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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.

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[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.

Similarly for math: When learning calc, websites from universities that were written in basic HTML with some latex/examples or on some pdf were far better than anything else. There are also some good YT videos where they do the problems which were good as well.

Quality significantly diminishes the moment you use your face in the video (because it's completely unnecessary when explaining how to do some series testing in calc for example)

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

I have been thinking about this recently. That applies to physical products too: the highest quality products are usually not the ones with the best marketing. What we need is a SEO-resistant search engine (for tutorials, products & services). Maybe a way to approach this would be to have the engine function more like an independent amazon-review engine where it's really hard to put fake reviews and have a "quality index" that's community based. I think that the successor to google will look like this: a search engine that cuts through SEO and marketing, and shows you the actual good stuff.

This is quite a difficult thing to build. Google has a whole web spam team dedicated to trying to fight SEO.

Yes it is difficult which is probably why no one has built it. The only solution I can think of requires a social graph which is another challenge to build in itself.

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 me to learn:

Basic carpentry. I've built several pieces of furniture around my home including a pretty nice poker table (so, upholstery too). I built a 12'x6' shed in my back yard on a foundation that's not going to sink or slide over. Drywall and ceiling repair. Re-did a bunch of baseboard trim and only me and someone who knows what they're doing can find the mistakes. I know my limit though. I'm probably not going to attempt kitchen cabinetry or replace my roof for example.

Basic plumbing. Gutted and replaced bathrooms and kitchens on multiple houses. Repaired a busted spa back to like new. Re-did sprinkler systems. Cautiously working my way up to gas lines--don't want to blow up my home.

Basic car maintenance and repair. Everything from oil changes, brake pads up to replacing intake/exhaust systems, replacing a power steering system, light bodywork.

Metal and fiberglass work. I'm building a single engine kit plane in my garage. Online resources have been vital, and there's no way I'd have gotten anywhere on this project without them.

You need to have a good filter. You're right that the highly polished "Brought To You By Tool Company!" productions with the generic 80s porn music soundtracks are pretty bad, and the "Hey Guys! Like And Subscribe" bros are always the worst. Find the videos without background music and with bad lighting and sound quality where the person is actually grunting and doing the work in real time along with you. They're usually the best.

Do you have a list of videos/channels you've found useful for these projects? I would find it useful and I'm sure others would appreciate it as well.

No particular channel I follow. I just do searches for whatever task and look for the lowest budget video I can find.

> 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.

I second the request for any channel recommendations, I bought a estate of two small houses that needs work. Contractors where I live are so busy and expensive, it's hard to get someone so I'm trying to get knowledgeable.

Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I've seen, usually on the jobsite,

"on the jobsite" is probably the most important point, because then you get to see the actual process as it happens, instead of someone talking about it and a series of jump-cuts of them barely doing anything.

I feel like the quality-vs-accuracy thing happens with websites too; the highly-SEO'd flashy sites also tend to be the most devoid of actual detailed information, and personal/smaller sites have the most interesting detail, but unfortunately search engines almost always pick up the former.

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 anything that comes from Hollywood. Daytime and reality TV are extremely polished but mostly tripe from either an entertainment or informational perspective.

The more time someone puts into a "production quality" video, the more they're trying to sell you something, even if it's just their brand awareness.

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 the idea of computer science to begin with, to hide data and information in a non-executable environment. Someone has the quote that "pdfs are where data goes to die". Give me the data structure, let me ask questions of it, hold it in my hands and inspect it at the pace of my own thoughts. This is not what material provided in "lecture" through "slide decks" provide.

The information density of lectures is also low, why are we anchored to the low bandwidth channel of voice (I could say the same about text writing or a textbook)? Give me the information, let me have it, then let's talk about it in organized discussion.

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.

I'm not sure what you're referring to but I'd be interested if you shared more. I don't know the references you make, though I do know the Alan Kay nano-Dijkstra quote.

