This video focuses on single artificial neurons, building up the idea of gradient descent and applying the single-neuron system to two kinds of applications: A distance predictor for a cannon, and a mango classifier based on length and mass.
I had originally planned to also cover more complex systems and to talk about AI more broadly, but I decided to cut scope. Even this smaller video is the longest video I’ve made on this channel, and I think it turned out to be a good conceptual stopping point. The next video will continue the idea, addressing the multi-layer perceptron, backpropagation, and how deep learning allows approximation of any continuous function (assuming you have the right combination of data, compute, and algorithms).
For those eligible for the patron-only live streams, we’ll be doing the stream at 10 am US Central time on Saturday, October 4. I’ll make a new post for that, which will also let you view the video-on-demand if you can’t make it for the stream. Please use this post to let me know any questions you would like to discuss during the stream. You can also ask them live, but if you ask early, I’ll have a chance to prepare, possibly setting up an animation or some code we could explore.
I wanted to share the current version of a scene from the next video. It's one of the first scenes and shows a sort of proto training loop for a single artificial neuron, which is being used to predict how far a projectile will go when shot from a cannon with a given energy. Once the rest of the scenes are sketched out like this, I'll do the voiceover, time the animations to it, and publish.
As a whole, the video will focus on how neural networks work. Along the way, we'll build a network that can control a cannon with the goal of playing golf with mangoes (with the first step being the single neuron in the clip). There will also be some simple classification examples. The script structure and the mango golf cannon are already built, so it's now just a matter of putting the actual video together.
As I'm sure you've noticed, there's a lot of chatter about AI. There are some good explainers out there already, but I think it's a big enough deal where it's worth a slot in the schedule to increase the number and diversity of resources that help people actually understand the technology.
While the focus will be on the nuts and bolts, I also plan to have a section where I address some questions that touch more on philosophy, culture, and economics. I won't have the answers on these, but my perception is that I can make a net contribution to the discourse on the topic. A throughline will be that it's wise to allow yourself to hold uncertainty.
So, if there's a particular question you'd like to me to discuss in the video, whether relating to copyright or jobs or doom, or anything else. Please let me know!
I also want to reference lots videos or other resources where people can learn more. I have a few in mind already that have been helpful for me, but I'm curious to know about your favorite videos on this topic from others, especially from creators I might not already know about.
We'll be doing a livestream to dive more deeply into the evolution of aging.
It's scheduled for next Saturday, February 8th, at 10 am Central (US). It will be an unlisted stream on YouTube, and I'll make another Patreon post with the link just before the stream. If you're not able to make it, the video will be available to watch afterward at the same link.
The agenda for that stream will be driven by your questions, so this post is meant to collect those questions. You can also ask questions live. But if you ask them here, I'll have more opportunity to prepare answers, perhaps including simulations that we can run live. I'm also happy to answer questions about the software and video making process, or anything else, but I'll prioritize questions focused on aging.
Hey folks, here's the video that will go live tomorrow. It's my longest video yet, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
As a reminder, the Patreon tiers are going to change tomorrow. More details on that in the previous post and in the video. Please feel free to send me a message if you have any questions.
Thanks for all your support, and I hope you enjoy!
Here’s the new set of tiers and rewards, which will go live when I publish the next video: Simulating the Evolution of Aging, which will come out in January. Basically, things are getting cheaper.
$3 – Name in the video credits, a discord role, and a merch discount. The main change here is putting video credits in the bottom tier. I’m extremely grateful to those of you willing to pay $37 per month for this, but I think I’ve overpriced it. No idea what the demand curve really looks like, but I want to err on the side of allowing more people to feel tangibly part of this project. This will take effect after the upcoming aging video, meaning those of you who have been paying for it will still have exclusive recognition. But after that, it will be a benefit for the $3 tier.
$10 – The above, plus participation in a live stream one week after the publish of each video. During the stream, I’ll have the simulation tool up so we can do custom simulation runs, and I’ll also have a tablet handy for chalk talk. This benefit includes access to the live stream itself, the opportunity to ask questions before and during the stream to help determine its structure, and also access to the recording in case you can’t make it live.
$25 – Same benefits as the $10 tier, just more impact for those who want to give extra support.
How will the transition work?
I will update the tiers right before I publish the aging video in January. All of the current tiers will act as normal through that video. The old tiers will then be “unpublished”, meaning they stick around for existing members, but nobody can sign up for them.
The first livestream, focusing on the aging video, will be open to all paying members, old and new. My hope here is to get as many people to show up as possible, since it will be a new format, and some existing members may not even realize it’s happening.
