i'm disappointed in brian mcmanus every time i watch a 'real engineering' video and find out that it's full of factual inaccuracies, like all the previous 'real engineering' videos i watched. you'd think i'd learn, but i keep confusing him with 'practical engineering', which is actually real
I find Real Engineering to be pretty good for aerospace, and horrible for everything else. There are errors, but no more so than any other resources I've seen on aerospace.
The problem I have is that it's trying to do electronic engineering, fusion, and now history. The worst is interviews / human interest / travel / behind-the-scenes, etc. My question is always: Why? Why do you think you're at all qualified to do a better job than the people who specialize in this?
If I had a choice, the Nebula-exclusive content would go more into math or deeper engineering: How does a jet engine work? That kind of thing.
But yes, Practical Engineering is very, very good.
I told him not to that unless he has actual knowledge, and he got very angry at me. On the occasion he made a very poor analysis of political and social situation of an African country (that's all I remember).
> On the occasion he made a very poor analysis of political and social situation of an African country
Cultural sidenote:
I do the same (although in personal conversation; I would obviously never do that on Youtube). I am very happy to espouse on topics I have little knowledge of, as did most of the community I spent time in when I was in grad school. This is looked down upon in most mainstream cultures, but it's actually very helpful. If I espouse something incorrect, someone can correct me. I learn something. It's a form of constructive / interactive learning which I find hyper-productive, and we did that all the time.
It's also helpful in social situations. The point isn't to convince you of something, so much as to communicate the state of my brain to you. That makes it much easier for us to debug who is wrong where.
Of course, that's completely incompatible with:
> he got very angry at me
Conversations got heated but never angry. There's a distinction:
What I struggle with is that in mainstream Western culture, this mode of communication comes off as arrogant, and conveys many subtexts which I don't want to convey. Part of that is that we expressed too much confidence when making those statements, but that's maybe 10% of the problem; even expressed with modesty, it mostly breaks in mainstream Western culture (and 90% of the other cultures I've been in; parts of Eastern Europe tolerate this a little bit better).
The problem with this approach, which yes can be productive, relies on cases of extremely high complexity. I had a friend who acted this way all the time, but sometimes all I could answer was "You need to read a few books", and then he thought I was the arrogant one, didn't read any book, and continued promoting his false, absurd and nazi-friendly ideas. Not a friend anymore...
When it came with specific book recommendations, it was extremely helpful in some cases (and in a few others, I didn't have time to read the books, so I shut up until such time will come).
yeah, i agree that that's a very productive mode. if i'm wrong about something, i'd much rather be corrected because i said what i thought instead of remaining wrong because i kept my mouth shut. it's embarrassing but worthwhile to realize how wrong i was
a big part of the problem is the nature of the youtube medium, which is effectively a 10-minute monologue desperately begging for mass attention. if it turns out something you said was wrong, you can't go back later and add a correction in the middle of the video. the best you can do is add a pinned comment or delete the erroneous video. people correcting you in the comments will only ever be seen by a tiny fraction of viewers. previously there was an option to add a "card" that overlaid the video at a given timepoint with text, but youtube removed that some years ago
maybe he has personality problems that make it hard for him to interact with people more knowledgeable than himself; that would explain why his videos are so filled with errors stated with absolute conviction
if you were running real engineering, you could maybe pay a team of fusion energy postdocs, unemployed electrical engineers, or middle-eastern-studies grad students to review your draft script and offer suggestions for improvement before you record the episode
if you want to know how a jet engine works i think your best bet (other than library genesis and google scholar obviously) is integza
Thank you for the pointer to integza. I have not watched the videos yet, but from the high-level, that's exactly what I was looking for (albeit for slightly different reasons; for a different project).
Was going to say… I love the practical engineering channel but that channel doesn’t really dive deep enough into any one topic to encounter any factual inaccuracies.
but that's not really a difference between the two channels; real engineering manages to pack plenty of misstatements into videos that are equally superficial
