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I don't know about the guys take on Iran, but I came across his channel a long time ago regarding some predictions on things I work with + I think Ukraine war? And it was so handwavy and "cherry picking stats to fit a narrative" style of reasoning, it was hard to take him seriously when many predictions were proven wrong and not even sound.

Granted, most YouTube analyst channels with ~=>500k subscribers usually do deploy exaggerated claims or "one parameter to explain everything" narrative (Zeihan, Varoufakis, Mersheimer, William Spaniel) so you should take their infotainment with a grain of salt. Current trendy buzzword is "Realism" and "Game Theory" so those two term are mired with wish washy handwaving.

Usually, just like tech stuff, the actually valuable insight is not found in the blogs but the source material they refer to, because they have nuances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

One of your "YouTube analysts" is a professor that developed one of the schools of realism, so maybe that's why he's using that "buzzword".

Edit: and varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece. I have no idea if he was any good at it or not, but your characterization is a little silly either way.

Would they be more credible to you if they gave 2 minute soundbites in between advertisements for drugs and gold on cable news?

Maybe I should've added a line break between the sentence.

I'm fully aware of prof Mearsheimers credential, and what realism is. I'm also aware that the biggest proponent of realism with the most power at hand, was Henry Kissinger. Not the brightest shining beacon.

Their worldview is funny. A self fulfilling prophecy kind of take that is most often used to justify heinous behavior by saying "well everyone is doing it" and take a selective look at history and deriving some universal theory of international politics.

So I think the "using one parameter to explain everything" is an apt description of him. A hallmark of pop social science gifter pattern is when they try to apply that one thing to everything. Mearsheimer isn't (wasn't?) that until the podcast fame inevitably asked questions to him that is outside his expertise and audience capture, inevitably, kicked in

Edit: indeed. He was finance minister during the Greek financial crisis. With your appeal to authority Fallacy, Lizz Tuss should still be taken seriously because she was UK prime minister (that was out lasted by a lettuce).

I like Varoufakis. He's at least consistent. His technofeudalism observation have some merit. But still his analysis comes from a limited scope, and (he's open about this) colored heavily by his communist stance.

The point was:

All those expert often have a compelling analysis, but the nuance is often lost in the medium such as YouTube. It's better to dive in to the nuance, critically examine it, and then listen broadly and repeat.

Yeah, I guess I zeroed in on the YouTube part and missed the one parameter part, which I'm not really qualified to speak to. I happen to think audio/video (basically lectures and dialogues) is a fine part of the toolkit for learning.

I was reading it as "look at these dumb tiktok'ers" or something like that, which seems like it would be selling at least those 2 quite a bit short.

I agree with you. I followed him out of curiosity for one or two months, watched about 10 of his videos.

He seems to have a good intuition, but he gives weak and often cherry-picked reasonings, to the point that many of his takes are completely unreliable.

For a channel called Predictive History, he made too many weirdly precise explanations and predictions that turned out to be wrong. Then, he'd look over the old failed ones to find new ones.

That being said, I'd say his macro level analysis is directionally correct, as well as his read on the incentives of each party involved. Watch his lectures, but be skeptical and double check everything he says, because he does indeed make factual mistakes... some of them are caught in the comments by other viewers, some are not obvious.

I agree with your more thought out assessment of the channel.

I stil think the effort of trying to predict history (trying to understand causal patterns and extrapolate) is a valiant effort, and don't want to write his entire channel off. So I can't comment on his Iran take until I've seen it.

But yes, everyone makes mistakes and that just shows we don't have some universal theory for predicting history, so one shouldn't get obsessed with one school of thinking, but try it out, find its limits, and be open to other school of thoughts too.

This guy's videos were immediately going viral after the conflict began. I enjoyed and found them educational, but I'm taking all of his claims with a grain of salt because I also don't know much about the region or its history. He talks very authoritatively which makes for compelling storytelling but conflicts of this magnitude require much more context to really understand.

