PragerU & Stephen Meyer - Broken Records, Double Standards, & Actual Indoctrination | Reacteria

Special thanks to Dr. Gerd Müller for his response to this interview and for allowing me to feature him in this episode!

Forrest Valkai, a biologist who teaches science on the internet, embarks on a quest to endure videos from people who claim everything he studied in college is wrong. Will he be convinced by creationist claims? Or will he remain steadfast in his study of science? Let's find out!

Need more science in your life?
Follow Forrest!

Visit the Valkai Labs Giftshop!

Want to send Forrest something?
Send your letters, artwork, science kits, or other surprises to
P.O. Box 1810
Broken Arrow, OK
74013

Want to help fund more shows like this?
or Donate with
Venmo - @ProfForrest
CashApp - $ProfForrest

Have an awesome day and never stop learning!

[treybriscoe]

Knowing that PragerU was approved for Florida schools before watching this made it more horrifying

[irenafarm]

Meyers: “Nothing productive can come from coding errors.”
Literally every speed runner ever: 😂

[HowToTrainYourDuncan]

I recently passed a kidney stone; having never had to give birth, I thought this was the most painful thing I’ve experienced in my life. Then I heard an “educational” video telling young women to smile more. And now I’m going to have to rethink my ranking of what the most painful thing I’ve experienced in my life is.

[TheIronDove]

"Stephen's arguments are like a medium cooked steak. They're neither rare nor well done." LOVE THIS

[juliantheivysaur]

I've once heard someone refer to Prageru as intellectual junk food for conservatives. and it's so accurate.

[Salty_Tiger]

The funny part about the whole code argument is that Steve isn't a programmer. If we was he would know that there is a type of programming that is almost exactly analogous to evolution. It's deep learning. Neural networks work by allowing the code to make small, and random, changes to itself and picking the best result to act as a parent to the next generation of changes. The whole argument only works if you don't know anything about modern machine learning programming.

[VidFace]

My absolute favorite part of this is the fact the kids went back in time and met a man who emphasized "working within the system" and "avoiding radicals"...while also talking about the founding fathers.

Men who were so radical they fought their way out of a system they found oppressive and wrong.

[ReVeralife]

@forestvalkai, I think the most compelling response to the software analogy... is that PROGRAMMERS USE NATURAL SELECTION AND RANDOM VARIATION OVER TIME TO DO THE MOST COMPLEX PROGRAMMING!!! They literally set the survival criteria (the end result they want) and delete the variants that they don't like until they get what they want. Programmers ARE NOT WRITING the programs that run complex things like AI, or the algorithms running google etc. It is far too much and too complex to manually write. They literally do it in a very close analog to how actual evolution works!

[Nerobyrne]

The guy who said "Feminism has made men and women less happy and less free" has a video out there where he said in an interview that it took a long time in his marriage to understand that his wife is actually capable of her own thoughts.

That's the caliber of thinker we're dealing with here.

[BjerkeRobin]

When Forrest said: "now, are you ready for the scary part?" I was like...

"WHAT WE JUST WATCHED WASN'T THE SCARY PART???"

[rhil]

I physically felt sick when they made Frederick Douglass defend slavery. Then it just got worse and worse. As a teacher, these are so abominable and horrific. I knew they were bad and biased, but just not sickening. Oh, those poor children in Florida. DeSantis and his ilk are destroying the people.

[AlX-Ander]

My autoplay keeps bringing me back to Forrest's videos and I don't mind one bit.

[leoarmstrong]

PragerU: "Fredrick Douglas here, don't be radical that's bad."
Actual Fredrick Douglas: "if you oppress people these hands cost free.99"

[Wolfgang-Y]

My favorite part about the computer analogy is that that's _exactly_ how some types of machine learning work. The program auto-generates multiple blocks of code with small differences (mutation), compares their output to the chosen data set, deletes those blocks that aren't close enough (selection), and creates new blocks with slight differences to the previous winning blocks (reproduction), repeat until desired results met.

[sledzeppelin]

I had never seen their "slavery was actually pretty okay" videos before. What a sick bunch.

[casualsleepingdragon]

The lady's scream at the start of the sponsor was professionally good. 10/10

[ReiperX]

The fact that they defend slavery and try to pretend it wasn't all that bad is really telling.

[chrisose]

When an apologist says the word "intuitive" you know what will follow will be some deep BS.

[foxbeans]

I find their video on Columbus especially egregious because his actions were controversial whole he was still alive. "You can't judge my 15 century morals from your 20th century, " his actions were excessively cruel even with 15 century morals.

[jerby]

The way the kids cartoon misspelled abolitionist as "abolishonist" is really funny to me