Most of you could save money by selecting one of the new tiers. If that sounds good to you, please do it!
For existing members who don’t update to a new tier:
Everyone will have access to non-stream Patreon posts.
Live streams will be available to anyone paying $10 or more.
Having your name in the credits will be strictly opt-in. If you’re not currently getting video recognition and would like to, either select one of the new tiers when they go live after the next video, or send me a direct message. I’ll also send direct messages to anyone with an ambiguous case beforehand to give another chance to opt in. This was a tricky choice. I think most people will want the recognition, and I would enjoy adding more names to the end screens. But I think it’s better for some people to miss out on the reward than to inflict publicity on someone who would rather keep things private.
Why the change?
I would like to bring in more money and use that money to help make videos more quickly. Primer isn’t doing well on Patreon, both in terms of general metric benchmarks and direct comparison to similar channels. I’m sure the new tiers are suboptimal in some way, but it seems clear that offering more value at lower tiers is a step in the right direction.
And even if revenue doesn’t increase, I’ll be glad that people are getting more value for their Patreon dollar. I’m particularly excited about the livestream tier, since it seems like it will be more valuable than my spotty generic updates, and it also gives me a concrete output to deliver on.
Realizing the current tiers are lackluster makes me all the more thankful for those of you reading this. You’re not getting much out of this personally, so you must be giving out of a genuine desire to see the channel succeed. I’m deeply thankful.
I can say thanks all I want, but the best way to show my appreciation for your support is to actually make the channel succeed. I’ve been overly averse to business-side optimizations, reasoning that the main bottleneck to the channel’s success is publishing speed. I still think that’s the main bottleneck, but making the Patreon tiers less terrible is an easy change that seems likely to result in more funds, which could in turn help solve that core problem of speed. It feels silly that I took so long to decide this, but here we are.
Next video: Simulating the Evolution of Aging
The next video on the evolution of aging is nearly done. I was hoping to finish in time for the new year, but it will be out in January.
The basic question in the video is: Dying seems bad. Why doesn’t natural selection improve our ability to maintain our bodies?
The video starts by simulating a population of blobs that don’t age, just to get a sense for the baseline without aging. It then goes through a few models to see if we can find any that can stand up to natural selection, or even be favored by it.
Here’s a frame from a scene that uses the simplest aging model: death genes that activate at a certain age. This isn’t a realistic model of aging, but the point of this scene is to illustrate the “selection shadow” phenomenon. Natural selection is weaker for genes whose effects are seen later in life, since the organism might already be dead from something else.
Looking back at this year's work
At the beginning of the year, I switched to the Godot game engine for a tool rebuild. It has been my destiny since the beginning of this whole YouTube endeavor to (re)build a lot of software stuff for every video. My goal with this year’s rebuild was to not have to do it again. In a way, the first six years of this channel have been me learning to code and learning what I actually need from a simulation video creation tool. I still have to follow through on the promise of finally actually publishing more often for real this time™, but I’m happy to report that I’m not planning to rebuild my tools next year. So that’s something.
For the aging video, I built a simulation from scratch with an eye toward making it extensible, easy to work with, and fast enough to run in real time.
Extensibility – The system is modular, allowing new behaviors or entities to be added without affecting the operation of existing systems. This allows the same simulation structure to easily be used for future videos. For example, I could add predators to the simulation without having to touch the creature behaviors. And the same patterns could be used for economics videos, or videos on any other topic.
Ease of use – The simulations are separated into data and visualization layers. This means bugs with one system don’t affect the other system. It’s also possible to run the data portion of the simulation alone to test and iterate on models more quickly.
Realtime operation – The hope is to publish interactive versions of the simulations. This has been a dream ever since I moved video creation to Unity in 2019. There is still UI and design work needed, so I won’t be able to publish an interactive version of the aging sim along with the video. But we’re closer to this than we’ve ever been. Here’s a screencap of me playing with an early interactive version.
All in all, the tooling is feeling pretty good, so I’m hopeful there will be an uptick in the number of publishes in 2025.
My current intent for the next video is one on Bayesian hypothesis testing, a counterpart to How to Catch a Cheater with Math, which looked at hypothesis testing from a Frequentist perspective. That’s all for this post. Now more than ever, I really appreciate you all for sticking with me. I already had a reputation for publishing slowly, and the last two years have been the slowest yet. But I believe the future is bright, and I couldn’t have carried through without your support.
I hope everyone’s 2023 is wrapping up nicely. Here’s my update for you.
