Scott Markwood's Interview of Nick Engler & random thoughts

[RFGuy]

Seldomly do I watch a one hour YT video, but honestly I watched Scott interview Nick for an hour and wanted more content (link below). I thoroughly enjoyed their discussion. Just wanted to say a thank you here to Nick and Scott not only for this interview but for all of their contributions to the Shopsmith & woodworking community. I appreciate everything you guys do for us. One of the comments from Nick stuck with me from the interview so I thought I would share it here. Nick talked about being the gatekeeper of information on his YT channel and how he sometimes censors comments if a viewer is giving out bad information. This got me thinking about all of this new online content for woodworking and how there are no editors or true gatekeepers for the plethora of content that gets before our eyes in woodworking. I mean in the past, most of us relied on books for woodworking education. Those books had editors and/or peer reviewers that would refine the content and hopefully give the best possible content to a student. Nick even commented in the interview about how his book editor was a woodworker himself and could intelligently give notes on a draft book. Where are the gatekeepers and editors who are subject matter experts for all of this online woodworking content? They don't exist. Add to that, that A LOT of the online woodworking content is essentially a video diary from prominent online woodworking influencers and you have a recipe for disaster in my opinion. Their intent is NOT to educate, but rather to sell a product and entertain. Case in point was a video that I watched regarding spraying milk paint instead of applying it with a brush. The influencer went out of their way to state that milk paint is food safe and non-toxic, so by extension they could spray it AND NOT wear a respirator while doing so. I got curious so I pulled up the MSDS for the exact product they were spraying and found that among several questionable ingredients, one of them was calcium hydroxide (lime). Inhaling this can lead to irritation of breathing passages, coughing and sneezing, but with enough exposure calcium hydroxide poisoning can lead to death. I politely commented on the video out of concern and was amazed to get an acknowledgement from the creator, but the video is still up and thousands more will watch that video and think it is safe to spray milk paint without a respirator because their favorite woodworking influencer said so. Just yesterday I watched a video that had the camera looking down on a jointer bed while the creator pushed small wood laminations through the jointer with their bare hands and no push block (a recipe for disaster). Don't get me wrong, I am not the safety police and I don't freak out on every video where safety gear is not used properly. However, the explosion of online video content has made woodworking inherently more dangerous than it used to be. There are just too many weekend warrior types posting questionable content leading many newbie woodworkers astray IMHO. Also, I see a lot of confirmation bias amongst the influencers supported by positive comments from newbies who can't differentiate quality content and think critically for themselves. Okay, that is the end of my rant here. I'd be curious to know anyone else's thoughts here. Am I overreacting, or do others see this as well?

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[JPG]

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[Majones1]

I hear you. Although I’m new to ShopSmith and this level of power tool woodworking, I’ve been around dangerous equipment and environments enough to sense when some operations “feel” unsafe. I’ve seen a few videos where I felt that the operator was doing something that seemed off for some reason, although I didn’t know why. For instance, I saw a video that I learned most of you have seen when I was going to post it here in the SS forum with comments about how I wouldn’t have even tried the operation he had done because it just felt unsafe. This was the guy who was “recreating” the jointer operation that had cut off his thumb. I thought he was stupid for even doing the recreation, although it was helpful to learn what not to do. I did not understand how his operation should have been done differently, but I did understand that there was no way I would ever slide a board on edge where you couldn’t completely control whether it would slide across the jointer beds. It was scary even watching him recreate that. Actually, it was stupid because you could never know if and where chipped pieces might fly at high speed, or if the wood or push stick might slip and you might stumble into the jointer. Dangerous! It wasn’t until I watched a later video by a skilled woodworker who demonstrated the proper way to cut a beveled edge on a board using the jointer that I learned how the operation could be done safely. The point being, that we always need to consider the physical characteristics of the operation and think through the possible uncontrolled movement of the various parts. Not everyone has the experience or inherent mechanical ability to do that, thus we certainly need “gatekeepers”, like editors, to help us new people gain good, safe skills.

I’m glad we have those, mostly gentle, gatekeepers here to correct us when we put out bad or dangerous information. That, and the capability in the phpBB forum to go back and edit our posts.

[RFGuy]

Thanks Marc. Yeah, I agree that this is one area where I think forums like this excel. We all have things to learn here, but typically there are always a few experts on a given subject that ultimately steer the conversation towards truth or towards the best practice/procedure. Sometimes the conversation is overdamped and sometimes underdamped but in the end we usually end up in a good place. Unfortunately due to the mechanics of the platform and/or algorithm driven feedback, I don't usually see this happen on these other platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). On those platforms, the peanut gallery drives the conversation. Posting even the slightest critical comment gets you labeled as a troll frequently resulting in your comment being taken down or summarily dismissed. It is just a popularity contest so educating viewers and "getting it right" are secondary. It seems to me like we need some gatekeepers to help weed out the questionable woodworking content online, but I don't know how we solve this problem. It also seems to be a culture change at play as well. In the past, many of us would seek out an "expert" to learn something new. That might mean a classroom setting. It might mean getting a book to read or a DVD to purchase. Not saying there aren't bad instructors, bad books or DVD's because there are. However, usually the better ones tend to rise to the top. Today, in this social media driven world, any time someone wants to learn something what is the first thing that they do? They go and check out YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, etc. Often the creator of the content that they watch is barely more knowledgeable on the subject than the person watching it. So, in the end they are NOT seeking out an expert like was done in the past. How does a newbie know which video to trust when they are being shoveled content by an algorithm whose sole intent is to keep them online longer, i.e. it is not optimized around the quality of the content.

