Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell"
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This is the first time (ironically) that I’ve ever herd this channel say something that’s actively damaging to science education and public knowledge generally. Of course, by saying you regularly, “lie,” to us (and I’ll overlook the patronising comparison to children that you made of your audience) you were using hyperbole. But you never once mentioned the moral dimension of the purpose of lying, the DELIBERATE intention to deceive or the correct definition of what lying actually is. It is about INTENT as much as it is about deception. You can mislead accidentally, but that makes a mistaken person a liar in your definition. And it’s not as though the time constraints and editing restrictions caused your omission?
Your definition was flawed in multiple senses, which I will not list completely here. But it is a category error to define all simplifications as lies. “Sphere,” for example, is a perfectly acceptable definition of Earth, for the purposes of description. It is NOT a lie to say so. Examine absolutely ANY sphere, real or depicted in a diagram, at a close enough scale and it is no longer spherical. There is no such thing as a perfect sphere in reality, but we define spheres accepting that there is more to them that can be continually added to each definition, both as a set, and individually. You could argue that it is impossible to even imagine a perfect sphere, thus proving that they don’t exist in any form. But that is an unhelpful way to live your life and will confuse the child in your example, who asked what shape the Earth is.
This was your worst ever video, and I fear it will have done nothing but add ammunition to the idiots suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect in the first place. What were you thinking. Being both wrong and patronising in one video is not a good look. And you’ve never done that before! Why???
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