First off, I’ll no longer do monthly Patreon updates. When I did a survey on them, responses were positive but few. I still intend to update regularly, but from now on if you see a Patreon post from me, you’ll know there’s something noteworthy. For those of you who enjoy smaller and more frequent updates, I encourage you to join the discord or follow on twitch.
I have to admit I had higher hopes for 2023. Only two videos were published, Primer has downsized from two full-time members back to just me, and despite progress on the timeline-based workflow, it’s still difficult to work with large simulation scenes, and production pace is continuing to suffer for it. No two ways about it; it was a bad year for the channel. I learned a lot, and I still get to make YouTube videos for a living. And on a personal level, I married someone wonderful this year. So I have a lot to be grateful for. But it will feel good to flip the calendar over to a new number.
I don’t have any big declarations for 2024, but there are two things I’m excited about.
The first is the list of videos to make. There are some really cool topics to cover in biology, economics, and other areas, and I’m looking forward to being able to share them with people.
Second, I’m the most capable version of myself I’ve ever been. My goal in seeking funding was to add software expertise to the team. And while it didn’t go quite how I hoped it would, there is a lot more software expertise on the team. It’s just inside my own skull. I learned a lot working with Matias for a year. Perhaps I’ll try to expand the Primer team again someday, but for now, I’m excited to just move forward with more confidence in my own ability to build things.
Here's the next video! It will release publicly on Saturday, assuming no major edits are needed.
The scope changed a lot as I was working on this one. When it began, I was planning to do a video on conditional strategies and introduce the concept of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS). But after working on it for a while, I felt it made more sense to cover mixed strategies first. But after working on THAT for a while, I decided it would be best to focus on pure, unconditional strategies, but explore all the possible types of reward matrices to get the best groundwork around what at ESS is. In a way, this is the video I would have made instead of Simulating the Evolution of Aggression if I had been more experienced with evolutionary bio at the time. Hopefully it feels different enough, and with this video done, I think there's a strong base on which to do more videos about evolutionary games (which I expect to focus on for the next few videos).
Thanks as always for your support! I'll do another post for the December update and yearly retrospective soon.
Matias and I have been hard at work on creating a tool that will let us assemble scenes in the Unity editor similar to how one would use a video editor.
This example shows a scene-in-progress that will appear in the next on the binomial distribution. Some of the animations are defined with keyframes in the Unity editor, and some are defined through code. One of the big time sinks with the old method of creating videos was the slooowwww iteration process where I had to recompile code and play scenes from the beginning to test how they had changed. Now, almost all of the animations can be previewed via scrubbing, and their timings changed in the editor rather than through code.
And when we enter play-mode, the timeline can trigger execution of runtime-only code, like the basketball shots that utilize the physics engine. As you can see, we still need to teach the blobs to shoot properly on the new hoops. I was hoping to get that fixed in time for the update, but it's a bit late as is, so I figured I'd just show you what we have.
It feels slightly ambitious but not ridiculous to have an early access version of this video ready by the next monthly update. Depends a bit on how often the unexpected bug fairies decide to visit. We shall see. But we're getting close either way.
Hey all, jumping on the year review train a bit early.
Contents
Updates to tier rewards in 2023
Reflections on the year
Update on tools work
Videos in progress
Updates to tier rewards in 2023
The tiers will remain the same, but there are some updates to rewards:
More updates for Insiders – I haven’t been systematic about giving updates to Insiders. And especially now that billing is monthly, you all deserve more. I’m committing to publishing an update for the Insider ($5) tier and higher at the beginning of each month in 2023, starting in January. These will be similar to this post, but likely shorter, since they will only cover a month.
“Advisors” will change to “Public thanks” – The surveys don’t get a lot of engagement, so they don’t appear to be valuable to patrons, and they also don’t provide enough information to be useful. So starting in 2023, surveys will be included in public posts about video publishes in hopes of getting more feedback. The tier will retain the benefit of having your username included in the video description.
I’m also open to other ideas for tier benefits you might value.
Reflections on the year
It was an interesting year for Primer.
The Coin Flip Cheaters game
Primer published its first interactive, Coin Flip Cheaters, which you can currently find on the homepage of primerlearning.org, or on the google play store. This was mostly an open-ended experiment to get a sense for publishing interactives.
