Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts.
Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available and how some people will tend to gravitate in different directions.
7 year old daughter is learning to knit and forgot how to "cast on" , so she jumped on YouTube to search a how-to and had one of the methods figured out in 20 minutes.
So, perhaps it does have more to do with the availability of such edutainment since they were very young -- we've been on this path for 5 years or so and it has just become "the norm" if we are to use YouTube as a household.
(I will admit that as Dad, my time on YouTube is split between learning about whatever new hobby has peaked my interest , currently SDR related stuff, and car related material for fun. I've also fallen into the LTT universe, but am aiming to back away because it, in my opinion , is just providing that mindless watching which I aimed to get rid of around 16 years old (ie, decades ago) to better use available free time.
Seems everyone is just different, but the resources are for sure there!
Reading stories to children for example. If the story is interesting, the child will want to know how the story goes on. As soon as they can read, they will be tempted to grab that book and find out.
I'll elaborate this evening, but as a lower poster said, it is all rolling dice and everyone is certainly their own beast in their own cage. I will gladly share how it seemingly transpired (and I feel, more important, the reasoning behind focusing on such things).
In very short, I'm a huge believer that we seriously underestimate what small children are capable of understanding at you get ages, and have always felt that exposure to 'all the things' helps provide needed prospective about all that is available in life.
They have both absorbed enough surface level interest and actual information that when watching a video about a semi related subject, they find themselves referencing OTHER information they learned from another video/source and click the pieces together like Lego -- you can see their eyes light up when this connection is made in their head, and I feel it starts really showing that information across the board is solely a piece to a way way bigger puzzle, and that although learning about seemingly disconnected things in a jumble can often find itself existing the jumble and finding its place in APPLICATION in life somewhere.
This seems to really nail home the point that anything, really, may be worth learning because no doubt a real world use case may arise sometime in the future.
Again, I can write more when time allows, but that's the reasoning behind it all. We also do a ton of projects where we can actually, partially at least, use a lot of the things learned from videos and transcribe them from thoughts alone into tangible end results - beyond important for everyone of every age, IMO
That's "piqued my interest". It's a homonym. Also used in "fit of pique" and, very rarely "piquant". It's a word on its way out, but I like it.
Close, V E R I S T A B L I U M
(For those not in the know, this is an in-joke originating at least from the Hello Internet podcast, with CGP Grey and Brady Haran. "Veritasium" is, indeed, the correct spelling.)
Ol' Dirk Miller! Heckuva guy!
But that there's that other guy Derek Mueller who has totally copied his channel.
Now there is excellent serious educational material on youtube, stuff like khan academy, etc, but thats not what people are watching for leisure.
If youre going to learn something useful, it is going to be difficult - e.g. it requires work on the part of the watcher. Gen z isnt just learning physics by idly watching veritasium videos.
Technology Connections will provide deep understanding of the refrigeration cycle, how different types of gas lamps work, how heat pumps work, and how developing film works.
And those are just the video series I can remember.
It's not directly equipping the audience with professional skills for a scientific career, but it is generating interest in science, and indirectly encouraging people to expand their own STEM skills and knowledge. I'm sure that dozens (hundreds? thousnads?) of people have gone into mathematics at least in part due to an interest generated by the likes of numberphile, etc.
> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free.
Now if a kid watching videos that are long form treatments on specific subjects and are following allong with a pen and paper doing practice problems, sure, thats a case where youtube might give you some serious skills, but that is a tiny fraction of kids and those same kids would have been doing the same shit with textbooks at their local library. Youtube is waaaaaaaay closer to being purely a distraction than to being something we could consider "educational" in any serious sense.
The thing is, when people are motivated to do something, they'll learn what they need. Otherwise, not even school can force feed students into learning those things.
Are you sure, that's what the original comment said?
I interpret the quote you posted as "they can already know everything about their passion when they leave school", which would mean that YT is not a replacement for school - but an addition to it.
