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.
MiniminuteMan, Tsuki, Practical engineering, Ben G Thomas, Townsend, Skaldagrim, Steve mould, Joe Scott, Applied science, Atomic Frontier, A shot of wildlife, Curious droid, Answer in progress, Tasting history, Casually explained, City beautiful, Plainly difficult, PBS Terra, Animalogic, Lindsay Nikole, Doctor Mike, Fern, Isaac Arthur, Sabine Hoffenfelder, Stefan Milo, ReligionForBreakfast, Crash Course, Bizarre Beasts, Geography geek, The plain bagel, Anton Petrov, History matters, Physics girl, Up and atom,
To name a few more
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
Kyle Hill is a great one that I don’t see getting recommended often enough.
PBS spacetime
Smarter everyday
Practical engineering
- 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.
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.
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
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.
You might like Captain Disillusion, he’s more about VFX type stuff but it’s a good series nonetheless.
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.
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
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
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
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
deleted by creator
It’s far more likely someone clicks on a video explaining something they want to know than a video debunking a misconception they didn’t know people had
I don’t think that’s true, honestly! My instinct tells me that someone would be way more likely to click a video called “why xyz is wrong about solar power” than a video called “learn more about solar power” even if they had no real experience in the area.
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.
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.
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.
Myles Power! I had this same issue with debunking type channels but this guy has a much more informative and chill tone and he makes good videos.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Popular Mechanics did a lot of debunking 9-11 myths
As a replacement option for thunder foot, try Paulogia. I enjoy Viced Rhino for more scientific looks at anti-evolution claims, but he might be too condescending for you; he does have at least one playlist where he explains all the evidence for evolution without reacting to any one person that you might enjoy, though.
Honestly, like some other comments pointed out, you may be happier with explanations that aren’t framed as responses. Philosophy Tube comes to mind. Just be aware that no matter the tone, condescension may be steeped into a person’s massage.
