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Familiar to a greater or lesser degree with most, but not all of those. I'd take exception to a couple inclusions. - Undecided w/Matt Ferrel This one is proba

Familiar to a greater or lesser degree with most, but not all of those. I'd take exception to a couple inclusions. - Undecided w/Matt Ferrel This one is probably the most questionable. I was always a bit leery due to the titles being a bit too accepting of anything you might find on r/Futurology, and then happened on a Thunderf00t Busted (not a regular viewer there either) about some of his videos and yeah. I think it's safe to say he's not doing much of a critical evaluation of anything as he is just reading whatever cool sounding press releases he finds. I'm usually fairly allergic to more absolute statements (part of the reason I'm not such a regular viewer of Thunderf00t's), but even with the limited amount I've seen I'm pretty confident in writing off Undecided w/Matt Ferrel. At the very least, it deserves the same kind of credibility as anything you might find on r/Futurology. - Veritasium Yeah, I know. But his repeated issues with basically doing ad-spots as videos, and his lack of acknowledging the issue, really soured me on him. If I'm learning about something through somebody like Veritasium, it's not a topic I'm well versed in to begin with and it's unlikely that I'm going to pursue it all that much further independently. That sort of format is also particularly prone to causing me to drop my more rigorous filters. All of that means credibility is particularly important there, and Veritasium completely lost my trust that he wouldn't try to slip advertising by me while pretending it's relatively unbiased information that's been checked in good faith. Even before that, he seemed to me to tend a little too far towards fully selling high school style explanations, without making it clear that that's what he's doing. By high school style explanations, I mean those that are nearly outright lies, serve to help students work their way to the point that they can make use of the next more nuanced and complex explanation which is closer to the truth. There's nothing inherently wrong with using those sorts of explanations, but when addressing such a wide audience with no expectation that they will be looking deeper later, I think it's very important to be clear about the limitations of the information provided. With Derek, you get exactly as much nuance as he thinks makes for a good story, and he does his best to leave you with the impression that's all there is.

