5 ms·
> “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”. Some of these channels have millions of viewers, and the on
by gotaquestion 4y ago
> “let me explain something using terrible metaphors because I fail to understand the math myself”.
Some of these channels have millions of viewers, and the one I think you are referring to has 11M. Remember when the Reimann Zeta function summation of -1/12 was all the rage, or the Banach-Tarsky paradox? Google either of those and there are a dozen YouTube videos for each one. These are post-doctoral topics that become name-dropping buzzwords, I would never claim to understand these, yet people who watched the video do.
Which seems like a lot what the internet has given us: information, not knowledge. To quote a speaker I saw at Siggraph in ~1996, "Information is not power, knowledge is power." This hit home. We've seen it from people reading WebMD in the 2000's and then trying to teach their doctors, to the crazy scientific ignorance about mask mandates today. All because of internet edutainment or in the worst-case misinformation.
Anyway, yes, her article got cynical fast, but I think it was because she bounded with realism because plotted on the arch of technology evolution: it would take thousands of generations (even at an exponential pace) to create tech that can take actual measurements. That seems like good science to me.
- TillE 4y agoPopular science has leaned heavily on terrible, unhelpful metaphors for decades, long before any YouTube channel existed. Of course you can't quickly teach the general public the actual math of quantum mechanics or whatever, but I think it's far far better to explain things in simple terms without further complicating the subject with awkward analogies.
- gus_massa 4y agoI agree that most videos in YouTube simplify the problem too much or are just wrong. My recommendations anyway: * Mathologer: "Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKRGpMiVTw * Vsauce: "The Banach–Tarski Paradox" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA Each one is like half an hour long, but you may need to pause them and rewatch them a few times to understand the details.
- gotaquestion 4y agoYes, I've watched both of those. Mathologer is in the biz of math, Vsauce is in the biz of ka-ching.
- mardifoufs 4y agoI don't think the vsauce channel is egregiously monetized. He sometimes does not upload for months or even years, and does not make the most clickbaity videos out there. He could've easily been much bigger than veritasium, in terms of monthly views, if he wanted to by just making the same type of videos as he used to do ( the broad mishmash videos that I really really liked honestly). The fact that he didn't, to me, indicates he is obviously not in the business of making money.
- gotaquestion 4y agoYeah, that's a good point. But I always found Vsauce and Ve to be clickbaity, with the former targeted at a more educated audience. But that's my opinion.
- ramraj07 4y agoI am a fan of her work and videos but saying We will never make experimental progress on the black hole paradox for TEN THOUSAND years seems myopic at best. Does she not instantly realize how long that is? Unless we nuke ourselves out of it, I see us as an interstellar civilization easily within 100-200 years. That’s being conservative. I’d be surprised if we don’t have probes looking around the nearest black holes or even creating ones experimentally in double or triple digit years from today.
- raattgift 4y agoThe closest good candidates for stellar black holes are thousands of light-years away from Earth. There is one possible candidate at about 1.1 kly, but there are good reasons to think that it (QV Telescopii) will turn out to be something else, as seems to be the case for LB-1 *. V616 Monocerotis at ~ 3.3 kly <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A0620-00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A0620-00> is the closest thing that is virtually certain to be a black hole. Given measurements of the Local Standard of Rest and star surveys of the LSR neighbourhood, it is unlikely that there are any stellar-mass black holes at all within about 300 light-years of Earth (and X-Ray astronomy and microlensing/MACHO-hunting surveys each gives even more pessimistic nearby black hole numbers) so the prospects of getting a signal from an Earth probe dispatched to close to a black hole within a millennium is, pardon the pun, faint. There could be only some thousands up to a few (~10) million in the Milky Way, a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars at this point in its evolution. There may be as many as ten billion stellar black holes in and around Milky-Andromeda five or so billion years in our future. I note you also say "creating ones experimentally", but that is in the realm of science fiction at this stage, barely hard s.f. even for microscopic masses, and it gets decidedly soft as one climbs up the mass scale from nanograms.
- ramraj07 4y agoFair, is it still theoretically possible that primordial black holes of mediocre sizes are floating around? Also of course experimental black hole creation is in the realm of science fiction but so was going to the moon 150 years back. Question is if there’s a fundamental theoretical block , similar to FTL , in achieving it?