MasterClass is seizing its moment
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
MasterClass brings you close to recognized greats, but to an extent your learning will be more about _them_ and only tangentially about the field of interest. There are some MasterClass episodes conveying very practical knowledge - typically the cooking ones - but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking (theory, law, etc).
Systemically understanding a field of interest is a different endeavor requiring more rigor. The Great Courses product is probably the more rigorous (categorically similar) educational tool in comparison to MasterClass. It has less production value (though more than sufficient) and the lectures are from obscure though academically recognized authorities rather than curated celebrities.
_IF goal is to:_
Really learn a new field or skill during the pandemic = The Great Courses.
Watch autobiopic on recognized authority = MasterClass.
For the record, I have both and am affiliated with neither.
I just went through the Hinduism course and it was an amazingly deep insight into how the country of India works and worked in the past when it comes to social fabric as religion is quite tightly weaved into the culture.
It is much much better than any of this fancy high production value celebrity tabloid thing we call "MasterClass". Nothing masterful about it.
I would recommend reading the book 'Being Different' by Rajiv Malhotra to balance out any such courses on Hinduism.
Disclaimer - Indian hindu
Explication of local culture in a foreign language for the benefit of foreigners will also have a slant. But it will be a very different slant, and it's a lot more accessible than the native materials. If the goal is "deep insight into how India works [today]", then Being Different is probably a pretty valuable thing to read even if the scholarship is shoddy. (On which question I have no opinion whatever.)
0: https://devdutt.com/articles/hiss-of-the-pio-bharat-tyagi/
I would very strongly recommend staying away from anything written by this person. Here's a sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/2t8ze3/a_fe...
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/great-utopian-and-dy...
The professor is excellent.
A master class isn't supposed to give you foundational or comprehensive knowledge about a thing. A master class is supposed to
a) give you some random-ish insights from an expert
b) be marketing for the expert
You don't go into a masterclass not knowing how to do XYZ and then leave knowing how to do it. You go into a masterclass with a fairly good base knowledge of XYZ, and then leave knowing a few neat expert-level details about a particular subset of XYZ, but without any practice on actually doing it yourself (unless you're the demo student, but in that case you're probably also nearly an expert yourself).
You get to ask the master questions.
If an author/artist/celebrity you particularly love is on MasterClass, it may still be worthwhile to pay for access to their bit. But you learn much less. I took the Annie Leibovitz photography class and absolutely enjoyed it. I still think about a few things she said. But I don't think it improved my photo portraiture skills at all. If anything, it sort of demoralized me to see the incredible level of input required for portraiture at her level.
That's certainly how I consume lots of similar educational content. I watch lots of videos of people who are passionate and experienced in some discipline simply talking about, demonstrating, or teaching that discipline, even when I have little or no interest in actually learning the discipline myself. For me it's cooking, 3d modeling, filmmaking and photography, musicianship, home construction, electronics, bushcraft and wilderness survival, and many more that I can't recall at the moment.
On top of this, in most of it, he’s surrounded by children who are clearly instructed to act like their mind is blown by some epiphany if grunting and pointing at some squares.
This is interesting, because you could make the same assessment about famous professors at famous institutions.
There were definitely professors that I had that were well known for their research, but were awful at teaching.
Progress may require different weights of the two for different people.
Though I’d say for the cooking masterclasses they meld a little closer towards the middle.
She'd more accurately be referred to as a creative director. In the class, she even says, "I don't even know what camera or lenses I use." You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important, but unless exaggerated for effect, this says something.
"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".
"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
You can get some nice stuff with just an iPhone these days, but there's probably a risk of the software making it look very samey.
> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important
But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.
It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory
Beyond the fact it's a 2015 Macbook Pro I couldn't tell you the specs of the laptop I'm using right now. It just doesn't matter to me what the specs are. So long as it's fast enough to do what I want when I ask it to I don't care. Plus I'm old and forgetful.
There’s always the gear heads in everything you do. They’re rarely the best
which is definitely not unheard of -- particularly for some of us who use a number of different devices any day.
Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.
World-class racing drivers don't maintain their own cars.
Michelin star chefs don't do their own veg prep.
Etc.
I recently heard an anecdote about how Steve didn't like the plastic screen on his prototype, only a couple of months before the phone would go on sale. So he said it would go on sale with a glass screen. There was no glass available in the market at that time which would work. Fortunately Corning had something in their research department which worked out perfectly. Steve's (unreasonable at the time) demand, ended up being the seed for gorilla glass being in pretty much every phone now. He didn't invent the glass, he didn't get in touch with Corning, he just got the right team put together to make his vision become reality.
He did and het got schooled on glass chemistry and composition.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40493737/how-cornings-crash-proj...
