Expertise in the Age of YouTube • Hacker News Board

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#81

Post by vturner » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

kd5bjo wrote: post #75

jbob2000 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call what you’re describing “information asymmetry”; a small amount of people holding all of the information. Much of our society’s modes of productivity depend on many people not having access to information. How can you repair your car if there is nobody to show you how? I guess you’ll have to take it to a mechanic! But the internet completely destroyed information asymmetry, many people have access to lots of in…

> I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil. This is historically why reading comprehension has been such a big deal. This information has always been widely available, in a maintenance manual you could borrow from your local library.

This point has stunned me recently. I purchased an air conditioner and furnace recently and thought hey I wonder what is in the massive manual. It turns out a lot! The same is true for most of the appliance and machine manuals I've looked at. What scares me from using said manuals is my lack of the basics in plumbing, electrical, etc.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#82

Post by vturner » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 11:42 AM UTC

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…

My personal hope is that because of the democratization of information and growing ubiquity of makerspaces and knowledgeable people around, that we will begin to not only repair but also produce many of the goods that once only came prepacked in a box and were sold to us at a high premium so insurance companies and executives could live the nice life. If that happens, our overall life costs will go down as people can order raw parts/materials and produce high quality long lasting items themselves.

Just as an example, I've decided I want to grow microgreens and tomatoes indoors. To do that efficiently, one needs grow lights. Thanks to the CBD community, there is sufficient information online to spec and assemble yourself grow lights. Whether you want to solder individual LEDs to a backing or glue COBs onto a heatsink, it's all there. Sure the initial investment is more, but product you can produce is staggeringly more powerful and the lifetime cost dramatically lower than what comes prepackaged.

Of course, then again this might not all happen if children are forced to be in school most of their waking hours.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#83

Post by dugmartin » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 12:26 PM 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…

For the same reason I usually search for “ sucks” for honest reviews I’ve learned that some of the best YouTube instructional videos for carpentry are the “don’t do this” videos, especially the inspection videos when a professional comes in to fix something. I just built a screened porch addition and am finishing the hip shingles today and I must have watched 10 roofing screwup videos before I started on the roof.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#84

Post by sedeki » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

kilpikaarna wrote: post #42

sedeki wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am prone to buying a book about the subject. Problem is I already have too many books and honestly I don’t read them all. I didn’t read much technical literature before Uni, and didn’t know where to find information about technical subjects growing up (even as I was of the geeky type). My main problem is what to focus on. Not how to learn it. I guess reading a blog post instead of paying Amazon would be good for me…

I find that amassing books or tools easily becomes a surrogate for actually putting in the effort to learn about a subject or do a project. When something piques my interest, it's pretty easy to just go online and order some stuff and get the satisfaction of having done something without having to put in much effort. Then once the thing arrives my attention has been directed somewhere else and I'm much less motivated…

My experiences exactly. I realized this a few years ago. So, do the books follow a particular theme, or are they on very disparate topics like for me?

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#85

Post by wongarsu » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 1:12 PM 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…

There are three factors that decide video quality: the host, the content and the polish (including camera+audio). If a video of a grumpy man holding a shaky camera has many views you better listen to him, what he says has to be phenomenal

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#86

Post by rorykoehler » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

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 con…

It’s time for the anti-seo spam filter for search engines

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#87

Post by philyg » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

codesushi42 wrote: post #57

glandium wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In part I agree, but for me (for some of the videos at least) ,I also see value in just being introduced to the idea and getting me to think about it (and perhaps consequently search for other sources) rather than increasing my knowledge or understanding in that particular area.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#88

Post by yabadabadoes » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

jowsie wrote: post #77

ginko wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why anyone in their right mind would want to learn programming through a video course. Programming languages are inherently text based, why wouldn't you rather read a denser tutorial or book than have someone spoonfeed you at a pace that's often either too slow or too fast and doesn't easily allow you to reread or skip sections.

Because if you sit me in front of a dense book of text I'm going to read the same line 3 times over before noticing and the information still wouldn't have gone in. Different people learn in different ways.

I have to agree with the OP, if something is primarily text oriented then it probably is more efficient to learn it using a great deal of text. The whole learning styles thing is not really something that should be perpetuated:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...

Motivation and styles is probably a different matter. There is the problem that self motivated learners can only learn if they are motivated, but also that they can be led astray by materials that primarily motivate and entertain.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#89

Post by adz_6891 » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

yabadabadoes wrote: post #88

jowsie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you sit me in front of a dense book of text I'm going to read the same line 3 times over before noticing and the information still wouldn't have gone in. Different people learn in different ways.

I have to agree with the OP, if something is primarily text oriented then it probably is more efficient to learn it using a great deal of text. The whole learning styles thing is not really something that should be perpetuated: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-... Motivation and styles is probably a different matter. There is the problem that self motivated learners can only learn if they a…

I wonder whether the point is more to do with memory. If you can show a person remembers more from watching an instructor code out an example on screen compared to reading a text based tutorial, and they spend the same time doing both, then it may follow that it's more efficient for that individual to learn in a non-text based manner.

In practice, I wonder whether this non-text based learning is more useful in the earlier stages of learning to write code. This might because your learning much more than how to write a valid set of lines that compile to an expected result, there's a lot about style, motivation and norms that you have to soak up too. A lot of that is often implicit in text based tutorials, whereas the video based format makes many minor details explicit (e.g. seeing someone type a line of code wrong, and then explain, 'oh yeah this is a commmon mistake'... this actually encodes a lot of information a text based tutorial would typically miss)

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#90

Post by coldpie » Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #3

I 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…

Hey, welcome. It's a great fun hobby. Check out Chris Schwarz's books, The Anarchist's Toolchest and The Anarchist Design book (the titles make more sense after you read them). There's an essay in Toolchest called "Three Tables" that basically describes my theory on craft, it's uncanny.