Semi-related YouTube news: the latest 3Blue1Brown video on language models (from 3 days ago) shows and scrolls through a post on the AI alignment forum, at about 1 and 2 mins in. It's at ~300k views atm.
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Neat; would he maybe be interested in discussing social choice on his channel? I'm on the Summer of Math Exposition Discord with the name @statslime
I believe the implied next step is for you to cold email a YouTuber you think is interested in that :-)
Okay this is a really good point about pedagogy. We can increase the influence of useful concepts simply by learning good pedagogical writing principles and applying them to Wikipedia.
Found a great example of something needing improvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_scientific_inquiry
Sorta surprised that this got so many up votes with the clickbaity title, which goes against norms around here
Otherwise th content seems good
2I don't think most of us mind clickbait so much as clickbait-and-switch, where the content is not what the headline promises. In this case, the 'bait' headline was more or less justified so I don't mind.
I dislike clickbait when it's misleading, or takes a really long time to get to the point (esp if it's then underwhelming). I was fine with this post on that front.
The clickbait title is misleading, but I forgive this one because I do end up finding it interesting, and it is short. In general I mostly don't try to punish things if it end up to be good/correct.
Yeah, you kind of have to expect from the beginning that there's some trick, since taken literally the title can't actually be true. So I think it's fine
Could you talk a bit about how much time and effort you have invested into writing the wikipedia articles?
I think it would be helpful by making it easier for other people to judge whether they can have an impact this way, and whether it would be worth their time.
The amount of time and effort you can invest into them is on a continuous scale. The more time you invest, the more impact you'll have. However, what I can say is if you invest any time at all into advocacy, writing, or trying to communicate ideas to others, you should be doing that on Wikipedia instead. It's like a blog where you can get 1,000s of views a day if you pick a popular article to work on.
Oh, same goes for if anyone knows a (preferably investigative) journalist interested in breaking a related story—I happen to have a scandal on hand related to this subject.
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
Link to the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Just over a month ago, I wrote this.
An update on this. I've been working on Wikipedia articles for just a few months, and Veritasium just put a video out on Arrow's impossibility theorem—which is almost completely based on my Wikipedia article on Arrow's impossibility theorem! Lots of lines and the whole structure/outline of the video are taken almost verbatim from what I wrote. I think there's a pretty clear reason for this: I recently rewrote the entire article to make it easy-to-read and focus heavily on the most important points.
Relatedly, if anyone else knows any educational YouTubers like CGPGrey, Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, or whatever—please let me know! I'd love a chance to talk with them about any of the fields I've done work teaching or explaining (including social or rational choice, economics, math, and statistics).