Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse? - Kurzgesagt

By GabeM @ 2022-08-16T20:06 (+33)

This is a linkpost to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W93XyXHI8Nw

Kurzgesagt just released their second video on longtermism as a partnership with Will MacAskill and on the day What We Owe The Future releases! 

My initial thoughts:


Nat @ 2022-08-16T21:26 (+29)

The top comments seem mostly critical at the moment. This video was posted today and already has 1.2 million views (>100x the number of active EAs as of 2019!), so it might be useful to examine the reception from this video's general audience. Some of the critique so far:

joko @ 2022-08-16T22:31 (+20)

What is the main idea this video is trying to convey? Based on the title and description, I assumed the goal would be to introduce key ideas of longtermism/x-risks and promote WWOTF. It did the latter, but I don't think the video presents longtermist ideas in a very clear way. 

Earlier today, I watched the video with a couple of friends who have never heard about longtermism and x-risks before. It did not do a good job at sparking discussion. When talking about the video, the main takeaways were something like:

Afterwards, I suggested reading Will's guest essay in the NYT. From my impression, that article got my friends a lot more excited about reading WWOTF and seemed to resolve the confusion about longtermism and EA. In the future, I will definitely send the NYT article to people as an introduction to longtermism or this WWOTF book review by Ali Abdaal for people who just really prefer watching videos.

WilliamKiely @ 2022-08-16T20:58 (+13)

There are a lot of highly upvoted comments saying the video needs a title change and frankly I agree the current title is not accurate for what the video discusses. I'm a little surprised and disappointed Kurzgesagt hasn't changed the title in response to the feedback. Does anyone know why they haven't changed it?

Gabriel Mukobi @ 2022-08-16T21:11 (+4)

They just added to it so it's now "Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse? And Could We Recover?" but it still seems to not answer the first question.

WilliamKiely @ 2022-08-18T01:06 (+4)

I'm still seeing "Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?" so looks like they may have changed it back.