I must be an outlier but I find a lot of the things the veritasium guy does as being extremely annoying to the point that I mostly avoid his videos. And it’s a shame because I know he produces a lot of really high quality stuff.
He’s talked before about how it’s better for learning if you first try to answer a question, get it wrong, then are taught the right thing. So he starts a lot of videos by asking random people on the street a question and we get to watch all of them give super wrong answers. Then he spends some time saying “a lot of people think X but really X is wrong!”
I really really really hate the whole “let’s all laugh at these dumb people” dunking that this encourages. I know he has his reasons that it increases the retention rate of knowledge if you get it wrong first, but to me it just comes off as smug. It gets to the point that a lot of the time he’s just poorly specifying a question, leaving it ambiguous, and when people are “wrong” it’s as much his fault as theirs.
Likewise with the clickbait… he can talk about how “unreasonably effective” it is, but I fucking hate clickbait with a passion and any time one of his videos has a “no way that’s true” headline, it’s almost always not, or at least only true on some mundane technicality. I’ve been burned enough times clicking his videos that I just ignore him now.
Clickbait may be unreasonably effective at getting any random person to click his videos, but to me after enough times I’ve learned to not watch his stuff because of the incessant clickbait. There’s more than enough quality educational stuff on YouTube, I don’t need to indulge smug people like him.
plandis 22 days ago [-]
> I really really really hate the whole “let’s all laugh at these dumb people” dunking that this encourages.
Are you talking about the entropy video where he asks people about the suns energy? I don’t think he was mocking people, the purpose was show that most people have an incorrect view.
ninkendo 22 days ago [-]
It's a ton of his videos. He did it a lot more often in the earlier days... if you sort by oldest videos it was pretty much 100% of his content: Walk around, ask people questions about stuff, and post how wrong everyone is. As the channel progressed this became less of a thing, usually just part of the intro. But he still does it.
I know it’s not explicitly trying to mock people, but I’m sure those people felt dumb after being told they’re wrong. He does his best to be nice about it, but something about his personality (or maybe just his facial expression) gives off this intensely smug vibe. He’s just so damned used to being smarter than everyone, it just comes across… even when he’s trying really hard to be nice about it.
_Algernon_ 22 days ago [-]
I missed the place where justifying doing a bad thing because it is beneficial to oneself makes it better.
sega_sai 22 days ago [-]
After watching the video, I think what he says in it is fair.
It is perfectly reasonable to want to have more viewers of the videos. Not only that gives more profit, but also that's the whole point of making educational videos in the first place. And if making more 'click-baity' titles leads to that, it is okay, provided you do not go over the boundary what is considered dishonest and would actively mislead. Obviously the exact boundary is somewhat fuzzy, but pushing all the way till that boundary seems reasonable.
greenthrow 22 days ago [-]
The same logic can be used to justify all kinds of awful stuff though. From putting a scantily dressed woman in the thumbnail to just straight up lying in the video to blow people's minds. You have to draw the line somewhere because you just don't want to do crappy things, unless you're a narcissist and/or sociopath.
ramraj07 22 days ago [-]
It took me a second to figure out what the topic is, as a biologist. As a non biologist I feel this is an acceptable description of what's being described, I wouldn't consider this to be clickbait..
uikoleawrfgolmp 22 days ago [-]
[flagged]
djmips 22 days ago [-]
I would rather just have the science facts without going into personal details about the primary inventor.
They're some interesting characters: https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/erowid_earth/
He’s talked before about how it’s better for learning if you first try to answer a question, get it wrong, then are taught the right thing. So he starts a lot of videos by asking random people on the street a question and we get to watch all of them give super wrong answers. Then he spends some time saying “a lot of people think X but really X is wrong!”
I really really really hate the whole “let’s all laugh at these dumb people” dunking that this encourages. I know he has his reasons that it increases the retention rate of knowledge if you get it wrong first, but to me it just comes off as smug. It gets to the point that a lot of the time he’s just poorly specifying a question, leaving it ambiguous, and when people are “wrong” it’s as much his fault as theirs.
Likewise with the clickbait… he can talk about how “unreasonably effective” it is, but I fucking hate clickbait with a passion and any time one of his videos has a “no way that’s true” headline, it’s almost always not, or at least only true on some mundane technicality. I’ve been burned enough times clicking his videos that I just ignore him now.
Clickbait may be unreasonably effective at getting any random person to click his videos, but to me after enough times I’ve learned to not watch his stuff because of the incessant clickbait. There’s more than enough quality educational stuff on YouTube, I don’t need to indulge smug people like him.
Are you talking about the entropy video where he asks people about the suns energy? I don’t think he was mocking people, the purpose was show that most people have an incorrect view.
I know it’s not explicitly trying to mock people, but I’m sure those people felt dumb after being told they’re wrong. He does his best to be nice about it, but something about his personality (or maybe just his facial expression) gives off this intensely smug vibe. He’s just so damned used to being smarter than everyone, it just comes across… even when he’s trying really hard to be nice about it.