It was his video on IQ tests that set off alarm bells for me.
IQ tests are not some method of determining intelligence they are very much linked to relative education/socioeconomic standing. His complete lack of criticism and neutral/positive support of IQ tests make me think he likes the result of his score…
“Oh and by the way, this is a sponsored video 🤷” and then spends half an hour sucking a company’s dick for money
That and the shampoo ad killed my interest in the channel, and ever since then I’m extremely wary of everyone. Kurzgesagt is also up there, for producing propaganda for a billionaire’s charity.
Whoa, I thought I was alone in disliking Kurzgesagt. What made me unsubscribe was a video that was very clearly sponsored by the game Cyberpunk but didn’t mention that anywhere
Their videos about the climate for the last few years essentially boil down to “shit sucks, everything is bad, a lot of people are going to die. But wait, here’s an interesting new technology that could save the planet! All we have to do is trust capitalism to make this technology happen, and we’ll be saved!”
I’m of the opinion that we should be brutally fucking honest about the climate, and that copium like this only makes people complacent. If we stopped pumping out greenhouse gases right now, we wouldn’t avoid 3° of warming. Hundreds of millions of people are going to die as a direct result of anthropogenic climate change, and there is nothing we can do about that. If we get complacent, that number will be in the multiple billions. Cute cartoon birds turning into skeletons does not reflect the horror of climate change.
The Kurzgesagt climate videos explicitly encourage political action to combat climate change. I think they even encourage it as the most important thing an individual can do. They don’t push ‘let capitalism solve everything’ , they push ‘vote in green candidates + regulation’.
I saw one of those videos taking them down for receiving Bill Gates money and frankly I think it’s a pretty empty hitpiece.
Don’t get me wrong, the Gate’s foundation does push this ‘never question the market’ ideology, and any organisation that relies on their funding deserves to be scrutinized to hell and back. But Kurzgesagt does not push this ideology.
’ The problem with Kurzgesagt’ never found any factual issues with their content, AND the broad message of their videos is ’ lobby the government for regulation + here’s the technology’ . If Gate’s Foundation money has caused them to compromise their values, it’s not done a good job of it.
Funding is not the same as editorial control, and the amount recieved from the gates foundation is not even a large portion of their income, so it’s not like they have much leverage.
Gate’s Foundation and similar spend money literally everywhere, so I worry about people writing good orgs off so quickly.
TL;DW: they assume technology will magically “fix” the climate crisis and no big changes to society or the economy are necessary. thus perpetuating and worsening the climate crisis by pretty much telling people “it’s gonna be fiiiiine”…when it really won’t be “fine”.
edit: note, that most of their content is fine, just the climate “solutions” and stuff are…so optimistic as to be misleading. their physics and futurology stuff is fine. also way oversimplified in many cases, but fine.
Guys, all we have to do is trust the technology that Bill Gates stands to profit from! Never mind the fact that Bill Gates funds my videos, just trust him, guys! The future might look bleak, but you don’t have to take any action! Ol’ Billy already is! Just trust him!!
Yeah, it’s really egregious. I don’t really like their videos because they all feel kind of biased like that… and just a lot of editorializing. To be clear, I’m not above technology getting us out of a jam, but I really don’t think we should expect it… We should really plan with what we know is possible.
Yeah, the new SAT video was great and i still can’t for the life of me figure how those people managed to think about the problem and realize the options were wrong, really goes to show how intelligent people are always doing things with a very alert mind, even if the problem is very easy
I stopped watching after the “speed of electricity in a wire” video. When I realised a video about something I knew about was bollocks, it made me question every other video that taught me about something I didn’t know.
Even if that had been a one off, how would I know? The trust is gone.
There are a lot of videos that made me question the validity of his “science”. While I didn’t want to spend time dissecting a specific video but with the videos piling up I decided it would be easier to just not watch him. I don’t watch videos to question whether it’s bullshit or not, so I ended up watching videos where I don’t have to ask that question.
Op said it’s bollock, not because it’s confusing, so i’m curious what went wrong as well. I think Electroboom challenge him as well, but not sure the context and how it went.
I’ll purposely seek out videos covering topics I’m (more) familiar with, from unfamiliar content creators that I might be interested in watching more of. It helps me gauge their accuracy, confidence, and ability to simplify without losing the underlying reasoning.
Ya know, maybe this explains why I (mostly) don’t like movies and don’t watch many. They are what you get if you take a fairly simple prompt (a short story, say) and run it through a generative AI. I’d rather just read the story directly, skipping the AI bot or Hollywood buffoonery as the case may ne.
Honestly? I’d crank out the fictional settings I’ve been tinkering with for a long time (one a military-political science fiction setting, the other a dark fantasy one).
Part of the problem is that I tend to think and create visually, so I don’t feel writing really captures either very well. I can picture, in my head, how I want to visually frame the most enthralling or emotional moments… but translating them to words never seems to capture it. So an AGI that could produce the media from my imagination on-demand is pretty much a dream come true.
If they can go back to their time and grab things to bring something back, I’d have them bring back (assuming they still have them) a USB portable hard drive (or something similar) that has many petabytes with of data (assuming it exists).
Ask if they wanna play games because I don’t know what else to do with a time traveler.
No. Seeing how “Rock music is evil.” thing started with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70’s you had people going for rock bands like the Rolling Stones for singing about sex and drugs. They moved to metal bands in the 80’s. Marilyn Manson was the big name target in the mid-late 90’s.
Maybe read a little more about the history before you start whitewashing it.
Elvis Presley in particular was seen as a problem specifically because he was a white man singing black music to young white girls. The same people hated that Rock and Roll before white artists adopted it, but it only really became a problem after a boom in popularity with white children. Rolling Stones were still singing black music to white audiences. While the contemporary trend might have been to stigmatize the sex and drug lifestyle, that lifestyle was still seen by racists as a black influence. Those prejudices were still firmly rooted in a pervasive racism that still very much gripped the country. The war on drugs and free sex (like sex and marriage between races) was very rooted in racism.
Metal, Glam, and Marilyn Manson is a couple generations removed from the black roots of rock music. But, the people promoting these satanic panic ideas were at the same time fighting to censor and restrict the growing Hip-hop scene. It was all the same fight, which is how you get people like Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa speaking out about legislation targeting censorship of Hip-Hop and Rock music. Maybe race wasn’t the only issue for conservative fascists, but it never stopped being a factor.
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