What are your favorite YouTube channels?

[mikewalker]

As a doctor, these two channels have the best research basis, really easy to watch/ understand for the average Joe, and concise.
(These two channels keep me up to date for my patients. So just go to my source).

Thomas DeLauer

Thomas DeLauer has built his name around helping the busiest people in all corners of the world find the time to make small, easy changes within their diets and their lifestyles to not only become healthier, but to become top performers within their respective areas. On this channel you're...

www.youtube.com

Weight loss, fasting, metabolic health/ insulin resistance.He’s successfully lost a heap of weight and kept it off for years (a decade?).

Renaissance Periodization

RP Strength (Renaissance Periodization) is a company with one mission: to get as many people as possible into the best shape of their lives. We help people transform in 5 specific ways: 1.) Customized hypertrophy training for less than a dollar a day through our RP Hypertrophy App. 2.)...

www.youtube.com

Everything exercise, fitness and health. He has an PhD, a natural communicator, and also critiques other people’s content with a great sense of humour.
(The YouTube channel is free & has heaps of content - 3,544 videos and 1.9 billion views).

Wow , that Dr. Mike "RP" channel is a nice find.
I learned a lot about the lifestyles of bodybuilders (My American-expat drummer for years in Moscow was a former Mr. Universe) but have zero interest in doing that kind of bodywork.
However I can really appreciate the need to (at the very least) offset the natural muscle atrophy as I get older - and this video on SLEEP is a real eye-opener!

I don't remember the last time I got six or seven hours sleep (thanks for NOTHING, technological society...)

 

[Wood and Wire]

KEXP is great if you enjoy discovering new bands and solo artists outside of the mainstream.

Yeah, I always have to remind myself to periodically check in with KEXP ; I seem to go months at a time before something pops up on my radar.

There's always a good mix of legacy acts, acts that never really went away, and brand new acts - but the emphasis is very much on guitar bands.

I love that they sometime go in the opposite direction, and invite electronic acts to perform in a totally stripped down format - even if it does look like a bunch of guys fiddling with cash registers :

Purity Ring




Moderat

 

[fdeck]

I've been following these specific controversies in physics for the past 30 years and my take on it is that the burden of proof is on those who make extraordinary claims about string theory, cosmic inflation theory, singularities, and other ad hoc speculatory ideas.

During that time, some of the most highly respected physicists have expressed polite skepticism of these ideas that are widely accepted by scientists as virtually proven theories, without their passing the required tests of being both reliable and robust. They were all initially viewed as so very promising because they're mathematically elegant ideas, but as years passed and more and more scientists joined the fields and published more papers, these ideas became widely accepted simply because so many scientists were working on them. They were essentially the only viable game in town, simply by default.

The bottom line is the scientific method is brutal and impersonal. There are no authorities whose word must be believed of past achievements. Claims require evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Without that supporting evidence, your claims are worthless to science.

She may very well be rude and disrespectful, and she may even be making money on YouTube videos being rude and disrespectful to other scientists, but that's completely irrelevant. The evidence is all that matters.

For what it's worth, I've only been aware of her existence for less than a year, but she's not saying anything that I haven't heard and read about before during the last several decades of following the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. If she disppears tomorrow, her criticism of string theory, cosmic inflation theory, singularities, and other similar ad hoc ideas will continue without her.

I liked Hossenfelder's early videos, when she was talking about things that work. Maybe it's because I get my fill of stuff that doesn't work at my day job as a physicist. And I was receptive to her concerns about conditions within academic research.

I can't critique her physics, and am sure she has the best of intentions, but I think she may have picked an awkward moment in history to mimic the "paranoid style" of social media advocacy. I see a number of problems with this style.

First of all, social media (including YouTube) encourages a certain style of discourse through its algorithm for choosing what content to promote. Making money requires playing to this algorithm. Second, the general public is already being fed beliefs, that mainstream science is in a "crisis" or is possibly even a "scam." This is reflected in comments that I read on some other web forums.

The algorithm may also be contributing to a misleading picture of physics. Most physicists are not theorists, and most theorists are not string theorists. Just for a fun factoid, Wikipedia lists about 1100 physicists, and 35 string theorists. Yet in reality physics is primarily an experimental science, and roughly half of physicists, including myself, work in industry.

Within the broader field, most physicists are apathetic or even skeptical of string theory. It's widely acknowledged that string theory has been unable to make a testable empirical prediction. On the other hand, the general public seems to be dead certain that string theory is wrong.