I contest your second point, by definition my pensil and paper are not executable environments. My brain is, but this gets us into the game of "how much computer can you simulate with your brain."

Why do we play the game of simulate-the-computer? We've had computer environments for at least 40 years now that do that thinking for us, that answer our questions about control flow or definitions or alternate scenarios. We have them, they were thought up, written up and delivered. Yet as a field we value this stupid idea of working alone without help and don't teach these workflows using the computer as a partner. No, in 2019 if you can't do it on paper you don't know it. That's bullshit, yet here I am and I can do it on paper. I'm just sad for those who come after me and have to go through the same wasteful hazing.

Fundamentally, it's the act of using your brain to simulate the computer that actually teaches your brain how the computer works so that you can reason about it later. In most domains, I find it best to start with doing things yourself, and only move on to the tool-assisted version once you thouroughly understand what the tool is doing for you. That way, you are still reasoning about the underlying system when working with the tool, and can figure out what happened when things go wrong.

Similarly in my domain of computer networking, the best advice I received was 'be the packet' - i.e. visualize the steps/hops the packet would take through the network and where are the decisions about forwarding would happen and what evaluations would be made to make that determination.

Troubleshooting became much easier as I took that advise.

I've written up three different replies now and I don't like any of them. I'm not sure how to respond to this statement. Thank you for writing it.

I fundamentally disagree with the two assertions "it's the act of using your brain to simulate the computer that teaches your brain how the computer works so you can reason about it later" and "In most domains, I find it best to start with doing things yourself, and only move on to the tool-assisted version once you thoroughly understand what the tool is doing for you".

I agree entirely with the notion that ability to reason about the underlying system is incredibly important, but I disagree about the methods to get there.

I disagree with those two ideas because (and maybe we have different perspectives here) but the choice of whatever level is the "base level" or "bottom of the stack" seems entirely arbitrary every time. Is assembly the bottom? Or C? No it's machine code. No it's the physical wires.

I think I should come back to my original comment here and reiterate. I'll clarify what I mean about those "computing environments that do that thinking for us" because I expressed myself poorly.

There are computing environments and workflows that people have built which expose to the end user (the programmer) deep information about the state in which they are working. As a field, as a culture we have not embraced this thinking and rather stick to the simplistic notion of working alone to build understanding for ourselves alone.

Sharing is discouraged (outright banned at school under penalty of expulsion) and difficult requirements are kept in place primarily for hazing purposes rather than pedagogical(I have this from a one-on-one discussion with the course designer at my school). There's this thinking that "I had to go through it, and the system produced me, so it must be good" and to think otherwise would be a recognition of being failed by the system, of missing something. A recognition that you could be smarter now than you currently are.

So to give a concrete example, as my sibling comment talks about "being the packet". Why is the 'network', and 'understanding the network' not realized as exactly the same idea? Why should I ever have the simulate the network in my head? The network is an man-created artifact, my understanding of the network should come from the network, the literal code defining it, not from text file RFCs however well they are written and whatever brilliant ascii art they have (because they ARE well written, and well explained by their diagrams). Programmers should have inspection tools that are borne out of the definition of the artifact they are inspecting.

This is of course being done in other disciplines first. An architect working in Revit is orders of magnitude more powerful than an architect working on pen in paper. In every case where an architect prefers pen on paper it is due to a failure of technology to realize practical or targeted workflow affordances, not due to the superiority of paper.

Working at a more concrete level is generally more effort and gives you greater flexibility than working in the abstract. There’s a tradeoff here, and the right answer will be different for every person, domain, and stage of development. The heuristic I use personally is that I shift to a more concrete perspective when I’m having trouble understanding something and to a more abstract perspective when things feel tedious.

I used tool-assisted incorrectly as a proxy for this scale. There are tools to help provide a more detailed, concrete view in addition to tools that speed up repetitive tasks.