You may not need to be a gear head but selecting the correct lense and settings is part of photography art itself. For example capturing the stars, this is a long trial and error process of getting your shutter speed right. I can imagine the photo looking great and directing someone else to capture it but the art is matching the photo to your vision and that comes with using the right settings and using the appropriate post processing.
If you had a couple of hours with Paul McCartney teaching you how to play a guitar you wouldn't want to waste time getting him to teach you how to tune it. If you had a few hours with Da Vinci you wouldn't want him to spend the first half an hour on mixing paint. The same is true for all the Masterclass courses. If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.
Most photography courses have the opposite problem. When a course is basically "Learn what an F stop is and use the rule of thirds for everything and then you'll be an amazing photographer!" it's often not teaching people what they want to know. People already know how to use their camera. When you pay money to take a photography course you want to know how to compose an incredible picture.
Masterclass is not about teaching people the basics. The expectation is that students are already knowledgable to some extent, want to become a master at their chosen skill, and want to learn from people who have perfected it.
I don't think it does. It assumes that people can pick up something useful from listening to someone who's perfected their art regardless of how good or bad they are at speaking about it, which might not be true, but I don't think it assumes anything about quality of the 'teacher'.
I would hope that Masterclass filter out the people who are genuinely bad at teaching. I would also hope that they don't just stick the person in a room with a camera and let them get on with it. They presumably have people on hand to help the celebrity make a good series of teaching videos.
In my experience, the thing that usually elevates experts above everyone else is their mastery of the basics. You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained that they always go right, and usually intermediate practitioners’ failures can be traced to technical rather than conceptual issues.
Generally advice around art I have seen tended to be quite opposite. You need to train creativity as a skill itself. Plus you need to experiment and train courage to "just do it even if imperfect".
If you focus on basics only, you will quit out of boredom and never challenge yourself.
The experts know basics. But you are not supposed to be doing only basics until you achieved some kind of perfection.
However, as students, we need to learn about those details ourselves so we can cross the chasm and make it over to her side. So for nearly everyone, it would be way better to save some money and just read Light: Science and Magic if they actually want to learn how to take a descent picture.
This is one of the things that has baffled me a bit. I’ve really gotten into cooking lately and learned a lot about the techniques of Michelin starred chefs. Things like cooking vegetables sous vide in aromatic court bouillon followed by searing over binchotan. Or A/B testing the optimal number of days to grill a beet over low heat. Or even starch retrograding potatoes at a precise temperature in their skins followed by passing the final result through a lab grade #60 sieve for ultra smooth pomme purée.
I watched the Masterclass snippet for Thomas Keller and nothing like that is in the video. Instead, it’s “add herbs to the water and brine the chicken”. I can find this anywhere on the internet. I want the real stuff. Surely Thomas Keller doesn’t want people to think his life’s work is so easy that it can be learned overnight. It’s the same with Gordon Ramsay. Almost all of his popular videos for how to cook are different than what his restaurants actually do. He even has two YouTube videos with conflicting instructions on how to cook a steak.
I’m not sure if it’s just specific to cooking, but it seems like the experts massively tone down what they are best at for the masses, and it’s a bit disappointing because I want to learn how they actually do it in practice. My best attempt to learn is to instead dig through archive.org for old blog posts from some of these world renowned chefs before they became famous; you can often find some insight into how they actually think about cooking.
Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated, and Chefsteps are also good resources, but I’m not sure they go quite to the obsessive level of world class cooking (Chefsteps used to, but their recent work seems scaled back a bit for some reason.)
Each video is short, maybe 5min, but is pretty dense with info about coming up with a dish. And you get to see little snippets of pro cooks putting stuff together in quiet hours outside of service, how they move and what they do without time pressures, experimenting with execution. Even better: most of the cooks are not yet famous.
Michael Carlsen's episode is one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/3hTW9jfoCBU
The book was too abstract for me. Seeing Voss in the act allowed me to imitate him.
The fact MasterClass ranks first in Google for "what is a shallot?" is pretty surprising.
- maybe many people who don't know what a shallot is would drop $80 for a Ramsay masterclass (kind of like how Gyms primarily profit from non-users).
- that many people who search for "what is a shallot" in fact do already know what a shallot is and are interested in gaining advanced/deeper information about the subject.
Obviously it's regional, but from my UK perspective shallots are not exotic.
I'm not aware that they even suffer from multiple names as do spring/salad/green onions/scallions. Echalions of course, but that's a subcategory.
If shallots are unfamiliar, again, UK, you've spent little time even in supermarket vegetable aisles or restaurants and, surely, are therefore unlikely to actually part with cash a cooking class?
