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This isn't a clickbaitey video. This is styropyro, one of the most knowledgeable YouTubers when it comes to lasers and the related engineering. He's not just so

by junon 5y ago

This isn't a clickbaitey video. This is styropyro, one of the most knowledgeable YouTubers when it comes to lasers and the related engineering. He's not just some dude who hooks up lasers to a wall outlet. He knows very well what he's doing. He always makes a point about proper laser safety. Another one is Photonicinduction, an electrical engineer that plays with insane voltages in his attic basically. I'd never want to replicate anything he does because I would surely kill myself doing it. That doesn't mean we should censor such channels. They're insanely educational, insightful, and fun. If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely, that's not the fault of all of the rational viewers who know better.

avianlyric 5y ago
> If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely. Unfortunately you only find out that you’re not capable when it goes wrong. There’s a reason why labs and engineering firms force people through long detailed safety training courses. There’s a lot of things out there that can kill or serious maim you, which look completely innocuous at first sight. Additionally there are many naive safety protocols that create the appearance of safety, without actually protecting people. Normally people only recognise poor safety setups because they’ve either been shown why it’s bad (plus accompanying horror story), or they’ve suffered the failure personally. Simply opening up the side of a microwave while it off and disconnected exposes you to a shock risk capable of killing. Unless you take specific steps to make the microwave safe, it’s not hard to imagine someone taking the side of a microwave off after watching this video, without realising the danger within.
- junon 5y ago
  > It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! Should we censor videos of people who free climb large mountains? Someone could fall and die! It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". Censoring instead of educating is directly part of the problem.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    > Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days. > It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video. > Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves. Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning. With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential. All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions. Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago. > It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.
- joe-collins 5y ago
  03:11 > Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    I think he could have done better and worked more warnings into his delivery as he went. Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings. When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you. Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
    - junon 5y ago
      I think you're making a lot of assumptions about someone based off of one video. If you've been a styropyro fan for a while, you'd know how serious he takes safety. He has whole videos about proper safety glasses and whatnot, and even destroys some to demonstrate that not all glasses are safe or even made correctly. Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
      - avianlyric 5y ago
        I’ll go watch more of his videos then. To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things. But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  No risk, no fun. Why so serious?
jrootabega 5y ago
I think it is/isn't a clickbait video regardless of the credentials of who produced it. I agree this one is. It's padded out to 20 minutes, stealth mid roll ads inserted, etc. You don't get to be well-known on youtube by making non-clickbait content. I don't dispute that he's knowledgeable, though.
- ubercow13 5y ago
  That’s not clickbait. The thumbnail/framing/title of this video isn’t deceptive. It delivers exactly what it says. What do midroll ads have to do with clickbait?
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    Eh, I think that's like saying gutting a fish is not fishing.
amelius 5y ago
I guess the guy was lucky that his laser goggles which were designed for 0.5 watts also worked for 700 watts.
- junon 5y ago
  StryoPyro is 100% aware of the ratings for his goggles.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Why is he not promoting a more safe way to do things, though? Often the safety measures take about as much time as setting up the experiment itself. In these videos, it looks nothing like that.
    - michaelt 5y ago
      Find me a better promotion of laser safety than this video by styropyro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzbIGkPW-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzbIGkPW-o No amount of warnings could be as convincing as seeing a cheap "medical" laser that can ablate metal... even through the safety glasses that were supplied with it.
      - amelius 5y ago
        He's acting in a very careless way though. Saying things like "oh, let's try this on my hand", without thoroughly thinking about the possibilities where it could go wrong, looks really stupid. Perhaps he thought about it before he made the video, but in that case he still sends the wrong message.
gaze 5y ago
Styropyro is one of the most universally reviled science YouTube channels among practicing scientists. Beyond doing really dumb shit, he runs an absolute cesspool of a discord server overrun with 14 year olds who build very dangerous laser contraptions, and then buy the cheapest, shittiest laser safety goggles, which are completely ineffective. He makes doing dangerous things in a completely unprepared way look cool.
- mutant 5y ago
  No joke about that discord. It's abysmal.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Any "scientist" who "reviles" styropyro is no more than a gatekeeping elitist with a chance of envy. He clearly knows what he's doing, stresses safety all the time, and makes great, informative, entertaining content. I've never seen him do anything dumb or unsafe.
  - avs733 5y ago
    I love that society has reached “I dislike you because you are teaching children to do dangerous things” is “elitist” point in its development. Civ didn’t prepare me for this.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      Wanting to keep information vaulted away from the public and only available to the "right" people is elitist.
      - micromacrofoot 5y ago
        the “wrong” people in this case are children, and the information is likely to cause injury…
        5y ago
karmickoala 5y ago
Parent didn't mention censorship. You're considering that everyone watching this video knows who styropyro is and have watched all his past videos, including the ones with safety instructions (which may sound like a waste of time to some people with other cooler videos to watch). This looks like the curse of knowledge at play, because there is a demographic that may think it's fine to try this at home. My suggestion would be to simply include more visual disclaimers, because his presentation makes it look like it isn't dangerous, despite him warning sometimes (but always half joking). The current disclaimers are easily missed since there are some people who skip the video to the good parts and don't watch everything. And just making clear that I want him to keep the jokes (like the moment at 3:20). Those are the best parts. ElectroBOOM does stuff like that too and it's great, but I think it conveys better how painful/dangerous it is. Perhaps if he includes an intro where he warns without jokes, and then adds some visual warnings throughout the video, would be enough. For instance, in this joke, it wasn't shown to a newcomer what he did to ensure it's safe to poke the microwave around like that.
kube-system 5y ago
The person you are replying to isn’t at all suggesting that this person isn’t very skilled. Obviously they are. The issue is, while many of us pick up on the shtick, there are many in the general YouTube audience who might not understand this. I don’t think it should be censored either, I just think these people should take some time to talk about the safety precautions they use. Because some people who watch these style of videos don’t realize there are unspoken safety precautions happening in the background.
- bdamm 5y ago
  He does talk about how fast his eyes would burn if exposed to the laser. If it helps people get off the couch is it really that bad? I want my kid to grow up too, but protecting him from all harmful information is just going to turn him into a potato or worse.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I never suggested anyone be "protected" from this information. Rather, that people should be given the whole story, instead of omitting information for shock value, entertainment value, provoking engagement, etc. I am aware that he did give some information about the dangers during the video, but they were mostly presented in a "look how dangerous I am!" style, rather than a "this is dangerous but because of precautions [x, y] and understanding [z], this is not actually putting anyone at harm"