On the production side, it unsurprisingly took a lot of extra work to go from simulated coin flips that worked for a video to an interactive game. Part of it was coding. For videos, the bar for code performance is very low. If a scene takes an entire day to run and render, it’s annoying, but it ultimately matters very little. But for a game, things need to work in real time, the assets need to be compact, and you need to worry about edge cases and cheating. For those of you who tried the game right when it came out, you may have noticed that the leaderboard contained some very suspicious scores. It turned out that I neglected to make sure people couldn’t just change the score value in the browser to send whatever number they wanted. Thankfully, detailed play info was sent to the server along with the scores, so we were able to check whether scores matched what actually happened in the game.
On the game design side, it was an interesting exercise to turn a statistics task into a game. I figured a “game” that told you to calculate p-values wouldn’t actually be that fun, so I ended up structuring it around survival, inspired by the “roguelike” genre of video games. Even optimal strategies will eventually lose, and the challenge is to make the best choices you can to give yourself more time to get lucky. Playing the game optimally turned out to be much more complicated than calculating p-values, etc., since you also have to consider the cost vs information value of an additional flip. It’s also more of a Bayesian game than a Frequentist game. If you want to know more, there was intensive discussion in the coin-flip-cheaters room in the discord.
On the engagement front, some quick, context-free stats: As of my checking of the datastore, the game has been played 145,761 times, by 50,230 unique user IDs. Most of that activity was in the first month, but in the past month there were 3935 plays, so some people are still playing with it.
As for my overall reflection, I didn’t have much basis for setting expectations ahead of time, but I feel subjectively pleased with how it turned out. There was a section of highly engaged people who delved into statistics or even learned how to create bots to play the game. I didn’t intend for people to make bots, but far be it from me to shut down someone’s motivation to work on a technical project. There was also a fair number of people with a less robust stats/coding background who joined the discussion and presumably learned from the experience. I also learned a lot from the experience. If I learned, other people learned, and now there’s a baseline experience to build from, that’s worth celebrating in my book. 🥂
I have some ideas for future games. No promises here, as none are scheduled to be made for now, but just to give you an idea of what I’m excited about:
One is a daily multiplayer game theory game. Each day, there would be a decision to make, and the results will depend in part on what other players choose that day. It seems like a really interesting way to reinforce lessons from the hawk/dove video, it could be extended to include game theory concepts and game variations covered in future videos, and it could produce an interesting data set on how real humans play these games, at least in a particular context.
A game that lets you build and manipulate simulated economies. This one would be quite a distance down the road. For the econ series, we’re building a tool that will let us set up economies with different parameters and explore the consequences (more on that below), and it seems natural enough that it could be packaged into a user-facing product, eventually. EVENTUALLY. The coin flip game is pretty simple but was still quite a lot of work, and that gave me a dose of humility. But this is an exciting thought to squint at on the horizon.
I’ve said “we” or “us” a few times now. Who is we? Well…
Primer is now a small team, not just me
A little over a month ago, I welcomed Matias Quezada as the first full-time member of Primer aside from me. He’s a software engineer. It usually takes a few months to find your stride in a new role, but he’s already been extremely productive, taking over the majority of the tools work and allowing me to focus most of my time on writing scripts and sketching out simulations and visualizations.
There are also a few other people who have been helping out on a part-time or contract basis, and I want to give them some recognition as well.
John Sullivan – A friend and former coworker from Khan Academy. They set up the backend for the coin flip game, and have been contributing their deep knowledge of all things coding to various other bits of Primer work. John also makes shmeppy.com, an online map tool for tabletop rpgs.
Angelica Pascua – Angelica is the 3D artist behind the blob hats and other models used in recent videos. I love her work so much and am also very glad to be past the days of blundering through blender on my own or hunting for suitable public domain models. You can see her portfolio at angelicapascua.art.
Mathieu Keith – Mathieu has been making music for Primer videos since “Simulating the Evolution of Aggression” in 2019. I’m beyond happy to have beautiful, unique, thematically linked music for every video. Mathieu is a freelancer, and you can reach him for business inquiries at mathieu.keith@gmail.com.
Grant funding
Early in the summer, I got a grant from the Effective Altruism (EA) Infrastructure Fund to accelerate growth. This is what allowed me to hire Matias. This is the first grant Primer has gotten, or I have gotten. I want to share a few thoughts on grants in general, and this grant in particular.
Grants are better than sponsorships, since you aren’t being paid to say something regardless of whether you think it’s true or useful. But there is still a risk that you’ll change what you do so you can please the grant makers, earning the next round of funding. Ideally, grants are made when there is already alignment of purpose and trust in the recipient’s ability to execute. I think that’s true so far, but I don’t want to sweep risks under the rug.
