vsauce’s trolley problem episode made me lose respect for him - he pretended to simulate the actual trolley problem, so you watch the episode thinking real people are being put in a situation where they have to make a choice of whether to pull a lever and kill one person or not pull the lever and let three people die. They even have an ethics board. This is of course distressing to watch because you think he’s doing this unethical thing by forcing them to actually make that choice. He never discloses, but researching the people in the video I found out they were actually actors, so the audience was being duped by thinking it was real. Either way it’s deceitful and upsetting.
Go to his channel and sort by oldest. You’ll see that he started out making the absolute worst type of vacuous clickbait slop.
You know how they say “the people most likely to seek and gain power are the ones most ill suited to having it”? That applies to celebrities as well.
You remember that article about how almost every second of Mr Beast’s waking life was devoted to content creation? That’s what happens when you select for the top 0.001% of the population that want to be famous the most.
If you went into a YouTube video with the expectation that they were going to kill someone live on camera to illustrate an ethical dilemma, I’m not sure the video was the problem here
Oh, sorry - maybe I wasn’t clear. That’s not what the video implied was going to happen, the audience always knew nobody was going to be hurt, and that the train was going to be stopped before it hit the workers. The episode shows how the “live” video feeds were actually recordings.
What was upsetting was that they made it seem like there was someone not in the know who thought they were actually having to make that choice, who didn’t know it was staged, which of course would be unethical.