And that's exactly what kids need. They can wait to hone rigor and scientific intuition. As long as the interest takes root, they'll find their way.
Veritasium is cut in the same cloth as Bill Nye (and Mr. Wizard before him), and we anecdotally know Bill inspired folks to pursue STEM.
> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free.
I think he’s right in theory, but in reality kids just watch what’s entertaining.
And is that because of infotainment?
They're totally different things, obviously...
> you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject. Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.
I disagree with this sentiment, even though what you say is technically true.
"Deep understanding" can't be imparted, not in school, not in a video. Here we all know plenty of engineers with degrees with no deep understanding of the programming languages they use daily. Deep understanding can't be imparted, you have to go and grab it by yourself.
"If you want people to build a ship, don't talk to them about sails and wood and tar, tell them about freedom."
Those edutainment videos have sparked my curiosity and help me appreciate things about the world around me I wouldn't have noticed. For really deep understanding, I may have to let this curiosity propel me into a book. Going into a book about urban design after a "Not just bike videos" with curiosity and an intuitive although shallow understanding, is much better than sitting through 50 minutes of a boring and bored professor drawling about something, which was a lot of my college experience.
You are right that Youtube can't replace college, or making experiments yourself, or reading a book. It's a different thing. But, specially for kids, this is how education should start, and it may be way more fundamental than the other pieces.
You are also right that if kids, or anyone, stays on the level of watching Youtube videos, not much is gained. But still, that edutainment can be a great part of education.
- An instrument/songwriting
- Music Production
- Video Production
- DevOps
- Network Administration
- Any kind of programming (Frontend, Backend, Game Development, Assembly, whatever you can think of)
- Vehicle Mechanics
- Electronics Repair
- Maths
- Hair and Makeup
- Costume/Fashion Design
- Fitness/sport coaching
- Graphic Design
- Bookkeeping
- CAD Design
- Carpentry
- Plumbing
And these are just the ones off the top of my head. They might need to get the piece of paper in order to legally practice, but the kids out there who like delving into how things work (and they do exist) could absolutely have all the knowledge they needed to work in a professional capacity and often do. Proficiency and reputation trump certificates.
are MIT lectures "factoids" now?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mit+opencoursew...
> Gen z isnt just learning physics by idly watching veritasium videos.
This is a massive generalisation. Sure, I'd probably agree with you that a large cohort are watching a lot of trash. But there's a sizeable amount who are putting the work. And I imagine that the percentage of those putting in the work probably increases the closer they are to the poverty line growing up.
Yes, I omitted saying it's mine, not because of any nefarious reason. Just didn't realize it was necessary to simply ask an opinion of one person about whether it would have the intended effect. And in my opinion it would actually be counterproductive to reveal that I made it.
My entire comment history has been one of discussing in good faith and standing up for what I believe in. You prefer that I back down and agree to something when I can correct the misunderstanding. That’s your prerogative. I see nothing to be ashamed of.
If someone wants to misinterpret what I say or take it out of context, I can’t stop it. Most celebrities cause far worse outrage when they get famous, I am rather careful with my words. I have made a decision for myself long ago that integrity and standing for what you believe in, in good faith, is worth it to me more than attempting to be too political. I could be wrong. We’ll see.
I was simply interested in the opinion of a thoughtful high schooler who is aware of what his friends are doing. I want to help fix society, including teenage education. This is how I do it — using software. I encountered an opportunity to ask an unbiased question and I took it — without biasing it with “Heey, what do you think of MY project that I clearly worked hard on?” That wouldn’t be neutral and thus defeat the purpose of asking the question. Reading into this that I am somehow looking to promote it is wrong. It would be a terrible way to promite, anyway. There can be other reasons for asking a question deep inside a comment thread that hardly anyone sees, than low key trying to draw attention to a project for purposes of promoting it. Besides, it isn’t even launched yet.
In fact, sometimes you don’t WANT the person to know whether what you’re asking about is yours, so they can give a more honest assessment without worrying about hurting your feelings. It should not matter, and for some purposes it shoild be disclosed, whether you made it.
