reminds me of Good Hunting, by Ken Liu

but better, faster, dogger

truly a masterpiece

thank machine doggo

I'm still not entirely sure if I'm going to write this. I didn't do it when I was freer, and now work is piling up fast. If someone wants to write something inspired from this meme and is curious about what I had in mind PM me.

Thanks :) 

It is going strong! Now views are coming in from YouTube recommending the video. 

I know how to turn this into a cool story. I'm going to try. If I end up giving up, I will post the idea as a reply to this comment.

Here's some more evidence I got in favor of the fact that this is a particularly good book to give to new people. So far, the Rational Animations video about the "Rethinking Identity" section is the channel's most appreciated video in terms of comments, both on Reddit and YT. Also, I'm seeing comments suggesting that at least some people deeply understand and incorporate the message. On r/videos, which is a pretty generalist sub, I'm finding some uplifting (for me) interactions:

I've seen some criticism of this book in EA/Rationality spaces and in some Amazon reviews about the fact that it uses too much internet culture as examples and ties too much with current internet discourse. But I think this is potentially something good. It could achieve at least three things: 1. provide real examples (in a non-aggressive way) that are likely to be somewhat associated with people's identities, thus maybe making them break from this pattern. 2. Be a guide and act as example on how to achieve non-inflammatory non-mind-killing discourse on potentially sensitive topics, and 3. be read more because it ties deeply with how discourse is happening on the internet in recent years. Before obtaining real-world evidence I wouldn't necessarily bet on the fact that it achieves these positive effects, but after seeing reactions in the wild I'm more positive. The negative examples I've seen are fewer and generally downvoted.

I've returned home, and my simulated self is not disintegrated, because he can't compare these metrics with other posts, so he should be fine.

This is really cool, and definitely an improvement. I already know it will finish destroying my sanity! :) I can't wait to return home, use the pc, and be utterly disintegrated. I'm especially excited about the prospect of discovering lots of views accompanied by very little engagement.

Thank you :) yes I've also asked for feedback in that group on the scripts of our next two videos

Rational Animations' writer here. I am just chiming in to say (albeit 20 days later) that we're interested in animating some of the EA introductory articles. We are also interested in adapting blog posts by Holden or anyone else writing about important/interesting stuff.

Before doing more core EA content, though, I want to improve some more. And potentially have someone (paid) always to edit, fact check, and PR-sanity-check my scripts. For now, I will fly pretty close to EA with some videos, but I will avoid EA branding till I'm exceedingly sure that Rational Animations' contribution will be a net positive. Which is probably at least a period of a few months.

 

Update: as a result of feedback here and in other comments (and some independent thinking), we made a few updates to the channel.

• Made new thumbnails without the clickbaity feel that the previous ones had.
• Changed titles (I did that already weeks ago, but it's worth mentioning again).
• Removed the arm from the cover photo.
• Removed mentions of EA from the channel description. For now, I will associate the channel with EA and LW the least I can. I will mention names of specific EA topics (e.g. Longtermism) only when I think it's really necessary. And it will be probably never necessary to mention the EA movement itself. In this way, I can focus on improving with a  lighter heart since the probability of causing PR damage is now lower. Obviously, I'll have to relax these constraints in the future if I want to increase impact.
• Hidden the weakest of the two "digital circuits in Minecraft" videos.

I have also read CEA's models of community building, which were suggested in some comments.

The future direction the channel will take is more important than previous videos, but still, I wanted to let people know that I made these changes. I wanted to make a post to explain both these changes and future directions in detail, but I don't know if I'll manage to finish it, so in the meanwhile, I figured that it would probably be helpful to comment here.