I am generally a little suspicious of this mode of rhetoric that I call the Malcolm Gladwell style, in which X is posited as a commonly held idea that's wrong. Gladwell in his first big-selling book was great at dressing up common sense or the obvious (when you think for a moment) as tremendously insightful by contrasting it with some straw man about "what most people think" without providing evidence supporting the claims about what most people think.
To me it is often unclear if this mode of rhetoric it is intended more to educate or to flatter the audience. It seem to me an indirect way of saying "you, gentle reader/listener/viewer, are not so dumb as most people who think the following wrong thing." You don't need the "most people believe dumb idea X" stuff to educate people, so what's it for?
In general, tilting at a strawman or an extremist is a really robust rhetorical method - I wasn't directly involved in this video, but I've explicitly used (and referenced) that fact in my own related presentations. When your audience is probably at least half-wrong on a topic¹, a way to avoid making them defensive is to say "well you good people, I know you're better than this, but there are folks out there who are just truly incorrect", and then you crucify the strawman and hope that people shift their incorrect impressions without ever having felt they were the target of an attack, because you're mixing in correcting their misimpressions with indictments of someone who they've never been and will never be.
I wouldn't call this a particularly
charitable method of rhetoric, since it's basically assuming that the audience can't stand to be told they're incorrect about something, but I've also observed it to be very effective with large, mixed groups. I probably wouldn't use this style when talking to my peers, but...I mean, it is a youtube video, that's about as low of common denominator as one is likely to get.
1: My baseline assumption is that the youtube audience is going to be >90% wrong on pretty much any arbitrarily chosen topic
I would have thought after he was threatened to be sued and Amir offered to assist, ASR in general provided support etc., that this approach would have ceased.
This video is based on a presentation Cameron gave at Canjam SoCal 2023 and NY 2024 - I believe there might be a recording somewhere online with me heckling him from the stage about some of the framing, in fact.
Why do these things almost always seem to devolve into being some kind of a competition, or get assigned some nefarious intent?
Humans are political creatures, and viewed through a lens of tribal politics, something is usually either "with us" or "against us"