Looking for resources that avoid berating people and just simply lay out the data with it’s context from professionals in the field.
I don’t know if I’m changing or the format of constantly pointing out how stupid someone is just gets more views, but it’s getting to be hard to digest. I’m all for learning new things and possible deceptions on claims being made, just without all the sarcasm and personal attacks.
I used to enjoy Thunderf00t, and while his content is probably the same from the beginning I just can’t do that condescending speech for 30mins anymore. My brain just starts to tune it out but I want the information. Professor Dave Explains, is probably borderline for me, Adam Something used to be less energetic with sarcasm in his past videos. Basically anyone that seems to have a personal vendetta with the people involved.
I believe I’ve ran across more positive debunking lately which might be why I want to shift my focus. Some notable mentions: Kyle Hill - Youtube’s Science Scam Crisis (more humorous presentation), acollierastro - harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb (spends most of the time actually talking about history versus attacking Avi Loeb), Fraser Cain - A Big Problem with Modern Science Communication (just an all around kind presenter).
I’m open to any field or subject matter, just wanting creators that aren’t raising their blood pressure while having to use an extremely incredulous negative tone to get their point across. I love to share the more positive videos with others when a conversation comes up and they’ve been sucked into a scam video that’s twisted the narrative. I know if it’s hard for me to watch, then they aren’t going to get more than 2 minutes into a video with that type of approach.
Edit: Thank you everyone for all the awesome recommendations! I’ve added a lot of subscriptions and will make a master-list of all the sources to upload for anyone else looking.
Why not just follow popular educational creators? Anyone who accurately explains science is inherently debunking false claims.
Very true, any recommendations that you enjoy? For the most part as I stated it’s useful for certain topics that come up when someone’s discussing some woowoo, it’s hard for them to sit down and go through a whole course when the context of what they’re discussing doesn’t come up. There’s also the problem of being slightly educated in a topic but then falling down a rabbit hole thinking it’s all legit (quantum subject matter seems to be particularly susceptible).
Tom Scott
Scott Manley
Minute Physics
Veratasium
Numberphile
Computerphile
CGP Grey
Adam Savage’s Tested
Kurzgesagt
Wendover Productions
PBS Eons
Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)
hbomberguy
Captain Disillusion
Smartereveryday
That my shortlist
Hey, just so you know, your comment displays as one big blob without formatting, at least on my app. A single carriage return doesn’t display as a new line. Adding "* " to the start of the line would put your list as bullet points, or adding a second carriage return would put each item on a new line.
Added some more returns lemme know if that helped
That’s much easier to read. Thanks.
Don’t forget PBS Spacetime!
Some of these are good suggestions, others not so much - unfortunately this area is rife for lots of issues such as undisclosed (or underdisclosed) sponsorship, creating content specifically to further the agendas of think tanks, and just straight up disinformation. There’s lots of criticisms of CGPGrey and Kurzgesagt for example. Just in case you weren’t aware
Great list! I’d add:
SciShow
Steve Mould
SixtySymbols
Periodic Videos
Cody’s Lab
Real Engineering
PBS spacetime
Smarter everyday
Practical engineering
Kyle Hill is a great one that I don’t see getting recommended often enough.
- 3 blue 1 brown
- applied science
- stuff made here
- breaking taps
- alpha phoenix
- practical engineering
- Tropical tidbits
These are all excellent non-sensationalized channels. It’s only tangentially related to your prompt, but they’re all worth checking out for education/entertainment without obnoxious hype clickbait and controversy.
I only added suggestions that I didnt see in other comments. Many of the other suggestions are also in my personal collection.
Tom Scott is pretty positive. The videos aren’t about debunking though, more just sharing info on random things.
One “debunking” style video might be the one on VPNs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
There’s a other great one on online voting
Thought Emporium is probably the premier creator when it comes to genetic engineering. I mean other times I’ve mentioned real things he’s done, people thought I was being hyperbolic, but no he is actually training rat neurons to play doom, he did create custom Spider DNA to create spider silk with Yeast and he did engineer a virus to solve his lactose intolerance.
Others have posted everyone I watch! There is another one that isn’t really science but still attempts to be objective and that’s Economics Explained which reviews contributing factors to current and historical global economic trends.
This guy is creating amazing short videos where he’s debunking UFO sightings with a huge amount of science and simple graphical tools.
Mick West is amazing
Did thunderf00t ever recover from his „the feminazis are destroying the world“, „anti sjw“ bullshit? I remember being linked one of his videos years ago, seeing that bashing women is 90% of his other content and going „well another one for the shitlist“.
