YouTube “Experts”
Where ignorance pretends to be intelligence.
Ms. Day is a terrific person, but her taste in entertainment runs from horror to sappy romantic comedies to YouTube nonsense. And most of everything on YouTube is nonsense. Cutting her some slack, most of her YouTube “viewing” is background noise while she works on art projects. But one of our two Roku units are often blaring everything from “alientologist” crap (the “Ancient Aliens” series, for example) to near-Qanon-sense political, psychological, faux-historical, and nature paranoia and worse. And, to be honest, that crap drives me nuts and it’s all I can do to not head for the router software and cut the Roku units out of my Wi-Fi network. I don’t like listening to stupid people on YouTube any better than in person.
I am not a television person. If it were my house (I just pay the bills, bought the house, and maintain everything but the flower gardens.), I wouldn’t have a video system, other than my computers. I’d probably still have a Roku unit for streaming background music (NOT Spotify) in the living room, but the screen would be set to drop into screensaver mode after a few minutes and, other than PBS, I wouldn’t subscribe to any video channels. Since my receiver has a USB port, I might just try to “stream” my huge CD collection, ripped to MP3, and blow off the video monitor and Roku entirely. YouTube, in particular, is only useful, rarely, for finding out how to get into weird electronic devices to replace batteries, weird vehicle maintenance tips, and other repair tasks. Even then, I have to sort through a half-dozen or more how-to videos to find one that is actually useful.
Before I retired in 2013, I was actually fairly knowledgeable in several technical areas and, when I was a college instructor, students would often refer to YouTube nonsense in class and, even, in test questions. Consistently, those “sources” would be bullshit. Failing grades was usually the result of using that “resource” for college work. When curiosity drove me to investigate what was on YouTube regarding one of my areas of interest, I would consistently be disappointed at the inaccuracies and outright foolishness of the “information” found in that internet sewer.
Yesterday, not by choice, but as a necessary result of a property boundary discussion with a neighbor, I was subjected to an ear-full of YouTube, 4Chan, X, Facebook, and Qanon-sense and I remembered more of the reasons that I’d be perfectly happy to see Google and YouTube be stabbed to death by Iranian hackers. Did you know that Bill Clinton and Osama bin Laden were business partners and that there was an article in Time Magazine about that partnership that has been “disappeared” from the internet? Me either, because it’s bullshit. Did you know that there were ancient civilizations that “everyone knows about” who had watches, cell phones, and nuclear power more than tens of thousands of years ago? Yeah, me neither. This is, however, stuff that all of the academic and media experts know and suppress to keep the rest of us ignorant. Sometime during the last bit of “information,” my politeness and attention span was exceeded and I started planning the work I’d have to do to revise our backyard to the “new” property boundaries (We “lost” about 10-20’ of our yard. It was never ours, but you sure couldn’t tell from the previous landscaping and yard use.)
These folks are reasonably nice people, but obviously the kind of people the rest of us had to tolerate tossing spitballs, making noise, and generally ignoring K-12 class material until they quit or were kicked out of school. “Back in the day,” they’d have shuffled off to remote trailer courts where they could inbreed more dummies to jam up public schools, but at least we wouldn’t have to see their bar-talk on social media. Now, thanks to YouTube, Facebook, and the rest of the braindead internet, they have become experts in their own minds: Dunning-Kruger experts with a platform. People who know so little that they have convinced themselves they know everything. I, completely fairly, blame most of their confidence on YouTube.
YouTube intentionally created this fools’ paradise. “Last Wednesday [March 25, 2026], the jury delivered their verdict in a landmark trial. A now 20-year-old woman (K.G.M.) sued Meta (including Instagram), TikTok, Snap, and YouTube,[1] claiming that she became addicted to the products as a child, and developed mental health problems as a result.” The analysis of this court decision is messy, at best, but to my point, selling crap is more important to all of those “social media” providers than providing honest, true information. At best, YouTube is a firehose of nonsense with “drips and drabs” of useful information accidentally and rarely inserted into the stream.
It would be great if we could assume this court loss would result in meaningful change, but it won’t. The billionaire class has totally sold “The Marching Morons” on their own genius and, because no one was there to tell them they are wrong, they bought it like a fish on a worm without a thought of the hook. Our court system is as bought-and-paid-for as is the rest of federal and state government. One entire political party is owned property.
All of the areas of society that desperately need studied expertise are being overwhelmed with YouTube-quality “experts” who have never cracked an adult book about any subject. Fox News gibbering idiots expound on the non-existence of climate change. Russia’s useful idiots are as popular in Russia as the US. And Republicans tell the rest of us that is “patriotism.” Every complicated issue from AI proliferation to protecting democracy to economics to national security to science and industry is being explained by people who know nothing about any of those subjects, while actual experts are sidelined and ignored.
As of January 2025, actual experts began to be purged from every area of our federal government. NASA scientists said the Trump Administration was the equivalent of a “knowledge extinction event” and the current hoopla about NASA making a “loop around the moon” in 2026 ignores the fact that this is a repeat of a 50-year-old “accomplishment.” Between 1969 and 1972, 12 NASA astronauts walked on the moon and no other nation has equaled that accomplishment although the Soviet Union (1966), China (2013), India (2023), and Japan (2024) have done what NASA is doing today. Of course, YouTube experts have argued that the US never made it to the moon 50 years ago. At their core, this bunch of fools is arguing “If I can’t do it, no one can.” More accurately, if they can do it, no one else would bother with something that simple.
[1] Note: Snap and TikTok both settled prior to the start of this trial.
Morning Thomas.
Look up the work of a US sociologist, Harold Garfinkle. He was involved, back in the day, in assessing candidates for some of the first sex change operations, and the reasoning these people had for wanting them. He is not complimentary about most of these candidates.
As you can see, he was interested in how people reason and make sense of the world, proposing what he called, "The Documentary Method". He did an experiment in a US college that would be unethical now. Students going to counselling were told that they were trying out a new method.
They would not see the councillor, and would only be able to ask questions that could be answered with yes or no. The yes/ no answers were given in an order that was set long before the interview, but the students did not know this. Despite getting these random answers, the vast majority of students said they found their session helpful, and that it had helped them to make decisions about their problems.
Now extend that to social media. The sheer weight of crap out there can plant seeds of ideas that the algorithms then reinforce until all that nonsense becomes fact in the minds of the media users. Looking for alternatives would demand time and effort, and would often be filled with obscure jargon from the field concerned, (have you ever tried to read a university Geology book!). In addition, social media has already planted huge suspicion of academia.
You are right, we are rapidly heading for an ideocracy.
And on that cheery note, HAPPY EASTER.
Hello Tom. I enjoy reading your posts on Substack. Thanks a lot. I know you from hb days, by the way. A longish time ago.
Tray