I'm usually listening to things while cleaning, driving, etc, for entertainment rather than maximizing learning. My experience has been that if someone introduces a really novel concept or historical fact in a talk, it will sink in and stick with me for a long time.

I've found a lot of fantastic material in this university's lectures- http://www.gresham.ac.uk/

I'm working on a search engine to curate a wider range of these, although it's still very much a work in progress-

https://www.findlectures.com/

Some random examples:

- I'm interested in turbine engines, AgentJayZ has a while host of videos taking real turbine engines apart, talking about obscure features like compressor variable valve vanes etc.

- Plumbing, almost everything I've ever needed to know about plumbing has been available from PlumberParts / dereton33.

- Woodworking, I basically learned everything I know from watching people like Matthias Wandel.

- Recently I've been digging to electronics, I have an excellent book "Practical Electronics for Inventors" but every now and again I need to hear a different take on the same things and invariably there is a good video or article which clears it up for me.

What's more, to get the level of detail these guys show for free in book form would mean investing in some seriously expensive books, most of which hide the interesting parts under a lot of uninteresting maths.

It is honestly easier to put a book down open to the right page, in line of sight. It requires no interaction and book authors are forced to write instructions that can be understood primarily without pictures, so there's no pause/unpause/rewind mentality. Books engage the mental tools to infer what happens next from textual description, an ability videos degrade in the viewer. The implications of that effects decision making subtly.

Books are also a welcome release from the trance-like state induced in consumers by most electronic displays.

I agree most books are garbage (like most of everything), the filtering of low quality books has failed. In my limited understanding most of the great literature was written between the 1700s and 1900s anyway. Recent literature does not grant the broad understanding and height over the subject matter.

It is somewhat problematic to rely on multiple youtube videos and find they all have 'small detail' gaps in their perfomances that exist because the video format is to train the user along a generic path of action. Those cracks often reveal a chasm of difference in understanding and in the end, the video is replacing turn-key parts and I'm angle grinding off a stuck cup and cone bearing, even though on the surface the problems look identical.

Here's one reason it's unhelpful; After 4 or 5 people list a bunch of books, you now have a long list of books, and no way to know which to start with, unless there is a lot of overlap - you could just as well google/search amazon and look at ratings, which would give you far better results.

Furthermore, many people tend not to read multiple math books on the same subject, so they just recommend what they know w/o having any knowledge of how that book fares against other suggestions.

If they expand on either their own credentials, and reading on the matter, so you have the context of their knowledge; or give reasons why that book is good, this gives a better basis for comparison.

As an aside; I like the coursera structure of following video lectures with content summaries of what was covered in the video. The advantage is 1) quick reference of material without having to search through a video; 2) if you already understand the topic, you can often just read the summary, and skip the video if you think you already know the material.

Another aside; one problem with books versus videos is often books are long compendia of a field, where as videos are shorter. if you already know topic A and want to learn B, then there may already be a video on topic B, where as a book might cover B in some chapter. For these cases, it might be good to discuss individual chapters/sections of book, but that assumes you can ready them somewhat independently given prior knowledge.

> If some 2-minute video gives you something actionable to do rather than going through a 2-hour chapter in textbook there is no point of going through 2-hour chapter. Knowledge is all about applying not learning the facts and saying it around to your friends I know it feels good but nothing comes out of it in real life.

There are optimal and suboptimal ways to learn things, sure. But some things legitimately cannot be reduced from a complicated textbook chapter to a straightforward YouTube video. You can improve exposition, but that comes with its own time efficiency trade-offs, and you won't meaningfully simplify the material without compromising significantly in depth of coverage. In particular, even extremely good video series like 3Blue1Brown's Linear Algebra have neither the breadth nor the depth to replace the material in any given chapter of e.g. Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right. The exposition is certainly clear, and you can get a nice overview, but you're actually not learning enough to apply the mathematics if you watch a video on it. Ironically, such a video is much more likely to leave someone able to talk about the subject but woefully incapable of actually doing it. The videos that can be used for learning are mostly lectures.

More importantly I think your conception of working through a chapter is incorrect. If you're spending a significant amount of time working through a textbook chapter, you're either 1) actively learning the material and doing the mathematics, not just passively reading it, or 2) you're not prepared for the material, and you're not learning efficiently. Finding a video to simplify the material doesn't resolve #2, it just disguises it. When you learn mathematics from a textbook, you should be applying the material by working through the exercises. You can't immediately jump into e.g. data analysis after learning linear algebra, and you certainly can't do so by watching a video on the subject.

I'm fully with you that replying to these questions with textbook recommendations is unhelpful, but not because they're textbooks. Textbooks are great! The hard reality is that you can't simplify most mathematics into an easily, quickly digested format, especially if you want to apply it. There are simply too many prerequisites for most material and too many unknown unknowns that can leave glaring blind spots. "There is no royal road to geometry" is a saying for precisely this reason.

Sometimes you'll find an article that is as good as a book but other times I read a book proceeding an article and then wish the author would have started by reading some books themselves.

I find other long form content like podcasts or filmed presentations can sometimes hit that quality mark of books too.

Articles / tweets are good for learning the name of a concept I've never heard of.

Books / podcasts / YouTube are a good way to deep dive on the actual concept itself.

Now that it’s possible to produce mediocrity at scale, that process breaks down. How is a beginner supposed to know whether the tutorial they’re reading is a legitimate tutorial that uses best practices, or an AI-generated tutorial that mashes together various bits of advice from whatever’s on the internet?

I know most all of us here are techies and very used to cracking open books and documentation and text tutorials to teach ourselves stuff, but many people are not like that and especially if you're new to a subject, sometimes books just don't help things to click as well for some reason.

There's probably something to do with the way material is structured and presented differently between talking about it and writing about it, but I wouldn't know what to say about it.

I dunno, just a guess because it's an interesting observation to think about.

In other areas, I've learned tons about history and other topics, by reading. What other form of knowledge transfer is better? Video? The books I read would fill thousands of hours of video.

This isn't a question of learning styles - and I do believe that online courses and videos are valuable supplementary materials. But none of them compare in richness and direction to a well written and organized book.