As for being accused of shilling… sounds like the crowd accusing you was pretty extreme. The definition of a shill from Wikipedia is indeed nefarious:
In most uses, shill refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers, participants or "marks" the impression of an enthusiastic customer independent of the seller, marketer or con artist, for whom they are secretly working. The person or group in league with the shill relies on crowd psychology to encourage other onlookers or audience members to do business with the seller or accept the ideas they are promoting. Shills may be employed by salespeople and professional marketing campaigns. Plant and stooge more commonly refer to a person who is secretly in league with another person or outside organization while pretending to be neutral or part of the organization in which they are planted, such as a magician's audience, a political party, or an intelligence organization
It was innocent and well-intentioned. You just misunderstood the intention. If people say there is a systemic problem X in high school, and a high schooler confirms most of their friends have problem X, what do you think is more well-intentioned:
1) Promotion: Hey high school student! I built Y! Check it out! Tell all your friends! I think it might help them! Or…
2) Feedback: Hey high school student, do you THINK this COULD help your friends or not: Y
My purpose was 2. I sometimes do 1, but here that was not my intent. When I’m promoting something, you know it. Now that you highlighted that I made it, though, it defeats much of the original intent. So now it has turned into a conversation about whether people can have purposes other than promotion. That’s fine. It is somewhat useful for me to get this straightened out. I won’t get an unbiased answer anymore, but I can get them elsewhere when I do case studies and beta testing.
bottom line: doing a clinical trial or experiment or beta testing or asking someone’s opinion isn’t always primarily about promotion.
Mixing all these metaphors isn't helping. It's like you're flailing for some justification. You act like you're sure you're in the right, but you keep fighting with people. You could just move on without digging any deeper. It's long past obvious your arguments aren't persuasive. This isn't the behavior of someone who's genuinely that confident.
You might not think a thread deep in HN matters, but I will remember it if any teacher friends mention your app.
Yes - I am confident I am right. I am choosing not to back down and acquiesce to a mistaken position. You take that as the opposite of what I think. I clearly didn’t convince you — but I did manage to clarify it.
You have a strange idea of words like “fighting” and “shilling”. My asking a question in the GP isn’t “fighting” or “shilling”, any more than the original one was “promoting”.
This is a thread deep inside HN forums, one of many, and mostly involves me and you.
I’d like to claim I’ll remember it, but honestly, I doubt it. Most of the stuff we write online is forgotten, and hardly read by anyone. It is just a cathartic process of self-expression. When the AIs will generate 99.999% of content online, your concerns will seem quaint. No one will care. I would take a bet with you that this thread won’t rank highly on google for any of the terms — but I do believe you when you say you - a single person - will remember it years later if encountering teaching.app
But somehow the sibling comment opened an interesting rabbithole — if you happen to scroll through its subtree I wonder what you think (since you’re the one I asked hehe).
PS: By asking this, I am not promoting rabbitholes! :)
(Possibly as simple as how many you know of compared to how much of the school population you know.)
I know a kid who is a big fan of any kind of sports. He is constantly watching youtube videos that are basically stats and clips packaged up with some slight humor but very little analysis. This kid has basically an encyclopedic knowledge of sports... stats. All from youtube. I was also like this to a degree as a kid, but I got my info from stats books/magazines/newspaper sports sections. So in a way the outcomes are the similar -- young kids love looking at the numbers -- but I can't help but feel icky about the way youtube can just lock a kid in for hours and hours.
* Example video about Tim Lincecum that basically enumerates the stats of his career but doesn't discuss anything else -- his personality, his pitches, his unconventional delivery, etc. Just clips (that repeat) and stats. It's bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo
There's not though. Most of what is narrative is cutesy jokes. Comparisons are just... stats. If you re-watch with a critical eye you'll see it's basically a formula: in these X games he pitched this well, then he'll compare him to some historical figure on stats alone, over a clip or a screenshot of baseball reference. At some point he just reads passages off wikipedia. There really isn't any subjective thought being put into it, it's just a clever packaging of google searches in a lot of ways.
