Bad aerospace websites and video channels (unwanted here)

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Archibald

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Army recognition - yep, it has a pretty bad rep here.
 
Archibald said:
This is one of the reasons I created this thread. Nor to humiliate anybody, just to point it is bad, according to the present list.
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Their website quality over the past ~3 years has taken an absolute nose dive - but their YouTube page with global defense convention coverage is still good, led by Xavier and co. The disparity between the auto-generated online postings and their in-person coverage is disappointing…

https://m.youtube.com/@DefenseWebTV/videos
 
Yeah, 'dark' and other hints of being edgy have developed quite the bad smell to me the past several years. That's part of the reason for this thread. I also want to know what to remove from my yt feeds, like apparently megaprojects and sideprojects.
 
To avoid at all cost is the History Channel.
On YouTube "Dark Skies" and certain channels were bald man with beard and glasses try to explain something.
Also to take with grain of salt is Wikipedia - check the reference at end of article !!!
certain forums were they convinced the NAZI atomic bomb is real (hi Kiwi guy)
and certain webpage that tribute the Black Sun of SS and wunderwaffeln in Antarctica (by Himmelman von Stahl)
 
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So far basically anything by Simon Whistler and Tyler Rogoway is the crap I'm looking to avoid if I'm reading yall's replies right. Thank you, keep it coming!
 
I doubt anybody really counts youtube as a source... Certainly anything done by Simon Whistler is infotainment, not a source (and the quality depends on the writer a lot).

I must admit I'm somewhat addicted to him, but only to Casual Criminalist, Into the Shadows and Brain Blaze.
 
Agreed, but I like my infotainment to be accurate and grounded in reality. This thread is my attempt at such a reality check.
 
The Daily Mail for anything
The Daily Telegraph for anything advocating the UK abandon something European for something American
Most other UK national papers are at random bloke in the bar levels of competence for defence, but the Mail and the Telegraph have agendas.
 
dannydale said:
Inspired by this post by Emobirb in "Let's Have Some Fun":

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/lets-have-some-fun.46044/post-793230
What other sources beside these two, TWZ, et al. do yall consider BS. People, yt channels, blogs, you name it; if they're selling cow manure online and calling it golden ground truth, I wanna see them get sendups here!
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I appreciate the sentiment in this effort. I also encourage participation, but ethically and with allowances for re-evaluation and redemption, even. Afraid though, that
  • There's so much disinformation that the list will soon become unwieldy
  • Current social and financial incentives to produce "content" can cause the same
  • AI will make the above problems much worse
  • People can have somewhat rational disagreements on the criteria for calling BS
  • This can easily become a purity test where any mistake, style or sloppiness can get sources blacklisted
  • Those who know how can trawl facts out of very bad source material as well
  • This forum is not immune to all of the above and the motives these entail
Now, this is not to say that this isn't worthwhile, nor is it an attempt to damn it by faint praise, nor to jam the freewheeling and simple works in committees, red tape, and such (a la the "Simple Sabotage" guidebook). Maybe just try and make a distinction with sources that are made in completely bad faith and just merely fallible, gullible and unreliable ones. Perhaps this should also be coupled with sources that are almost entirely beyond reproach.

As how to effectuate this effort (apart from making mental notes) perhaps those sources that are sufficiently agreed upon to be bad faith operations or whatever, maybe edit the first post in this conversation to include the evolving list. Beyond that I don't know whether some sort of automation could help flag posts with bad faith sources. Again, I don't want to make this too complicated. Fact checkers everywhere are grabbling with this and it can easily become as complicated as it gets.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Please elaborate.
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The War Zone is okay, but much of its analysis and content appears to be taken from online search and reading forums like this one. Actual original research is low-to-none.

Bruno Anthony said:
As for my choice of Grade A horseshit sources, Yefim Gordon.
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He's normally okay on development and technical details, as long as he stole from the right Russian-language sources, but operational analysis is usually worse. Also his Modern Russian Aircraft series just bung a bajillion pics in to inflate size, so they aren't as 'weighty' as they might appear.
 
Source reliability is really a function of your own biases and your own knowledge of the source. Taking a random person's opinion that "this is a good source" is a bit counterproductive because you, the reader, don't know what that person considers to be reliable.
 
Anyone saying "TWZ is non-credible" is just another milblogger high on their own supply of perceived self-superiority. "Everyone sucks, there are no good sources, but my opinions are very credible!"

The reality is that TWZ is primarily a news outlet which disseminates news on current events. Senate hearings, Ukraine battlefield reports, F-47 announcements, Chinese shipbuilding developments, you name it. If something happened, they might post an article about it within a few hours or a few days. There is nothing wrong with learning about new information from a TWZ article.

TWZ will also post background information with an article. This is the default for pretty much every news outlet. "Here is the breaking news: a general said this in a senate hearing. Here are several more paragraphs of background public information about this thing, in case you don't know anything about this."

You can also learn about breaking news from other sources rather than from news outlets.

And yes, TWZ will sometimes make mistakes in their reporting. You will also make mistakes in your original research and come to incorrect conclusions on your own.
 
