Something about Veritasium absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and I generally like Youtube education creators, but his videos are borderline unwatchable for me.
Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
Does anyone have an explanation for what it is about his videos that is so grating?
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.
The videos are of educational, high quality, and the content is accurate. But the presentation is not for me.
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