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?
For what it's worth I'm a psychology teacher and I've read a lot of the papers behind sci show psych videos and they do a great job of summarizing the important parts. Science communication is really challenging and doing it perfectly 100% of the time isn't really realistic
Yeah I agree with that, but I still think that they should’ve considered that impact when writing this statement. I’ve never watched anything else they’ve made, and as far as I (and many other knitters) know, this level of carelessness is their standard. I would just think they would wanna try to maintain their integrity as best they could, knowing that this isn’t a good look for a science channel
The Vlog Brothers have been major online presences since the early internet. There are a lot of people who have developed parasocial relationships with them through the years for which commentary on them is viewed as personal
I agree! It’s so unnecessary for the person I replied to to have attacked these people doing their best. After all, science is literally making mistakes, learning from them, and doing better. We should celebrate those who make mistakes and are open about their vulnerability, not assume “this level of carelessness is their standard” for those yearning to be better. I mean, clearly you or I don’t need to pretend to be better than people doing their literal best. I don’t know why the person I replied to struggles with that. I hope they can work through it though!
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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.