Tom Nicholas
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2023
51:36 · 2.7M views · Oct 20, 2021
Tom Nicholas critiques Veritasium's sponsored video on driverless cars, using it to examine YouTube sponsorships, science-channel credibility and how statistics and misinformation can be used in branded content.
HN cites it in discussions of sponsored science content and Veritasium's credibility, usually as the go-to critique.
8 comments from Hacker News
This video may be worth a watch: this video Side note: I don't really agree with a lot of his other videos. Yet I am sharing this one, because I believe it's worthwhile and am not taking his other videos into account for a context that doesn't matter :)
I was quite disappointed by his video on self-driving cars. It presented a very one-sided view and felt like a puff piece (and, indeed, it was sponsored by Waymo). Tom Nicholas did a good job breaking down the problems with it: this video
You may be interested to see this critique of Veritasium which cooled my views on the channel significantly since I saw it: this video
> 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 runn
> Where I get uneasy is how quickly SmarterEveryDay seems to have > switched from a YouTube channel about explaining things into a > YouTube channel about stoking "Big Tech" fears as a way to sell > apps. The latest video is title "Is Your Privacy An Illusion? > (Taking on Big Tech) - Smarter Every Day 263". This has been a trend with YouTube science communicators and educators for a while now. They're getting hired by companies to basically produce an ad in the style of their regular videos. Physics Girl did a video in cooperation with Toyota praising Toyota's hydrogen powered test car, telling her audience that hydrogen as a passenger car fuel has a future while ignoring the fact that every car manufacturer including Toyota has given up on it and favoring Lithium battery packs instead. [LINK] It was an odd move from her to hype Hydrpgen cars but her audience caught on to it quickly in the comments. Which prompted her to make a follow up video: [LINK] where she's trying to save what's left to save for the hydrogen cause. Veritasium did it too. In which Derek Muller created nothing short of a propaganda piece for driverless cars and not even just an ad for the Waymo service in particular. [LINK] This gives me the same vibe as those doctors promoting cigarettes smoking against coughs in the 1950s and 1960s: Here's a professional often someone who is highly regarded as being objective and impartial who is basically leaving out crucial information to push something either a prod