I'm not sure I'd go that far. Shallots can also be confused with scallops. (They're not similar things, but they are similar names.)
I think it's more likely that it means you're trying to read a menu, really.
No more surprising than this MasterClass ad from the nytimes. We know companies hire PR firms to get their products in articles/ads in newspapers and favorable "SEO" rankings.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think having an unfamiliar subject presented to you in an enjoyable and understandable way is actually a really good thing for expanding your perspective. But that's very different from taking a class to gain proficiency.
Of course there's also the other type of "master class" where a master teaches the nuances that set the masters apart from the "merely proficient".
But they're not?
They're using the word as a trademark, sure, but the actual service is obviously intended for people of a variety of skill levels, as thematically connected by being taught by well-known 'masters' (such as the Penn and Teller magic lessons).
In other words, when I buy an Apple computer and it doesn't include any apples in the box, that's not 'paradoxical'.
It's clear in this case that the reason they have famous people is because of the celebrity value.
Teaching is hard. Just because you are an expert in a field doesn't mean you can teach it.
Probably the only one I would actually trust is the Gordon Ramsay one. He knows his stuff, and it's clear he can teach it.
I absolutely love his shows and youtube videos as entertainment, but he will frequently not mention measurements, temperature or cook time, not mention WHY he's doing something, just that it should be done.
He has a video along the lines of "Cheap simple dorm room meals for college students" that requires expensive ingredients like Saffron and fresh mozzarella, lamb shanks.
As Alton Brown's videos demonstrate, this takes up a LOT of time on air.
The problem, I suspect, is that most of Ramsay's videos are time constrained. When he doesn't seem to be time constrained, he's absolutely delightful to watch.
I've watched him teach things like "how to cook scrambled eggs for breakfast" that are absolutely wonderful.
And watched him screw up the timing of the toast. :)
Given his ability with kids and the times I have seen it shine through in videos, I suspect he is a very strong teacher.
I've had a subscription for about eight months now.
Most of the classes are at the same level that "prosumer" hardware is marketed at: advanced amateur or beginning professional.
For example: Daniel Negranu (a poker pro) has a very good class on poker. At no point does he explain how to play the game or what terms like "on the button" mean - that's all assumed knowledge. The target user is a player who can play a solid game already and hold their own in tournaments, perhaps without actually winning the final table.
Thomas Keller's (a famous chef) masterclass is similar: at no point does he explain what a shallot is or how to hold a chef's knife (obscure, seldom-used hooked knives ARE explained if they come up), but he does go into a lot of precise detail about how to cook certain dishes and exactly how to identify the freshest produce or tell when the lamb shank you are braising is done.
>I'd say a master is generally quite well above 90th percentile of people in their field.
The quality of instructors is truly amazing - easily the top 0.1% - most are world-famous masters of their art. Things like acting lessons from AAA celebrities, dancing lessons from the lead ballerina at one of the top companies in the world, music lessons from multi-platinum artists etc.
This sounds like a giant ad for masterclass. I just happen to really like their content and am definitely not paid by them in any way :)
Hope this helps!
FWIW, the best talent usually do not make the best teachers. This is a fact widely remarked upon in the world of sports. Knowing how to get your body to do something well is a very different skill from being able to get another person's body to do something well.
The corollary is that good teachers are rarely great in their field.
Having said that, I watched a couple of Neil Gaiman's lectures and because I love Neil's work, I loved what he had to say.
They're charging close to the same fees as Netflix, yet their production costs are very little. They don't need to bet millions on some show or pilot and become a flop.
They can quickly churn out classes with very limited budget compare to Netflix's budget and keep their paying customers happy.
The standard model is something like $100k up front + 30% of sales. If someone's net worth is in the dozens of millions or more, this really isn't moving the needle, so the major incentive has to be the altruism.
However, will people continue to choose to be altruistic on this platform, when it is turning the creators into the ultra wealthy? One might be less inclined to altruism if you're actually giving a +1 to the world but a +50 to a random company who hosts a website. Many of the people that have done Masterclasses could make an arbitrary individual wealthy and famous (e.g. Spielberg could just say "<random no-name filmmaker> is my protege and all films I work on will be co-directed by them"). The question is how many people are going to make that choice for Masterclass when they could just as well host it on their own website, or put it on their own channel on youtube, etc.
Personally I just love their name. Brilliant marketing. I'm starting to see it used outside of their product.
Sorry, no. The major incentive is keeping one's name relevant/established. Think about the Masterclass as an advertisement for their personal brand and it will make a little more sense to you.
1. Exposure to his story. How did he get there. What did it take? How long? How did he pay his dues? How did he get lucky? How did he make his luck?
If I were a teenager, this would’ve been HUGE. It isn’t a blue print, but it gives you an idea of what these people go through, and how many years it takes to get where they are.
