Now at 101 Videos in the Endless Covid Hysteria Season of my Science Moment series

But follow me at Rumble, not YouTube.

I started my Science Moment series in January of 2019, originally aimed at short content talking about research in and around my work. I was at Moment 51 when Covid hit the following year, and I put the series on pause.

I did this for two reasons.

• First, I was distracted, spending almost all my time on Twitter trying to calm people the fuck down.

• Second, simply doing science content unrelated to the madness that had taken over seemed impossibly tone deaf, akin to an artist whose work continued without noticeable change over WW2.

But by November of 2020 I resolved to restart the series. My science colleagues with large audiences and recognizable faces had failed us, and what Team Rationality needed was faces in front of cameras: real people with blood and emotions, not just Twitter avatars.

How, though, to format the series in this light? The series never was news related, and that’s just not my schtick. Ideally, I like each episode to stand somewhat timelessly, so that in a decade someone can say, “Oh, Changizi did a good short video in 2022 explaining that.” …as opposed to news-ish content that is obsolete in a month.

As it turns out, one of the first things I noticed about Covid hysteria was just how scientifically interesting the entire mess was, and by mid-March I had begun working on ideas for making sense of mass hysteria, and inhibiting it.

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

Problem I am working on: How can social media be re-designed to prevent mass self-reinforcing opinion?

By November, there were so many interesting angles that it was clear the series could continue, and each Moment could just deal with one standalone idea, but an idea somehow connected to what we were experiencing.

And — this is crucial — an idea that no one else will convey to you. My videos may be low on cinematographic appeal, but they’re content you just won’t hear anywhere else. And that’s not so easy to continue over and over and over.

In fact, as I write this, the series is at Moment 152, so that’s actually 101 videos in the Covid season.

As excited as I am to have made it this far into my video series, between my censorship at Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, my YouTube subscribership has gone completely flat for almost six months.

I’ve placed the entire series at Rumble, and I encourage my friends here to follow me there. Help wean me from the T-F-Y trifecta of censorship.

https://rumble.com/user/markchangizi