With a clickbaity title like that, I knew this would be Veritisium before I clicked it. And now, having verified that it is, I share this information with you.
This has been disproven by people doing experiments
Someone set up some long wires over a farm field, and measured the time to first current flow, which was faster than if the current had to travel the whole wire length. Granted, the full current flow doesn't appear until later, but the first little bit of current is there, which is exactly what Derek said in the Veritasium video
(The fact that the loop is closed can't be relevant by simple thought experiment, because otherwise it implies you could get ftl signaling by having a switch on the physically distant checking whether the "tiny current" flows when you close the source)
Whether the distant end of the loop is closed or not makes a difference eventually, where 'eventually' means once the initial EM wave has reflected from the end and returned to the load.
And considering the fact that Derek has a Ph.D. in physics education research [1] that seems like an odd mistake for him to make, unless it was intentional.
As another commenter pointed out [2] Derek's content lately seems to be tailored to the maxim of "Make people believe they're thinking and they'll love you. Make them actually think, and they will hate you." It seems intended to invoke incredulity rather than understanding, presumably because he's decided the former is more marketable - because providing incomplete understanding and phrasing things in a way that's just technically correct enough to invite flame wars boosts engagement and therefore virality.
Yet another commenter [3] invoked https://xkcd.com/169/, which I think is apt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Muller#Early_life_and_ed...
I understood even less after watching it I think..
I have done this personally with shorter coax and TDR.
At this point it seems like a vicious spiral. Someone clicks on a guy on a ladder and all of a sudden you're being recommended guys on ladders, so now everyone needs to get on a ladder to get on the front page.
Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
The videos are of educational, high quality, and the content is accurate. But the presentation is not for me.
It's some form of uncanny valley type of thing where every detail or facet or property I might point out, there are other people exhibiting the same nominal qualities without bothering me. But something here is just slightly off in some way, but so subtly you can't say what it is.
I honestly can't say he's doing anything actually wrong. I don't think even the most dumbed down ones are really guilty of being wrong. Not enough that I'd complain about it in a casual yt video.
I can see some people maybe not liking his basic style of exposition. That slightly affected dreamy pondering thing.
One thing I can observe is that another guy that just turns me right off even worse is the Smarter Every Day, and these two appear in each others videos at least a few times. Or maybe it was just one time and that one time just bugged me that much :)
I don't know what it is but I frequently see a video from either of these guys where the topic they are presenting looks interesting, but then I do not like their video on that topic.
I think it's down to the presentation just seems a bit too affected. And it's not even as bad as seeming fake or insincere. They both actually strike me as perfectly sincere.
I guess to summarize, with Destin it feels like you are learning with him and Veritasium feels like you are being lectured.
I see the distinction you make there now that you point it out.
I saw something similar all the time as a dance teacher: explaining stuff and showing over and over made the students feel like they learned a lot. But they just didn't. It was mostly a total waste of time. I switched to showing ONCE then they had to try. Then I showed again. The speed of learning went up dramatically. The problem I had then was that the students didn't like it!
"Make people believe they're thinking and they'll love you. Make them actually think, and they will hate you."
It'd be nice with a real scientific test! There's a lot of subjective feeling here and not anything very solid. Veritasium at least backs up his position with his own thesis research. I find that more compelling as an argument than having a position not backed up by anything at all.
Ok that one has something I can identify clearly: The way Justin (Smarter Every Day) seems to be just badly hamming up the whole "this is so weird and hard to visualize" as though to pander to the audience who are expected to be baffled by the idea being presented. That was Justin though not Veritassium.
I agree with what you point out about this one.
I've unsubscribed from this channel and smarter every day because while I believe the authors feel like they're doing the right thing. They let themselves be highly biased/influenced by their sponsors that I cannot watch the video and believe that they're being honest.
His videos don't strike me as intending to educate. They strike me as intending to show how much more clever he is than you - and it's entirely that he came up with some weird gotcha that people logically assume he couldn't be talking about because it's nonsense.
It's like watching a smug teenager who never grew out of it. No thanks, I don't need that reminder of how grating I was.
What I really don't like are the new video titles. At some point he started A/B testing them to maximize his revenue. He even made a video about it [3]. Of course, this selects for the most outrageous clickbait in order to get that sweet engagement. I am starting to wonder if he took into account, how much this is starting to alienate long-term followers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
I imagine that, over time, this may shift his target audience. But if a new audience is comprised of a demographic he's aiming to reach, and it gets him the views, I can't fault his decision on how he titles the videos, even if they have me skipping them.
I think he’s experimenting with clickbait.
Besides that I think the topic is prescient; there's a company local to me in Australia called Brainchip that is doing something similar I think. Given that NNs are just a bunch of matrix multiplications it's a promising approach.
I occasionally used to watch Smarter Every Day then he started doing a lot of this stuff, I think one of them might have been for an oil or defense company which I found utterly gross and I've avoided watching the channel ever since.