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Expertise in the Age of YouTube

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Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it.

I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are content marketers. Their job isn't to educate you. It's to regurgitate whatever bullshit they can find on topic[0] in order to create SEO and social-share optimized vehicles they can then attach advertising or affiliate payload to.

--

[0] - I worked alongside content marketers few jobs back. There was zero verification or care about accuracy of what was posted, and a lot of copy-pasting+rewriting of similar content from competition.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#52

Post by TeMPOraL »

langitbiru wrote: post #22
glandium wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: 3Blue1Brown.

Yeah, I think there is a massive opportunity here. Combining marketing, design and depth knowledge into a learning experience.

> Combining marketing

This is the point where you start bleeding value your videos might have for the audience. When content becomes a vector for marketing messages, it almost always goes very hollow very quick.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#53

Post by JDiculous »

I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills).

The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidly deteriorating due to this democratization of information. Credentials mean less today than they ever have in history. Specialists will have to be on top of the ever-expanding spigot of new information in order to remain competitive and justify their fees in a time when anybody can just search Google/Youtube for the answer.

None of those would be problems if workers weren't financially dependent on their jobs, such as if we had a universal basic income. But since most of us our financially dependent on our jobs, we're basically in an arms race against each other to the bottom. Stay at the bleeding edge, or get replaced by a more financially desperate harder working 20 year old from an Asian country who learned everything you know from Youtube / the internet. Many will instinctively deny this now, but just watch how this continues to play out over the next 10-20 years.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#54

Post by shantly »

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…

> Cautiously working my way up to gas lines--don't want to blow up my home.

Easier'n most plumbing, I'd say. Run gas to stoves on three houses now, hardest part's piecing it together without needing three runs to the hardware store. Doesn't make me half as nervous as electrical. Or piss me off as much. Damn tiny spaces and too-stiff or too-bendy wires.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#55

Post by dimator »

resu_nimda wrote: post #36
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…

Any examples of great craftsmen with great video quality? I recently discovered the "Essential Craftsman" channel which seems to be pretty good all around. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzr30osBdTmuFUS8IfXtXmg

This Old House has a great channel, at the intersection of production value _and_ expertise https://youtu.be/t8xkMoM4t9w

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#56

Post by shantly »

omosubi wrote: post #8
nefitty wrote: post #6

I'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 b…

> 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".

To piggyback on that, I need either a real project or genuine curiosity. I'm terrible at making myself learn something that I'm not 1) immediately applying to real work—paid or personal—not a make-work learning project, or 2) just really dog-chasing-a-bone interested, and I cannot gin that up or fake myself into that mode, though sometimes I can start poking around a topic and find something that gets me going.

Fortunately for me I'm fuckin' good at working that way. Unfortunately it made school a real pain in my ass.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#57

Post by codesushi42 »

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.

3Blue1Brown is not very good. I have found Udemy courses way more valuable. Even Stanford or Coursera lectures can be better.

I think 3Blue1Brown is a good example of things being trivialized to the point where you're tricked into thinking you learned something new, when you actually didn't learn much at all.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#59

Post by zanny »

JDiculous wrote: post #53

I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills). The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidl…

It used to be about the only thing you had going for you if you didn't have the political connections of wealth was the ability to become an expert through extreme effort to acquire cloistered information.

This is also certainly a contributing factor to the flatline of median incomes for 40 years in the US - among the dozen other influencers including globalism, automation, deregulation, deunionization, etc.

But we, as the labor class, are in a constant ongoing rat race to the bottom. The endgame is near total automation of production, near total availability of expertise on demand, and total capture of all resources by those own the robots. And this isn't like any other time - an able bodied man in any age before this one had intrinsic value to their community. They could be taken advantage of and thus provided for. We are going to see billions who cannot contribute meaningfully to economics. And I do not think those leading the charge towards automation are all that interested in seeing quarterlies dip to reduce suffering in the world.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#60

Post by clarry »

fuzzybear3965 wrote: post #5

In 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…

Another Kinesis & custom Dvorak user (since >10 years ago) here.

I've been checking out steno, and I'm really still not sold on it as far as coding is concerned. I've mostly seen a bunch of bad demos.. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490348)

I still think the keyboard as well as the software side of it could be improved quite a bit. I'd like to start at the keyboard, but it is surprisingly hard to get started. There are lots of custom keyboard kits out there but they all seem to be using the same standard size switches & caps that aren't what I need. So what, do I have to start by designing and making my own microswitches?! I wish I had a youtube video or three for that ;-)

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