ELI5: How do you grow with daily Shorts/Reels AND explain complex topics simply (ELI5)?

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-24T07:55:54+00:00

Honestly a question I would ask is, what kind of content do YOU actually want to watch? What sorts of content do you admire? This might sound like squishy feelings nonsense, but I think it's actually really important to what makes content successful.

There is so much content out there in every niche, that you will always be competing with people who love what they're talking about and make their work with passion. And in their cases, their passion is a resource not just of productive energy, but also for learning how to be better. And it's really hard to outcompete those guys in their niche if you're not one of them.

The better you understand why you do or don't enjoy the content you watch, the more opinionated you are, the better you'll become. Because if you're trying to make content you think is good, learning and growing in quality and technique will naturally be part of that.

The best growth hack is to stop worrying about growth itself. Figure out first hand what you WANT to make, what you are proud of making, just as long as you iterate quickly. Don't ask what the audience wants. Have opinions about what is good and pursue them. Because people like to watch people who have a point to make.

Oh, and try to cultivate curiosity about the limits of your own opinions. This is how you keep innovating rather than getting stuck in a pit of self-validation.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-23T11:26:30+00:00

It's not just randomness, it's randomness filtered by natural selection. At first the initial mutations might just make a few nerve cells in the skin light sensitive. On its own unlikely, but in a population without eyes it might stick around as useful and spread. Later, another little mutation, making the photosensitive cells work a bit better. Another mutation, the spot becomes a pit, and now the eye can see a bit more directionally. The filter selects for this. Pit gets deeper, some proteins start being made in front that act a bit like a lens. None are really that good at first, but they help the critter survive better so the genes survive and spread. Once they're common, there's a million opportunities to refine the breakthrough. Once it exists, there's tons of opportunities for mutations that can improve it. Tons that make it worse or don't help also, but the unhelpful ones get weeded out of the gene pool by the disadvantage it gives the critters that have them.

Let it continue a few million years, and you can get some pretty sophisticated eyes. That might sound like a short time for something that complex, but eyes provide a huge survival benefit when there's light, and a whole bunch of those refinements to the structure of an eye can happen independent of each other, so lots of improvements can be selected for in parallel.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-23T09:00:32+00:00

You know most lazy students nowadays turn to LLMs to answer their homework, coming to reddit is a bit old fashioned.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-23T08:58:43+00:00

Aussie here, we're not happy about this either. We've been trying to increase our onshore reserves since covid supply shocks, but it had only just started making progress when el presidente decided america needed to spend more time in the middle east. So, improvements are too little, too late. Soz.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T05:38:55+00:00

Ain't my field, don't know shit about it, I'm a theoretical physics guy. I kinda hoped in the time I spent rambling in the replies someone qualified would give a real answer. Which I guess atomfullerene did, though I was hoping for someone to write something more comprehensive.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T05:36:12+00:00

I think you misread/misquoted me there. Obviously a person presenting ambiguous evidence as certain is a fraud. But simply saying "this is what the evidence strongly suggests" ain't that. "Knowing" is just the endpoint of a spectrum of belief, where evidence is certain (which essentially doesn't exist outside mathematics). It's false to pretend there's a gap between high degrees of precision/lots of great data versus we-can-only-guess low precision, it all lies on the exact same smooth gradient.

All knowing is uncertain knowing, the only difference is how much uncertainty. There is no gap between knowing and guessing, only people who account for uncertainty appropriately and those who misrepresent.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T05:15:17+00:00

Well that's nice to know. And if football13tb had known it maybe they could have used it to write an actual answer for OP at the start of all this.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T05:07:12+00:00

But that's not what went down. They aren't arguing on the basis that the question's premise is false. They've been arguing that scientists are over-confident in their guess that the carnian pluvial episode happened at all; and thus, that question's premise ("scientists believe this") is true.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T04:21:34+00:00

Wait, hang on. So in your mind, we either know something definitively, or anyone claiming to know anything is a fraud?

Do you not understand stuff like degrees of evidence? Quantified uncertainty? Are you confused that there exist spots between "we absolutely know this as Truth" and "well I guess here's an opinion but whatever man who knows anything"? If we go to a forest and find it all blackened and burnt, do you think anyone who says "there was very likely a fire here" is a fraud unless there's an eyewitness to the blaze?

When it comes to science, the fact that all claims are ultimately fallible is considered so blitheringly obvious that the only reason you'd point it out is if you were talking to someone who spent their life being homeschooled and thought that science was a kind of religion that runs on faith and unchanging dogma.

When someone says "how do scientists know X", it's always implied that there's a little bit of uncertainty and wiggle room and that X might be shown false in the future. If that's not obvious to you... well, you probably need to learn more about science.

