> Not really. Opening up electronics, fiddling with them, and then plugging them in, is pretty typically considered dangerous.

With a microwave, just opening it up and fiddling is dangerous. No need to plug it in. The main capacitor inside stores enough charge at a high enough voltage to kill you. Unless you take explicit steps to discharge it, it’ll hold that charge for hours to days.

> It's such a ridiculous argument to say we should be censoring this stuff because it's dangerous to the untrained.

I’m not advocating for censorship. But there are plenty of other YouTubers out there doing similar videos, but they do a substantial better job of explaining the risks and danger, and do so in an entertaining way. I think it’s reasonable to expect YouTubers like this to place appropriate warnings in their videos to make it clear how dangerous their work can be. Those warnings don’t need to be boring or distracting to be effective, it just requires some imagination to integrate them well into a video.

> Should we censor professional cooking videos where they chop food really fast with sharp knives? Someone could cut themselves!

People encounter knives on a day-to-day basis. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows that knives can be dangerous when misused. The same can’t be said of lasers and microwaves.

Lasers and microwaves are particularly dangerous due to reflections and refractions, and can pose a significant danger to more than just the experimenter. Lasers bounce around a room, if that room isn’t properly sealed there’s the potential for escaped light to blind someone outside your lab. If you don’t have proper access control on your lab, then you can accidentally blind someone entering it without the correct PPE. If someone grabs a cheap high class 4 IR laser off the internet (which really isn’t hard) and plays with it in a bedroom or garage, there’s an extremely high risk they’ll blind family members. If they’re wearing the wrong type of laser goggles, then they also risk blinding themselves. With an IR laser, you can’t even see the beam. You’ll only know you’ve walked into it when your retina starts burning.

With microwaves, the signal can easily penetrate walls and other non-metallic objects. If you don’t have a faraday cage, or it’s not properly tuned for the frequencies you’re working with, then those microwaves can travel into other rooms and cause significant interference with other electronics (including pacemakers) and cause metallic objects to accumulate significant voltage potential.

All of these risk are non-obvious because the electricity, and RF radiation behave in extremely non-intuitive ways. We have no natural fear or understanding of these phenomena because they’re only dangerous in purely artificial, man made, conditions.

Knives, mountains, fire etc we’ve got thousands of years of evolution telling us those things are dangerous. Laser, electricity and microwaves only became a danger a human is likely to encounter 100 years ago.

> It's this sort of collective dumbing down of people that results in us having warning labels on hair dryers that say "do not use while sleeping".

I don’t think people have ever been very good at evaluating these risks and acting appropriately. If we were, then safety courses would be unnecessary. The only thing that’s changed in the past 100 years, is that we’ve figured out how these technologies will kill and maim us. Now we have the knowledge, it seems stupid to make further blood sacrifices to relearn it.