Aubi said:
I doubt anybody really counts youtube as a source...
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Depends on the channel. Drachinifel is great for pre-WW2, including projects. The various pilot and aircrew interview channels frequently have excellent information; 10% true just did a phenomenal series on Light Attack. Forgotten Weapons is excellent on small arms. Likewise Chieftain for AFVs and tanks. There's plenty of good stuff on there.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
He's normally okay on development and technical details, as long as he stole from the right Russian-language sources, but operational analysis is usually worse. Also his Modern Russian Aircraft series just bung a bajillion pics in to inflate size, so they aren't as 'weighty' as they might appear.
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You’re very kind.
 
On occasion, a bad source might have a good story depending on who is interviewed—and a good source can always be duped.

In the late 1990s early 2000s, any quack or crank not allowed to do so much as sniff the (then art be-decked) cover of JAMA could always get in The LANCET….that’s where the “vaccines cause autism” chestnut really started. RFK and others simply read a journal that had a good history by-and-large.

People always remember stories—less so retractions.

I think Retraction Watch is good.

Any publication or video is to be thought of as a dialog—not a final word.

Every so often, conventional wisdom can be upended…later restored, and so on.

Ugh
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zTVbAKmQAKI&pp=ygURMS81MzcgZHJlYWRub3VnaHQ%3D


Pond Racer vid--thoughts?
 
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joshjosh said:
Anyone saying "TWZ is non-credible" is just another milblogger high on their own supply of perceived self-superiority. "Everyone sucks, there are no good sources, but my opinions are very credible!"

The reality is that TWZ is primarily a news outlet which disseminates news on current events. Senate hearings, Ukraine battlefield reports, F-47 announcements, Chinese shipbuilding developments, you name it. If something happened, they might post an article about it within a few hours or a few days. There is nothing wrong with learning about new information from a TWZ article.

TWZ will also post background information with an article. This is the default for pretty much every news outlet. "Here is the breaking news: a general said this in a senate hearing. Here are several more paragraphs of background public information about this thing, in case you don't know anything about this."

You can also learn about breaking news from other sources rather than from news outlets.

And yes, TWZ will sometimes make mistakes in their reporting. You will also make mistakes in your original research and come to incorrect conclusions on your own.
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https://www.twz.com/air/the-navy-nearly-built-a-nuclear-armed-super-sidewinder-air-to-air-missile
The War Zone stole every image and fact from this article from the below topic on SPF, and failed to give any credit at all.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/th...na-lakes-nuclear-sidewinder.2555/#post-791865
That's pretty shitty, right?

Given the level of 'research' they put in to this story (they didn't even make their own screencaps from the Youtube video) it makes me wary of their reporting on other matters.
 
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overscan (PaulMM) said:
Youtube videos can get people interested in a topic. They can be less than rigorous academically, but that's okay unless you treat it like a trusted source of information.
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Yeah, I generally only find them objectionable when someone presents themselves as an expert when they clearly are not.
 
publiusr said:
In the late 1990s early 2000s, any quack or crank not allowed to do so much as sniff the (then art be-decked) cover of JAMA could always get in The LANCET….that’s where the “vaccines cause autism” chestnut really started.
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Oh come on, how was the Lancet supposed to know Wakefield had falsified his research data?
 
DWG said:
Adding to the list, any AI. Just noticed someone citing Grok and ChatGPT in the Spectra EW thread. For something easily verifiable from other sources at that.
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AI can be used as it exists but judiciously. Paul Gilster of the "Centauri Dreams" blog recently stated that his heuristic is to consult two different AIs and also do a "traditional" web search; if the results differ, he delves deeper into it. I presented this protocol to an AI and it didn't take offense but courteously commended it.

It's also difficult to avoid (LLM) AI anymore, it's being integrated into everything. Just saw a frankly amazing/scary video editing software which allows for cuts based on an auto-generated transcript. Not only that, if someone on the video is unclear or fumbles the script etc. the software can emulate the speaker on the fly and "correct" that bit (almost) automatically with that person's own voice. AI urban planning software is doing deep site analysis and environmental modelling based on open source data, something that previously took weeks or months. And on and on and on.

Purpose built scientific AI is also very much a thing (at least somewhat apart from LLMs) these days. Mathematicians seem to use those to develop complicated proofs all the time etc.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
Could be light on primary research.
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Given the scale of topics he covers, pretty much everything naval prior to 1950, can you blame him? But he also spends time in naval archives doing research for some of the videos, and just had a book on HMS Belfast published by Naval Institute Press. There aren't any better where youtube is concerned.

The upside to being subscribed to good youtube military channels is you get recommendations for other good channels. The downside is you'll also get a lot of recommendations for not so good channels. I think the real issue with those is the bad ones are farming for views so even if they have good intentions they are putting out so much content that glaring mistakes wind up being made. Even someone as high profile as Simon Whistler is subject to this; his teams produce so much content that errors creep in to the videos. I notice them constantly when he does a video on a subject I know something about, so I assume the same is true on topics I don't know about.
 
tychosis said:
Yeah, I generally only find them objectionable when someone presents themselves as an expert when they clearly are not.
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Presents themselves or is wrongly interpreted by the viewer (who later gripes) as such
 
dannydale said:
So far basically anything by Simon Whistler and Tyler Rogoway is the crap I'm looking to avoid if I'm reading yall's replies right. Thank you, keep it coming!
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It will depend upon individual videos and more so the writers behind (remember that Simon is not the writer/researcher here). Moreover, remember that they are not meant to be authoritative presentations on subjects.
 
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