Hi everyone yes, I left OpenAI yesterday

He's a great educator, but at the same time we must recognize that his videos are not a replacement for a traditional math course. They amplify the existing paradigm, not replace.

MOCs are great for access, but they are not, and definitely should not be treated as, replacements. That I am certain will have a net negative result. I'm in grad school and there's something I tell students on the first day:

> The main value in you paying (tuition) and attending is not just to hear me lecture, but to be able to stop, interrupt, and ask questions or visit me in office hours. If you are just interested in lectures I've linked several on our website from high quality as well as several books, blogs, and other resources. Everyone should all use these. But you can't talk to a video or book, but you can to me. You should use all of these resources to maximize your learning. I will not be taking attendance.

I'm sure many of you have had lectures with a hundred students if you went to a large school (I luckily did not). You're probably aware how different that is from a smaller course. It's great for access and certainly is monetarily efficient, but its certainly not the most efficient for educating an individual. MOCs are great because they increase the ability of educators to share notes. We pull from one another all the time (with credit of course), because if someone else teaches in a better way than I do, I should update the way I teach. MOCs are more an extension of books. Youtube is the same, but at the end of the day you can't learn math without doing math. Even Grant states this explicitly.

I think it's important to separate the motivation pill from the content delivery. You can buy a motivation pill for cheaper than $160k or whatever a degree costs these days. And we get to compare the very best tryhard youtubers to the median lecturer who is grinding it out.

(I realize know I dislike using the descriptor "tier", as it implies some sort of ranking. Perhaps "layer" would have been better, but I'll stick with it for now)

For both tier 2 and tier 3 its basically the same process. This is for Spotify btw, I have no idea how different the workflow would be for something like Apple Music.

Say the genre you want to dig around in is Hip-Hop. You are aware of Eminem and Mac Miller, and vaguely aware of a guy named Nas. By intuition you'd probably already be able to tell that Nas is more at the edge among the mainline artists.

You click on "Nas", and scroll down to Fans also like. Right now, for "Nas", it is showing "Mobb Deep", "Mos Def", "Rakim", "Big L", "Wu-Tang Clan", "Gang Starr", "Ghostface Killah", "Method Man" and "Common".

This is a mix T1 and T2. "Wu-Tang"s in there along with assorted members, but some of the other artists are much lesser known quantities.

Its a bit hard for me to decide what a Hip-Hop layman would consider the most unknown name here, but I'd venture it'd be "Big L". We click on him, do the same thing. Now we're really getting somewhere, with guys like "Inspectah Deck" and "Smif-n-Wessun". Click, dig, we get a bunch of names amongst which "Lord Finesse" stands out. The Show more at the end of Fans Like is also invaluable.

In total the dig order for me to get to the very bottom of the undeground is "Nas" > "Big L" > "Smif-n-Wessun" > "Lord Finesse" > "Channel Live" > "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs" > "Trends of Culture" > "Brokin English Klik" (358 monthly listeners).

I wouldn't consider each of those going a tier (layer) deeper. As a guy who knows waaay too much about Hip-Hop, I'd separate them into:

- T1: "Nas", "Big L"

- T2 "Smif-n-Wessun", "Lord Finesse"

- T3 "Channel Live", "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs", "Trends of Culture", "Brokin English Klik"

Perhaps "Brokin English Klik" should be in its own T4 and 3 tiers lacks the fidelity to be necessarily accurate. Not sure.

A little shortcut would be using "The Edge of $Genre" playlists. They're the pair playlists to "The Sound of $Genre" (broad slice) and "The Pulse of $Genre" (most popular) generated via everynoise.com, although as that guy got fired from Spotify its up in the air how long those will keep working.

Edit: oh, and if you run into a playlist that caters to that deep underground (in my case, that was "90's Tapes"*), that's worth its bytes in gold.

*https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2H0rNGEBShvHSGebM2m37c?si=...

(I deeply hate TikTok)

TikTok's recommendation algorithm is probably one of the best. It puts content first, giving what seems only a passing weight to follower count.

That doesn't mean that having a big follower count doesn't increase you chance to go viral and gain a lot of views, but it is much more likely for great content from a small creator to go viral, than mediocre content from someone with 500.000 followers.

You can also see this in that successful TikTok profiles often have a much higher view-to-follower ratio than something like YouTube.

> Youtube seems to come the closest, but Youtube educators also show how much time you have to spend attracting views instead of teaching expertise.

Actually for all the attention that the top Youtubers get (in terms of revenue), the reality is that it's going to be impossible to replace teaching income with popular Youtube videos alone.

Based on what I've seen, 1 million video views on Youtube gets you something like $5-10K. And that's with a primarily US audience that has the higher CPM / RPM. So your channel(s) would need to get to about 6 million views per year, primarily US driven, in order to get to earning a median US wage.