>I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory. I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.
youtube consistently steers everyone who touches it to more and more extreme content with the passage of time. It's not unique, and often times that content tends to be anti-science.
I'm not the OP but youtube is tainted for anything other than entertainment and a few select channels like the ones by PBS e.g Space Time.
That's in stark contrast to my opinion about YouTube. I have a huge list of highly trust worthy subscriptions / reference channels and no other social media platform comes close. If you live on your subscriptions channel, you never need to worry about content being thrown at you, or radicalization rabbit holes.
I can easily find upper graduate university lectures for complex topics. YouTube makes it easy to link first sources unlike other image/video platforms. Also, since they appear on official pages of reputed sources (conference channel, university channel) there is a certain level of reliability irrespective of who the speaker is.
Lastly, search for any popular video on YouTube and you will see just as many 'response' videos. While not intentional, it helps avoid echo chambering as the counter argument is readily available .
> If you live on your subscriptions channel, you never need to worry about content being thrown at you, or radicalization rabbit holes.
Ok, but you understand why someone might be weary that the most common first hit for someone might be an arbitrary youtube video given your premise is living on the channels you've subscribed to.
The bulk of youtube's content is garbage. You have to go sifting through the content over time, suffering through the recommendation engine (or a shortcut - ask friends who've already lived through that nightmare) to find the geese who lay the good eggs.
Note that they're also talking about Google search ranking. People who are actual experts in things tend to have meatier hits at the top than J Random Vlogger.
Every time some rando on the 'net claims "do your own research" they'll send a link to a YouTube video of some charming BS artist with no qualifications peddling ideological garbage to whomever is credulous enough to watch it uncritically.
Are there good YT channels? Yeah. But 9 times out of 10 (or more) when I search for some rando's recommended expert and the first result is a YT video, it's crap. Utter crap.
I nearly choked when my sister-in-law told me a couple years ago about some really convincing anti-vaccine information she had read which made her very nervous. I asked her what she'd heard, and she gave me a link to a YT video by Dr. Shiva. Yes, THAT Dr. Shiva. Ha! I tried to break it to her gently, but I'm pretty sure she still decided he was a credible source of information.
