I do agree with the criticism against him in terms of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I think the criticism of his automation and self-driving cars videos is a bit of an overreaction. These are videos trying to predict the future based on current trends. At the time, many were very optimistic about the progression of AI (and not just Tesla). At the same time, whille his predicted timeframe was off, its also not seeming unlikely that his predictions will come true. We’re already starting to see AI automate a bunch of jobs. If I remeber correctly, he also talked about the original video on Hello Internet about five years ago and basiclly said what I am now: his timeframe was optimistic but much of what he predicted still seems feasible if not likely. As for the traffic video specificly, it might be overly simplistic, but the idea is to give an idea of how traffic management might change in the future. It’s focus isn’t on bikes and pedestrian, and while not covered in the video, its not like they don’t fit in to that model. You literally just need a signaled crossing like is used now, or if you insist on ensuring near-maximum efficiently, a bridge, underpass, or otherwise separated infrastructure (which is usually better for pedestrians and bikes where possible anyway).
I also don’t really think the end of Hello Internet was esspecially out of the blue, or unreasonable. It was very much an improvised, talk-about-a-random-topic type of podcast, so after about 200 hours of talking, its not suprising that they would find it difficult to come up with new topics that they can both engage with and make entertaining. IMO it was very clearly fizzling out well before they stopped, and post covid, it would have only been more difficult. The lack of announcement is annoying, but I would hardly consider it a betrayal.
I know its very blunt but, it sounds like you were far more attached to him than was warrented. I always read his talk of fans as very clearly viewing them as a seperate group - appreciated customers, not friends. For example, his talk about using the Grey alias to seperate himself from his work, trying to keep himself faceless and mostly anonymous, and the treating of all of his works as a buisness. IMO he never tried to sell it as anything more than a buisness.
No, it wasn’t, and that’s exactly the problem. Car dependent infrastructure is so bad for society and he was proposing a concept that would entrench it to a degree that would make today’s anglosphere look like a utopian Nordic paradise by comparison. Underpasses can be ok options in the right circumstances, but pedestrian bridges almost never are: they’re car infrastructure to keep pesky pedestrians out of the way of the all-important car traffic and are exceedingly inconvenient to use. As for signalled crossings, that’s fine, but doesn’t help much at the huge number of unsignalised crossings, or in local streets.
Fundamentally, you cannot fix the problems of cars by adding more cars. You fix it by making it easier for more people not to drive. With better, more frequent, quicker public transport connections and with safe, separated, direct cycle paths. It’s indicative of the techbro mindset to think more fancy AI, even if the AI was capable of doing so much more than it really is, can fix all sorts of problems.
I also don’t really think the end of Hello Internet was esspecially out of the blue, or unreasonable
Ending it was not unreasonable. Ending it and then saying nothing for months, before having your cohost release a lie stating that it hadn’t ended is unreasonable by any metric. It would have taken so little effort to put a post up on the subreddit saying “thanks for all the good times, but we’ve decided we’ve exhausted what we can talk about, you can keep up with me on my YouTube or my productivity podcast at these links.”
You don’t get to give your fans cutesy nicknames and invite them to send you postcards en mass to vote on a community flag and then pretend to maintain the sort of faceless transactional relationship you described there. You just don’t, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
I should add one more point to the list though that I just remembered while writing this, which is his defence of the extremely problematic Kurzgesagt during that channel’s integrity debacle, and his completely silent use of bots to shadowban anyone who pointed out how shady Kurzgesagt was being through the whole thing. Say one bad thing about Kurzgesagt and get blocked from ever discussing a CGPGrey video or podcast again on his subreddit, without you even knowing that that’s happened to you. In case you’re not familiar with the incident itself, I’ll copy-paste a summary into this post in an edit shortly after I submit this comment (because I need to swap devices to get it).
Kurzgesagt debacle
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.
And as a separate thing that came out a while after this, Both Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey were early members of Nebula. Today, Nebula is fairly well-known as a creator-owned streaming service. Creators literally have an ownership stake in the business, and are paid out a slice based on their viewership (I don’t think the exact formula is public, but presumably some function including number of views, view hours, etc.).
