Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

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.

> 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.

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.

> You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained

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.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers. I believe that is only rarely the case and thus the exception, not the norm.

Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers.

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.

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