On the EA grant, I’m pretty aligned with Effective Altruism in general. There are some risks to the association, though. There are some ideas that are weird by most people’s standards, and it’s also tangled up in the FTX situation. But the way I see it, there are two core ideas to EA. The first is that we should take seriously the fact that we have quite a lot of material wealth in the rich world, and we can make a big difference for a lot of people at relatively little cost to ourselves. The second is that we can use analytical tools to improve the positive impact we make with our finite resources. I endorse both of those wholeheartedly. The rest is details. And some of the ideas associated with EA also happen to be intellectually interesting and would make good Primer videos. I was already motivated to make videos that are attractive to EA funders, so as of now, I don’t feel conflicted about this specific grant.
Despite the specific comfort, I do feel a general discomfort about growing too dependent one source of funds. I want to make sure Primer is able to stay independent. As part of this, I plan to apply for some other grants. YouTube ads, merchandise, and licensing all play a role as well, and it’s possible we’ll include some paid sponsorships in the future (though I’d like to avoid them if we can).
The last part is all of you. Voluntary support from small donors is the revenue source with the best possible incentives. We’re making these videos for you, so you should be who Primer’s finances care the most about. As always, thanks to all of you for supporting!
Tools work
The main difficulty in making Primer videos is that there isn’t a single tool out there that’s great for both simulations and scripted animation. Unity is great for animated simulations. After all, it’s a game engine, and a simulation is basically a game with no players. But while creating cutscenes is part of video game development, many studios use other tools for their cutscenes, so creating a timeline-based UI for orchestrating a scene hasn’t been a priority for Unity. Over the past few years, I constructed a kind of Rube Goldberg machine with a mostly code-based interface for lining simulations and other animations up with voiceover. This contraption worked, but was had to run all at once, making iteration difficult. And would sometimes fail quietly, leading to work having to be redone, and adding a lot of time to the creation process. After checking out other game engines, John and I decided to stick with Unity and build custom tools to enable a smoother workflow for making Primer videos. And now that Matias has joined, much of his work is focused on this.
Here’s a small sample animation using a timeline in Unity. It probably doesn’t seem like much, but the ability to preview code-generated animations by scrubbing, and the ability to change timing and other parameters on the fly, will save so much time in finishing videos.
Videos in progress
With people in place working on the tools, I’m finally spending the majority of my time researching, writing, and sketching visualizations.
There are two videos currently being produced. They are both in the stage where the scope, outline, and a draft script are in place, and prototype animations/sims are being constructed. After that, there will be some iteration loops where the script and animations inform each other, leading up to final polish and publish.
These are the videos:
Understanding The Binomial Distribution – Likely the next video to be published. This is an interlude between the frequentist hypothesis test video (How To Catch A Cheater With Math) and the promised Bayes video. I decided to prioritize the binomial video largely because the script seemed easy to write, so there would be something concrete to work on with Matias right away. But I was pleased to discover that there are going to be some interesting animations leading up to understanding the binomial coefficient, also called the “choose” operation.
Simulating a Barter Economy – I’ve been feeling overdue for an economics video for a while. This one will essentially combine the sims from the first two econ videos into one. Blobs will be able to harvest mangoes and logs each day, and at the end of the day they’ll have the opportunity to trade. It should be a solid intro to trade concepts you’d find in an econ 101 textbook. What I’m most excited about, though, is using this simulation as a stepping stone to simulating more complex economies and economic concepts. The plan for the following econ video is to attempt to create conditions in which the blobs will begin using gold as a medium of exchange (without it being hard-coded).
And there are a few more videos in the earlier writing stages, including some of the long-promised evolution videos.
Thanks for sticking with me all the way through this!
The latest video just went live. It goes through the process of trying to calculate how many people might exist in the future, in a few different circumstances. I hope you like! This is also the fastest turnaround I've had on a video since the very early days. Less than two months.
The video is also related to an update. This summer, Primer received a grant from the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. They agreed to the grant because I was already interested in doing videos like this one, which explore topics that are both intrinsically interesting and relevant to making the world better. But the grant doesn't come with strings attached, and the extra funding means means more videos of all kinds, so the biology and econ series will also see more entries soon.
A natural question is: Does it make sense to continue supporting Primer if there is grant funding? In the end, only you can make that determination, and I would understand if you decided to put your money elsewhere. But, the more diverse Primer's revenue sources, the more independent it can be. And Patreon has the best incentives out of any of the possible revenue sources. It's the closest thing free internet videos have to selling straight to customers, letting me focus on making good stuff and worry less about advertisers or grant makers. So your support continues to be extremely valuable. But I wanted to let you all know about the grant so you can be informed in your decision. And whatever you decide, you have my thanks.
