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I typically don’t have the patience for most videos. I want information, and much of the time, the information bandwidth or payoff is too low. I think video can be great auxiliary, supporting material, but there should usually be a textual component when trying to inform.

I get around this by watching videos in fast forward

> there should

Or, we could accept that different people learn better in different ways. It's wonderful that a variety of learning resources are being made, so more people have the opportunity to learn complex and interesting topics.

> the information bandwidth or payoff is too low

Perhaps consider that you might not be the target audience?

> Or, we could accept that different people learn better in different ways.

No evidence for interpersonal difference in learning styles: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/12/no-evidenc...

That's saying that some recently fashionable, and fairly elaborate, theories about teaching children are basically junk science.

That includes the ideas that there are left/right brain learners, children who are holistic as opposed to serialists, and children who are inherently "verbalisers" or "visualisers".

I don't doubt they're right. But I think it would be a mistake to read that article and conclude that adults who simply say they do much better with videos than books, or vice versa, are mistaken about themselves.

It's trivially obvious that some people get more from reading than from watching, and vice versa. If you think a study disproves something trivially obvious, odds are that either the study is flawed or you've misunderstood it.

I'm guessing the latter, as mjw1007 points out.

> If you think a study disproves something ...

That wasn't the comment. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, I don't really know why the parent posted that. Or why you try to imply counter evidence, but don't name any.

> trivially obvious

It's something you see on a street intersection? I'm kidding, but i don't agree. I don't even agree that the problem is framed correctly. Somebody mentioned "isomorphism" in this thread, which is a very important notion. Different methods of learning are used to learn different things. The things are in principle in different domains. The things might be isomorphic, ie. readily transferred from one domain to another, but they are not equal. A painting of a square is not the same as a verbal description of it. On the one hand, nobody is equally skilled in all domains. On the other hand, there should be some basic skills that are necessary to solve certain problems. So, either everyone who isn't comfortable with a given "learning style" will inherently fail to solve corresponding fundamental problems, or there are multiple ways to solve a problem effectively -- which ideally would mean the student can choose the problems of interest and capability.

In conclusion, both hypothesis are true at the same time, but you are assuming a misguided context. Of course there might exist different ideas of what's elementary or fundamental.

Uneducated individual here. What is the proper term for arguing against a claim that was never made or incorrectly assumed, but ambiguous enough to become a target? I see this a lot in political debates. Something more technical than a misunderstanding.

Anyway, I think that’s what’s happening here. It’s not a simple matter of different learning styles, but rather the strength of stimuli that are involved when learning something new. Some people may find text sufficient, but a lot of people prefer videos because it’s far more engaging. Breaking down learning styles into visual, audio, etc is meaningless imo.

I think this falls under a strawman argument. I don't think there's any requirement that strawmans have to be deliberate.

I usually agree with you, but lately, I have seen amazing advances in using video as a medium to teach ideas.

I think the standout for me would be the channel 3Blue1Brown on Youtube, which teaches math concepts with animated videos, in a way that is just amazing. I highly recommend it if you're at all interested in math.

(And no, this doesn't replace the kind of textbook learning you need to actually understand math. It's more about concepts and ideas. But it's still amazingly valuable).

To illustrate just how good 3Blue1Brown is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003510

That was one of the other videos Deemed Worthy. There are so many more.

I wasn't able to visualize higher dimensions until watching that. And now it seems totally obvious how to do it.

The problem is that so many videos are full of fluff. This video is nice because it gets to the point and finishes in 3 minutes.

Article often have 3 paragraphs of preamble, but at least you can skip all that quickly.

Some topics lend themselves to videos. This is one of them.

Many (most?) topics can be explained just fine in text though. And I can read a hell of a lot faster than I can listen to someone talk.

> And I can read a hell of a lot faster than I can listen to someone talk.

Especially when you have to go through 1) an intro sequence 2) some guy asking how you are and telling you how he's doing 3) what upcoming awesome videos are going to happen 4) other chitchat - to even get started.

the problem with videos is that they require a lot more of a time investment to determine if they're worth watching.

I can skim an essay or an article to determine if the content is worth a proper read, but i can't skim a video. So i'm a lot more likely to ignore a video, unless it's already been heavily upvoted or endorsed by somebody i trust. Video is a great medium to convey an idea to people who already trust that you aren't going to waste their time, and that's why youtube works so well - subscribers to a channel have made the decision to trust that channel up front. but it's a poor medium for a link aggregator site like HN. It's not that HN readers don't take video seriously, it's just video is not a good fit for the HN format, where the default assumption on clicking a link is that the content is probably not interesting, and it's up to the content to prove otherwise before losing the reader's interest.

This is similar to the belief that visual computing will replace programming languages. New generations keep thinking this and it fails. Videos are great but they will not replace the written language.

> I've been working on an essay for some time now, but I'm seriously considering making it into a companion video.

I think that this is the best route to go with. Your supporting multiple learning styles and providing an easily searchable chunk of reference material.

Others have pointed out that the ratio of videos like this one to junk is very high - and I do not disagree. The issue is that the quality videos are mixed in with the noise of "social media" as we have one (dominant) platform that supports both. Great videos are about as rare as great/informative social media content.

What IS nice is that there are a few channels that realize producing this sort of content is a good thing - numberphile tends to crank out great and quality stuff, but you can find the same sort of values on completely different topics - AVE, and big clive both spring to mind -

Nobody ever said, "a picture is always worth a thousand words" !

In the case of the behavior of physical objects, though, if you tried to use words to describe complex motions, the reader would probably get lost. (And in this case, you'd lose the 'tension' of watching the race.)

For the same reasons, rock videos of people just playing instruments are rare.

Personally I can learn MUCH faster (+ enjoying it) by looking at someone doing/explaining something in a video (e.g. coding). To take it even further: if one person (expert) explains something to another person (not an expert on this specific topic) and the non-expert frequently aks questions. This helps tremendously.

Agreed though it depends on the topic. If it's very visual, like this is, video is perfect.

Video makes a lousy reference though.