Yeah, how are we supposed to know where to put our weizen glass relative to our pint and pilsner glass, and if those go on the left or right of the tulip glass. You are using the proper beer glass for the correct beer, right?
Human nature seems to include a very bad ability to estimate risks involved things with low probability but high costs. You could probably ask several of those people who don't use their turn signals, assuming they realize what they are doing, and some amount of them will acknowledge it could lessen their chances of an accident by some degree. But they will then have some rationalization for why that risk is not worth addressing, and there being more benefit to being lazy. Some people will not do more straightforward things, like wearing a seatbelt, unless threatened with fines. While it is possible for someone to be inconvenienced by something like a seatbelt or turn signal enough that they actually get more utility out of following an unsafe habit even with the risk of injury, most seem to be just misjudging risks.
This was the system at the undergrad university I went to, and while it was in many ways convenient... it also lead to professors making tests that were 4-6 hours long, or where they gave a whole day, or worse, a whole week to work on it. That resulted in very little sleep while double checking every answer, assuming people were able to get an answer for every question.
I feel like the reasons people lie are diverse enough, that there will be many people who lie on something inconsequential but won't on things of higher importance or more serious situations. That seems like assuming anyone who takes something without paying will eventually steal something big, as if the person who took a bonus drop in a vending machine will at some point be robbing a jewelry store.
I think there is a lot of danger in the attitude, "Go to school/university to get a good job." Sure, that attitude is a lot better typically, in the sense of being less risky, than no drive to learn. But learning with a very specific goal in mind can easily cause you to miss out on learning a lot of other things. Some of it might be just things for personal interest. Other things might be useful for your career in ways you don't yet see too.
Even ignoring auxiliary topics, when learning comes from a direct interest in learning for the sake of learning, you will see students going above and beyond what is just needed to get a good grade in classes needed for their major. Some students do this anyways knowing it will help their resume or grad school application depending on how good of guidance counseling they have. But you end up with a lot of job oriented people complaining how useless the classes are when they could have taught themselves the material, yet miss that classes are only one part of the resources available at a university. And in many careers, you will need to keep learning after school to stay up to date. A person who tinkers and reads tech news in their free time will have a chance of doing better in the computer industry than someone who took that route because it pays good and only do what they need for their particular job at the moment.
I feel like I had the opposite experience, that by high school and university level classes, kids were old enough to have long term goals and have perceptions of the consequences for falling short on them. At that point they are willing to take short term risks for long term gains, an ends justify the means approach.
That is for the more "serious" cheating efforts though, a lot of it still comes down to laziness and sometimes no amount of instruction is going to re-align their priorities. From my experience grading university level courses, it is amazing what people will cheat on, as in not just the difficult stuff that would be expected, but on the easy stuff and even on a rare opinion question that can almost not be answered incorrectly.
Some friends travel to Belgium frequently for meetings, and they described the french fries there as the best they had. The Belgians took the fries seriously, with a lot of sauce options and plenty of places on the street to purchase them. Although they were told the secret to really good fries is to use horse fat instead of beef fat.
I think his approach to "singularity" is horrible, even though he starts to introduce a classic example of the North pole without really saying why it is relevant or important.
A singularity is just a place (can be a point, line, sphere, curve...) where some quantity becomes mathematically undefined or infinite. Sometimes this is just due to a bad choice of quantities you look at, like an inadequate coordinate system. Longitude and latitude suffers this problem at the poles, where longitude is undefined. That doesn't mean someone can't stand on the north pole, only that the particular coordinate system fails at that point, and a different one could be used that would work fine there.
There are other kinds of singularities that cannot be fixed by changing coordinates and involve physical quantities becoming undefined or infinite. An example would be the center of a black hole where general relativity says density becomes infinite and there are problems with any coordinate system you use. It is not a term inherently meaning we don't know what is going on, but typically scientists see problems with current theories if you take certain values to extremes, or just presume that there may be more going on at that point, so that such a point would likely involve things beyond current theories.
You could talk about another example: a bouncing ball that with each bounce loses some energy and doesn't bounce as high as the previous bounce. If just considering gravity's pull on the ball and the dissipation of energy at the bounce, it would look like there should be a point in time where the bounces become infinitesimally small and the bounce frequency becomes infinite. This doesn't happen because other dynamics kick in if the bouncing happens too fast, or the distances between the ball and the ground get small enough.
