wrong abstraction

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

Ben Felix argues that common beliefs about renting versus buying are wrong: homes are not great investments, mortgages are not a wealth hack, and ownership does not reliably bring happiness.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

A School of Life video arguing that everyone marries someone who is somewhat wrong for them, and that this is unavoidable. It is a four-minute version of an essay by Alain de Botton.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains why people keep making the same mistake with millions and billions, using a Bloomberg cash calculator example. He looks at the unit slip behind the repeated arithmetic error.

Tom Scott's Ignite London talk about a flash mob that went very wrong.

Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains what flat earthers believe and why, arguing that their reasoning is wrong but not stupid. She suggests scientists should take such believers more seriously.

Tom Scott's correction video on his earlier claim that 18th-century insurance firefighters let uninsured buildings burn. After a historian looked into it, he concludes the story was wrong and explains how the error happened.

Not Just Bikes explains how North American speed limits are set and why posted limits matter far less than street design. It argues that drivers follow the road's cues, so safe speeds have to be built into the street.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

Veritasium explains, with expert input, that in general relativity gravity is not a force and objects follow straight paths through curved spacetime, including why standing on the ground means you are accelerating.

Explains induced demand beyond roads, showing that it applies to transit, walking and cycling infrastructure too but with different consequences. It corrects common misunderstandings of the concept.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Johann Hari's TED talk arguing that addiction is driven largely by disconnection and environment rather than chemical hooks alone. He draws on his personal experience with addicted relatives and on research and policy examples from around the world.

Veritasium recounts a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over whether a vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind. He presents the professor's reasoning and demonstrations, including one without aerodynamics.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

Engineering Explained examines new research suggesting corn ethanol in US gasoline may emit as much or more carbon than gasoline. It covers the Renewable Fuel Standard and why ethanol was assumed to be a green fuel.

Not Just Bikes argues that North American transit struggles to attract riders because of the land use around it, not the transit itself. It uses examples such as a London, Ontario line with unreachable stations.

ACS Reactions investigates why Mexican Coke, supposedly cane sugar sweetened, tested as having glucose and fructose, explaining that sucrose breaks down in acidic soda.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on how forensic science used in criminal trials is often unscientific. It looks at unreliable methods and lab malpractice, and ends with a joke about a TV procedural that might change public perception.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining the scientific method: guess, compute consequences, compare to experiment, and why vague theories like astrology cannot be proven wrong.

Hans Rosling and his son Ola run an audience quiz with global population, health and income data to show how wrong most people are about the world. Ola then gives four ways to get less ignorant.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

A short Veritasium video explaining regression to the mean and how ignoring it leads to wrong conclusions about punishment versus reward, medical treatments and sports streaks. It uses the example of flight instructors who believed criticism works better than praise.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.

Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains why light travels slower in water and glass. He knocks down common wrong explanations such as absorption and re-emission, then gives the wave-mechanics reason tied to refractive index.

Animator Noodle explains why frame interpolation does not make animation better, covering timing, easing, smear frames and using the wrong tool for the job. A pinned correction says the video is partly outdated given later AI developments.

Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer who wrote Task Manager, responds to the claim that Windows sucks. He describes how he would fix common annoyances, in what he calls a love letter to Windows wrapped in a rant.

Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.

An expat YouTuber in China shows how dockless bike-sharing, once loved, has been flooded by competing companies. Bikes pile up, get abandoned in odd places and are vandalised, with footage from around the city.

A ten-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing how mathematicians and physicists differ in their interests and customs. He argues physics rests on visualizing and applying math rather than pure abstraction.

YC partner Michael Seibel discusses his essay on real product-market fit, why founders wrongly believe they have it, and how building a company is not a single-variable problem, drawing on Justin.tv and Socialcam.