There is some evidence that assistive tools may impede learning, particularly regarding navigation with GPS vs a paper map. If you just want to get the job done, tools are great. If you’re going to be doing similar jobs frequently, it’s probably worth investing the effort to try the lower-level/older method a few times; it’ll make you better at using the more modern methods. It seems that going more than about 2 levels of abstraction away from my original problem gives too little return for the effort, though— Diving into the debouncing circuitry of my keyboard is unlikely to help me diagnose a syntax error.

For learning, I’ll stick to paper and pencil, personally. I could never get my head around double-entry bookkeeping until I started keeping my personal accounts in a paper ledger book. I wouldn’t hire a professional accountant doing things that way, though: I now understand what the tools are doing well enough to appreciate both the benefits and drawbacks.

Similarly, spaced repetition systems like Anki never really clicked for me. It only started to work when I made a physical Leitner box and wrote out cards by hand. I eventually moved to a hybrid system where I computer-generate most of the cards but still print them out and review with physical cards. The extra flexibility of the concrete system let me try thing and figure out what I needed to make a system that works for me; I doubt it’s right for anyone else, but that doesn’t matter.

I’ve always wanted to try that out actually. I wonder whether it’s worthwhile

The better the tool the less you learn from it. There was an experiment, I don't have a link, read about it someplace, about a task two groups of people had to solve on a computer. In one case the tool was merely checking the final answer; in another it was also offering helpful visual clues during the solving. Both groups solved the problem, but a follow-up check revealed that the first one has built a somewhat better understanding of the task, a better mental model of it.

I think this is same with today's maps: it's very easy to find a road with a navigator, but it doesn't leave any lasting impression. Fine if it's a one-time task, but not that good if you want to become an expert on local roads.

With a PDF about data structures you do have the executable environment: the compiler or the interpreter the PDF uses to give examples. The compiler has no manual on data structures, but you have the PDF instead. This is the real thing, by the way, that compiler. An medium that combines both instructions and some interactive thingie that shows the data structure will be much farther from the actual compiler than that poor PDF.

> The better the tool the less you learn from it

This seems too broad to make a general rule. Shall I not use calculators and memorize trig tables to better understand the tools that are these functions?

I would be interested in seeing that experiment, I cant come up with a concrete example in my head which would follow that pattern.

> maps

I agree, I think most people should not have to become experts on local roads, then again, I think you over simplify the issue. I would bet that most people are experts on their local roads. I am in my hometown, I am not when I travel.

I do not know how pdfs are made today, but keynote/power point are generally drawn with WYSIWYG tools rather than post script or latex. I am not aware that I have ever read a pdf or been to a presentation with slides not generated by one of these WYSIWYG tools in my entire life. I have never actually opened one of these files, but I also don't expect that I could. I would bet they are not stored in text files.

Overall I contest each of your points, though I appreciate the ideas. I understand the sentiment but don't agree on the reality. Sorry for the late reply, I'm happy to continue if you have the time.

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.

In another field Wendover is pretty good as well and insightful. But you can probably count this kind of channels on one hand, per topic.

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.

I would like to respectfully disagree wrt Hollywood. I have watched my fair share of indy films and, oh boy, they’re no better or worse on average than big budget films are. And Hollywood can crank out some absolute top quality smash hits... when they feel like it.

Agreed on everything else :)

'Polished' might be an result of large population of audience.

If we take an example from programming:

A fundamental Python or JavaScript course would have massive audiences. As a result, some of the video author would made money from their videos and then keep polishing the videos.

In contrast, a in depth video guide on how to prove theorems in Coq would be very lucky if they have 10 audience...

Not like the Olympic games or video games, where professionals' performance are pleasant to behold. The problem of 'How to' video is it encourages shallow information because the real professionals' work are either too arcane or too boring for the audience.

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.

