Expertise in the Age of YouTube
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Expertise in the Age of YouTube
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Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#2A superb reflection on the accelerated potential technology affords learning.
I would add an additional note that the choice of topics to dive into is now both more vast and accessible than it has ever been.
Not only can you learn what you want to, but you can stumble across that which you'd never thought of or scarcely knew existed and discover more about yourself along the way.
When you search for things to learn you're merely bolstering your predisposition, but when other things emerge before you and stick, something altogether more interesting is taking place.
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#3I have been starting the process of learning hand woodworking by watching the likes of Paul Sellers. It is amazing how much knowledge there is available on YouTube about craftsmanship. Combining YouTube with niche web forums multiplies the learning power. I'm already able to dimension boards with nothing but a hand plane, a combination square, a depth gauge, and winding sticks. I'm just at the start of my journey but I'm so thankful YouTube and all these creators are out there to introduce me to this new hobby!
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#4As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.)
The majority of good polished videos have the least accurate or useful information. These I've surmised are people that would rather be into video production or youtube stardom than they would being actually good at the subject they profess. Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I've seen, usually on the jobsite, are some of the best practices, tricks of the trade or just informational rich videos you can get. These are people that are not into being youtube stars and are just part of the 'sharing community' as it maybe was originally envisioned. But as Rumsfeld said, there's known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and when you're a homeowner watching how-to videos, its very difficult to know what you should know.... so most of them go by, instinctively, the quality of video production as their guide to what they should be doing.
Sure there are great craftsmen with great video quality and there are some really poor craftsmen with poor video quality but these are not the bulk of what's out there. What rises to the top of search offerings seems to be equally what's been marketed (poor craftsmen, high quality, "please like,share, and subscribe") or what's been organically liked (poor quality, high craftsmanship).
For the tradesmen out there dealing with homeowners, its now sometimes a bit of an uphill battle after homeowners have done their 'youtube' research and have determined how hard the job they've asked you to bid is going to be.
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#5In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It's still what I use today.
Roll forward a couple of more years and I'm working on my Ph.d. and have the thought that someone must have done more optimization on keyboard layouts: Meet http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx. That inspired me to learn QFMLWY, something I have yet to do.
Roll forward to a few months ago and I'm experiencing some slight wrist pain; a coworker uses a Kinesis Advantage and recommends it. In true punk style (and unhappy with the Kinesis' outdated appearence), I endeavor to find a superior product. I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal.
This is a niche path involving one skill set: Improving the human-keyboard interface. And, it involved real-world interaction with people and the resources that people on the internet have provided. I'm convinced that either only in-real-life (IRL) or only online interactions would have inhibited my growth in this domain.
I'm sure that this same concept applies to every web development framework or conlang or beauty style or any human endeavor. As an aside: These ideas are also related to why I'm confident that an artificial general intelligence developed in the vacuum of the internet will not succeed relative to a competing technology that is able to benefit from both offline, interactive experiences and also online information trawling.
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#6I'm interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning.
What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#7What "absurdly demanding online game" is the author referring to in the first paragraph ? He mentions Overwatch later in the article but in another context so I'm not sure that's the one he meant.
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#8I'm interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning. What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?
I'm the same way. I find that choosing a project that inspires me takes me much further than just saying "I want to learn X, let me follow a tutorial".
On a related note, I just read nassim taleb's anti fragile which has a section arguing that most progress comes from people tinkering with things to get something they can sell or to solve some problem they have rather than academics trying to understand things from basic principles. I don't agree with it entirely but that and my way of learning has led me to value experiential learning much higher than society does currently
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#9In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It's still what I use today. Roll forward a couple of more years and I'm working on my Ph.d. and have the thoug…
> I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal.
I've been using the Dvorak layout since 2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for a long time and currently with an ErgoDox EZ Shine that I bought like a year ago or something (wow, time flies! I thought it was only a year ago that I bought it but I looked it up in my e-mail archive and it was in fact December 2017 that I bought it) and have been using since then. Right now I am typing on the QWERTY keyboard of my MacBook Air, just because of where and how I am sitting at the moment. But I love my ErgoDox and use it a lot.
Here is my custom Dvorak based layout for ErgoDox EZ that I created basically recreating the position of most of the keys that I was used to with the TypeMatrix 2030 USB that I had, and with a couple of minor but important modifications.
https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/ENb6/lat...
This layout has been working perfectly for me and I am very happy with it. It's mostly looking the same now as when I first created it (that link is for the most recent version, the one I am using now).
Some things to note about this configuration and about ErgoDox EZ in general (for the benefit of others ITT):
- In the typical position of caps lock I have Escape when I tap it, but Control when I hold it. Awesome!
- This whole layout resides on the keyboard itself. I have all my computers set to US standard layout and am able to have my layout work always on all of my computers across all operating systems with no configuration or anything. This alone is worth like a couple of hundred bucks at least, seriously!
- The previous keyboard that I had, you know, the TypeMatrix, had hardware Dvorak support too, but I always had to press a button on it each time I unplugged and replugged it, or woke my computer from sleep, or turned my computer back on after having shut it down. It's actually surprising how annoying pressing that button each time where I needed to, which wasn't always (because back them I was remapping the keys to Dvorak in software on most of my personal computers), but often enough that it got annoying. None of that B.S. with the ErgoDox! :D
Prior to purchasing the ErgoDox EZ those two years ago, I too had looked a bit at stenography tools and projects. My conclusion back then was that it seemed useful, and was interesting, but cost prohibitive and time consuming to learn, with the added factor of uncertainty that I have no idea if writing code with stenography methods would actually be faster or in other ways better than my current means of writing software.
Anyway, if you do end up learning stenography and use it to write code I would love to hear about it and I hope you post about it to HN then.
Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube
#10As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accura…
I find that's true of most information. The higher the craftsmanship of the video, the worse the actual information being presented. Lectures, for instance, that are just a professor talking with his PowerPoint slides are almost always better than videos that put on a production with fancy graphics, jump cuts, and narration.
Look at the news. The news with more spectacle tends to be of lower quality on average. Or anything that comes from Hollywood. Daytime and reality TV are extremely polished but mostly tripe from either an entertainment or informational perspective.
The more time someone puts into a "production quality" video, the more they're trying to sell you something, even if it's just their brand awareness.