this was james somerton

Every gamer watching Elon Musk play PoE 2

It’s even more fun when you know about global warming and seeing misunderstandings every time someone talks about it!

>Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

>That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

— Michael Crichton, “Why Speculate?” (2002)

The unfun but important thing to keep in mind is that EVERY video essayist is susceptible to this. Yes, even the one you’re thinking of right now as you read this who is your favorite guy and the only exception.

But that’s not like a moral judgement, that’s normal. No one can be an expert on everything even if they put in research, especially on some fields/topics that get really complex and really dense.

And this is why I just stick with funny content, cause if they say they’re funny, they gotta show proof.

Obligatory Shadiversity. I didn’t realize how little he knew until he wrote a book. Then the illusion shattered.

There was a famous crank 20th-century crank named Immanual Velikovsky who invented a wild cosmology loosely based on ancient stories, e.g. suggesting the manna in the Book of Exodus was actually organic material raining down from the planet Venus, which had been ejected from Jupiter (he considered the Great Red Spot a scar from this event) and was passing by Earth before settling into orbit around the sun. Carl Sagan wrote the following:

>Velikovsky has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing *Worlds in Collision* with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view.

The most lighthearted and least concerning version of this is watching a Let’s Play YouTuber play a game that you don’t know vs. a game that you do.
I love the Game Grumps but I *cannot* watch them do a series on a game I know very well.

James Somerton: half of the stuff in his videos was plagiarized, and the other half was just made the fuck up!

(Seriously, the hbomberguy + Todd in the Shadows double whammy was astounding).

“Somewhere in an attic, there’s a painting of Elon Musk getting smarter every day”

Me when Linus tech tips post a vudeo about controllers, like im not as in depth as the other guys and the best controller I had is a $60 chinese pc controller but like the way they present them is wrong without even giving proper context on why they behave that way

Also when youtubers try out motion aiming then scoffs at it and claim sticks is better while their showcase is them not using it properly, or a game with poorly implemented one, sometimes both

This is also what Game Theory is like. Though that channel was almost always more focused on being educational rather than informed on a wide variety of games, so y’know, I don’t hold it with nearly as much contempt.

>purchase complex videogame
look up youtube guides for complex game
“woah, these people are really smart, I should copy what they do and follow their guides”
pour far too many hours into complex videogame
understand videogame mechanics
rewatch youtube guide for nostalgia
notice horrific mistake 30 seconds into the video, half of everything they say is just straight up wrong

This has happened to me three (3) times.

Human Monsters

Not that I was a huge fan or anything, but all credibility went out the window when they ran a serial killer true crime story that was an April Fools joke on another podcast. We’re talking grabbed the script (which is posted with each episode) and read it 90+% word for word with almost no editing. Bonus points for doubling and tripling down when called out by trying to attack the original podcast and calling the fans trolls.

Me with Style Theory when they started talking about curly hair. Like I already knew their stuff was shoddy, but now I can’t even watch for entertainment.

Who was that one ostensibly leftist dude who tried to do a video defending fucking Christopher Columbus of all people and it was so bafflingly bad that it made it clear he had no idea how to do research

In a similar way I had no opinion and didn’t care about the guy before I heard about a presentation about a battery with 5x the capacity of the previous one.

The only problem is, the slide included an engineering code that indicated the size of the batteries. The new one was 5x the size.

If he did not intend to mislead media into thinking he made more capacity dense batteries, then the slides would have been completely useless. And then I looked at other of his work and I realized the guy is incredibly dumb, he just have money.

The tweet is good, but I really am astonished by the amount of time it took for people to realise it was all a lie. Any Billionaire trying to come off like a real life Iron Man is full of shit, folks. Do not trust or love any billionaire.

I was a Veritasium fan for awhile until he tried to create the “rods from god” weapon (rods dropped from orbit to destroy cities.) His entire methodology was so stupid and ridiculously unsafe that I lost respect for him. It was so badly planned that it made me question his entire process and I can’t shake the image of him as a wannabe mythbuster.

Even more hilariously, he invited Adam Savage to see his test and it took Adam seconds to point out how badly planned it was.

I saw this post on Reddit that was basically a bunch of screenshots of Ares discourse coming from people acting like experts and I’ve never wanted to erase anything from my mind more. I feel like I’ve become numb to this kinda misinformation after being on Tumblr for years

Funny about how innocuous it is. It turns out some people just lift all their content from someone who does know what they’re talking about and make sure to never be in a situation to have to argue about it. That way they look like they’re pretentious instead of clueless.

Bellular reports on the video game industry in such an overconfident manner that I can’t help but scrutinize the contents of his reports.

This needs to be pasted to every cybertruck. Until people realise they are just driving an overpriced overhyped pile of junk.