2. Exposure to his methods. How does he come up with jokes? How does he shape a story? How does he harness inspiration? How does he workshop and develop those ideas?
This is valuable to anyone interested in doing what he does. It’s a playbook for getting started. It has the potential to shatter the whole, “I don’t even know where to start” barrier.
“Start writing down funny things that happen” is obvious as hell, but hearing that’s exactly how one of the best in the world does it, from the horses mouth, gives it a different weight.
3. It’s entertaining. Even if you’re not intending to write comedy, it’s kinda like watching an episode of VH1 Storytellers. You get to hear great stories about how things, that you’re intimately familiar with, happened.
4. Pro-tips. This kinda goes with 3, but there are some real gems. He’ll say something casually about how he does X, and you just think, “duh. Of course that’s how I should be doing X. Can’t believe I never thought of that.”
Think about times in your life when you’ve learned something small from a peer and had your mind blown that you’ve not been doing it that way your whole life. Those are peppered throughout.
5. Demystification of the “master”. I actually think this might be the important thing in all of this. These people are just people. They worked hard and put themselves out there. They fail a lot; probably more than most.
I had the same feeling arriving in a start up office in Silicon Valley from a Texas childhood. I had pulled back the curtain, and it was just more people. Sure, they know a lot about machine learning, but that’s not because they’re superhuman, it’s because they spent the last 10 years (PhD) studying that extremely specific topic.
Seeing how human these people are makes me feel like there are a lot of people I know who are every bit as capable of writing funny things as he is. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for them, or that they’ll ever reach his level, but it makes it feel like if they just reprioritized a few things and did it — they might surprise themselves.
—— So, will he teach you the intricacies of script structure, dialog, timing, etc... no.
Will he spark enough creativity and interest that you get off your butt, start writing some stuff, and go find the content that will teach you those things? I think so.
In my mind, Masterclass is like a tasting menu of hobbies / alternative professions. It gives you a feel for what’s involved and what it takes, and then the person can decide if that’s the rabbit hole they’d like to go down.
For example, the violin class by Perlman that I took. Judging by the content alone, I wouldn't say it's worth $90, since it's not that deep, and a lot of the information is online for free already.
On the other hand, I can comfortably afford it. I'll happily pay that 90+ bucks just to hear Perlman talk about violin for a few hours, regardless of the depth.
I'd say the same for the writing courses. Not deep, no special secrets, not going to make you a master. But if you just want to hear them talk about their own crafts and processes, it's also a bearable price.
He has a no-bullshit, get to the point, approach that I liked. He has points on what should a story accomplish, where the responsibilities of a character end, and the nature of the job being to entertain, not inform or lecture. It can directly be transferable to feature creep, single responsibility, etc.
Problem is: It is never easy to achieve a high level, at anything.
And that in turn leads one to Peter Norvig's (posted here many times) excellent Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years blog post https://norvig.com/21-days.html
And, eventually, even he gave up.
Doing really good videos for training is really hard and takes a lot of work. Fundamentally, most people good at it conclude that online isn't worth it and that meatspace pays better.
Covid has flipped that around for a bit, but I suspect it will hold true again within a couple months.
However Tom Morello’s was cool. Both technical and nerdy as well as inspirational. And I’m not a big Rage against the machine fan or anything.
(Granted there are plenty of other resources for such, including a number of Kasparov books)
Don't watch these classes just to watch these classes. Watch them to enrich an active part of your life.
The content is good. Criticisms that the content is often shallow and more about the person than the topic are fair and valid. Your won’t really learn much actual skills apart from maybe the cooking ones. It’s interesting and inspiring content regardless.
You can find comparable stuff on YouTube if you know where to look and are willing to filter though things (lots of great biographic speeches on there and such) but I get their biz model and it makes sense. It’s basically super premium YouTube. They’ve attracted a very diverse and impressive mix of talent too.
I had been producing music for 12 years when I took the class, and I had 30+ years of musical and recording experience to draw from. Also, I use the same software (Ableton Live) as deadmau5 did in the tutorial, so most of the technical elements were immediately usable.
We all have different needs for affirmation to information. My fear from what I've seen is that MasterClass is too heavy on affirmation. I already know I can do it, that's not what I need.
From Wikipedia: His books have been translated into 57 languages and, as of 2012, have sold over 200 million copies. Three of them, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno, have been adapted into films.
It all depends on what your goals are. No-one is forced to take any of the offered classes.
So which author is better? Not necessarily the one that is more difficult to read...
I'd love to learn from him.
It's a joke prediction about the year 2120, not 2020.
Of course, these Masterclass identities are as much celebrities as they are experts.