[BuckeyeDennis]

I also thought that was a great interview. I rarely make it more than a minute or two into interview-format woodworking videos, but I too watched the whole thing. It left me with an even higher opinion of Nick than I already had, and Scott showed real talent as an interviewer.

IMO, the explosion of woodworking content on the web is a mixed blessing. If I'm researching something obscure, it's great to be able to easily find anything on the topic. But you definitely have to take the content with a large grain of salt. Even YouTube woodworkers with large followings sometimes get things wrong. If you want to see a huge diversity of opinion and information/misinformation, just look for content on radial arm saws!

I've only recently made a regular practice of reading the comments following videos, but they do provide "curation" of sorts. If a video contains bad information, chances are good that someone will call it out. Which is sort of a wiki-based curation, if you will. To put that in context, I subscribed to the online edition of Consumer Reports for many years. But I eventually dropped the subscription when I realized that I had shifted to relying on the buyer reviews and ratings on Amazon et. al. for product testing. The buyer info is more timely, covers many more products, and is quite possibly even more "accurate", given that the product sample size tested is much larger.

As for newbie woodworkers who don't yet have enough knowledge to know BS when they see it, that's definitely a problem. But many new woodworkers don't have anyone to mentor them in person, and I'd argue that attempting to use power tools with NO instruction is even worse. With YouTube, at least you can see operations before trying them yourself.

If YouTube were to get serious about serving up reliably good information, it seems to me that they could easily facilitate a more formal user-review process. Perhaps something along the lines of what Wikipedia does with their articles. The info I've seen indicates that information on Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Neither is perfect.

[RFGuy]

Thanks Dennis. You make some good points as well, but I am not sure on the curation aspect. I mean if the YouTube channel is small then you have a better chance of the content creator responding to your feedback. Good luck getting any content creator to respond to your comment on a channel with lots of followers. There just aren't enough hours in the day for them to get through all the comments, if they even wanted to. Sometimes another expert comes in to confirm your comment, if you are lucky. In my experience, too often there are too many people who comment on the entertainment aspect only of the video and decide to deride you for offering any differing viewpoint to the content creator. Maybe that is all that it is for most viewers, i.e. they are being entertained and aren't really there to learn. I just feel bad for the few people who are trying to learn from online content and have these "bad" teachers yet the principal is away...

[Majones1]

If YouTube were to get serious about serving up reliably good information, it seems to me that they could easily facilitate a more formal user-review process. Perhaps something along the lines of what Wikipedia does with their articles. The info I've seen indicates that information on Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Neither is perfect.

Great point. Academics used to warn students to never use Wikipedia as a source, but for at least the past 5 years they have been teaching students how to use it as one of many sources. And the really good professors actually have their students working as teams to create well researched pages with high quality citations. You still have to be careful, but there is a massive amount of quality data available there on a world of subjects. But there are topics that you need to avoid, mostly politically-based.

In grad school I had a professor who taught us how to create a Twitter account that served us and wouldn’t slide into the mess that most people have. You ONLY follow people or organizations that post about the subject matter you are interested in. For us, as history students, this was limited to historians, museums, archives, etc. My Twitter account almost never has any political posts, and it’s a joy to read. But you cannot add friends or family, unless they stay on subject.

[RFGuy]

I wasn't aware that Wikipedia had improved, so I will have to check it out again. Several years ago I had seen issues with it and have tended to discount it ever since as a result. Thanks for letting me know.

[algale]

Great video! And unlike a certain semi-retired Shopsmith chief engineer's shop tour, I was glad to see Nick still had a couple of Shopsmiths in his shop and equally glad to hear that he still had good things to say about the machine itself even if he took a couple of (probably well-deserved) pot-shots at the business acumen and marketing skills of the people who run/ran the company.

As for the lack of editors/gatekeepers vetting all the internet woodworking content, that issue goes way beyond woodworking content! With very few exceptions, there's nobody vetting anything on the internet! Folks can't tell what's real from what's fake or real expertise from b.s. And everyone thinks they can become an expert on fill-in-the-blank if they read a couple of dubious sources on-line and that such "research" puts them on par with top experts who devote a lifetime to studying a subject We are in big, big trouble.

[RFGuy]

Thanks Alan. Good points. Yeah, I appreciated seeing and hearing more about the Shopsmith equipment in Nick's shop. I was hoping they would go into that a bit deeper, e.g. which Shopsmith tools does Nick particularly like and enjoy using. Are there any Shopsmith tools he wishes they would update/improve, etc. Yeah, it isn't just woodworking that this is happening in where I think we need gatekeepers, but it seems like the woodworking/DIY category is more prone to this issue perhaps, but I could be wrong. I mean I don't think we can find tons of videos on how to be a doctor or demolitions expert or elevator mechanic. Kind of reminds me of those Holiday Inn Express commercials where the customer had such a good night's sleep that they believe they can do surgery afterwards. Maybe this is what happens to some newbies who watch woodworking videos on YT and become emboldened by it?