Comment on Your [Year] Theme | CGP Grey [6:23]
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoIts a posting of his video from years ago.
While I’ve been disappointed by his lack of modern content, I don’t see a reason to call the productivity techniques he likes nonsense, nor to lose respect for him as a whole. Is there a particular reason?
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
The productivity hack stuff is only one small part of it, but I do think it’s more relevant than you suggest. He’s got a podcast that’s all about how to be more productive, meanwhile he’s put out zero main videos (i.e. , not a follow-up or ad) since July '23.
But the main things that bug me are different from that.
The first thing that really pissed me off was when he put out an apology after his missile silo urbex video. In it, he used the wrong name for a missile. The one he mentioned was submarine based and the right one was land based, or vice versa. I forget, because ultimately it was such a minor nitpick it really didn’t matter. But Grey made a huge deal about it and said it was such an important issue with the video he was compelled to correct the record. Which wouldn’t be such a problek—maybe he just holds himself to a very high standard—if it weren’t for the fact that he has multiple videos whose most basic thesis is directly conflicting with expert consensus, including one based on Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, which pushes a deterministic narrative popular with racists. His pro-Tesla AI-hyping techbro bs with the “automation with kill all jobs” video wasn’t great, but his “autopilot is going to fix traffic” is even more directly harmful considering how detrimental it would be to cyclists and pedestrians to do things the way he suggests…if it’s even technically possible.
Then there’s the more direct disrespect to his most dedicated fans with how he cancelled Hello Internet. I don’t think anyone expects them to keep the podcast going indefinitely, but to have a community as strong as HI did and not ever make any public statement himself, and only have his co-host day that they’re on a temporary hiatus six months after the final episode, and no further updates after that. It was very disrespectful and it says a lot to me about the kind of man he is. He didn’t genuinely see us as the community we thought we were, but a means to an end. He’s one of those disingenuous influencer types—he was just better than most at hiding it for a long time.
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I do agree with the criticism against him in terms of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I think the criticism of his automation and self-driving cars videos is a bit of an overreaction. These are videos trying to predict the future based on current trends. At the time, many were very optimistic about the progression of AI (and not just Tesla). At the same time, whille his predicted timeframe was off, its also not seeming unlikely that his predictions will come true. We’re already starting to see AI automate a bunch of jobs. If I remeber correctly, he also talked about the original video on Hello Internet about five years ago and basiclly said what I am now: his timeframe was optimistic but much of what he predicted still seems feasible if not likely. As for the traffic video specificly, it might be overly simplistic, but the idea is to give an idea of how traffic management might change in the future. It’s focus isn’t on bikes and pedestrian, and while not covered in the video, its not like they don’t fit in to that model. You literally just need a signaled crossing like is used now, or if you insist on ensuring near-maximum efficiently, a bridge, underpass, or otherwise separated infrastructure (which is usually better for pedestrians and bikes where possible anyway).
I also don’t really think the end of Hello Internet was esspecially out of the blue, or unreasonable. It was very much an improvised, talk-about-a-random-topic type of podcast, so after about 200 hours of talking, its not suprising that they would find it difficult to come up with new topics that they can both engage with and make entertaining. IMO it was very clearly fizzling out well before they stopped, and post covid, it would have only been more difficult. The lack of announcement is annoying, but I would hardly consider it a betrayal.
I know its very blunt, it sounds like you were far more attached to him than was warrented. I always read his talk of fans as very clearly viewing them as a seperate group - appreciated customers, not friends. For example, his talk about using the Grey alias to seperate himself from his work, trying to keep himself faceless and mostly anonymous, and the treating of all of his works as a buisness. IMO he never tried to sell it as anything more than a buisness.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
No, it wasn’t, and that’s exactly the problem. Car dependent infrastructure is so bad for society and he was proposing a concept that would entrench it to a degree that would make today’s anglosphere look like a utopian Nordic paradise by comparison. Underpasses can be ok options in the right circumstances, but pedestrian bridges almost never are: they’re car infrastructure to keep pesky pedestrians out of the way of the all-important car traffic and are exceedingly inconvenient to use. As for signalled crossings, that’s fine, but doesn’t help much at the huge number of unsignalised crossings, or in local streets.
Ending it was not unreasonable. Ending it and then saying nothing for months, before having your cohost release a lie stating that it hadn’t ended is unreasonable by any metric. It would have taken so little effort to put a post up on the subreddit saying “thanks for all the good times, but we’ve decided we’ve exhausted what we can talk about, you can keep up with me on my YouTube or my productivity podcast at these links.”
You don’t get to give your fans cutesy nicknames and invite them to send you postcards en mass to vote on a community flag and then pretend to maintain the sort of faceless transactional relationship you described there. You just don’t, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
I should add one more point to the list though that I just remembered while writing this, which is his defence of the extremely problematic Kurzgesagt during that channel’s integrity debacle, and his completely silent use of bots to shadowban anyone who pointed out how shady Kurzgesagt was being through the whole thing. Say one bad thing about Kurzgesagt and get blocked from ever discussing a CGPGrey video or podcast again on his subreddit, without you even knowing that that’s happened to you. In case you’re not familiar with the incident itself, I’ll copy-paste a summary into this post in an edit shortly after I submit this comment (because I need to swap devices to get it).
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Ignoring the fact that its already entrenched and not going to change without dedicated infrastructure that happens seperate to the development of individual vehciles, at that point, you’re asking him to make a video on urban planning rather than AI. Its an entirely different field. Might have well ask for him to make a video on vaccine development or something at that point. To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the importance of pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and it’s importance doesn’t mean that cars can’t or won’t develop further. Frankly, given the fact that Grey has lived in both American and Europe, I doubt he’d disagree, given the first-hand experience.
Given the unscheduled, (relatively) umplanned nature of it, its likely they just didn’t fully know what the plan was. Again, not suprising for what it was. Its entirely possible, for example, that they do hope to come back to it someday. Declaring the indefinite hiatus a lie just because it hasn’t ended is an overreaction. They could very easily decide that in the last five years, they’ve amassed enough new topics to come back for another 100 episodes.
I mean, companies and organizations do that sort of thing all the time. Providing a banner for fans to rally to doesn’t make them any less of a buisness. I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of the head of the Nationa Research Counsel just because I was a big supporter of Boaty McBoatface, nor was that their goal.
I was not aware of the Kerzgizart or Nebula drama. If true, that would be a much bigger concern to me, and yeah, would paint him as much more of a scumbag.