Some proposed cosmology theories remove singularities, while others do not. This leads to the beef with how he pushes that idea that space is infinite. It is useful to consider, but there are also plenty of work that based on theories that have a finite universe, with or without initial singularities, that could still be pictured as the entire universe being within a single point at the beginning.
And I wonder which evidence he was referring to the universe being 20x larger than the observable universe. I've seen estimates much larger than that before, although they are usually all based on some big assumptions, e.g. we see X, but if it was really Y, the universe would need to be this much bigger to make it look like X.
But rat hair would be so much more boring than the normal explanation of ketchup being thickened by something like xanthum gum, creating a particular kind of non-Newtonian liquid that demonstrates thixotropic shear-thinning: a liquid that lowers its viscosity over time as shear stress (e.g. shaking) is applied. Without that, the next best common example would be paint, but no one wants to watch paint dry.
It isn't found only in those two things, but those are the some of the notable examples. Although the alcohol version of the sugar, Fucitol, sounds a lot more amusing, reminding me of an anti-depressant name I think was used in a Robin Williams stand-up bit.
I would give what I was doing, except for a professor I knew that on the first day of class would ask his whole class to write down what they did on 9/11. Then he repeated the request on the penultimate day of the course. The resulting stories showed quite a few details differed between the two versions. His course (and his research) was on memory and emotion, and discussed a lot about the disconnect between confidence/vividness of certain memories and their actual accuracy. Most of the students didn't think that would apply to them, until he broke out the write ups on the last day of class, something that ended up being more memorable that the rest of the course. This seems to have lost some of its effectiveness with 9/11 though, as the stories will get more consistent the more years that go by, and may have to do more with remembering the story after telling it enough times than the original event (or that people in his course now would have been ~6-8 years old on 9/11, he used different events before, so might have switched by now). So now I don't worry about where I was or what I was doing...
Even ignoring auxiliary topics, when learning comes from a direct interest in learning for the sake of learning, you will see students going above and beyond what is just needed to get a good grade in classes needed for their major. Some students do this anyways knowing it will help their resume or grad school application depending on how good of guidance counseling they have. But you end up with a lot of job oriented people complaining how useless the classes are when they could have taught themselves the material, yet miss that classes are only one part of the resources available at a university. And in many careers, you will need to keep learning after school to stay up to date. A person who tinkers and reads tech news in their free time will have a chance of doing better in the computer industry than someone who took that route because it pays good and only do what they need for their particular job at the moment.
That is for the more "serious" cheating efforts though, a lot of it still comes down to laziness and sometimes no amount of instruction is going to re-align their priorities. From my experience grading university level courses, it is amazing what people will cheat on, as in not just the difficult stuff that would be expected, but on the easy stuff and even on a rare opinion question that can almost not be answered incorrectly.
A singularity is just a place (can be a point, line, sphere, curve...) where some quantity becomes mathematically undefined or infinite. Sometimes this is just due to a bad choice of quantities you look at, like an inadequate coordinate system. Longitude and latitude suffers this problem at the poles, where longitude is undefined. That doesn't mean someone can't stand on the north pole, only that the particular coordinate system fails at that point, and a different one could be used that would work fine there.
There are other kinds of singularities that cannot be fixed by changing coordinates and involve physical quantities becoming undefined or infinite. An example would be the center of a black hole where general relativity says density becomes infinite and there are problems with any coordinate system you use. It is not a term inherently meaning we don't know what is going on, but typically scientists see problems with current theories if you take certain values to extremes, or just presume that there may be more going on at that point, so that such a point would likely involve things beyond current theories.
You could talk about another example: a bouncing ball that with each bounce loses some energy and doesn't bounce as high as the previous bounce. If just considering gravity's pull on the ball and the dissipation of energy at the bounce, it would look like there should be a point in time where the bounces become infinitesimally small and the bounce frequency becomes infinite. This doesn't happen because other dynamics kick in if the bouncing happens too fast, or the distances between the ball and the ground get small enough.
Some proposed cosmology theories remove singularities, while others do not. This leads to the beef with how he pushes that idea that space is infinite. It is useful to consider, but there are also plenty of work that based on theories that have a finite universe, with or without initial singularities, that could still be pictured as the entire universe being within a single point at the beginning.
And I wonder which evidence he was referring to the universe being 20x larger than the observable universe. I've seen estimates much larger than that before, although they are usually all based on some big assumptions, e.g. we see X, but if it was really Y, the universe would need to be this much bigger to make it look like X.
At least around Wisconsin you don't have to go to a fair to find cheese curds though.