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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Matt Ferrell's Undecided is great. Yeah he just explains interesting press releases, he isn't shy about that either. Why would he want/need to be critical about them? Unless he's reading press releases of companies that don't actually exist I don't see how this could be a bad thing.

Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If he manages to sneak in an ad without me noticing, all the better, he's getting paid and I wasn't annoyed. I watched all of his video and I don't remember any annoying ads. He also produces some of the greatest and most beautifully produced explanations of interesting maths and physics concepts on YouTube, all for free.

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> Disliking Veritasium because of some ads is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I don't think we're talking about the same things here. I'm talking about wholesale videos that are effectively a big, undisclosed ad. I don't mean I don't like how he does ad reads. I mean I don't like how he's created entire videos that are basically ads and then passed them off as his own original good-faith attempt to inform.

It's not so much actively annoying as is it actively deceitful.

Do you have exact examples of that?

Whenever I've seen people trot this argument out in the past it's typically sourced from a couple of old Twitter threads and it's a 20/20 hindsight thing wherein he is talking about something exciting and new looks like a shill five years on because they were only talking about that one specific company's thing, ignoring the context of the video and the "at the time this was completely new" factor.

I've seen the same happen for things like ML as applied to a variety of things, most notably Tesla's autopilot features.

Already posted in an earlier response to you.

But no, nothing like that. These were relatively recent videos about newish but well-established industries. In particular Waymo's self-driving cars and, to a lesser extent, some company doing consumer DNA testing.

These were pretty blatant immediately, no hind-sight or digging required. And full videos too, not ancillary comments like on Twitter.

Matt also has a followup podcast about each episode where questions are answered. It's on youtube as well, https://www.youtube.com/c/StillTBDPodcast.

The issue at hand is that Undecided presents press releases as fact, without adding any fact checking or caveats that come along with them. One of his most recent videos about hydrogen storage disks basically highlights this more directly, since he presents this technology as if it's a solved problem when in actuality it's more so a barely formed idea with many many caveats.

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