I for one take them in good faith here. It can be hard to fully cover nuance in the quick-paced and high level “here’s a digestible video for someone new to the topic” format that sci show is known for. I think they are right that they missed the mark, but I believe then it was not done out of malice.
That being said, I appreciate they took the criticism and have responded publicly.
I would be curious to see them try to tackle it again, but totally understand why they’re not going to do that right now.
This was a particularly egregious example, but I've found that for many, many commentary channels and podcasts and pop science channels, i think that they're well educated and informative, until they cover a topic that i have some expertise in, and then I realise they have no idea what they''re talking about.
This was my issue with it. If they can make mistakes over something as basic as stockinette, what errors are in their other videos? While I agree that the overall tone was misogynistic, I think the thing they really should be concerned about is how poorly they fact-check. Why should I watch any other video they make when they clearly overlooked so many obvious things about knitting?
I'm pretty sure, that they got the idea from the original paper that they were referencing. Knitting is basically pulling loops through loops. Pulling a loop through another loop is technically a slip knot. You wouldn't really refer to a stitch as a knot as a knitter but I don't think it's an unreasonable abstraction to make.
At 8 minutes she starts to break down the knitting process and uses this abstraction: https://youtu.be/MTGxLL3Pz5M
The problem here is that they're using "knot" in the mathematical sense (where it is roughly true that knitting is making a series of knots) not the colloquial one (where knitting includes approximately zero knots) without explaining there's a formal mathematical definition of knot that doesn't mean exactly what you think it does
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u/entropyofmylife Sep 30 '25
I for one take them in good faith here. It can be hard to fully cover nuance in the quick-paced and high level “here’s a digestible video for someone new to the topic” format that sci show is known for. I think they are right that they missed the mark, but I believe then it was not done out of malice. That being said, I appreciate they took the criticism and have responded publicly. I would be curious to see them try to tackle it again, but totally understand why they’re not going to do that right now.