The YouTuber who goes by the nickname SciManDan is one of the biggest flat earth debunkers on YouTube (620K subscribers as of writing this), and thus quite famous among that crowd.
As far as I understand, he is a physics teacher (I'm not sure at what grade), so he does have at least some scientific background (at least at the level that's required for such a teaching position).
Most of the time he does a decently good job at debunking flat-earthers (and sometimes other conspiracy theorists). However, what I really don't like about him is that he sometimes makes the most egregious and obnoxious errors in his explanations.
As an example, in a recent video he commented on this particular picture created by flatearthers:
He says:
"The three people on the bottom photo are all very close together so their shadows would look the same. The three examples on the top photo are all really far apart, so perspective comes into play here."
I facepalmed when he said that.
It's extremely obvious that what's seen in the bottom photo is the reflection of the three people on the wet surface of the sand. Those are not shadows, they are reflections, and that's completely obvious. How on Earth can he not see that?
If this had been the only egregious blatant mistake he has ever made, then it would be nothing. No biggie, he made a mistake once, who cares? The thing is, he has made similar blatant mistakes and given completely incorrect explanations literally dozens and dozens of times during his YouTube career, and he just keeps doing it. It's not extremely frequent, but it does happen way too often (perhaps one in each ten videos he uploads will contain such an egregious mistake or wrong explanation, give or take).
Sometimes the mistakes are misinterpreting photographs and video footage (giving the completely wrong explanation of what's happening). Othertimes he gives wrong explanations of actual physics, such as how planetary orbits work (as he did in one video, although I can't be troubled right now to try to find.) Both types of mistake are bad, but especially the second type of mistake is extremely so, as he is literally teaching incorrect science to his viewers.
It's very clear that he spends very little time doing any research or even thinking about the arguments, photos or video footage that he is explaining, or trying to corroborate that his explanations are correct (eg. by searching online or consulting with knowledgeable friends). He just spouts whatever first comes to his mind. Most often it will the correct or mostly-correct explanation, but then you have these cases where he goes completely off the deep end and gives an absolutely idiotic wrong explanation. And this has happened way, way too many times.
The mistakes he makes are sometimes so utterly egregious that sometimes even other YouTubers have had to step in to correct him, such as for example here. (In this case, like in so many others, the main problem is not really that he gave the completely incorrect, and rather idiotic, explanation, but that he quite clearly did zero research, consulted nobody, and simply spouted the first thing that came to his mind, with complete disregard to whether it made any sense or was in any way accurate.)
The main problem with this is, of course, that giving the wrong explanations for stuff only erodes the credibility of debunking. If eg. a flatearther were to catch such a mistake he could point it out, laugh at it and at SciManDan himself, and dismiss everything he says because of that. (Luckily flatearthers lack the IQ to do that, but it's a very real possibility.)
It's aggravating when SciManDan just keeps doing these egregious mistakes month after month, year after year. He was making these egregious mistakes 7 years ago, when he started, and he is still regularly making them to this day. He just doesn't learn.
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