10:25 It is my honor as a knitter to recount the Hank Green Knitting Incident for you, reader:

As Carl says in a second, this was a SciShow video, presented (but not written) by Hank.  Clearly the intent of the video was to highlight how cool and useful knitting is from a physics and engineering perspective, touching briefly on some interesting new research but mainly serving as a very general physics-flavored overview of how knit fabric works.

Sounds great!  Knitters love seeing a general audience get educated about knitting.  Many yarn crafters are very STEM-oriented people and knitting is notably pretty popular among nerdy women.  

Which did make it seem a little bro-y and out of touch that the video opens with a joke about how the audience surely thinks knitting is boring.  The SciShow audience probably has a fair few knitters, it's really not all that niche of an interest.  Knitting nerd communities are as old as the Internet and they only seem to be growing.

Imagine if they'd been like, "I know, hobby electronics isn't exactly an exciting topic - you probably just think of a multimeter as that weird thing your crusty granddad was always going on about, but I'm here to try to convince you that it's actually a pretty useful tool, and now science has finally proven it!"  That would be a bit weird, right?  You might be like, wait, SciShow, who do you think is watching this?  

But that's not all that weird for knitting, we know to expect that "girl" things will be treated as niche by default in mixed company - women are often aware of "boy" interests whether they share them or not, but a lot of men seem to never organically learn about women-dominated interests, even very popular ones* - and anyway plenty of knitters embrace the "granny hobby" jokes - so, maybe a bit of an eyeroller, but, whatever, not a huge deal.  

However, the factual content of the video was pretty sloppy.  You might say it was full of embarrassing technical errors, or at the very least full of misleading edits and phrasing.  Knitters being a bunch of technical nerds who are always ready to fact-check, naturally there was fact-checking, and perhaps some gentle poking of fun.  Much of Kristine Vike's response video is a good-faith explanation of those issues, done patiently but with just enough subtle exasperation to be entertaining.  

And then, probably the most inflammatory part of the script was the way it transitions into discussing the research.  The conceptual hook of the video is something like, "no one knew how knitting worked until the physicists came along," and they sort of imply through a series of misfired snappy turns of phrase that everybody was just kinda vibe-knitting for most of human history and had no conscious engineering intention behind what they were doing lol.  And also something about how now that knitting was in the hands of physicists it could finally be applied towards something useful and not just clothing.

Clearly this was clumsy presentation and not the actual claims SciShow was trying to make, but the whole tone reads as weirdly dismissive of the knowledge and innovations of traditional craftspeople and seems to exalt institutional frontier physics as knitting's ultimate savior, which, combined with the fact that this video is premised on the assumption that you, the viewer, need to be convinced that knitting is interesting or important technology at all, plus all the careless mistakes about the actual craft and history, it kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  So in total you might say it comes across like,

"I recently learned a handful of half-right facts about this boring old craft that women do (women who are invisible to me, let's assume we're just talking about them and not to them), mainly for making played-out stuff we already have like garments.  But you'll be shocked to hear, we discovered there are actually some cool physical properties of the technique these simple folk accidentally stumbled on that might be useful for my favorite esteemed professionals to reappropriate for the superior, modern applications that you and I might care about, thus innovating a scientifically competent approach to this craft for the first time in history, according to the very light dusting of historical research I felt like doing."  

Again, obviously not what they were trying to say, but like, yeah, it was a disappointing video.  And that's as far as I'd personally go with it - the video was cringe, it deserved criticism, it got criticism, it rightfully sparked discourse about the way people dismiss "women's" crafts and their technological innovation outside of institutional academia, it prompted some deep dives on knitting physics, and it made Hank and SciShow look a little foolish and oblivious - but I think things probably did get out of hand in the backlash. 😅

I'm not really a Hank Green or SciShow person so maybe those people have more of a case for feeling "betrayed" or whatnot, but I do remember thinking it was kind of snowballing needlessly into a content feeding frenzy.  Maybe more so after SciShow's (admittedly kind of defensive and unsatisfying) response post.  Perhaps knitters as a mostly peaceful people are starved for interesting knitting news lol, perhaps a lot of craft channels struggle if they don't make some hot topic clickbait, perhaps the whole thing really struck a nerve for a lot of nerds who've been chronically ignored and marginalized by the king nerds because of their gender, perhaps it's just the classic conflict escalation we've come to expect from all sorts of people doing all sorts of discourse in the attention economy, whatever the case may be.  