by junon 5y ago

avianlyric 5y ago

> If some idiot thinks they're god and wants to emulate something they're clearly not capable of doing safely It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely. Unfortunately you only find out that you’re not capable when it goes wrong. There’s a reason why labs and engineering firms force people through long detailed safety training courses. There’s a lot of things out there that can kill or serious maim you, which look completely innocuous at first sight. Additionally there are many naive safety protocols that create the appearance of safety, without actually protecting people. Normally people only recognise poor safety setups because they’ve either been shown why it’s bad (plus accompanying horror story), or they’ve suffered the failure personally. Simply opening up the side of a microwave while it off and disconnected exposes you to a shock risk capable of killing. Unless you take specific steps to make the microwave safe, it’s not hard to imagine someone taking the side of a microwave off after watching this video, without realising the danger within.

junon 5y ago
> It can be difficult to know if you’re capable of doing something safely Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! Should we censor videos of people who free climb large mountains? Someone could fall and die! It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". Censoring instead of educating is directly part of the problem.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  > Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous. With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days. > It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained. I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video. > Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves! People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves. Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning. With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential. All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions. Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago. > It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping". I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.
joe-collins 5y ago
03:11 > Now I gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced. When electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're messing around with microwave parts like these.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  I think he could have done better and worked more warnings into his delivery as he went. Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings. When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you. Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
  - junon 5y ago
    I think you're making a lot of assumptions about someone based off of one video. If you've been a styropyro fan for a while, you'd know how serious he takes safety. He has whole videos about proper safety glasses and whatnot, and even destroys some to demonstrate that not all glasses are safe or even made correctly. Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      I’ll go watch more of his videos then. To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things. But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
No risk, no fun. Why so serious?

jrootabega 5y ago

I think it is/isn't a clickbait video regardless of the credentials of who produced it. I agree this one is. It's padded out to 20 minutes, stealth mid roll ads inserted, etc. You don't get to be well-known on youtube by making non-clickbait content. I don't dispute that he's knowledgeable, though.