tinco 4y ago
Matt Ferrell's Undecided is great. Yeah he just explains interesting press releases, he isn't shy about that either. Why would he want/need to be critical about them? Unless he's reading press releases of companies that don't actually exist I don't see how this could be a bad thing. Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If he manages to sneak in an ad without me noticing, all the better, he's getting paid and I wasn't annoyed. I watched all of his video and I don't remember any annoying ads. He also produces some of the greatest and most beautifully produced explanations of interesting maths and physics concepts on YouTube, all for free.
- ShortStretto 4y ago
  Matt also has a followup podcast about each episode where questions are answered. It's on youtube as well, https://www.youtube.com/c/StillTBDPodcast https://www.youtube.com/c/StillTBDPodcast.
- foerbert 4y ago
  > Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don't think we're talking about the same things here. I'm talking about wholesale videos that are effectively a big, undisclosed ad. I don't mean I don't like how he does ad reads. I mean I don't like how he's created entire videos that are basically ads and then passed them off as his own original good-faith attempt to inform. It's not so much actively annoying as is it actively deceitful.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    Do you have exact examples of that? Whenever I've seen people trot this argument out in the past it's typically sourced from a couple of old Twitter threads and it's a 20/20 hindsight thing wherein he is talking about something exciting and new looks like a shill five years on because they were only talking about that one specific company's thing, ignoring the context of the video and the "at the time this was completely new" factor. I've seen the same happen for things like ML as applied to a variety of things, most notably Tesla's autopilot features.
    - foerbert 4y ago
      Already posted in an earlier response to you. But no, nothing like that. These were relatively recent videos about newish but well-established industries. In particular Waymo's self-driving cars and, to a lesser extent, some company doing consumer DNA testing. These were pretty blatant immediately, no hind-sight or digging required. And full videos too, not ancillary comments like on Twitter.
- Kirby64 4y ago
  The issue at hand is that Undecided presents press releases as fact, without adding any fact checking or caveats that come along with them. One of his most recent videos about hydrogen storage disks basically highlights this more directly, since he presents this technology as if it's a solved problem when in actuality it's more so a barely formed idea with many many caveats.
namaria 4y ago
I think it's best not to conflate entertainment and information sources. "Informative" youtube channels fall on a weird middle ground where their content seems to be edifying you but they are so riddles with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, you have to spend a lot of energy filtering it or you might develop misconceptions. I'd rather just watch silly videos and get my information from reliable publishing house that provide some expectation of curation and fact checking.
tiborsaas 4y ago
So basically Veritasium is selling ads to keep making more videos and sometimes he makes things simple enough that high schoolers can understand it? Ok :)
- foerbert 4y ago
  I mean, if you want to consider "selling ads" to include selling undisclosed ads as organic, original, and good-faith reporting of accurate information, then yeah, sure? I sure wouldn't, though.
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    Care to share an example? It makes talking about this really hard.
    - foerbert 4y ago
      Sure. Here's a video critiquing one of Veritasium's videos I had issues with. Check this[1] thread for further details about it from me and some good rebuttals from another commenter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=foerbert#32223515 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=foerbert#32223515
obscurette 4y ago
About Veritasium. These good stories with dubious claims and with "but I wasn't wrong!" and "at least I made you think" reactions is considered OK by most in the US for example. But in eastern parts of the world it is treated as a pure smartass behavior.
- foerbert 4y ago
  Is it? Maybe (probably) I'm unusual as far as US folk go, but I think it's pretty squarely in the realm of smartassery.
- tpush 4y ago
  If you're talking about the electricity video, that one was not wrong at all.
  - magarnicle 4y ago
    No, but he didn't put enough effort into making sure his question was clear, and it felt a bit deceptive ("click-batey"). He asked when the bulb would light up at all, but it seems most people thought he was asking when it would light up fully. He didn't make that clear initially, and then didn't admit later that he had communicated poorly. That being said, I really like his videos and don't mind most of the issues people bring up with him here.
hansword 4y ago
I want to very much second excluding Veritasium. Whenever he talked about something I was knowledgeable in, he made mistakes. This combined with branding himself as 'the element of truth' and the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs made me stop watching him. It's an entertainment channel, and if you want light science entertainment, and expect to forget everything within a few hours, it's a good channel. If you want a science/learning/education channel, it isn't.
- bil7 4y ago
  >the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs an unfortunate appeal to the recommendation algorithm that is now a must. You are leaving views on the table without employing these clickbait methods. One solution that many channels use including Veritasium is trying out various clickbait packaging for the first 24-48h, then swapping to something more descriptive. When these videos represent not only one person's livelihood but also the salaries of a team of producers, camera operators, scriptwriters, etc it just makes unfortunate sense to appeal to the algorithm
