Since no one asked, here's my take on SO.
I used to watch his videos regularly, part of my morning routine. He does a nice job of summarizing the interesting astronomy news of the day, at least insofar as giving quick introductions to a wide array of neat headlines, and he's certainly useful insofar as that goes.
However. My own professional research is directly related to topics that he talks about quite a bit, and I therefore know a thing or two about those subjects. There's been a few times where papers that colleagues of mine have written have been featured on his channel. His presentation of their work has been hit and miss - sometimes getting the point, other times missing it entirely. Well, no one can understand everything at a glance, so that in itself isn't a damning critique. But, Davidson's trademark delivery is heavy on the confidence - he says everything with such assuredness that he lures the viewer into assuming that he must know what he's talking about, when that is not always the case. How often is that? Well, I can't really say, except that in the small number of cases in which I have professional knowledge, his accuracy has been spotty. As those experiences built up, my skepticism towards everything else he presents - his grand narrative of an onrushing current sheet, a magnetic and rotational pole flip, the whole bit - started to grow.
There have been other times when he's said things that struck me as missing the point entirely. For instance, when he writes off binarity as the origin for certain phenomena, because ... *drum roll* ... you can't (visually) see two stars when you look! This is the kind of thing that a non-astronomer might find convincing, but to a professional it's an eyeroll-inducing groaner. Binary stars are only distinguishable as separate objects when their orbits are very large; in the vast majority of cases, they're identified spectroscopically, via the Doppler effect, and in some cases they're found via other phenomena e.g. periodic variations in the X-ray brightness of eta Car, which is a binary system in which both stars are embedded in a very thick cloud of plasma that obscures them completely at visible wavelengths. Based on some of the things he's said over the years, it's not clear that Davidson understands things like that ... things which are actually rather basic in astronomy. Of course, by pretending to not understand, he can then present himself as the brilliant maverick who actually gets it (unlike all the dumb professionals) ... and when he presents himself as such with his towering sense of conviction, he brings the viewer along to imagine that the viewer, too, is "in the know".
None of that is to say he's necessarily wrong about everything, or even dishonest. But he does seem to be lacking in humility, which is an essential quality for any scientist ... and possessed of an absolutely invincible faith in his own correctness, which is a fatal flaw in any scientist. The combination doesn't inspire confidence.
A while back I watched a video by a skeptic who did some digging on Davidson. While I usually find such individuals odious, and this case frankly was no exception, he made the interesting observation that Davidson's earthquake 'predictions' (which he makes big deal about) are, statistically, not very impressive, since the earthquake magnitudes are low enough that there's about a 50/50 chance of a quake popping off somewhere on the planet within the 3-day window Davidson uses following any solar eruption. The same individual also pointed out some rather shady practices with the so-called paper Davidson published (on the same subject, if I recall), in which he talked some professionals (again, if I recall correctly, a geophysicist and a statistician) into collaborating, who then asked to be taken off the paper when he entirely ignored their concerns about his methodology ... a request which he refused to honour. That rather rubbed me the wrong way. If he didn't want to take their advice, fine, but to then keep their names on the paper after they specifically requested they be withdrawn smacks of deceptive marketing practices - since Davidson now gets to claim that he's published a serious scientific paper with serious scientists.
More recently Davidson has been shilling for something called the Phoenix protocol. It was supposedly developed by NASA to help astronauts recover from radiation damage during deep space missions, and involves extensive dry fasting (literally going up to 3 weeks without water) in order to kickstart the body's self-repair process. So far so good, I ... guess? Who knows? Maybe it works? However, upon reading the book, the author starts making some pretty wild claims about this being the secret of literal immortality, not a somewhat extended lifespan but actual timeless youth, which strikes me as entirely too good to be true and more likely to be dangerous nonsense. Davidson claims to be doing this himself at present. I don't know if he is or if he's just got a deal with the author to take a percentage of the book sales in exchange for promoting it on his channel. If he bought into this enough to do it himself, such credulity doesn't speak well of his judgement; if not, it speaks against his honesty; either way I could well imagine it could get any of his viewers who take it seriously into very serious medical trouble.
tl;dr He certainly says some interesting stuff, and can point to neat things in the news, but there are enough red flags around the guy that I eventually stopped paying attention to him because frankly, I can read the headlines myself.
one can only wonder..
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