I think he could have done better and worked more warnings into his delivery as he went.
Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings.
When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you.
Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.
These are all great points, for someone putting out a single video. When an entire channel covers a single subject matter with the same precautions etc each time, it's easier to just create dedicated videos to that information, otherwise each video you release comes with a 30 minute safety training section. Nile Red is another channel who does a lot of things that are potentially dangerous, and in editing will gloss over some of the safety precautions taken. He also has dedicated videos to lab safety for this purpose.
If that’s the case he should at least point out and link to that video at the appropriate time. That wasn’t the case here. When he says “usually it’s because of touching parts like these” and then touches all of them, its not clear to a lay person that he might have discharged all the relevant bits and taken appropriate precautions.
The reality of YouTube is people send links to individual videos, much like this going on HN. People are going to watch a one off (such as myself right now) and not scan a channel for a meta-level warning video.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about someone based off of one video. If you've been a styropyro fan for a while, you'd know how serious he takes safety. He has whole videos about proper safety glasses and whatnot, and even destroys some to demonstrate that not all glasses are safe or even made correctly.
Almost every video of his mentions "if these lasers were on for even a second and I'm not wearing glasses, I would immediately go blind".
To be clear I really enjoyed the video, and love videos like this, and want to see more. They’re incredibly educational, and do a fantastic job of lifting the curtain on the modern miracles of science we take for granted everyday, and demonstrating that normal people can understand them. With luck it’ll encourage more people to pick up science and engineering, and build new and interesting things.
But I do worry that sometimes the internet makes it very easy for people to put themselves into very dangerous situations without realising it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for educational community on YouTube to be constantly trying to find new ways of teaching about the risks, in addition to messing around with the science.
I absolutely agree. There will be laypeople who don’t understand because he hasn’t shown all the precautions taken. It could be actually interesting and informative for him to create a parallel video of the things he did to make it ok and link to it in the main video.
Simply saying something dangerous isn’t enough. People need to understand _why_ it’s dangerous, or they’re likely to ignore the warnings.
When he was messing around with the capacitors (the really dangerous bit in a microwave). It would have been easy to work in a sentence about how they have a high voltage, and touching them could kill you.
Equally when he was messing with the lasers, he didn’t explain the risk at all, or even demonstrate any safety equipment. Him simply wearing this laser googles on his forehead for the second half of the video would be enough to make it clear that he’s using safety equipment and not just winging it.