But early on, when it was still taking the shape we know it in today, Grey and Kurzgesagt were members with an ownership stake. They left it a long time ago citing “creative differences” (or some vague nonsense like that). From little pieces that have come out on the rare occasions that existing Nebula creators have said something about it, apparently those two were less interested in the vision of Nebula as a place where multiple creators support each other in growing their collective revenue; instead they wanted to take more of a parasitic approach where they could profit off of the backs of other, smaller creators. Because the then-co-owners weren’t interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.
No, it wasn’t, and that’s exactly the problem. Car dependent infrastructure is so bad for society and he was proposing a concept that would entrench it to a degree that would make today’s anglosphere look like a utopian Nordic paradise by comparison.
Ignoring the fact that its already entrenched and not going to change without dedicated infrastructure that happens seperate to the development of individual vehciles, at that point, you’re asking him to make a video on urban planning rather than AI. Its an entirely different field. Might as well ask for him to make a video on vaccine development or something at that point. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the importance of pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but it’s importance doesn’t mean that cars can’t or won’t develop further. Frankly, given the fact that Grey has lived in both American and Europe, I doubt he’d disagree, given the first-hand experience.
Ending it and then saying nothing for months, before having your cohost release a lie stating that it hadn’t ended is unreasonable by any metric. It would have taken so little effort to put a post up on the subreddit saying “thanks for all the good times, but we’ve decided we’ve exhausted what we can talk about, you can keep up with me on my YouTube or my productivity podcast at these links.”
Given the unscheduled, (relatively) umplanned nature of it, its likely they just didn’t fully know what the plan was. Again, not suprising for what it was. Its entirely possible, for example, that they do hope to come back to it someday. Declaring the indefinite hiatus a lie just because it hasn’t ended is an overreaction. They could very easily decide that in the last five years, they’ve amassed enough new topics to come back for another 100 episodes.
You don’t get to give your fans cutesy nicknames and invite them to send you postcards en mass to vote on a community flag and then pretend to maintain the sort of faceless transactional relationship you described there. You just don’t, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
I mean, companies and organizations do that sort of thing all the time. Providing a banner for fans to rally to doesn’t make them any less of a buisness. I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of the head of the Nationa Research Counsel just because I was a big supporter of Boaty McBoatface, nor was that their goal.
I should add one more point to the list though that I just … … … interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.
I was not aware of the Kerzgizart or Nebula drama. If true, that would be a much bigger concern to me, and yeah, would paint him as much more of a scumbag.
I do agree with the criticism against him in terms of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I think the criticism of his automation and self-driving cars videos is a bit of an overreaction. These are videos trying to predict the future based on current trends. At the time, many were very optimistic about the progression of AI (and not just Tesla). At the same time, whille his predicted timeframe was off, its also not seeming unlikely that his predictions will come true. We’re already starting to see AI automate a bunch of jobs. If I remeber correctly, he also talked about the original video on Hello Internet about five years ago and basiclly said what I am now: his timeframe was optimistic but much of what he predicted still seems feasible if not likely. As for the traffic video specificly, it might be overly simplistic, but the idea is to give an idea of how traffic management might change in the future. It’s focus isn’t on bikes and pedestrian, and while not covered in the video, its not like they don’t fit in to that model. You literally just need a signaled crossing like is used now, or if you insist on ensuring near-maximum efficiently, a bridge, underpass, or otherwise separated infrastructure (which is usually better for pedestrians and bikes where possible anyway).
I also don’t really think the end of Hello Internet was esspecially out of the blue, or unreasonable. It was very much an improvised, talk-about-a-random-topic type of podcast, so after about 200 hours of talking, its not suprising that they would find it difficult to come up with new topics that they can both engage with and make entertaining. IMO it was very clearly fizzling out well before they stopped, and post covid, it would have only been more difficult. The lack of announcement is annoying, but I would hardly consider it a betrayal.
I know its very blunt but, it sounds like you were far more attached to him than was warrented. I always read his talk of fans as very clearly viewing them as a seperate group - appreciated customers, not friends. For example, his talk about using the Grey alias to seperate himself from his work, trying to keep himself faceless and mostly anonymous, and the treating of all of his works as a buisness. IMO he never tried to sell it as anything more than a buisness.