 

[mambo4]

I enjoy hard science and skeptic /debunking you tube channels, especially recently.

Like Milo Rossi aka Miniminuteman and his Pseudo archeology debunks -but his actual archeology videos are equally enjoyable

I enjoy Sabine's channel

I enjoy her videos but was surprised to see that there is a small but organised group that has something of a vendetta against her, basically accusing her of being a pseudoscientific hack.

I also enjoy a scathing debunk from Professor Dave Explains tho he may be harsh for some. He tackles psuedo science and science denial with the gloves off. His debates with anti-vaxxers and Discovery institute creationists are great. Sabine is also the subject of a few of his videos.

Another less vitriolic, legit science you tuber is Doctor Angela Collier


Less debunky but great science is the paleozoology of Lindsay Nicole (Bass content in some of the backdrops if you look)


A running theme across all of these is an effort to counter pseudo science , science denial, and anti intellectual conspiracy garbage with actual science and demonstrate that is it even more wonderful and awesome than the made up stuff. Something I think is needed these days.

 

[4Mal]

Given recent interest I've been wallowing in Crypto rlelated podcasts and Youtube. CryptoDad on YouTube helped me through some technical hurdles around implementing a Cold Storage wallet. Pretty much mandatory if you want to dabble safely.

 

[fig]

A running theme across all of these is an effort to counter pseudo science , science denial, and anti intellectual conspiracy garbage with actual science and demonstrate that is it even more wonderful and awesome than the made up stuff. Something I think is needed these days.

Agreed.

The foisting of pseudoscience (intentional or not) on the general public has gotten more complicated with the advent of AI deep fake vids. Found this example today. 28 second video, watch until end.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/neil-degrasse-tyson-deepfake-earth-flat-video-b2856203.html

For my own enjoyment of YouTube, I've been diggin' the shorts. Never found alot of time to sub to channels. The only periods where I was intense into Youtube was learning new songs for gigs.

 

[Chad Michael]

Skylabs Audio - vintage hifi

 

[rasr1]

The Charismatic Voice
Uncharted X
Pilot Debrief
Blancolirio
California Weather Watch

 

[Chad Michael]

Salty Old Biker.... here's his latest, speaking of riding culture

 

[Paul New]

I like fermilab’s channel
much better than Hossenfelder. But i’m no physicist.



And Trae Crowder (the liberal redneck).

 

[Chad Michael]

Keyboard player Thiago Gomes - here playing a funky jam with two keyboards and a drum machine

 

[J Wilson]

OrsaraRecipes

Hello everybody! Cooking has always been a passion of mine and I have been sharing recipe videos since 2008 here on YouTube! This channel started off with me sharing recipes passed down for generations in my family from Orsara, Italy (hence the channel name), but it is not the only type of...

www.youtube.com

I wanna be just like Pasquale when I grow up. These are Italian recipes like my mother and family cooked, with great technique but with indredients from his garden or most grocery stores regular people can go to. So many of the other online Italians have ingredients I could buy in Little Italy but NOT Nashville. Also Laura Vitale.

https://www.youtube.com/@LauraintheKitchen

 

[J Wilson]

I love European cars, and Iain Terrell runs a fabulous garage/restoration service in Jolly Old. He does lots of the 'nerdy stuff' when he talks about a car, and you haven't lived until you see him adjust an Italian V12 with six dual Webers listening through a rubber hose and fine tuning each carburetor until he can balance a shilling on the valve cover.

https://www.youtube.com/@iain_tyrrell

 

[hbarcat]

Within the broader field, most physicists are apathetic or even skeptical of string theory. It's widely acknowledged that string theory has been unable to make a testable empirical prediction. On the other hand, the general public seems to be dead certain that string theory is wrong.

That's a 180 degree shift from just a few years ago.

Before 1985, string theory was pretty much unknown to the public when the first major revolution in string theory took place. Several best selling books came out and the scientifically curious public was basically told that cosmomigists had figured out that the universe is made of vibrating strings of energy that manifest themselves as the known elementary particles, depending on their mode of vibration.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, because it is a subjective observation, but it seems to me there was an excessive amount of cheerleading for string theory being done by the most prominent string theorists, with (in my opinion) premature claims of grandiosity.

1) That string theory is likely to be the solution to the greatest problem in 20th century physics - the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

2) That despite string theory having absolutely no supporting evidence from any scientific experiments, it can be regarded as a true scientific theory based on its esthetic value. The reasoning went that string theory is so mathematically elegant that it must be true.

String theory then sort of coasted with no further developments until the late 90s when the 2nd major revolution in the field took place.

