Introductory video on safeguarding the long-term future

By JulianHazell @ 2022-03-07T12:52 (+23)

We (Giving What We Can) recently published a video to go with our page on safeguarding the long-term future that you can now watch on YouTube.

Throughout the rest of the year, we intend to create similar videos that cover important topics related to effective altruism/effective giving. If you’d like to learn more about why we think content creation is particularly important, check out this forum post.

PS:

At the risk of sounding cliche, we’d really appreciate it if you could (1) like, (2) comment, (3) share, and (4) subscribe to our channel. These things actually do make a difference as far as the YouTube algorithm is concerned and would take less than a minute of your time.

Credits

Script: Shakeel Hashim

Video Editor: Marco Shimabukuro

Host: Luke Freeman

Producer: Julian Hazell

Researcher: Michael Townsend

Audio Mastering: Alexander Siedler

timunderwood @ 2022-03-09T14:06 (+1)

 This is nice, but I feel like it is trying to have good production values for normal people to be impressed, but it doesn't justify caring about the septillions of humans in a way that will actually appeal to normal people. Perhaps sticking that sort of number and the distant future as an issue at the back of the video rather than in the front -- I really like though that this was produced, and it seems to me that working on this sort of project is potentially really important and valuable, but the group doing it should be looking for ways to get feedback from people outside of the community (maybe recruiting through some sort of survey website, reddit, facebook groups, whatever), testing metrics, and systematically experimenting with other styles of videos and rhetoric (while at the same time, of course, keeping in mind that the goal is to make videos that convince people to act for the sake of the long term future, and that making videos that people actually watch and listen to is only useful to the extent that it actually leads them to help the long term future).

But a good job.

JulianHazell @ 2022-03-10T09:12 (+1)

Thanks for the feedback! I agree, sometimes conveying the potential value of future generations to a general audience can be really tricky. We're currently working on improving our feedback solicitation process, precisely so we can get input from a wide range of people like you flagged — from highly engaged EAs to members of the general public.

I do think there is a tricky line to balance between going too high level and going too granular when creating longtermist content for a wide audience, but it's something I think is extremely valuable to figure out and would like for us to continually improve at doing a good job of.

timunderwood @ 2022-04-02T08:42 (+1)

The main thing I think is to keep trying lots of different things (probably even if something is working really well relative to expectations). The big fact of trying to get traction with a populat audience is that you simply cannot tell ahead of time what is good.