  - hansword 4y ago
    You are right. And I do understand why he does it. I can see his side. But I sit on the other side. I hate it and will tell everyone how much I hate it. --- Edit: Or, if you prefer, in market terms: Because I am not alone, there is a market for non-clickbaity titles, non-exaggerated thumbs, and there are channels that cater to this market.
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      I think the overwhelming majority of people on HN (and possibly elsewhere) would prefer if they could just have a homepage that was just reverse chronological ordered videos from their subscriptions, with a separate "Discover" tab, with no interference from their algorithm. This thread might prove an excellent case study for YouTube. I was subscribed to all of the channels I listed and a few more along the same lines; my recommendations have never shown me videos from some of the other channels people have posted in this thread or in reply to my own post. If you want a good recommendations system, this thread has been better than YouTube's algorithm for discoverability on these kinds of topics. I can't imagine anyone is actually happy with how YouTube works on this front.
BeefWellington 4y ago
> This one is probably the most questionable. I was always a bit leery due to the titles being a bit too accepting of anything you might find on r/Futurology, and then happened on a Thunderf00t Busted (not a regular viewer there either) about some of his videos and yeah. I think it's safe to say he's not doing much of a critical evaluation of anything as he is just reading whatever cool sounding press releases he finds. I'm usually fairly allergic to more absolute statements (part of the reason I'm not such a regular viewer of Thunderf00t's), but even with the limited amount I've seen I'm pretty confident in writing off Undecided w/Matt Ferrel. At the very least, it deserves the same kind of credibility as anything you might find on r/Futurology. I don't know what to tell you if you believe Thunderf00t's "debunking" is more valuable than your own viewing of any given channel. Thunderf00t is someone who is on his own very problematic and misleading. The question posed was about things for the intellectually curious, not for "who is the most accurate science communicator on YouTube" so I think including people who cover topics in a simple way are useful. I'd encourage you to look at many of his videos that cover basic things like how geothermal heating and heat pumps work. Regarding Veritasium, that is an even weaker argument IMO. If we're going to try to pillory everyone trying to make a living off communicating STEM topics I'm not sure who we'll have left in the space. The boring altruistic rich people? I'd love to see examples of him outright lying or misleading his audience if you have it, because that would certainly change my mind on recommending his channel to people.
- foerbert 4y ago
  > I don't know what to tell you if you believe Thunderf00t's "debunking" is more valuable than your own viewing of any given channel. I wasn't very inclined to view Matt Ferrel's videos much in the first place. I was too leery of the way they were presented to consider it worth my time to investigate further. I was wondering if I was missing out, but never decided to really try to find out first-hand as it just wasn't worth it to me. It was at that point that I saw Thunderf00t's video, and I decided to see what his take was. As you note, I'm a bit wary of Thunderf00t as well. I don't watch his videos often and when I do I ensure to remain a little more actively critical. Based on what I saw there, I didn't feel inclined to further wonder if I was missing anything by avoiding Ferel's videos. I'm sure that video, and the follow up, were probably some of the weakest from Ferel. However, it was less the actual content and rather the approach that didn't fit what I'd want to watch. Uncritical readings of pie-in-the-sky press releases isn't my thing, and the follow-up in particular made it clear that that was not where Ferel thought the problem was. > Regarding Veritasium, that is an even weaker argument IMO. If we're going to try to pillory everyone trying to make a living off communicating STEM topics I'm not sure who we'll have left in the space. Making a living is one thing. But that isn't my problem. I wouldn't recommend avoiding his channel if it was just a matter of him running ads and/or doing some ad-reads. > I'd love to see examples of him outright lying or misleading his audience if you have it, because that would certainly change my mind on recommending his channel to people. The largest straw for me was probably the one on self-driving cars with Waymo. For an in-depth look, Tom Nicholas did a pretty good job[1] covering it from what I recall. In particular the comments on that video from Veritasium really shook my trust, IIRC. Around the same time I also took issue with several of his other videos. The one that I recall now was about some kind of DNA testing company. It was another one where the company both sponsored the video and provided exclusive access. There my issue was largely with how he soft-balled the interviews and even outside of them didn't bring up what I felt were the most pertinent - and well-known - arguments against such companies in general, as well as (again, IIRC) that specific companies actions. These ones weren't, as far as I know, as extreme as the Waymo one. But they - and the lack of any sort of response from Veritasium when many people brought the issue up - were enough to already have me teetering on the edge when the Waymo one nailed the coffin shut. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc
p1mrx 4y ago
Just Have a Think covers topics similar to Matt Ferrel, with a bit more rigor: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustHaveaThink/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/JustHaveaThink/videos

