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Comment by yogurtboy | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing! I tried a couple of videos and the questions seem pretty relevant and answerable (is there a better word for how a question is worded clearly and the provided answers seem clearly distinct and one of them is obviously correct), which is really hard to do by hand, much less by AI.

I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to differentiate "educational entertainment" videos (I notice a lot of Real Engineering and Economics Explained and CGP Grey videos) and actual education videos: primary-source explainers from teachers and subject-matter experts. The information density in the latter is way higher, and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.

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> and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.

I disagree. Some people might overestimate how in-depth the information is, but the educational value of these videos lies in giving someone a basic understanding of something they otherwise wouldn't have learnt about at all. The lower information density helps making the video easier to understand and thus easier to consume, compared to something like a Havard class.

If you want to learn something in-depth, an actual class, a book, etc. will of course always be better, but if that's neither required nor wanted, the infotainment is just fine.

Yeah, I feel it's not ideal, but at least it's better than doom scrolling, and especially if it's a field that you're not familiar with having some simple explanations is still useful as a starting point

One point is if the end-user understand it is just infotainment and not a concrete guide.For example,People became "experts" on covid thorugh some videos that spread misinformation and became hardcore fanatics.This is just one example of many.

Thank you!!

Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, I actually built out the playlist feature just this morning because it's easier to "show" how Plato works, but I basically just wrote some scripts to get some good enough videos for the demo

If you have any good channel suggestions I'd love to add them :))

One of the things I have on the backburner for now is building a BERT classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all and have a more customizable video suggestion than YouTube has (I actually have 2 accounts on YouTube, just so I can watch some random video on 1 without it polluting my education/learning heavy one)

One thing though, is I actually think both have their merit, while I agree the actual educational content is pretty different, the educational entertainment is a nice alternative to TikTok or IG reels when you just want to mindlessly scroll, I think there still often some useful content there, especially if you don't have any background in the area

> classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all

I'm a bit surprised to only see like 3 questions for a 14 minute video of quantum mechanics. For educational videos with very dense information, is there a way to raise the questions per video rate?

Looking forward to see MIT OpenCourseware videos supported. Right now they are too long :D

Working on that soon! That's actually also one of the reasons I'm limiting to 30 min, 5 questions definitely isn't enough for 1 hour video but I have some fixes in the work for it!

Pm me (email in bio) and I can add some MIT OCW videos and turn on support for longer videos to your account

"educational entertainment" videos are way too many, way too popular and binge-able - much more recommended by YT's AI. Actual education are much harder to discover on YouTube.

I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks.

Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's platoedu or even make me write out some notes. Then I am forced to curate videos and maybe be more productive.

This is a problem I've had too, my current solution is to have multiple profiles on YouTube so whenever I click on a random video one it doesn't pollute my other education heavy account. Also just removing videos helps... but even then YouTube still pushes edu-tainment over harder educational videos.

One of my ideas that's on the backburner is build a BERT classifier to separate between Educational, edu-tainment, and random, then use that to filter suggestions from the ones of people that use Plato

Anyway if you have any good suggestions for better educational content I'd love to add that to Plato over the categories I have now!

Multiple YT profiles is a smart hack! And also, great work on the app!

The YT algo is pretty good - it catches on to what I want to follow and magnifies (ie suggest more content on) that topic. But it never pushes me to educational videos.

I suspect educational videos are best to watch on Coursera. I know people who just open up Coursera and start listening on commutes, etc - instead of infi-scrolling.

The pedagogical (instruction techniques, content structure, etc) aspect in those vids is different. I wonder if there is inspiration for creators/topics from Coursera?

This. I don't think most educational content on YouTube is worth remembering (or the best way to spend your time in the first place).

So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.

I invite you to share your own superior knowledge to the masses via your own YouTube videos so we can learn from you. Until then, I’ll learn from what is made available for others. Post back here once you’ve created some better content so we know where to look.

Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures.

That's where you'll find actual knowledge and not in high production value videos which have to be financially viable for their creators.

It's hardly a secret that Youtube has a problem funding long form videos with a certain depth and instead favors clickbaity, short material. No reason to be offended.

As a rule of thumb I'd say everything with a sponsored segment is entertainment but too shallow for education.

> Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures

Perfect list. Tech talks, university lectures (recorded videos) are almost as consumable as YT edu-tainment videos. Papers, books and textbooks are accessible but requires more motivation.

To the parent comment (zadokshi), if YT content is education, why don't the biggest creators make 5-10 videos on a topic, back-to-back? 5-10 is minimum for learning, example Coursera content - I'm not even comparing to semester/yearlong coursework at schools. Because there isn't a demand or incentive for that on YT.

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