Edward Witten proposed a way to unify nearly all of the competing versions of string theory that cosmologists were working on at the time into a single, conceptual framework.

This new way of looking at string theory immediately energized the field and many cosmologists predicted that this was the breakthrough that would establish string theory as the answer to the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of everything. It was just a matter of working through the math and comparing the answers to a few real world experiments and that would establish string theory as the basis of all modern physics.

But nothing significant has happened since then, except that during the past two decades, quite a few physicists have become very critical of the field, with some even castigating string theorists for acting irresponsibly by overpromoting their ideas and falsely misrepresenting their field of basically "speculative science" as if it had earned the level of legitimacy of a fully accepted "scientific theory".

 

[fdeck]

That seems fair. But I think if string theory was over-promoted, physicists got more than a little bit of help from the science press, which now includes the entire YouTube influencer ecosphere. So I think I'm agreeing with you, but trying to step back from the public controversy and paint a more charitable picture of what happened with the science.

David Tong, in his fascinating but difficult lecture notes, noted that the good and bad thing about string theory is that it's a theory of quantum gravity. The good thing is that it seems to work. If it didn't work, it would conflict with an experimental result, and it could be disposed of. The bad thing is that direct effects of quantum gravity are expected to happen at an energy scale that is likely to be permanently beyond our reach, either in the lab or via astronomical observation. Thus the only hope for a QG theory is to find an indirect effect on something that can be measured. That's hard, and we haven't succeeded -- yet. I'm putting the "yet" in there because it's always there when you're trying to solve a hard problem and you're stuck. To make the obligatory car analogy, it's like the engine that might start on the next try.

Of course it's worth asking how much money and attention should be spent on "yet." And accepted scientific methodology doesn't answer this question.

For now, QG doesn't solve a problem, because you could use the perfectly good theories of Q (standard model) and G (relativity) separately. There is no need to unify them, except for pure curiosity and the nagging fact that they conflict with one another. The theory needs to find the problem that it solves, such as a novel experimental prediction under earthly conditions.

Relativity had the same problem. It was a mathematically complete theory before it was able to make testable predictions, and the first predictions that emerged were wrong until Einstein got some math help.

We've been lucky to enjoy a couple of centuries when major physics problems were solvable within someone's lifespan, but it kind of left us unprepared for a problem that might be harder than that.

 

[KohanMike]

Any random acts of kindness videos. When animals recognize their care givers after an absence.

 

[Funky Ghost]

Dave's Garage - He's the uber-nerd. I've learned a great deal watching him over the years. A fascinating individual whose story Is almost unbelievable.
Recently Ben Collins Drives. He's the Stig, c'mon.
Leland Sklars channel has great stories and anecdotes. He's a legend.
The Why Files. I'm not much of a conspiracy guy but the stories are still fun and a fair bit of history is involved. I appreciate that AJ debunks 90% of it, but still gives it a fair shake first. High production value to his episodes as well.
StarTalk - Love or hate him, I still find him compelling. I'm going to forever be a student. He's a good teacher.
66Samus - Sometimes I just need to see a drummer in their natural environment, but safely. He's a special brand of stupid but like a big orange dog, you gotta love him.
DriveTribe - Was a great show that I got to watch grow from a quirky "test-bed". It's now mostly Richard Hammonds daughters vehicle to get more social presence. James May was the long time stand out but the channel now is nearly not something I seek out, if I'm honest.
Drumeo - I love the blind challenges. Super cool format that SBL is kinda taking on now for our folks
SBL and SBL Podcast are pretty good.
Gaming:
Neebs
Direwolf20
TheMindCrafters
The Spiffing Brit
Let's Game it Out

 

[roccobass]

I wouldn’t say necessarily a channel, but whenever I see Jay (Leno) On The Street or Jay Walking, or any of the Battle of the Jay All-Stars videos, I can’t resist.

 

[Gopherbassist]

She'd rather blame one person than mention the recent takedowns of her in places like the Wall St Journal which discussed her critiques in the orbit of 'conspiracy physics', and her hyped-up rhetoric which uses terms like 'corrupt' and 'scam' and 'dishonest' in discussing physics, and using misleading metaphors (eg physics as religion), and accusing scientists as bad actors and lacking integrity. At least now she gets clicks from bring a martyr.

I just searched for a Wall Street Journal article about her and didn't find anything?

 

[BismarckHerring]

I just searched for a Wall Street Journal article about her and didn't find anything?

Must be this one (paywalled).