Veritasium. Over time I realized his content is mostly about flashy half baked “sciencey” content like Discovery Channel. It’s meant to get an audience and nothing more. It lacks quality control, and fact checking. I only realized how many errors his videos have when he covered a topic I know more about. Also, the whole electricity thing and self driving car debacle only reinforced my views on his content.
Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.
Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)
They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.
Veritasium. Over time I realized his content is mostly about flashy half baked “sciencey” content like Discovery Channel. It’s meant to get an audience and nothing more. It lacks quality control, and fact checking. I only realized how many errors his videos have when he covered a topic I know more about. Also, the whole electricity thing and self driving car debacle only reinforced my views on his content.
What happened with the electricity thing an self driving cars?
Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.
Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)
They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.