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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Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might get a better result. Also, don't forget the social media channels. Twitter , uh X or whatever its called this week, does offer a conduit where directly approaching media figures is a little more normalized.
Agreed, chance of success when cold emailing busy people is low, and spamming them is bad. And there are alternate approaches that may work better, depending on the person and their setup - some Youtubers don't have a manager or employees, some do. I also think being able to begin an email with "Hi, I run the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team" was quite helpful here.
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
Very related is the finding that scientific articles being used as Wikipedia sources causally gives them an average of 91% more citations: "Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia".
I am sure that being cited by wikipeida is very good for giving an article more exposure. There is an "altimetric" thingy on some journals that is used to help funders see what other useful impacts an article had on the world beyond citations from other articles, and it thinks wikipedia mentions are high-value (it also likes things like newspaper coverage).
I suspect that it is not that rare for the authors of a paper to go and put a link in wiki to their own paper. I have certainly seen wiki articles mention something with a cite, which, while true, feels weirdly specific.
I'm even aware of some labs that have groups of students who routinely update Wikipedia articles relevant to their research. It sounds nefarious — and some activities might be, i.e. replacing sources from other labs with your own lab's papers — but really it isn't super far off from what OP is describing. The role of a scientist is to create and disseminate new knowledge, and there are few venues better than Wikipedia to make new concepts accessible to broader audiences.
There is also some conception of Wikipedia as "for laymen", which is true to some extent — I doubt number theorists often read the Number Theory article — but also misses the huge contingent of scientists who do use Wikipedia for cursory, high-level understanding of fields adjacent to their own — maybe a combinatorics researcher would read the Number Theory page for a quick overview before talking to a collaborator. I guess your Veritasium post is even a weak example of this! (Congrats on that btw :D)
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.
Hey i'm from YouTube (Art of the Problem) and working on a new series on Economics. Thinking about exploring it via evolutionary lens (making decisions about value)...if interested please reach out
2This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).
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
If you show them this link, I suspect Rational Animations would be happy to talk to you! Lmk if you need help getting in touch!
https://www.facebook.com/rational.animations
This would be great! You can message me on Discord (handle @statslime) or by email (closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com).
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! 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 (Arrow's theorem proves every ranked voting rule has spoilers). It's now very easily-accessible for someone like an educational YouTuber who wants to talk about this topic.
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).