What probability would you have placed on you shifting career paths from academia to more like your Unsong character if, in the 1970s, your younger self and everyone you knew witnessed the sky shattering?
John S Wentworth wrote a 1 minute post considering whether individual innovators cause major discoveries to happen many decades or even centuries earlier than they would have without that one person, or whether they only accelerate the discovery by a few months or years before someone else would have made the advancement. Based on your impact on the philosophy scene in the 1970s and EA’s emergence decades later (the counterculture movement is considered by many to have died down during the mid-1970s which notably is around the time when some of your most famous works came out), what does your life indicate about Wentworth’s models of innovation, particularly conceptual and philosophical innovation?
What do you think about the current state of introductory philosophy education, with the ancient texts (Greek, kant, etc) being Schelling points that work great in low-trust environments, but still follow the literary traditions of the times? Do you think undergrads and intellectuals outside contemporary philosophy culture (e.g. engineers, historians, anthropologists, etc) would prefer introductory philosophy classes be restructured to produce a more logical foundations to produce innovators and reductionists like your 1970s self and less literary-analysis-minded thinking?