No, it wasn’t, and that’s exactly the problem. Car dependent infrastructure is so bad for society and he was proposing a concept that would entrench it to a degree that would make today’s anglosphere look like a utopian Nordic paradise by comparison. Underpasses can be ok options in the right circumstances, but pedestrian bridges almost never are: they’re car infrastructure to keep pesky pedestrians out of the way of the all-important car traffic and are exceedingly inconvenient to use. As for signalled crossings, that’s fine, but doesn’t help much at the huge number of unsignalised crossings, or in local streets.
Fundamentally, you cannot fix the problems of cars by adding more cars. You fix it by making it easier for more people not to drive. With better, more frequent, quicker public transport connections and with safe, separated, direct cycle paths. It’s indicative of the techbro mindset to think more fancy AI, even if the AI was capable of doing so much more than it really is, can fix all sorts of problems.
Ending it was not unreasonable. Ending it and then saying nothing for months, before having your cohost release a lie stating that it hadn’t ended is unreasonable by any metric. It would have taken so little effort to put a post up on the subreddit saying “thanks for all the good times, but we’ve decided we’ve exhausted what we can talk about, you can keep up with me on my YouTube or my productivity podcast at these links.”
You don’t get to give your fans cutesy nicknames and invite them to send you postcards en mass to vote on a community flag and then pretend to maintain the sort of faceless transactional relationship you described there. You just don’t, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
I should add one more point to the list though that I just remembered while writing this, which is his defence of the extremely problematic Kurzgesagt during that channel’s integrity debacle, and his completely silent use of bots to shadowban anyone who pointed out how shady Kurzgesagt was being through the whole thing. Say one bad thing about Kurzgesagt and get blocked from ever discussing a CGPGrey video or podcast again on his subreddit, without you even knowing that that’s happened to you. In case you’re not familiar with the incident itself, I’ll copy-paste a summary into this post in an edit shortly after I submit this comment (because I need to swap devices to get it).
Kurzgesagt debacle
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.
Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.
And as a separate thing that came out a while after this, Both Kurzgesagt and CGP Grey were early members of Nebula. Today, Nebula is fairly well-known as a creator-owned streaming service. Creators literally have an ownership stake in the business, and are paid out a slice based on their viewership (I don’t think the exact formula is public, but presumably some function including number of views, view hours, etc.).
But early on, when it was still taking the shape we know it in today, Grey and Kurzgesagt were members with an ownership stake. They left it a long time ago citing “creative differences” (or some vague nonsense like that). From little pieces that have come out on the rare occasions that existing Nebula creators have said something about it, apparently those two were less interested in the vision of Nebula as a place where multiple creators support each other in growing their collective revenue; instead they wanted to take more of a parasitic approach where they could profit off of the backs of other, smaller creators. Because the then-co-owners weren’t interested in that, Grey and Kurzgesagt ended up leaving.
Ignoring the fact that its already entrenched and not going to change without dedicated infrastructure that happens seperate to the development of individual vehciles, at that point, you’re asking him to make a video on urban planning rather than AI. Its an entirely different field. Might as well ask for him to make a video on vaccine development or something at that point. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the importance of pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but it’s importance doesn’t mean that cars can’t or won’t develop further. Frankly, given the fact that Grey has lived in both American and Europe, I doubt he’d disagree, given the first-hand experience.
Given the unscheduled, (relatively) umplanned nature of it, its likely they just didn’t fully know what the plan was. Again, not suprising for what it was. Its entirely possible, for example, that they do hope to come back to it someday. Declaring the indefinite hiatus a lie just because it hasn’t ended is an overreaction. They could very easily decide that in the last five years, they’ve amassed enough new topics to come back for another 100 episodes.
I mean, companies and organizations do that sort of thing all the time. Providing a banner for fans to rally to doesn’t make them any less of a buisness. I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of the head of the Nationa Research Counsel just because I was a big supporter of Boaty McBoatface, nor was that their goal.
I was not aware of the Kerzgizart or Nebula drama. If true, that would be a much bigger concern to me, and yeah, would paint him as much more of a scumbag.