How to Suck Less at Youtube Videos

I watch a lot of Youtube, but there are a lot of crummy videos out there. The most annoying mistakes people make in their videos have really obvious solutions. I don't know why people still make them. It's like they're not even looking at their own videos before they post them. This is why the Wadsworth Constant exists.

Most of this boils down to "stop wasting people's time!"

Anyway, here is the list:

1. Don't apologize for not making videos recently, having a sore throat, or being incompetent. This includes pre-apologees ("I'm not sure how this works so sorry in advance if I screw it up"). No one wants to hear it. And if it sucks that much, remake your shitty video instead of posting sub-par content. 
2. Don't talk about how many subscribers you have or don't have. Unless you're making a "Hurray 100,000 subs I'm giving away $1,000,000!" video, no one cares.
3. If you want to ask for likes and subscriptions, do so at the end of a video. If I haven't seen the video yet, how do I know whether I actually like it/you enough to do these things.
4. Don't talk about things people said in the comments or private messages. Youtube comments are notoriously awful. If you're going to respond do so in the text because most viewers haven't read all the comments from your last unpopular video like you just did.
5. If you make a mistake that takes more than 2 seconds to fix, edit it out. There's no reason to make others watch you fixing things, and learning to use a basic movie editor doesn't take long.
6. Know what you're going to do in advance. Running around aimlessly trying to figure stuff out isn't very interesting. Look at how they do things on cooking shows: everything is setup ahead of time and the steps that include waiting for something to finish are cleverly skipped.

Cost Benefit Of Changing Other's Epistemology

Today I got a kindly worded invitation from a member of the church I went to growing up inviting me to return to their Sabbath morning classes.

I doubt I will respond at all, but if I were to do so, it'd go something like this:

Thanks for the invitation. :)

Unfortunately I'm unlikely to come for reasons that have nothing to do with feelings of family (that's the one part I do miss!). You mentioned I have 'out of the box thinking', and that is true. I've become an atheist. I don't think god exists. I'm not angry or afraid and thanks to my upbringing and my own searching I'm better informed on this one topic than many people who debate this topic professionally.

If I came to sabbath school and kept my peace, I'd be miserable in the same way you probably feel when you listen to a political speaker that you completely disagree with go on and on about something that isn't important to you. And that would be the best case scenario.

If I came to sabbath school and shared what I think, I'd end up in an no-where argument with someone every time. We'd argue in circles about the existence of god or the reliability of the bible for any purpose and usually neither of us would budge in our opinions.

Say I did manage to convince someone, what good would it do? Changing your epistemology drastically is *stressful*. I think most of the church goers could handle that stress, but why should I try to make them do it? None of the members are bad people or do bad things. In fact they're better than most. Changing your epistemology means having to *rediscover* a reason for every good thing you do, and giving up some things you enjoy if your new thinking tells you they're harmful. Worse, there's no guarantee that you will discover all the reasons you should, and your behavior in the mean time can be a bit erratic. (I think this is one of the major reasons teens are so ill behaved.)

The people at church are old, and unlikely to have a bigger impact on the world than they've already had. As long as I don't see significant harm coming from wrong beliefs, I have little incentive to work hard to try to change them. Changing epistemology is harder as you get older, and even if I were wildly successful, many would be dead of old age before they became comfortable with their new beliefs.

Even more likely, I'd convince no one in which case, almost *anything* I choose would be more productive. Argument isn't something I do for fun. It's something I do to think, learn and teach. If I'm not learning, and others probably won't either, then I shouldn't do it.

And I'd be arrogant not to consider that you all might convince me. It's completely unimaginable to me that the people at church might have an argument that the internet, years of bible classes, and hours of reading and debates haven't presented. It seems as silly to me as my convincing you that god doesn't exist probably seems to you, and I don't think it would change me for the better.

That's why I think it's much better for me to spend the time during church making sure that I get As in my classes so that I can win the grad school entrance game and start doing research that improves people's health as soon as possible. Making people healthier is at least one thing we can agree is good, so I'll get back to it.

How To Figure Out What You Want To Do When You Grow Up

I recently grew up, and even more recently figure out what I want to do with my life career-wise. Given the recency, hopefully this essay will be a little more helpful than others of its kind in helping you choose a career.

The big secret missing ingredient for me was: have one, involuntary goal.

For relatively smart, relatively lazy folk like me, the world has too many possibilities to get excited about any of them. I imagined being a firefighter and getting paid to work out and play video games in between playing small time hero. I thought about joining the army, programming computers, stripping, doing porn, being an startup entrepreneur, a lawyer, an inventor or a stock trader. I'm mentally and physically capable of any of those things, but none of them were things I felt compelled to do.

All I really wanted was to get laid more often, play video games, look good, and otherwise feel great, and even those things I only wanted in that they were the most frequent whims. School and career were just something annoying on the side that I had to do to buy my way towards those things and/or not get yelled at.

That level of motivation got me through an easy bachelor's degree with crummy grades, and into a job I didn't care about. After a few years I got really bored and bit depressed and my motivation at work completely disappeared to the point that I got fired. I think many if not most people with a similar demographic to me end up like this, but manage to force themselves to do enough to not get fired because they have a family or more fear or something. It sucked. Hopefully you can avoid it.

Having one goal changed all of this because now there is no moment of the day during which I don't know what I should (ideally) be doing. I'm still human, which means I often waste time (writing this essay) or break to have fun, but I know what I should do all the time. I have purpose. I can finally take workaholics and otherwise productive/prolific people as role models without feeling like the whole idea is stupid. I finally understand what big shot celebrities are talking about in motivational speeches when they share the stories of how they earned the careers and companies they built.

The one goal has to be involuntary though. I couldn't just pick something at random because that wouldn't stick. I tried that before and a few months later I'd get bored and then get excited about something else. My goal today isn't something I chose out of a list of possibilities. It's something that, after finding it and learning about it, I must do it. It's so important to me that it's instantly obvious that no other long term goal will compare to it.

The only way I know of to find an involuntary goal, is to learn about different things in hopes of finding it. If there's a faster more systematic way to discovering your goal, I certainly didn't find it. Start reading about new inventions and new ideas. Find out about how the world works, and hopefully, eventually, you'll see something that not enough people are doing, not enough people care about, something so important that its current state is unacceptable and if you want it done you must do it.

That is your one goal. Once you find it, life will still be hard, maybe even a little harder, but suddenly the effort will be worth it.