Can something be done for those of us who are averse to watching long videos? What, for example, was the RTB position? Did it change at all?
There is a transcript. Perhaps try reading the transcript instead of watching the video? I’m sure there are website that will do it for you if you can’t find the right link.
Excellent. Where?
The youtube link has one. Here are instructions on how to obtain it.
https://gotranscript.com/blog/getting-the-transcription-of-a-video-from-youtube
I suggest looking at the transcript in YouTube, and clicking on lines to jump to key parts you want to listen to @John_Harshman.
That transcript is heinous. The most serious problem is that it doesn’t tell you who’s talking and runs everyone’s speeches together without breaks. When you introduce yourselves it’s possible to tell, but everywhere else there’s no way to know when one person leaves off and another starts. Would you consider downloading and editing it into a coherent form?
It is automatically generated. I works well as a topic guide. If you click the text, it takes you to precisely where the discussion happens, and that ends up being pretty helpful.
However, it’s not at all useful for anyone who just wants to read a transcript. No plans?
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Cleaning up a transcript requires money, about $50 per hour. So it is not that much, but it adds up.
Would you be willing to contribute to the costs? If you would, and others would too, perhaps we will. At the moment, we have a Patreon site that is largely inactive, because we have not pushed for donations. Still three members of the forum do contribute. So far, I have not tapped into this for funds, and most costs have been out of pocket.
We are starting to get our system in place now. If there was a desire for transcription, and people were invested enough to contribute, we could make it happen.
I would contribute a little. Anyone else interested? Incidentally, you’re “Swamy toss” in some places.
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Give us a couple weeks. I’ll talk to my editor and a consultant. We may need to launch the Patreon outlet for real. So this will take a bit of thought. I now that doesn’t scratch the immediate itch, but it could create an ongoing longterm solution.
Sounds like a plan.
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I think I used to contribute but had to replace my debit card for unrelated reasons, and probably am not a patreon contributor anymore. I’d be willing to kick in a little each month. Like John, I do not enjoy watching long video discussion of substantive topics (un-substantive topics are another story).
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Thanks for asking this. I will rarely watch a video of any length, and a transcript will only interest me if the content of the video is very important. I’d probably have to be asked specifically to comment. Videos aren’t my thing. Not hard to imagine why.
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Not sure if you’ve done this before. My experience with transcripts of anything resembling a technical conversation was that the quality was so poor, that cleaning them up was a project in itself. The transcribers just substituted some random word for any technical term they didn’t understand. Maybe, we just used the wrong people.
That is correct. Which is why we will need resources to do this. I do not think we will initiate this without at least some buy in from people who are requesting it. PS currently hits my own pocket book pretty hard. It is worth it, but it also needs to be bigger than my personal pocket book to have the impact we all want it to have.
Any interview done on YOUTUBE has an option (if requested) for a Transcript. It’s not a perfect transcript, but it can be very helpful.
The recent one for example:
Go to [1]… click on the elipsis.
Go to [2] … click on Open Transcript.
Go to [3] (upper right … and the transcript is generated right there with time stamps…
This is exactly the transcript we’ve been discussing here.
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Contribute to PS? Yes. Contribute to an effort to make transcripts of content from Reasons To Believe? [content removed by Jesus]
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Hehe. That is pretty hilarious. If you listen to the video, you might be surprised. RTB is seriously working through if they can accept Christians that take a view like the GAE in the camp, evolutionary science and all. Can you imagine a world where RTB does not affirm evolution, but also is not anti-evolution? I can. That would be a good world.
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Okay, we now have a long term solution in place that you might really like. We are using rev.com to do human transcriptions. It costs about $1.25 per minute to transcribe, the quality is really good, and we will be slowly growing up our library of transcribed talks.
To get access to transcriptions, you will need to be at least a $10 per month patron (Peaceful Science | creating trust between scientists and the public. | Patreon). At $25 per month, we will give you priority in determining which video/audio is transcribed.
I picked these price points because most of us can easily afford $10 per month. This price is a steal for what you’ll be getting. As enough people join, we could be transcribing a fairly large number of videos and sharing the benefit together.
I’ll be explaining more in the next month our full plans to make it worthwhile to most of us to join, at least at the $1/month level. We are also committed to being transparent in our use of funds, none of which is going to me personally at this time. So I hope that you guys (@John_Harshman and @sfmatheson) and others will consider becoming patrons soon 
.
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