ubercow13 5y ago
That’s not clickbait. The thumbnail/framing/title of this video isn’t deceptive. It delivers exactly what it says. What do midroll ads have to do with clickbait?
- jrootabega 5y ago
  Eh, I think that's like saying gutting a fish is not fishing.

amelius 5y ago

I guess the guy was lucky that his laser goggles which were designed for 0.5 watts also worked for 700 watts.

junon 5y ago
StryoPyro is 100% aware of the ratings for his goggles.
- amelius 5y ago
  Why is he not promoting a more safe way to do things, though? Often the safety measures take about as much time as setting up the experiment itself. In these videos, it looks nothing like that.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Find me a better promotion of laser safety than this video by styropyro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzbIGkPW-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbzbIGkPW-o No amount of warnings could be as convincing as seeing a cheap "medical" laser that can ablate metal... even through the safety glasses that were supplied with it.
    - amelius 5y ago
      He's acting in a very careless way though. Saying things like "oh, let's try this on my hand", without thoroughly thinking about the possibilities where it could go wrong, looks really stupid. Perhaps he thought about it before he made the video, but in that case he still sends the wrong message.

gaze 5y ago

Styropyro is one of the most universally reviled science YouTube channels among practicing scientists. Beyond doing really dumb shit, he runs an absolute cesspool of a discord server overrun with 14 year olds who build very dangerous laser contraptions, and then buy the cheapest, shittiest laser safety goggles, which are completely ineffective. He makes doing dangerous things in a completely unprepared way look cool.

mutant 5y ago
No joke about that discord. It's abysmal.
jimmaswell 5y ago
Any "scientist" who "reviles" styropyro is no more than a gatekeeping elitist with a chance of envy. He clearly knows what he's doing, stresses safety all the time, and makes great, informative, entertaining content. I've never seen him do anything dumb or unsafe.
- avs733 5y ago
  I love that society has reached “I dislike you because you are teaching children to do dangerous things” is “elitist” point in its development. Civ didn’t prepare me for this.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    Wanting to keep information vaulted away from the public and only available to the "right" people is elitist.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      the “wrong” people in this case are children, and the information is likely to cause injury…
      - 5y ago

karmickoala 5y ago

Parent didn't mention censorship. You're considering that everyone watching this video knows who styropyro is and have watched all his past videos, including the ones with safety instructions (which may sound like a waste of time to some people with other cooler videos to watch). This looks like the curse of knowledge at play, because there is a demographic that may think it's fine to try this at home. My suggestion would be to simply include more visual disclaimers, because his presentation makes it look like it isn't dangerous, despite him warning sometimes (but always half joking). The current disclaimers are easily missed since there are some people who skip the video to the good parts and don't watch everything. And just making clear that I want him to keep the jokes (like the moment at 3:20). Those are the best parts. ElectroBOOM does stuff like that too and it's great, but I think it conveys better how painful/dangerous it is. Perhaps if he includes an intro where he warns without jokes, and then adds some visual warnings throughout the video, would be enough. For instance, in this joke, it wasn't shown to a newcomer what he did to ensure it's safe to poke the microwave around like that.

kube-system 5y ago

The person you are replying to isn’t at all suggesting that this person isn’t very skilled. Obviously they are. The issue is, while many of us pick up on the shtick, there are many in the general YouTube audience who might not understand this. I don’t think it should be censored either, I just think these people should take some time to talk about the safety precautions they use. Because some people who watch these style of videos don’t realize there are unspoken safety precautions happening in the background.

bdamm 5y ago
He does talk about how fast his eyes would burn if exposed to the laser. If it helps people get off the couch is it really that bad? I want my kid to grow up too, but protecting him from all harmful information is just going to turn him into a potato or worse.
- kube-system 5y ago
  I never suggested anyone be "protected" from this information. Rather, that people should be given the whole story, instead of omitting information for shock value, entertainment value, provoking engagement, etc. I am aware that he did give some information about the dangers during the video, but they were mostly presented in a "look how dangerous I am!" style, rather than a "this is dangerous but because of precautions [x, y] and understanding [z], this is not actually putting anyone at harm"