"Veritasium" is one of those huge and world-famous YouTube channels that has 20 million subscribers and creates such high-quality documentary style videos that they rack up about 10 million views per video on average.
Some of the videos are extremely interesting and didactic. Perhaps the most brilliant of such examples is his "Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED" video, which is not only technically and historically very interesting, but something that most people don't know.
Given how technical many of his videos are, sometimes dealing with deep scientific subjects, some of his videos are not without their criticism and, perhaps, slight controversy.
Perhaps one of the most infamous ones is the video "The Big Misconception About Electricity", which was criticized by many experts. Not in that what he was presenting was wrong per se, but in that the explanations and the video overall was needlessly complicated and cryptic for something that isn't really that complicated to explain (even in very accurate technical terms that are not dumbed-down to the general public.)
That video isn't unique in that regard. While not common, some of his most technical videos about deep scientific or mathematical subjects can likewise be unnecessarily complex and cryptic, spending way too much time explaining relatively simple concepts in needlessly complicated ways. He is making the topics sound more complicated than they really are, and explaining them in needlessly complex cryptic ways.
Some videos are more of a "miss" than a "hit". Not in terms of number of views (his videos are guaranteed to always get 5 million views minimum, no matter what they contain), but in terms of what he was trying to accomplish in the video.
No better example of this than his video "Testing the US Military's Worst Idea", where he tried to test in practice if an idea that the US Military at some point entertained would work in practice: And that's that instead of using complicated missiles or lasers or other high-end weapons, how about just using extremely heavy metal rods: Just drop them from orbit on the target. The kinetic energy that they gain when dropped from orbit is absolutely ginormous and would cause considerable damage.
But is that actually feasible, and how much damage would such rods actually cause? He was set to test it in practice, with a somewhat scaled-down version of the scenario (with an about 10:1, or the like, miniaturized "city" and metallic rods.) And this was one of his biggest videos in terms of preparation, resources and crew size. He even got Adam Savage of MythBusters fame to participate in the video.
Problem was that they couldn't test it as originally intended, and the reason for it was that the downwash of the helicopter they were trying to use to drop the rods was swinging the rod way too much, so it was impossible to have them fall vertically down and on target.
So what was their solution to that problem? Just drop the rod from a significantly lower height so that it would at least hit the miniature city. But that meant that the rod had but a microscopic fraction of its kinetic energy when it hit the ground, making the entire test completely moot, as it didn't demonstrate anything useful.
The entire video was an absolutely colossal waste of everybody's time, and I'm not exaggerating. I was shaking my head. "You have a team of engineers there. You are yourself an engineer. Engineers solve practical problems, for f's sake! You could have perfectly well devised a way to drop the rods accurately from the intended height."
Anyway, while that was astonishingly stupid, it isn't really the reason why I wrote this blog post.
The reason is that I lost brain cells because of something he did in his latest video (as of writing this): "How The Fridge Destroyed One of the World's Largest Monopolies", which goes through the history of the invention of the freezer (and thus fridge) in order to create ice, so that it could be produces anywhere at any time, rather than it having to be collected from somewhere on the other side of the world and transported at great cost.
What made me lose brain cells was a disclaimer that he said in the video after the intro: He explains to the viewers that the video is about frozen water, not about the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And mind you, that disclaimer comes after the intro, which extremely clearly establishes that the video is about the history of production of ice, ie. how to freeze water.
I don't know what is more appalling, the fact that he felt the need to explain the difference, or the fact that he is outright insulting the intelligence of his viewers by explaining them the difference, as if the average viewer couldn't understand the difference.
That disclaimer is so astonishingly cringe and insulting that my jaw dropped. I literally felt like he is insulting my intelligence, thinking that he needs to explain to me what the difference is between the two things.
I stopped watching the video right then and there. How can somebody be this astonishingly stupid?
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