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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Matt Parker's video on Square Roots and Maxima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga9Qk38FaHM

The original post verifies the fact (experimentally) using simulations, and includes example code. However, the guy in the video you referenced does a lot of talking around the problem, and includes a VPN advertisement in the middle. I never heard of Matt Parker before, and I'm not knocking his talent (he has 1.24 million subscribers!), but the only coherent part of the video is where he includes an explanation from another channel, 3blue1brown.

They target different audiences. 3B1B tends to aim at those who want to know more of the underlying math and develop good analytical thinking, Matt Parker often keeps things at a bit more approachable a level for those who aren’t as inclined.

Matt Parker is an ex-math teacher that does stand-up math comedy shows[1], FWIW.

[1]: https://standupmaths.com/

He's a comedian and maths communicator (including author). He appears in quite a few Numberphile videos too. He seems to be friends with quite a few YouTube maths presenters such as Grant Peterson and Hannah Fry (she seems to have moved over to TV presenting now which is good - I think she'd be an excellent choice to do a James Burke style Connections series as she also has a dry wit).

People waste so many hours watching these types of video where the presenter talks a lot around the problem (has lots of fluff, comedy skit and ads). I think the presenter should have used this opportunity to introduce random variables, independence, Tschebyscheff inequality and explained the "bizzare" puzzle.

Or if you are going to do this with simulation, then a introduction to Monte Carlo methods, and why such simulations work and provide correct results would have been a better us of viewer's time.

But videos like this just state a fact and then handwave around the fact without hitting the core idea. The viewer leaves with a false sense of understanding, and keep wondering about the "bizzare" fact, when it is nothing but good ol' introductory probability. YouTube math needs reform.

I think there's room for Matt Parker's more "fluffy" type of maths presentations as well as the more in depth Grant Sanderson's visualisations. Matt is on a mission to popularise maths and it's easy for anyone that gets inspired/intrigued by a topic to dig deeper.

Rather than a reform, maybe there's room for more maths-based videos to fill the gap between recreational and more serious maths?

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