As I mentioned in the most recent post, I've been working on an interactive version of the sim for the next video. It's finally ready for some play testing! My hope is to introduce it with a short video next week (assuming some issues can be resolved), then use data from it to in the main video ~2 weeks after that.
I'd be grateful if you tried it out and let me know what you think. You can find it at primerlearning.org (the game is just on the homepage for now). I also made a short survey to organize feedback (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsuu1UI-ERMgQbpl54ozk442Leibgbj84hlsH_mBHxt4-t5w/viewform?usp=sf_link), but I'm happy to just read a comment here or in any other format. I'd say more, but part of the test is to see how well the game speaks for itself.
A few comments about known issues:
- The leaderboard doesn't work properly just yet - The game hasn't yet been optimized for performance, so you may see poor frame rate or rendering artifacts - The game uses a vertical aspect ratio for mobile devices, but it currently doesn't size properly on mobile web browsers. The newest version of Unity has support for WebGL on mobile, but I was encountering some tough bugs on that version and decided to use a slightly older version for the playtest. So a desktop or laptop may be necessary for now.
I can't thank you all enough for sticking around to support experimental stuff like this. <3
As the title hints, the most concrete change for all of you is that I’m switching Patreon charges to a per-month schedule. There’s more on the reasoning behind that below, but I wanted to call it out at the beginning to reduce the risk that someone might miss it.
No sponsored messages in 2022
In 2022, I'm planning to shift to a more Patreon-focused model. Over this next year, I'm not going to do any sponsored messages in videos. I hope to continue this beyond 2022, but I'm using this year to experiment to see whether it's viable.
I’m not the first content creator to bemoan dependence on ads. All the usual motivations apply. I want viewers to be the customers, not the product I’m selling to advertisers. I don’t want to spend time making ads or evaluating the companies to make sure I believe what I’m being paid to say about them. I don’t want to erode trust. I don’t want my choice of what content to make to be affected by anything other that what I think people would get the most value from.
Many media companies have no choice about this, but my costs are low enough right now where I can afford to take a risk building toward a healthier model.
Thanks to all of you for making this possible. Without your support, I wouldn't be able to take this leap.
Moving Patreon to per-month
As part of this shift, I'm changing the payment schedule to monthly rather than per-video. The biggest reason is that it's a more steady and predictable situation for everyone involved. A few other considerations that contribute to this:
When I first set up a Patreon, I wasn't working on this full-time, so I didn't want to charge people monthly when I might not even be working on it. Now, this is my full-time job, and I'm working on it all the time whether or not a video comes out in a given month.
The per-video structure comes with an incentive for me to create more, smaller videos. This might involve being less ambitious with each project, lowering my "just ship it" threshold, or splitting videos into multiple pieces. Given my weakness to scope creep, this is still a good incentive for me to have, so losing that is theoretical a downside to this change. I say "theoretical" because I'm clearly still letting scope creep run rampant despite the presence of this incentive, and I have other strong reasons to want to publish more anyway. But as someone who makes economics videos sometimes, I'd be remiss if I didn't think about the incentives I'm making for myself.
The next video will include an interactive version of the simulation (more on this below). Depending how that goes, this may or may not become the norm, but either way, it will sometimes make sense to try things outside of the usual 10-20 minute YouTube video. Going per-month makes it less ambiguous how or whether I should charge for those other kinds of projects.
By default, your current per-video pledge will convert to per-month at the same amount. If you'd like to change your pledge, you'll need to do so before Jan 1 to avoid being charged the old amount.
Other updates
Creative Commons: I’ve added the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license to existing videos, and future videos will have this license added after they have been up for two weeks. The delay is to make sure the video gets momentum before allowing others to re-upload. This is still a somewhat restrictive license, but my hope is that it will reassure people who are scared to get in copyright trouble (seemingly a lot of people) that they can use the videos for personal and educational projects.
Part-time hire: Toward speeding up the publish rate, I’ve hired someone to write code and produce scenes in Unity. His name is also Justin, and he had a great entry into 3Blue1Brown’s Summer of Math Exposition that you should check out. The role is part-time for now, but assuming the specialization of labor works well, I’m excited to expand further. And it is indeed going well!
Interactive simulation: The next video will be accompanied by an interactive version of the simulation, packaged into a simple game. The video itself is about detecting biased coins, so the sim is on the simpler side, and it seemed like a great opportunity to make a first interactive. Educational games/interactives have a pretty fraught history. I’ll avoid turning this into an essay on that topic, but for now, suffice it to say that I think it’s worth experimenting with interactives a bit in conjunction with a channel that’s mostly based around playing with simulations. The game itself is nearly ready for playtesting, so I’ll do a dedicated post on that sometime in the next few weeks.
