Rex Kerr
1 min readOct 16, 2023

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No, you don't understand. I'm not making a logical argument. I'm making a social one.

The social one is this: I don't want to waste my time on convincingly-presented rubbish that's hard to fact-check. I don't know whether this is convincingly-presented rubbish, but I do know that videos are great at that and that it's really hard to make a video that does a great job supporting what it says. So in the best case scenario, you're making my life harder than it needs to be to learn something; in the worst case you're wasting a bunch of my time on drivel; and past experience suggests that the latter is considerably more likely. But guess what? It's a YouTube video! I can't really tell which it is without watching the whole thing!

I'll spend time on it if you respect my time by giving me something that I can ingest quickly and which is set up to make verifying claims easy.

I'm happy to draw my own conclusions, and happy to entertain alternative ideas supported by evidence--but I'm not happy to do so if the person with an outside perspective can't at least make it easy for me.

The bar is low. People pass it thousands of times per day writing articles for journals. If nobody can be bothered to pass that bar, I am happy to not be bothered to pay attention to whatever it is that they don't care to make easy to scrutinize.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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