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)

I have to agree, for example, there are many things about programming and getting a non-academic job that I have learned from watching programming videos and many things at a higher academic level or for contributing to a codebase that I have learned from skills picked up from texts and working with text based documentation. The problem I see with the a focus on learning styles for individuals is that they add additional layers of complexity and ultimately more ethical failures by claiming with little or no proof that different learners have vastly different capabilities in a whole bunch of categories that are innate rather than a matter of practice.

Given that subjects have inherent styles of medium that become more essential as you approach expert and need to interact with experts in an efficient way, if you convince someone they have an innate problem you deprive them of the motivation to become an expert, and you see more and more people going to a junior level and dropping out.

Words are text oriented but if you’re learning the word “blue”, text isn’t going to help you a whole lot. It’ll help you spell it and recognize the word, but it won’t help you understand what the color means nearly as well as a video which shows the word but also several images of blue things.

I’m not at all convinced that programming is primarily text oriented in any case. The underlying concepts are mathematical and logical, not textual. People don’t learn through text or video. Those are mediums. They learn through metaphor and relationships.

So the question is which medium gets those metaphors across most efficiently. Consider, for instance, a binary tree. It’s a metaphor. And I’d be willing to bet most people new to the topic would learn that metaphor better (or at least faster) with a person drawing out a tree and pointing to the path a program would take to add/remove/list/etc. the nodes on the tree than they would seeing a block of code and having someone explain it in text.

I also think this is just how education works broadly.

Whatever information has been printed in ten million textbooks and distributed across ten thousand public schools by a legion of educators is at a stretch mostly accurate.

Our actual best understanding of the universe is whatever was just mumbled in a graduate seminar by a half-asleep emeritus faculty member who doesn’t really mind that nobody heard it, because they’re bright kids and one of them will work it out if they think about it.

It’s a little different in that textbook companies can find authors who may or may not present the information well and then help them with editing and sales.

Also, in general, the very best books can only be written by a subject expert who can coherently hold enough of the subject in his/her head to find out how to express it. It’s rare but exists (tannenbaums operating systems for example?)

Someone highly skilled at one activity may only have enough content for a handful of videos, so there is also a tendency for the best videos to be old, have near zero subscribers, and be harder to find as a result.

For the same reason I usually search for “<brand> 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.

Those unfamiliar with a trade weight presentation of competence too heavily in decision making. This applies to contractors, auto body repair, and so forth. You pay a premium with the shop that has a pleasant waiting area and smiling salespeople yet the quality of the work is no better, even potentially worse, than what the unpolished one offers.

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

mathias wandel comes to mind

lol this is funny because he is definitely better than some, he is absolutely not even close to a master craftsman

what do you call a master craftsman ? his pantorouter build is far above the usual craftmanship IMO. Maybe not the best but clearly worth knowing.

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

"Chinese Cooking Demystified" has the best presentation of any cooking channel I've seen. Simple, clear instructions, and it gets straight to the point without wasting your time. I'm not an expert on Chinese cooking myself, but the recipes appear to be accurate. I tried their baozi recipe and it worked great.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC54SLBnD5k5U3Q6N__UjbAw

Of course, because if something that poorly produced is at the top of the recommendations people must have found it really good.

This beautifully describes a big problem/pain that when people want to buy something they know little about, they have to use other cues, then those cues become more important then the product itself. Maybe it can be solved with a PageRank algorithm, but for upvotes/downvotes?

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

Not surprising: being good at something != being good at teaching this thing. I remember seeing someone showing on TV how to open oysters, he was doing it with his bare hands!!

That makes a lot of sense. I bet it holds true for most things. Though now I'm curious how well it holds up for video editing howto videos

I think the formula is a bit different for software tutorials as they can all easily look very similar (since they are basically showing the same thing.)

Recently I have been watching a lot of blender tutorials and some people are much better than others at getting to the point and describing important details about what they are doing without losing the flow.

If the first30 seconds of the video consist of the person clicking seemingly randomly around in their UI while talking about what they are going to be talking about then I usually just stop watching and move onto something else.

>" There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information"

This is a quote to remember. You nailed it.