#How Stuff Works

[is-the-post-reliable]

anon who mentioned the antimatter spacecraft article! how stuff works' faq explicitly says that their articles are written by freelance writers, and that articles written in the past ten years includes a list of sources BUT as said previously, most articles were written in the early 2000s and haven't been updated despite what the article says, beyond being run through ai to change wording. physics phd and youtuber acollierastro has a video on her channel debunking the antimatter spacecraft article specifically, and she says that it is not an isolated incident. mediabiasfactcheck checks media bias, and how stuff works is admittedly unbiased, but that doesn't mean that its articles were written by experts or are based in up-to-date scientific findings. how stuff works is operated by system1, and their website is worth checking out

hi! again (not to sound like a broken record) but do you have any sources for this information (other than the youtube video referenced)?

MBFC doesn't just check media bias. They rate sources on bias, but also on factual reporting and credibility, as well as including a list of failed fact checks and a brief history.

For How Stuff Works, the MBFC rates it:

[nichrome-media]

Toasted Object Analysis and Synthesis Tactical Enforcement Reserve

Slice #253

[gone2soon-rip]

MARSHALL BRAIN (1961-Died November 20th 2024,at 63).American author, public speaker, futurist, entrepreneur, and professor, who specialized in making complex topics easier to understand for the general public. Brain was the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and the author of the How Stuff Works book series. He hosted the National Geographic channel's Factory Floor with Marshall Brain and Who Knew? With Marshall Brain.Marshall Brain - Wikipedia HowStuffWorks - Learn How Everything Works!

[karihighman]

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A post shared by The Rookie (@therookieabc)

Can’t cohost a podcast called Shop Talk and not post this cool BTS video showing how the crew runs the shops for the show, y’know? 🚓

[miscellaneous-geekery]

Source: @BSchuermanWX on the site formerly known as Twitter

[courtingwonder]

How Refrigerators Work --- Source: "The Book"

[antennatoheaven]

[duckysprouts]

jesus sensing you spawn into a crowded space 2000 years in the past with a body full of vaccines: God give me strength

[chloesimaginationthings]

Poppy playtime got a guy worse than William Afton

[is-the-post-reliable]

HowStuffWorks is full of slop written by ai. Not a good source.

hello, could your provide any sources? I haven't been able to find any sources suggesting that it isn't reliable, and MBFC still rate it very high for factual reporting. you're the second anon to message about this, so it's clear that you aren't the only person who doesn't believe HSW is reliable, but I do need to find a reliable source before I start removing this source from my fact checks

[auressea]

Derin. you are teh BOMB! amazing work here, patiently doing basic science comms to all askers. You're doing a great public service.

[trekkerac]

he's like a faulty lightbulb

[dilaofan]

unfortunately my dunmeshi welfare vision is an unusually catty kabru. practise safe binding my friends

(笨蛋 = dumbass, idiot, dimwit, etc.)

[lillyjen]

I think the point at which they stopped trying to educate people probably coincided with the time companies realised they can sell people more stuff if their stuff keeps breaking... (people are more likely to break stuff if they don't know how it works).

Because, the thing is, it wasn't schools that used to teach new tech & how it worked, but the people who invented it & the companies who sold it.

The late 19th & early 20th centuries were full of exhibitions where people showed off new tech, how it worked, & what it could do, which would be widely reported on in newspapers, & later newsreels. Because society hadn't become jaded yet to the ever increasing rate of technological advancement, & all this stuff was new & exciting & it was an era of "how does this work?". People also weren't used to a constant stream of 'new', so even though they were a lot more excited by new discoveries, they were a lot more cautious of them, too. (Not to mention less disposable income, less leisure time, etc). So in order to convince someone to buy something you had to be able to fully explain it to them.

But then there were more & more & more new things, & each one was more complex than the last, making them harder to explain, but easier to sell even though they weren't fully explained, because hey, everyone knows new is good, right? And it was less & less about the thing itself & more & more about the bottom line, & the latest product, & trust the experts, but not those experts, we paid a different set of experts....

So here’s a question that’s recently troubled me: When did average people stop knowing how their technology works?

I don’t even mean at the level of engineers or even electronic hobbyists; I mean like…at the level of general physical principles. Like “touch screens work by deforming a charged conductor layer, bringing it closer to a second layer and altering the local current to register a touch.” Did average people ever know this sort of stuff? Because it seems like they did. Like, maybe it’s just bias in the type of late-19th/early-20th century fiction I read, but it seems like people knew, at least in general principles, how, say, a victrola worked; they were interested in radio; they knew the basics of electricity.

So when did they stop? Like, how many people actually know how their computers work? How many people know about the humongous backend of physical infrastructure that’s necessary to support cloud computing or LLMs?

I mean, there’s an entire subgenre of horror stories that’s just about personal electronics doing spooky things…and why shouldn’t there be? As far as most people are concerned, they’re surrounded at all times by unfathomable nonhuman entities that mostly do what they’re supposed to, but sometimes don’t for unfathomable reasons. Honestly, I’m surprised people aren’t as superstitious about it as 17th century sailors were about the sea.

And I mean, part of it is just increasing disciplinary specialisation meaning you can’t know things fully; and part of it is just that computers and software tend to be black boxes (and to hide the backend). But also, to a large extent, we don’t even try to explain it.

Like, I assume that kids in the early 20th century studied how electricity works and how mechanics and such work in their science classes. But I grew up in the 1990s “Age of Computers” and I can’t recall anyone ever sitting me or my class down in public school to explain how logic circuits work. Did they do it for other kids in the 1990s? Are they doing it now?

I don't know; I just keep thinking that there's benefit to knowing that the world is rationally explicable, but it just seems to be getting more and more opaque to most people. I think we might be reaping the consequences of this.