[Link] Animated Video—The Useful Idea of Truth (Part 1/3)
I have taken this well received post by Eliezer, and remade the first third of it into a short and quickly paced youtube video here: http://youtu.be/L2dNANRIALs
The goals of this post are re-introducing the lessons explored in the original (for anyone not yet familiar with them), as well as asking the question of whether this format is actually suited for the lessons LessWrong tries to teach. What are your thoughts?
Awesome!
Getting these ideas wider presentation is a good thing.
One stylistic nitpick: I know the visual style you’re going for requires the words to appear incrementally in the video, in time with the spoken presentation. But do they really have to appear syllable by syllable in some cases? Things like “Al-fred-Tar-ski” comes across to me as if you’re talking down to the viewer, which I don’t think is your intention.
I agree with you. If you pay attention, you’ll notice the overall presentation of the text changes dramatically as the video goes forward. This correlates to the lessons I learned in real time while making it, and the earlier video is only like the way it is because I didn’t feel like going back and changing things was an important enough of an improvement to warrant the effort.
I like the animation and the voice, but I dislike the text. I don’t need it and it really distracts from the animations. And if I did need to read along with what you say, I think YT has a subtitle feature that would be much less distracting and could be turned off. I suppose I’ve seen videos using the style you attempt here, but I’m not sure I like then, either, and they typically use text only, while you also use pictures.
Oh, and I suppose you would be faster in producing those videos if you were to give up on the text.
It’s a great idea and well executed, I hope you continue! (Even though I firmly disagree with the epistemology described in the post.) Please note that there are a few spelling mistakes (seperate, privilige), maybe you can fix those.
Thank you for the feedback! I do plan to make many more, but unfortunately, these videos will easily have 2 or more months between each other, unless I can get the income to support myself working on them near full time. This little project took >80 hours of work.
As of now, I don’t plan to go back and fix small errors, like misspellings. It’s possible, and I do apreciate you pointing them out where they exist, but it’s a lot of trouble to do.
Do you have someone to help you for future videos? I mean, just one other person to help you would probably cut down on mistakes like misspellings quite a bit.
I don’t really, though I did show the video to a couple people while making it, at different in-progress points, but there was never the specific instruction to look for spelling errors. If there is anyone here interesting in joining such a group for official “proofreading” purposes, comment here or send me a PM. I’ll get to organizing a mailing list/subreddit/something to suit the purpose.
That’s really great, and well done. I’m looking forward to the others, so I can send the complete set off to some of my friends—if I just send off this one, a few I know will say ’Yes Ben, the postmodernists are right.”
That’s one of my larger concerns about this format, actually. Only watching one video, out of the context of the others, could be more harmful than good. Even videos that are more independently consumable than this one run into the problem that knowing about biases can hurt people.
However, I think (eventually) having a large bank of videos for viewers to binge on, and including links directly to related LW posts I haven’t yet covered is a good enough band-aid to assuage that worry.
Increasingly, I’ve concluded this is true for a great many people, and just the people who would first ask these questions. For them, truths really are primarily weapons to manipulate others. And why shouldn’t they be? Real power in the world is power over others.
What I notice in the video, and as a common theme of people I consider sane, is a bit of insanity, assuming that the correspondence theory of truth is shared by all, and similarly motivating to all. The seemingly inexplicable crazy of others becomes perfectly explicable and predictable when you give up that assumption.