Public version of PrimerTools: The public PrimerTools repo has been updated and will stay in sync with my version, including new simulations. It’s still a bit rough around the edges (perhaps also at its core), but with Justin’s fresh perspective and some help from other contributors, I’m excited that it may have potential to be useful to others.
That’s it. Please let me know if you have thoughts on any of this, and thanks as always for your support.
This is the one where I actually get Hamilton's rule right. Most of the time on this one was re-writing it a thousand times to try to make clear the subtlety that led to my initial confusion. It still feels a little complicated and long, but I hope the goal has been achieved for many viewers.
Thanks for your support, and special thanks to those of you who gave feedback on the early version.
This video has been a long time coming. Ever since calling Hamilton's rule a lie (over two years ago, now), I've been wrestling with how to communicate its subtleties that I didn't originally appreciate. It's still not perfect, but I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out.
This is not quite the final version. There are a few warts and some pieces to polish. Most notably in my mind, some of the parts with text or equations are a bit dry and could use some idle blobs or some colors or arrows to accent what's being said. Assuming nothing major goes wrong and the music is done in time, I plan to publish the final version on Sunday. Between now and then, I'd love to hear any feedback so I can make improvements.
It's the remake of the video I took down. I took out the erroneous part about hamilton's rule but it's also remade to be a better video in a number of other ways, from production value to the fact that I use many sim runs for the discussions rather than running a single sim and asking the audience to trust me that I picked a representative run. I find that latter part important because it's better modeling of a proper attitude of inquiry for those in the audience that might be on the younger side (which, presumably thanks to the blobs, is a significant fraction). It also took extra time, of course, but overall, I'm glad I remade it. And thankfully, the same underlying simulation structure and animations will apply to the future Hamilton's rule video.
As a reminder or notification for new folks, I'm not charging patrons for this remake.
Thanks to the insider-tier folks who offered feedback on the early-access version. You all helped make it better.
These feedback posts are normally reserved for the Adviser tier. But it wasn't a paid video, and the departure from the normal style makes me want extra feedback, so I'm opening this one up to everyone.
This was an unusual video in several ways.
1. It was an apology/correction video 2. It featured my face on camera 3. It did not feature a simulation
Here are my initial thoughts on these differences, but I'd love to know your reactions, too.
1. I'll continue to own up to mistakes when they happen, of course, but it goes without saying that I want to minimize apology/correction videos.
2. I included my face simply to give viewers something to look at, since there was no animated simulation. But I do think there were some other benefits. First, it makes the video feel more personal, which felt right for this particular video. And unexpectedly, it felt like the camera sharpened my delivery, making the video editing faster than editing together a mess of audio takes. These benefits are making me consider including my face (with better production value) during interstitial sections of simulation-based videos. Kind of like MarbleScience, a channel well worth checking out if you haven't already: https://youtu.be/7ESK5SaP-bc
3. Simulation videos are core to Primer's identity, and there's plenty of fodder for years, if not decades of simulation-driven content. But not all topics lend themselves to simulation, and simulation videos are a pretty large investment (hence the slow publish rate), so I'm trying to develop an informed opinion about the role of non-simulation videos for Primer.
I'll likely experiment with these factors a bit more over time so I can get a better sense, but I'd appreciate hearing your perspectives to help accelerate this evaluation process.
Giving my own thoughts before having you fill out the survey (and indeed embedding them in the survey) isn't good data collection practice, but since the numbers are fairly small anyway, I'm thinking of this more as a sort of middle ground between a survey and a conversation, and I look forward to any rebuttals in the free-response section. :)
New video today. This one isn't a paid Patreon post, though, since it's not a normal video. I made it to address a mistake in a previous video. It's also my first try at a talking-head video and isn't the highest production quality. Overall, it didn't feel right to charge you fine people for this one.
In "The Natural Selection of Altruism", I claimed that Hamilton's rule was a lie. I meant that to be a somewhat comically bold statement, but I've since realized that I was laboring under a misunderstanding and that the video is more misleading than is acceptable. Today's video acknowledges that error and goes through five pathologies of thought that contributed to my publishing an error. This has been a useful reflective process for me, so I hope sharing it will be useful to some others.