I did start to feel a bit bad for Hank et al. haha, they were not remotely prepared for how many knitters there are and how capable of nerdrage we can be.  And it is embarrassing and reveals a lesson worth learning that they weren't prepared for that, and tbh I didn't really keep following all this so I don't know if they kept making it worse, but personally I'm inclined to give people in that situation a friendly "you know you embarrassed yourself" slap on the back and then back off and wish them better luck next time, you can certainly keep the mistake in mind if it becomes relevant again but I think dogpiling is rarely productive, and I was surprised to see it happening because at first it really felt like the vibe we were on was more "oh no Hank Green posted cringe about us, that's kind of annoying but also slightly funny" and not anything heavier.

Later Carl mentions the frustration of the doomer sponcon discourse becoming about how Hank and SciShow suck instead of unpacking the systemic issue at hand, and I feel the same way about the casual knitting misogyny haha.  I wouldn't be surprised if Kristine does too.  The purpose of callouts like that isn't to tar and feather the individual person who exemplifies the common problem, it's to point out how common the problem is, and maybe get them to acknowledge their own biases.  

Thanks to anyone who read this far hahaha, go try knitting if you haven't, it's fun.  

*I once saw a video from a great multidisciplinary maker channel arguing that fabric and the sewing machine are the most underutilized useful maker tools - the video was lovely, I appreciate and endorse it, but at the same time I had to be like, only people stuck exclusively in the Boy Crafts box could possibly need to hear this argument lol, the engineering usefulness of textiles is obvious among makers who sew

You guys are getting much better at this, not interrupting or talking over each other.

I feel like there’s something related yet different along the lines of Gellman Amnesia with YouTubers. And it’s really just probably human nature in general but it’s easier to see when it’s on a free platform for the world… basically, they start a channel because they’re passionate and knowledgeable about a specific topic but inevitably they’re going to run out of things to say about it. So then they can either repeat themselves to diminishing returns, stop posting, but if they want to grow, branch out into topics that they are no longer the expert that appealed to people initially. But that means that ultimately the largest channels are going to be the least informed but live off of earlier audience trust. And like I said, this phenomenon is sort of everywhere, especially in others forms of media, but it’s probably why I’m really skeptical when I see a channel with 500k to over a million subs and why I mostly watch smaller ones (if it isn’t just for pure entertainment where accuracy doesn’t matter).

19:38 "real people getting hurt by that" those individuals losing jobs, but also ALL OF THE REST OF US because the quality of every product/service is in rapid decline

I like that more people start to understand how weird Rationalists/Effective Altruism people are, and by extension how weird Silicon Versailles and the techbros have become.

These are people who have finally detached from industrial reality itself and openly engage in a cargo cult.

Carl, the care with which you describe the carbon footprint thing and the way it relates to ai is excellent, thank you for being so careful in the expression of that idea and also doing it quite well.

Best new podcast on the tubes.

I think this was a very useful discussion, but I'll take exception to one thing you both seemed to agree on, namely the idea that there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with an individual using LLMs. I hope the rest of this doesn't sound like an attack, cause I'd be genuinely curious of your thoughts:

If LLMs are useful to you (which I'll assume they are, or else why use them), you are arguably indirectly and knowingly profiting off of the theft (perhaps monetarily, perhaps in other ways). This then starts to sound like you're acknowledging the theft, but whatever moral outrage you have doesn't prevent you from doing business with the thief. To pick a simplistic analogy it's somewhat like a jeweler who wouldn't himself steal a ring, but has no issue selling one knowing it was stolen. To your mind, is there no sense in which contributing to the AI labs' revenues (or even just bolstering their usage statistics) is enabling them to continue their behavior? Obviously I agree with you that the companies should be the ones legally responsible for the theft, but I don't follow how that removes all moral weight from using their products.