Kinda, between the iconic hbomberguy video that tore his videos to shreds and his experiences of being on the other side from his new alt-right pals on the subject of Brexit, he had a bit of a rude awakening and seems to have steered away from political content, but he has never acknowledged any wrongdoing or expressed any remorse for his shitty behaviour.
He likely still holds the exact same opinions as before, but keeps them to himself now. Either way, he isn’t worthy of your support.
sabine hossenfelder
I’ve watched that channel in the past, been meaning to check out that latest “capitalism is good” video that’s hit my feed and caused some controversy from what I’ve seen. I’m hoping there’s just context that’s being missed and the video is actually decent.
yeah I skipped that one for the same reason but I think I’ll give it a watch today to see what her point is. Maybe mixed markets? If she’s arguing for free market neo liberalism crap then she should probably stick to science.
If she’s arguing for … crap then she should probably stick to Science.
tldr/w: I probably should’ve only doe this bit here and on her being a physicist versus a science communicator
Humorously enough, she also has a video for that Basically she talks about:
- Why “doing your own research” should be poked at
* Topics she doesn’t have a PhD in and has been told she shouldn’t talk about
* On being a physicist versus a science communicator
- Main video points
- When not to do your own research (When there isn’t enough research) 2.(?) Reasonable expectations (Why she doesn’t talk about UFO’s, a plug for support to do a video on ‘Experts’, limits of Google/internet, what is relevant for understanding? )
- Be honest with yourself (Acknowledge what you dont understand, erroneous mental short cut example)
- Acknowledge biases
Rest of video not as relevant to your point
Do your own research. But do it right. [Video] Now where’s that bot at…?
Kyle Hill and acollierastro are two of my favs.
I also like Dr Becky. She mostly just likes to educate on astrophysics, but whenever the media overblows something in the field she’s usually there to tell you what the data actually means.
Similarly I wouldn’t class it as a debunk channel, but any time there’s a major engineering disaster Practical Engineering usually does a video of what happened mechanically.
And I’d encourage people to go through some of Physics Girls old videos. She got totally sidelined by covid induced ME/CFS but her older content is great.
I’d shout out Folding Ideas for his series on Flat Earthers, NFTs and Blockchain Games. And I’d shoutout Knowledge Fight for debunking pretty much everything Alex Jones has ever said as well as Tucker Carlson and Project Camelot.
Forrest Valkai is an angel
Reacteria is a lot of debunking, but it’s also a lot of dunking
I don’t ever feel like Forrest is being mean, honestly
Shoutouts to acollierastro, who mostly addresses ideas instead of people in her debunks. Her videos do contain some snark, but she tries to keep from being unecessarily mean
A little late, but a channel I like is potholer54. He usually talks about COVID or climate change nowadays, and back in the heyday of youtube atheism he did a lot of debunking of young earth creationists and evolution deniers. He has a strong science focus, discussing papers and tracking down peoples’ sources and whatnot.
Looking for resources that avoid berating people and just simply lay out the data with it’s context from professionals in the field.
I find that oftentimes just the act of laying out the data is construed as berating. No matter how positively you try to present the material, to some people it will seem like a personal attack against their “sincerely held beliefs”.
This kind of content doesn’t really succeed because it drives less engagement than it would if it was really impassioned and angry, and that means less money. So even creators that start out balanced, neutral and considered are incentivised to become more algorithm friendly by encouraging angry comments on their videos
There is also a large audience for outage of any sort. If you have a message of “people who believe X are idiots” you’ve got a big audience: all the people who disagree with X love to hear you elaborate all the ways the X people are idiots and thereby feel smart and smug and righteous.
The audience of X believers who might listen to a message of “hey, here’s why X isn’t quite right” is a harder sell. For one thing most people are not looking to hear how some view of theirs is wrong, and even worse, in this polarized environment all the people making hay off of “X believers are idiots” are helping inoculate the X believers against that message.
https://youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder?si=uqlmXEa_i1cjUygN
Sabine Hossenfelder isnt neccesarily a debunker, but she does post videos going over certain hot topics and breaking them down. It’s fun!
Her videos explaining physics ar eone-of-a-kind, but her videos on sociology and psychology really prove the rule that an expert in one subject does make someone an all-around expert. Her video on trans people and ROGD sparked plenty debunking videos all on its own.
Yeah her video on trans people really just left a weird aftertaste (per se) for me. It was really weird and definitely off the mark.
She recently made a pro capitalism video that shows she really doesn’t understand it at all… I like her physics videos, because she explains things really well, but outside of it, I am not very impressed.
Popular Mechanics did a lot of debunking 9-11 myths
Elina Charatsidou (YouTube), Nuclear Physicist. She debunks a lot of misconceptions about nuclear power and radiation!