Fame and fortune: that's the lure of being a Youtuber. It costs nothing to have a channel. To create content, all you need is a camera and a microphone, and if you have a channel, you must already have either a phone or a computer, and both of these have cameras and microphones. YouTube offers fame and fortune -- for free! And whom do you think this incentive attracts?
Every possible charlatan.
Since YouTube is full of inaccurate, misleading information, including scams, charlatanism and all sorts of propaganda, there's only one way to tell whether a YouTube is useful and accurate, and that's if you already understand the material. But if you already understand the material, YouTube will be useless to you. Therefore, there can be no useful information on Youtube. : )
But there's plenty of dangerous information, given that watchers believe what they want to believe and don't understand.
There is, however, a market correction in the ecology of youtube. I call it the Charlatan's Check. It used to be that the snake oil salesman traveled from one small town to the next, never staying long enough for the disappointed buyers to catch up with him and tar and feather him. But in the ecology of YouTube, the charlatan is stuck in place with his deceptions. He's gotta step up his game, otherwise he might lose his audience.
This doesn't always result in good research or better advice, but it does strengthen the value of the performance. One radio health influencer used to rely largely on (justifiable) distrust of Big Pharma. But to keep up his market profile, over time he added lots of research. His new game consists of identifying a beneficial chemical present in a food -- citing scientific journals for support -- then another chemical in another food, and another and another until he's listed dozens of foods that you absolutely need to consume every day, more than you could eat in a day let alone afford to buy. What he doesn't mention, is that all these foods all have all these chemicals, so you could just buy and eat any one of them to gain all the benefits. It's a clever mountebanks scam. After listing a couple of dozen absolutely necessary foods -- all supported by science -- he offers his unique supplement containing everything you need in a spoonful of green dust.
That's the Charlatan's Check. Notice he's given you lots of scientific information. That's an upgrade in his game. Expect upgrades also of propaganda and scamming. Another feature: scammers often endorse an analysis that the audience already knows and believes. Hearing this, the audience immediately feels confirmed in its beliefs and trusts the scammer all the more.
Despite all this misinformation and gullibility, we still believe that democracy is a viable political system, that citizens are capable of making wise choices based on good information. The empirical fact is that democracy plays into polarization, and polarization plays into identity, not rational policy. And it's the character of my side bias (including confirmation bias) that no one ever truly believes she or he is biased. We always believe we're right, not biased. If we thought we were biased, we wouldn't believe what we believe.
Can we change our bias? Only superficially when learning that some belief we held turns out to have consequences contrary to our more deeply held bias. Our deepest biases are who we are, our bias is us. Lose your bias, and you lose who you are. Get used to it. But maybe we should rethink democracy.
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