Sorting out how to handle this has been a big part of the delay in finishing the main Hamilton's rule video. I wanted the end product to be a smooth set of videos for new people who find the channel, but I also wanted to acknowledge the mistake in a big enough way that many who saw the old video would get a chance to realize it was misleading.
I've taken down the old video. I'll replace it with a new version that avoids Hamilton's rule (which also won't be a paid Patreon post), and following that will be the dedicated Hamilton's rule video. My hope is to have both of these published by the end of the year.
On a more cheerful note, blob plushies are now available for pre-order at dftba.com/collections/primer. Patrons get 20% with the code 848HEQD0BJ2A. Please let me know if you have any trouble.
Other tier rewards from the previous video are on their way this coming week.
We have a new video. I know this one might be surprising, since I had been working on the Hamilton's rule video, but I started learning about voting systems and decided a video introducing alternate voting systems could be both interesting and important.
I hope you enjoy it! And if you're waiting for more bio, the Hamilton's rule vid shouldn't be too long in coming.
First off, the next video is coming along in the next few weeks. It's a little too early to give an exact date, though. Sneak peek animations coming soon. (I've left much of the visual work for last.)
Second, as a way of trying to connect a bit more often (and to give myself a small bit of structure), I'm going to stream myself working on Wednesday mornings (US) for the next several weeks, potentially longer if it seems to be going well. I'll largely save Unity work for these streams, so if you've wanted to see how Primer videos are made, here's a chance. You can find the stream here: twitch.tv/primerjustin
Third, related to connecting a bit more, times as they are, there is now a Primer Discord server. (You were already added to the server if your Discord and Patreon accounts are linked.) The hope is to develop a community where people can go to discuss the concepts in videos, as part of the learning process. That was my original goal with the subreddit, but it doesn't see much action. Having spent some time in other Discord communities and seeing the realtime chat, I'm hopeful Discord will turn out to be a bit more active and useful for those looking to discuss. You can find the server here: https://discord.gg/NbruaNW
Thanks as always for your patience and support. Let me know if you have any questions.
The next video is done and will premiere at 10 am US Central time tomorrow (May 17).
I was planning not to do a COVID-19 video, but we've been seeing a lot of coverage of specifics when many people don't have a great understanding of the basics. This video focuses on those basics and doesn't try to make predictions or advocate for particular solutions. I'm hoping this helps people put new developments in context.
I hope you're all making the best of this, and thanks for your support.
It has been too long, but I finally have a preview of the next video.
The next several videos in the economics series will build a model economy from scratch, exploring general concepts along the way. This clip shows the basic building block of an economy: a single agent making decisions subject to its production possibilities and utility function.
I still don't know the publish date for the next video. There are a few things left to build, a bit of polishing, and likely several unknown unknowns between now and my first full video produced with Unity. Still, this feels like a milestone. Producing this short clip, I'm already feeling the workflow benefits of Unity over Blender. And, if you're inclined to have a look, the github repo for this project should be quite usable. If you have Unity downloaded, you should be able to just clone/download the project and press play to see a cube gathering resources.
Thank you Patrons, for your generosity and patience.
With the success of the last two videos, it now seems very likely that Primer has the potential to become sustainable, so I've been thinking a bit more about the long term. Here are a few updates.
I'm not taking outside work anymore
I just finished my last remaining freelance contract, so I'll be full-time on Primer for the foreseeable future. This will be a factor pushing to speed up the rate of video production. Yay!
Primer is transitioning from Blender to Unity
I've come to realize that Blender is not the right tool for Primer. It's designed primarily for 3D artists making assets for games and movies, not for defining entire complex scenes with code alone. The Unity game engine, on the other hand, is designed, for, well, games, which regularly spawn objects that follow scripts while being rendered in real time. It's also a professional tool for animated video, so visual quality shouldn't take a hit.
Transitioning to Unity will allow me to produce videos more quickly, make a tool that's more (read: at all) usable by others than the current github repo, and publish interactive versions of the simulations with relatively little extra work. That's the hope, anyway!
The downside, of course, is that it will take some time for me to become proficient in Unity and reproduce the functionality of code I've already written for Blender. I hate to make the next video take longer, but investments have the most time to pay off if you make them early. :)
Merchandise is coming
To make this transition to full-time work safer and hopefully give Primer a production budget other than my own living expenses, I'm going to start selling merchandise with DFTBA. I'm not certain what kinds of things people would actually want, though. If you'd like to help shed some light on that, here's a very short survey.
Filling out the survey also enters you to win some of your preferred merch, and Patreon patrons will get 20% off.
Thanks for reading. I'm not sure I can say too often how grateful I am that you've decided to support.
