An infinite DNA glitch saved millions [video] | Hacker News Reader

An infinite DNA glitch saved millions [video]

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“This video was sponsored by: Erowid”

Thanks for that rabbit hole!

They're some interesting characters: https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/erowid_earth/

Interesting to see no publications or public appearances since 2017, wonder if they landed in legal hot water?

Jesus that publications list looks like one hell of a drug trip.

Erowid's claim to fame is a collection of trip reports, so that's not at all surprising.

I had never heard of him, so it certainly was for me. But then again I'm not that into drugs.

The guy was so annoying he helped "save millions", but we're still going to tell you how much of a douchebag he was

For the folks who don't care for video, it's about the history behind Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and how it changed the process of DNA testing.

I'm a bit disappointed with how clickbaity the title became for this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng - "Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective" | Veritasium

I must be an outlier but I find a lot of the things the veritasium guy does as being extremely annoying to the point that I mostly avoid his videos. And it’s a shame because I know he produces a lot of really high quality stuff.

He’s talked before about how it’s better for learning if you first try to answer a question, get it wrong, then are taught the right thing. So he starts a lot of videos by asking random people on the street a question and we get to watch all of them give super wrong answers. Then he spends some time saying “a lot of people think X but really X is wrong!”

I really really really hate the whole “let’s all laugh at these dumb people” dunking that this encourages. I know he has his reasons that it increases the retention rate of knowledge if you get it wrong first, but to me it just comes off as smug. It gets to the point that a lot of the time he’s just poorly specifying a question, leaving it ambiguous, and when people are “wrong” it’s as much his fault as theirs.

Likewise with the clickbait… he can talk about how “unreasonably effective” it is, but I fucking hate clickbait with a passion and any time one of his videos has a “no way that’s true” headline, it’s almost always not, or at least only true on some mundane technicality. I’ve been burned enough times clicking his videos that I just ignore him now.

Clickbait may be unreasonably effective at getting any random person to click his videos, but to me after enough times I’ve learned to not watch his stuff because of the incessant clickbait. There’s more than enough quality educational stuff on YouTube, I don’t need to indulge smug people like him.

> I really really really hate the whole “let’s all laugh at these dumb people” dunking that this encourages.

Are you talking about the entropy video where he asks people about the suns energy? I don’t think he was mocking people, the purpose was show that most people have an incorrect view.

It's a ton of his videos. He did it a lot more often in the earlier days... if you sort by oldest videos it was pretty much 100% of his content: Walk around, ask people questions about stuff, and post how wrong everyone is. As the channel progressed this became less of a thing, usually just part of the intro. But he still does it.

I know it’s not explicitly trying to mock people, but I’m sure those people felt dumb after being told they’re wrong. He does his best to be nice about it, but something about his personality (or maybe just his facial expression) gives off this intensely smug vibe. He’s just so damned used to being smarter than everyone, it just comes across… even when he’s trying really hard to be nice about it.

I missed the place where justifying doing a bad thing because it is beneficial to oneself makes it better.

After watching the video, I think what he says in it is fair. It is perfectly reasonable to want to have more viewers of the videos. Not only that gives more profit, but also that's the whole point of making educational videos in the first place. And if making more 'click-baity' titles leads to that, it is okay, provided you do not go over the boundary what is considered dishonest and would actively mislead. Obviously the exact boundary is somewhat fuzzy, but pushing all the way till that boundary seems reasonable.

The same logic can be used to justify all kinds of awful stuff though. From putting a scantily dressed woman in the thumbnail to just straight up lying in the video to blow people's minds. You have to draw the line somewhere because you just don't want to do crappy things, unless you're a narcissist and/or sociopath.

It took me a second to figure out what the topic is, as a biologist. As a non biologist I feel this is an acceptable description of what's being described, I wouldn't consider this to be clickbait..

I would rather just have the science facts without going into personal details about the primary inventor.

There you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

haha

I read “infinite NDA” and built up a crazy story while the video was loading.

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