tinco 4y ago

Matt Ferrell's Undecided is great. Yeah he just explains interesting press releases, he isn't shy about that either. Why would he want/need to be critical about them? Unless he's reading press releases of companies that don't actually exist I don't see how this could be a bad thing. Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If he manages to sneak in an ad without me noticing, all the better, he's getting paid and I wasn't annoyed. I watched all of his video and I don't remember any annoying ads. He also produces some of the greatest and most beautifully produced explanations of interesting maths and physics concepts on YouTube, all for free.

ShortStretto 4y ago
Matt also has a followup podcast about each episode where questions are answered. It's on youtube as well, https://www.youtube.com/c/StillTBDPodcast https://www.youtube.com/c/StillTBDPodcast.
foerbert 4y ago
> Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don't think we're talking about the same things here. I'm talking about wholesale videos that are effectively a big, undisclosed ad. I don't mean I don't like how he does ad reads. I mean I don't like how he's created entire videos that are basically ads and then passed them off as his own original good-faith attempt to inform. It's not so much actively annoying as is it actively deceitful.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  Do you have exact examples of that? Whenever I've seen people trot this argument out in the past it's typically sourced from a couple of old Twitter threads and it's a 20/20 hindsight thing wherein he is talking about something exciting and new looks like a shill five years on because they were only talking about that one specific company's thing, ignoring the context of the video and the "at the time this was completely new" factor. I've seen the same happen for things like ML as applied to a variety of things, most notably Tesla's autopilot features.
  - foerbert 4y ago
    Already posted in an earlier response to you. But no, nothing like that. These were relatively recent videos about newish but well-established industries. In particular Waymo's self-driving cars and, to a lesser extent, some company doing consumer DNA testing. These were pretty blatant immediately, no hind-sight or digging required. And full videos too, not ancillary comments like on Twitter.
Kirby64 4y ago
The issue at hand is that Undecided presents press releases as fact, without adding any fact checking or caveats that come along with them. One of his most recent videos about hydrogen storage disks basically highlights this more directly, since he presents this technology as if it's a solved problem when in actuality it's more so a barely formed idea with many many caveats.

namaria 4y ago

I think it's best not to conflate entertainment and information sources. "Informative" youtube channels fall on a weird middle ground where their content seems to be edifying you but they are so riddles with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, you have to spend a lot of energy filtering it or you might develop misconceptions. I'd rather just watch silly videos and get my information from reliable publishing house that provide some expectation of curation and fact checking.

tiborsaas 4y ago

So basically Veritasium is selling ads to keep making more videos and sometimes he makes things simple enough that high schoolers can understand it? Ok :)

foerbert 4y ago
I mean, if you want to consider "selling ads" to include selling undisclosed ads as organic, original, and good-faith reporting of accurate information, then yeah, sure? I sure wouldn't, though.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Care to share an example? It makes talking about this really hard.
  - foerbert 4y ago
    Sure. Here's a video critiquing one of Veritasium's videos I had issues with. Check this[1] thread for further details about it from me and some good rebuttals from another commenter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=foerbert#32223515 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=foerbert#32223515

obscurette 4y ago

About Veritasium. These good stories with dubious claims and with "but I wasn't wrong!" and "at least I made you think" reactions is considered OK by most in the US for example. But in eastern parts of the world it is treated as a pure smartass behavior.

foerbert 4y ago
Is it? Maybe (probably) I'm unusual as far as US folk go, but I think it's pretty squarely in the realm of smartassery.
tpush 4y ago
If you're talking about the electricity video, that one was not wrong at all.
- magarnicle 4y ago
  No, but he didn't put enough effort into making sure his question was clear, and it felt a bit deceptive ("click-batey"). He asked when the bulb would light up at all, but it seems most people thought he was asking when it would light up fully. He didn't make that clear initially, and then didn't admit later that he had communicated poorly. That being said, I really like his videos and don't mind most of the issues people bring up with him here.

hansword 4y ago

I want to very much second excluding Veritasium. Whenever he talked about something I was knowledgeable in, he made mistakes. This combined with branding himself as 'the element of truth' and the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs made me stop watching him. It's an entertainment channel, and if you want light science entertainment, and expect to forget everything within a few hours, it's a good channel. If you want a science/learning/education channel, it isn't.

bil7 4y ago
>the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs an unfortunate appeal to the recommendation algorithm that is now a must. You are leaving views on the table without employing these clickbait methods. One solution that many channels use including Veritasium is trying out various clickbait packaging for the first 24-48h, then swapping to something more descriptive. When these videos represent not only one person's livelihood but also the salaries of a team of producers, camera operators, scriptwriters, etc it just makes unfortunate sense to appeal to the algorithm
- hansword 4y ago
  You are right. And I do understand why he does it. I can see his side. But I sit on the other side. I hate it and will tell everyone how much I hate it. --- Edit: Or, if you prefer, in market terms: Because I am not alone, there is a market for non-clickbaity titles, non-exaggerated thumbs, and there are channels that cater to this market.
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    I think the overwhelming majority of people on HN (and possibly elsewhere) would prefer if they could just have a homepage that was just reverse chronological ordered videos from their subscriptions, with a separate "Discover" tab, with no interference from their algorithm. This thread might prove an excellent case study for YouTube. I was subscribed to all of the channels I listed and a few more along the same lines; my recommendations have never shown me videos from some of the other channels people have posted in this thread or in reply to my own post. If you want a good recommendations system, this thread has been better than YouTube's algorithm for discoverability on these kinds of topics. I can't imagine anyone is actually happy with how YouTube works on this front.