I don't disagree. That's why I'm open to the opinions of others in this matter. I'm no subject expert.

The guy who thinks the Jesuit illuminati run the world?

https://youtu.be/4Ql24Z8SIeE?si=csY0Jl19VYXNouk2&t=860

Been following this guy for a few months now. On Iran i think he is right on the money. He also has some very good lectures about personal development.

He might indeed need some personal development himself. I followed him when the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites last year. He was involved in a controversy with his kid and turned into a dick, going into a charade against the Western education system, for being overly harsh to his kid in a public space and getting reprimanded for it. I'm not condoning his behavior, I wasn't there, but I'd take anything this guy has to say on personal development with a pinch of salt. By the way, he published a post of apologies in his Substack IIRC.

This is natural behavior as a father, specially from Asians. You do not know what actually happened to the kid, we too have done the same.

He is based in Beijing according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Xueqin.

That matters. China would not allow him to broadcast things they do not approve of.

Equally, were he based in the UK (or even the US during wartime, despite the First Amendment), he wouldn't be able to say things those governments don't approve of.

So yes to some extent it might be CCP propaganda, but that doesn't mean it's always wrong, and the alternative is western propaganda, which is also sometimes wrong

One difference is that in the UK/US it has in practice only applied during actual war time. I remember the instant switch in tone of reporting from the BBC the moment war broke out in 2003.

And I have never seen it apply to individuals in UK/US. (Post WW2.)

In China it's all the time. And the control is _so_ much stricter.

That is true but there are still some things that are illegal to say in the UK 365 days a year every year.

One topical one which I won't repeat here for obvious reasons but it relates to the middle east

So much is illegal to say in the UK. Let's just focus on [what is illegal to say in the context of] political/military analysis?

There definitely is some relevant stuff, but unfortunately by definition I can't say what it is.

Also I would point out that there is a lower tier of things that are not exactly illegal to say per se, but will still result in you being ostracised, probably getting fired etc. Especially if you're a university professor, academics probably have among the lowest freedom of speech of anyone

Seeing as people like Tim Pool were based in the US to say things to large youtube audiences Funded and directed by the Kremlin, this does not seem true.

No way you are suggesting this guy... there is no way.

While I agree with some of his sentiments the entire video reeks of half-baked conspiratorial thinking and shallow engagement with the facts.

A quick tell is that the video's title includes "Game Theory", while only referencing game-theoretical concepts twice in an off-hand comment. In both instances the usage is plainly wrong.

In general, he loves making big assertions without backing them up with evidence or explanations that go beyond hand-wavy examples.

Any thing he said that about the conflict that you disagree with?

He makes quite a few quite controversial assertions without evidence or even bothering to explain them. At the top of my head and paraphrasing:

- "The conflict is a game of chicken." Only in the vaguest sense in which any war or confrontation could be called that.

- "The USA is not equipped to handle a war against drones and fanatics". Idk they seem more capable than any other nation save Ukraine given that those two things have been a major feature of their recent wars.

- "Countries that are poor have more energy and are more cohesive". This is just demonstrably false, but he does not bother to explain why he thinks this.

- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.

I do share his negative sentiment and outlook about the war, but there are way better critics that don't resort to this type of intellectual laziness.

  - "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245067

What do you think of this?

I think that there is a huge leap between using the Kurds to do your fighting (like in Syria) and what he claims if you look at the map that he pulls up in that section.

Game Theory is the name of his class. He is a high school teacher. I agree his ideas about the conflict are only loosely connected to "Game Theory" in the Academic sense. If you engage with more of his content, he often repeats that he is probably wrong and exhorts you to think for yourself and make your own conclusions. His perspective on past and current events is certainly not mainstream.

I think we should hold people to a higher standard especially when they talk with this much confidence and present themselves as a professor. The issue is that "Game Theory" is a technical term so there really only is an "Academic" sense otherwise it's just a marketing term for whatever ideas you want to push.

It's YouTube, cuz'

And? There's endless high quality content on YouTube.