Expertise in the Age of YouTube

Post by Godel_unicode » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #15

CM30 wrote: post #14

I think it's especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started and people making professional quality works in said area has gone down significantly too. For instance, my go to example are video game mods and ROM hacks. In the olden days, these communities grew quite slowly, and it took a fair amount of time for people to…

But those examples seem to be the result of more frameworks and tooling and boilerplate code that is already available that people can just build upon rather than delve into the inner workings and figure stuff out - rather than people learning to become experts much faster.

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 4:30 AM UTC

glandium wrote: post #18

ravenstine wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Counter example: 3Blue1Brown.

Post by resu_nimda » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 5:19 AM UTC

jnellis wrote: post #4

As 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…

Post by pmh » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #28

jnellis wrote: post #4

As 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…

As a die hard Jack Of All Trades handyman, I can't overstate how incredible a resource YouTube has been for me. You need to come at it with at least a small baseline of knowledge of what you're trying to attempt, good shop hygiene/safety habits, patience, a "measure twice, cut once" attitude, and so on. But once you get in the right mindset, there is just so much to learn there. I credit online resources for helping…

Post by jammygit » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #33

angleofrepose wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I think about it and reflect on my (computer science) education I think more and more the lectures are awful. It is only the ease/ubiquity of creating them that has kept them around. Fancy graphics is by no means an indicator of good information, but neither are lectures. It blows my mind that I can be taught programming concepts, say data structures, on a PDF. That is insanity, it is a total divorce from th…

Dijkstra and the European school took a dim view of gluttonous Americans who refused to do computer science if they didn't have an expensive computer in their lap. Your pencils, paper, and brain are an executable environment.