Today’s unhinged screed has been building for a while. The final straw was an article in WaPo about how young women – especially mid teens to early twenties – were being increasingly led astray about the facts regarding birth control by the tsunami of drivel that is currently flooding the internet. (The article may be found here: Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion – The Washington Post.) Other contributing factors include reading the comments on NASA posts on Facebook. (Yeah, uh, don’t, uh … don’t go there.)

The problems (and let’s be clear: they are multi-threaded, multi-dimensional, and, well, just “multi”) almost universally circle back to how people take in and process the stuff that is available to them. Some of that stuff legitimately qualifies as information. But a great part of that stuff is simply the most disgustingly infantile and indefensibly fatuous twaddle imaginable. In a great many of these latter instances, nothing more extraordinary than simple and ordinary intelligence suffices to recognize said twaddle for the nonsense it patently happens to be. But we have reached a stage in our culture where, evidently, there really is nothing more extraordinary than simple and ordinary intelligence.

Which brings us to our primary theme. So, for example, if your primary source of information on a topic is a YouTube video, then … YAAFI. So what does that mean? Well, YAAFI means

YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT.

Similarly, if you are making lifestyle choices based upon what some internet “influencer” is telling you, then

YAAFI

Now, I think YouTube is an enormous amount of fun. I’ve learned about a great many musicians and groups that I might never have heard of in the absence of such a channel. There have been many entertaining moments dealing with science fiction trivia (yeah, who’d have ever guessed that’s something I’d be interested in?), comedy routines and presentations, snippets from “making of” moments related to films etc. I’ve even had a presentation that I made (in a scholarly setting) posted on YouTube. (If you must know, Gary L. Herstein, “Learning the ‘Language’: Thinking Like Whitehead” (youtube.com).) There are even good videos for learning how to perform various kinds of maintenance on various kinds of machines and systems. But here we are already stumbling into the frontier between the legitimately intelligent and the belligerently asinine. Because so much of what presents itself as reason and fact on YouTube is, in point of fact, childish drivel. And that is why, when you treat YouTube as something more esteemed than mere entertainment, then YAAFI.

The same is true of so-called “influencers.” Honestly, I cannot for my life understand the attraction here, much less the enthusiasm to pay some braying jackass for braying like a jackass, and then taking such braying seriously. I mean, even the amusement of laughing at such pretentious buffoons is only short-lived, and certainly not the kind of thing a nominally thinking person would pay good money for.

As for YouTube, as mentioned just a moment ago, I have a video on that site that purports to be something more than just entertaining. (Although, regardless of whatever degree I might have succeeded, I did try to make it at least a little entertaining.) But the YouTube video was a secondary product of what was primarily a scholarly presentation before members of my academic peers who were more than capable of taking me out behind the woodshed were I to go too completely off the rails. So this presentation was, in fact, delivered in the immediate presence of peer-review, a claim which very few such videos can make. (If you listen all the way to the end, you will note that said review was both constructive and positive.) My presentation included significant textual references (which you can find here, along with a repeat of the video: What a math … | THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION (garyherstein.com)), a thing which, again, is typically lacking from the spectacle of vacuous hand-waiving that constitutes the bulk of supposedly “educational” YouTube videos.

So how do Y(ou) avoid being AFI?

Well, the most obvious question to ask of any source is, who/where is it coming from? The next question to ask is, where does this claim sit within the scientific consensus? If someone well outside the usual channels is making a claim that is adamantly rejected by the consensus, then why are you taking it seriously? Notice that this puts many of the points I’ve argued against the Standard Model of Gravitational Cosmology (SMGC) on thin ice. This is why I back up my claims with real references to the peer-review literature. I also note that the amount and kind of data available is very “thin” (a factor I call “data density” Model-Centrism 2: Data Density | THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION (garyherstein.com)) respecting the SMGC as opposed to other scientific studies, such as those about climate change or birth control.

Medical studies are an area that are especially attractive to crackpots, greedy sellouts, and viciously ideological political hacks. (Consider the “doctor” who so extravagantly praised Jabba-the-Trump’s physical condition.) You can still double check such people yourself by just searching for pre-publication articles at PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed). You can also notice if the presenters of these spectacular claims on YouTube are providing references in the comments, or somewhere equally accessible (see “What a math” above.)

So, YAAFI is a condition one ought to make a conscious and deliberate effort to avoid. YouTube videos, especially those produced and pushed by (fucking) bullshit artists, invariably rely on spectacle over argument. They may actually provide “citations,” but mostly because they are confident that YAALFI (You Are A Lazy Fucking Idiot) and won’t actually check. Often times the citation won’t exist, or will claim the opposite of what they are asserting. You may not have the expertise to follow the scientific details of a research paper, but there’s a good chance you can understand the abstract (always right up front, and almost never behind a paywall) well enough to understand the argument that is actually being made (as opposed to what the greasy carny on YouTube wants you to believe.)

Which brings us to the last point: if you see a YouTube video, and simply accept what you are shown without digging into the actual science, then YAAFI.