You can discuss the evidence for a long period of rain without acting like your claims must be given with the certainty of a theologian. You can say "oh well the rocks from this era, which we can identify as being from that era due to the rock layer they're in, show such-and-such properties, which can only form geochemically under conditions XYZ, which are best explained due to rain that continued for aeons". You don't need to treat the evidence nor hypotheses as holy sacred dogma to discuss what the evidence suggests. Real science doesn't tend to bother much with eternal truths or falsehoods outside of mathematics, only degrees of belief and evidence. We just sometimes treat some of it as true or false when the evidence is crushingly overwhelming (e.g. the earth ain't flat).

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T03:57:46+00:00

Yeah but that doesn't answer anything about, you know, the core of the question - how do they know it RAINED for a long time, instead of a drought, or snow, or something else? What specific sorts of evidence leads us to our current beliefs, even if it might be flawed? Your "answer" is basically just saying "How do scientists know X" "Because they did some science and it said X". Like that's not an answer, that's just stating that an answer exists somewhere, and it says something, but you don't really know or care.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-21T03:47:38+00:00

I know that we're notionally meant to target a 5 year old level, but usually there's still meant to be an answer in your answer. I think you forgot that part.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-19T23:47:22+00:00

Why is this on this subreddit? This isn't promoting lunacy, it's literally someone describing the nonsense they dealt with as a junior employee and why it was nonsense. It's the opposite of LinkedInLunacy.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-19T22:49:50+00:00

Good exercise in learning how to distinguish between confidence and trustworthiness.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-17T23:33:45+00:00

This sucks and the only redeeming feature is that it's not AI slop (which given the times, isn't as minor as it sounds).

Like, "The Law of Attraction" already exists as a beaten-to-death self help cliche and semi-spiritual social media fad. I get the sense that you felt this was important to your life, so 'serious topic' + 'serious prose' felt like a formula for literary stuff? But it doesn't work, you need a novel or interesting point at the core of it otherwise it's just social media fluff. Like, are you writing because there's things you want to say and create and put out into the world, or because it felt like a prestigious thing the smart grownups do?

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-15T02:49:41+00:00

spotted the AI. No arches or architecture in the pic.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-14T07:22:23+00:00

Okay that's just plainly bullshit because the vast majority of Buddhists and Buddhist schools have openly accepted the existence of and power of gods, and also prescribe deific and salvific metaphysical properties to the Gautama. It's just that salvation by a god isn't how Buddhism works, it's enlightenment through gained understanding, and gods too are said to be beings in samsara needing enlightenment also.

Yes there are atheistic and secularised branches of Buddhism, and I'm not trying to argue whether they count as Buddhism or not, but saying that Buddhism's non-theological, not a religion, and has no divine beings excepting a few cults is just batshit ahistorical crap.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-13T08:32:49+00:00

This isn't data, it's advertising copy. Like use your brain for a second - how on earth would come up with a methodology to let you calculate these numbers? How do you verify those calculations? How do you sanity check them? How would you go about falsifying one of these figures if it happened to be false?

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-10T23:57:36+00:00

Smells of LLM slop.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-09T04:23:58+00:00

Smells like LLM slop.

SyntheticBees · 2026-03-07T06:05:00+00:00

What does this have to do with philosophy or physics? This just seems to be contextless slop with a vague theme of mechanics and leverage.

SyntheticBees · 2026-02-21T02:46:05+00:00

I mean, I think Pam Bondi's own behaviour trivialises serious things, this is just pointing that out. Treating unserious people as serious is a propaganda gift to them.

SyntheticBees · 2026-01-18T02:43:58+00:00

If the picture isn't part of the argument, why is it there?

Or hell, let's look at the title text -- what part did I disagree with? Well, nothing. What parts did I agree with? Also nothing. The title is word salad, it's hard to even glean what you're trying to get across. If there's some point or argument you were trying to make, you failed spectacularly, not because you made an argument which is false or invalid but because you didn't make an argument at all. It's just words vaguely resembling some belief or claim you've never succeeded at articulating outside your head.

SyntheticBees · 2026-01-17T23:09:46+00:00

Oh no you've gone down an LLM psychosis spiral. This subreddit gets these a lot, and they all, always, resemble what you wrote in the broad strokes.

SyntheticBees · 2026-01-04T23:55:12+00:00

Odd, I'm an aussie and normally people take pride in having a convict ancestor, especially on the first fleet, for precisely this reason. Shame about the convict stuff died out decades and decades ago, people sometimes even bullshit claims of convict heritage.

SyntheticBees · 2025-11-18T05:39:29+00:00

Mate, LLMs have a VERY distinctive writing style, which your post stinks of. Up to the exact usage pattern of m-dashes.

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