BeefWellington 4y ago

> This one is probably the most questionable. I was always a bit leery due to the titles being a bit too accepting of anything you might find on r/Futurology, and then happened on a Thunderf00t Busted (not a regular viewer there either) about some of his videos and yeah. I think it's safe to say he's not doing much of a critical evaluation of anything as he is just reading whatever cool sounding press releases he finds. I'm usually fairly allergic to more absolute statements (part of the reason I'm not such a regular viewer of Thunderf00t's), but even with the limited amount I've seen I'm pretty confident in writing off Undecided w/Matt Ferrel. At the very least, it deserves the same kind of credibility as anything you might find on r/Futurology. I don't know what to tell you if you believe Thunderf00t's "debunking" is more valuable than your own viewing of any given channel. Thunderf00t is someone who is on his own very problematic and misleading. The question posed was about things for the intellectually curious, not for "who is the most accurate science communicator on YouTube" so I think including people who cover topics in a simple way are useful. I'd encourage you to look at many of his videos that cover basic things like how geothermal heating and heat pumps work. Regarding Veritasium, that is an even weaker argument IMO. If we're going to try to pillory everyone trying to make a living off communicating STEM topics I'm not sure who we'll have left in the space. The boring altruistic rich people? I'd love to see examples of him outright lying or misleading his audience if you have it, because that would certainly change my mind on recommending his channel to people.

foerbert 4y ago
> I don't know what to tell you if you believe Thunderf00t's "debunking" is more valuable than your own viewing of any given channel. I wasn't very inclined to view Matt Ferrel's videos much in the first place. I was too leery of the way they were presented to consider it worth my time to investigate further. I was wondering if I was missing out, but never decided to really try to find out first-hand as it just wasn't worth it to me. It was at that point that I saw Thunderf00t's video, and I decided to see what his take was. As you note, I'm a bit wary of Thunderf00t as well. I don't watch his videos often and when I do I ensure to remain a little more actively critical. Based on what I saw there, I didn't feel inclined to further wonder if I was missing anything by avoiding Ferel's videos. I'm sure that video, and the follow up, were probably some of the weakest from Ferel. However, it was less the actual content and rather the approach that didn't fit what I'd want to watch. Uncritical readings of pie-in-the-sky press releases isn't my thing, and the follow-up in particular made it clear that that was not where Ferel thought the problem was. > Regarding Veritasium, that is an even weaker argument IMO. If we're going to try to pillory everyone trying to make a living off communicating STEM topics I'm not sure who we'll have left in the space. Making a living is one thing. But that isn't my problem. I wouldn't recommend avoiding his channel if it was just a matter of him running ads and/or doing some ad-reads. > I'd love to see examples of him outright lying or misleading his audience if you have it, because that would certainly change my mind on recommending his channel to people. The largest straw for me was probably the one on self-driving cars with Waymo. For an in-depth look, Tom Nicholas did a pretty good job[1] covering it from what I recall. In particular the comments on that video from Veritasium really shook my trust, IIRC. Around the same time I also took issue with several of his other videos. The one that I recall now was about some kind of DNA testing company. It was another one where the company both sponsored the video and provided exclusive access. There my issue was largely with how he soft-balled the interviews and even outside of them didn't bring up what I felt were the most pertinent - and well-known - arguments against such companies in general, as well as (again, IIRC) that specific companies actions. These ones weren't, as far as I know, as extreme as the Waymo one. But they - and the lack of any sort of response from Veritasium when many people brought the issue up - were enough to already have me teetering on the edge when the Waymo one nailed the coffin shut. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

p1mrx 4y ago

Just Have a Think covers topics similar to Matt Ferrel, with a bit more rigor: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustHaveaThink/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/JustHaveaThink/videos