this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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They're pretty okay for shallow understanding on a subject, but Wendover (not on the list), Economics Explained (not on the list), and CGP gray all get stuff pretty wrong once you get past shallow depth. I know because I'm a huge transit/urbanism nerd. If these channels haven't wronged you in some minor way, they just haven't talked about something you're a subject matter expert in yet. The point here isn't that they're bad, just understand that these are shallow explainers, the next step in from like a news article, Wikipedia, or a blog, and take them with a grain of salt.
My personal list is Kurzgesagt, XKCD explained, and The Action Lab.
Wendover is pretty bad and finding out they take essentially bribes in the form of free stays and travel from an amusement park to say only nice things a little them after the park had an accident that killed a kid makes it so it's pretty obvious it's not about being good content for us but for the people making it. Likely tax write-offs and funny accounting all over their channels.
They state that they aren't for education but entertainment and thus don't have a to cite sources either.
Yeah they aren't a trustworthy source is my point.
Do you have examples of CGP Grey getting things pretty wrong aside from his Solution to Traffic video which I indeed think holds up poorly.
Right? I'm surprised by this claim as when he found out he made a pretty minor error in his video on an abandoned missile silo, he made a whole other video to address it.
That was actually the one I had in mind
There's not really a way around this, and I think one of the explainer channels actually went into depth about it.
They gave an example of how everyone learns that the earth is a sphere, but once you 'dig deeper' you find it's not actually a sphere because it's elongated at the equator (making it a spheroid.) You can then 'dig even deeper' and find that the earth isn't really a spheroid, it has mountains and all kinds of other inconsistencies that don't matter to most people but can make a difference to an expert.
The real takeaway is that we should not consider ourselves experts, or even significantly more knowledgeable about a subject because we saw a video on one of these channels. They're for entertainment first.