The YouTube revolution in knowledge transfer (2019)

But, they seem to have replaced the written tutorial or instructions for a lot of things.

I'm one of those people, I learn better through reading. I learn alright through youtube videos, but I find I retain knowledge better through written descriptions and pictures.

I've found since youtube tutorials and knowledge videos really exploded in popularity, finding highquality written tutorials or instructions has become more difficult.

Even a lot of programming stuff is moving into video format, which honestly, I can't learn anything from those. I need to be able to work through something like that at my own pace, possibly work through different sections, maybe experiment to fully understand. Doing that with a video is much more difficult than something written.

Lately, i've been looking into stuff about blender, trying to find anything up to date in a non-video format is almost impossible. There's some great high quality written stuff for blender out there, but it's several years out of date and everything that's replaced it is in video format.

This all being said, I am still glad this all exists and there's so much information so easily available.

So I expect the next generations of athletes to have way better knowledge of the sport and just be way better.

Same in music. I had a drummer friend who had one tape of Neil Peart of Rush. He studied this in and out. Today you can find recordings of all the greats easily and see how they do it. This will take off years of the learning curve.

However, much of my ability to enjoy and use that tacit knowledge is predicated on having other basic skills. I know my way around tools and a shop both because my dad taught me and because I took courses in school.

YouTube (and much of online learning generally) is fantastic to for learning specific, point in time skills that you need to use right away. This is incredibly important and incredibly useful. It is less good at ensuring the people learn the fundamental skills they need to make these sorts of point in time learnings accessible. After all, while I didn't learn how to replace the trunk lock assembly on a 2010 Toyota Highlander in school, but I did build enough things in Junior High shop class that I knew what a socket wrench was and that it was possible to fix things.

These technologies and systems serve different needs, I think its important to recognize that.

I guess the flipside, in my experience it doesn't count as anything in the professional world. Since I back doored engineering, I am currently the technical lead on two projects at my job, both of which have vacant engineering lead positions - making me the defacto engineering lead. So I do the engineers work for technicians pay ($19/hr). I am also the only technician in the engineering dept. as opposed to the lab.

I should have just stuck with programming 20 years ago. Sorry this is a bit of a rambling tangent I went on. Maybe a warning to others that a degree is often more important than the knowledge the degree brings.

IDK how much I saved, but at least 2000 CZK (approx. 80 dollars). Not to mention that I didn't have to wait for the plumber to arrive, which would take a few days, probably.

Gardening reveals a gotcha that I’ve thought I’d like to solve with my own content though. Often content is presented with no followup. Ie “top 10 ways to get rid of squash vine borers” regurgitates the same things as lists online, with very little I’ve seen saying “these worked, these didn’t”. Since it’s often a longer term endeavor with lots of variables, there’s little content that follows gardening techniques through. I’ve thought if I started a garden channel, I’d like to do time lapse videos following real random controlled trials with various techniques to see and demonstrate what works. Maybe a way to have a very boring channel, but it’s what I’d like to see.

  Quality affordable digital cameras
  Internet for everyone
  Search Engines
  Portable screens

Kids these days love to learn via self paced youtube

*note, if you're going to let your kids watch youtube, either put your own anti-advert features in on your network or pay for youtube premium. You tube adverts are abhorrent on their own let alone the constant breaking up of what self paced education they might be getting from it.

There's no doubt that YouTube has made a number of these topics far more accessible. The inclusion of videos along side typical text searches means that it's just as easy to click on an article as it is one of those videos. There's also typically a multitude of options that each might cover the same topic from certain angles and varying degrees of overlap.

These videos are typically uploaded by creators who are passionate and incredibly enthusiastic to share a key aspect of their lives. Many of the popular educational channels have a passionate creator behind them, rather than a flatter more lecture based approach like you might get in typical coursework (which is also on YouTube, but isn't nearly as widely consumed).

Lastly, I can find a 5, 10, or 20 minute video that's focused on a specific subject or topic on YouTube as opposed to going through 60 or 90 minutes of coursework/lectures that are predefined. I can jump from video to video, carving out my own path to learn what I want, rather than sit through a lecture that may not be discussing something particularly of interest.

The Tacit knowledge that's referenced in the article is certainly there in many of the videos on YouTube, but is not the main driver behind this "revolution". It's the ability for anyone in the world to dive nearly as deep as they want, lead by content creators that are genuine passionate about the subjects they cover.

That said, I do credit part of my education to Youtube University. I learned more about virology in details that I never thought about before. Still, I haven't yet complete the virology lectures.

Samo also lists (heart) surgery as an example and I think it would be very hard to learn this at any level of excellence from footage alone. (obviously also hard to test given the lack of volunteers I imagine). But there's a huge tactile component that just gets absorbed by osmosis in a real world setting and that's hard to replicate from a screen. Same with woodworking and some of the other examples given. Even labwork in fields such as chemistry has a surprising amount of 'art' to it that one wouldn't expect just from observing.

There's a reason we don't see modern Bob Vila-personalities on TV as much these days.

> Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it.

There was an article I saw on HN the other day about organizational decay on the internet, in particular, dead hypertext links, and a big example given was a significant number of citations in court rulings go nowhere. With this in mind, I don't believe the problem of losing this knowledge is solved, unless you trust that YouTube won't purge data ever or won't ever cease to exist.

And then young people could take jobs earlier, in their teens, and learn about the world and find out what their interests are instead of regurgitating the same answers for the same old assignments over and over.

Find an interest, turn it into a job, be a bit happier.

Or just study and settle for something, either way I think there should be more freedom for young adults now with the internet.

Education and Instruction still have the vast time difference in dimension.

And its hard to push yourselves through the desert of ignorance to in depth knowledge-which is why online univerty-courses have such a low completion ratio, compared to the traditional "forced to be there"-lectures and tutorials.

"Expert search" startup opportunity?

At some point we can hope that hosting is cheap enough we can all host our own videos, that search engines will find our content (without any favouritism) and that such an outcome will actually be legal.