I would also argue that much of the harm being done by LLMs isn't analogous to the environmental harm Carl compared it to. I think that when people talk about LLMs being ethically problematic, they are often speaking in terms that are harder to measure empirically but nonetheless starkly felt, like our shared sense of fact-based reality being diluted with floods of falsehoods, people becoming yet more isolated and atomized by turning to a bot rather than a person, human artistry being cheapened or marginalized by the implication that it can be mass-produced, etc. In other words these are issues that take place at a way more personal or inter-personal level. LLMs are societally corrosive, I would argue, and so once again I don't think participating extensively in their use is a values-neutral action.

45:13 missed opportunity to say "I appreciate the pushback"

16:30 I’m painfully aware of this and it drives me mad, makes me second guess most publications until I read a paper or primary source

It's pretty clear in hindsight that Hank Green has been suffering a form of AI psychosis since 2024. His content was overall normal/expected for the historical context of his shows, except when it came to topics of AI, where he was an obvious AI glazer and would toss all reason and science out the window to glaze about AI (note doomerism is a form of AI glazing in my experience). And as these things go, the psychosis gets worse the longer the action 'keeps working', and so naturally the escalation continued until intervention happened.

Man the behind the scenes info about Hank really doesn't sit well with me. Granted I haven't had a high opinion of him for a while now, but it seems like his use of his "innocent curiosity"  persona as an excuse for lackluster research quality is far more deliberate and calculated than I expected.

43:01 to shift society responsibility to individual responsibility. That is a major issue in many of the things today.

38:00 last addendum, even if you say you’re accounting for bias you’ll end up just having the opposite bias to what you have, it’s the issues Ground news has where they boil everything into two opposing categories, that in itself is a problem. Rarely do people fall so cleanly into polar opposites, even people pushing the same goals probably aren’t fully aligned with it

22:57 It is clear that a large part of any audience hates AI Slop... they treat an AI script like plagerism (because LLMs are built on plagerism). So, that is actionable: if I am using obvious AI scripts without citing it, many people will hate that in the same way reading a chapter out of a book and not citing my source will get me in trouble.

If you aren't proud to reveal to your audience that AI wrote your script (like you would a human staffer) then you know not to do it.

10:45 Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Edit: 17:00... lol, exactly.

I tried to use a small local LLM for grammar it was okay but I really would love some type of grammar tool that just highlights what's wrong mentions why and then also gives resources on how to learn more. Many LLMs still crave to re-write the entire thing in a general writing style that stripes it off the writer's style or voice when I just need punctuation and grammar and then a why it needs fixing. Also it is still a guessing machine so sometimes I'm not sure if the grammar rules are accurate. And then I'm not sure if I want to use Grammarly or ProWriting Aid or Hemingway because I don't know what they would do with my work.

Really appreciate the work you guys do, but Carl's rundown of events around the 15min mark was very hard to follow.

Okay, imagine that we have a model that's trained on licensed data and runs on green energy. What's the problem with LLMs? I'd say it's not an ethical problem but an epistemological one. Writing is thinking. When we outsource writing to an LLM we are not giving ourselves a chance to think, it's also easy to decieve ourselves into thinking that's what I would have said. There's so much discernment in the process of writing that sharpens thinking. There's also a deeper issue of aesthetics—it's the same reason we often find ghost writing distasteful, or at least diminishes the claim of ownership—those small stylistic decisions aren't just aspects of a text, they are the text, they are the idea (not just representations of an idea)

"its idea of what was in the podcast is phrased about as well as what I would say, I think" <-- but that's why you'll never get better at it