My heart breaks when I see nephews playing dumb mobile games and watch youtube videos of someone playing games, all these interrupted with multiple full screen ads which they also diligently watch. Fuck these platforms and all their creators.
YT is full of good content but the good content is not addictive or viral and the viral addictive content is not good. There might be a few kids that will gravitate toward substance but I have yet to see one. If we visit a home with YT enabled the kids are watching hours and hours of trash.
Then rotate video selection powers to each family member so that there's an equal mix of Mr Beast and Practical Engineering/Vertasium/Tom Scott etc.
But, those who do put some effort on actually making good use of this platform definitely has huge advantage than our generation growing up though. So, in that regard I'm still optimistic that our future generation will be much smarter than us.
If they're not interested in that area (and mine aren't), then there's not much you can do, even if you spend a lot of time and effort trying.
Normally I'd say let them grow, have their own agency and learn the world in their own eyes with parental supervision. But right now, the media and culture are so highly toxic and degenerate, that I say it's our duty as parents (and humans) to shield them from that, and instilling positive values.
Maybe they lurched out and attacked or assimilated someone when a new trending channel appeared that urged such activities.
I joke but it really is a bit spooky how plausible the Borg are today to the point that I can imagine what it would be like to be part of them. It’d be like scrolling TikTok but with Neuralink.
Anyone good suggestions?
Smarter every day
Practical engineering
For the competitive athletes, all attack.
Maybe something with Scratch, but id argue they should be doing scratch, not watching someone else create content.
Any peppa or similar extremely benign cartoon if you are reinforcing a foreign language (Spanish, French, Italian, etc)
https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay For good deep dives into international politics.
https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel For good videos on civil engineering.
I would recommend these channel for older children who can digest the information. They are all understandable for to the layman.
Programming - freecodecamp
AI - Andrej karpathy
Science - acapellascience
Kids are different. I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that.
But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.
I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopular but intelligence is highly genetic (at least 50% of outcome determined by genes).
But people usually aren't talking about intelligence. They're talking about success in life, be it career or school.
Our oldest old had a terrible time at math, and the teacher thought she was doing well in the start because she never asked questions.
But the first practice test showed otherwise. After that we made a point to ensure she understands math. It was a rough couple of months at the start of the year, but that's paid dividends and the last 5 have been pretty smooth.
She didn't get smarter. And if she didn't have parents with the time and ability to help her, she woulda flunked.
The effort at home involved gentle encouragement and keeping him focused on the phonics homework. It wasn’t tough on him or us but it has restored his confidence and he’s keeping up with his classmates now.
This is totally the kind of problem that could have festered and led to poor outcomes for him in all of his schooling if we’d ignored it.
I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.
If you think of (defending against) all those negative effects, I think the impact of a parent goes well beyond the basics you mention. That goes even further when you consider all other skills that one can foster that benefit a future member of our society.
Most kids grow up to be average adults with average jobs doing average things. No amount of Smarter Everyday is likely to change that. And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.
I'm not sure an astronaut is the best profession to get your point across here. The resume of an astronaut is normally off the charts. They put in an absolute fuck ton of work, it's definitely not luck of the draw.
My point was that generally there's no parenting method that produces a specific outcome very consistently. Kids are generally going to end up how they're going to end up no matter how many Baby Beethoven CDs you make them listen to. It's just easy to fool ourselves into thinking that "this method works" because we don't see the million other people who end up the same way as a result of a different method.
Everyone hopes that their kids will be exceptional.
You just have normal kids, get over it.
What I found most interesting is the fact that Spielberg's father was apparently a skilled computer engineer who worked for the IBM. There was a scene in the movie where Spielberg's father tries to show his kids the beauty of engineering while building some simple structure from wooden sticks but they all are disinterested and shortly run away. There is a scene where Spielberg's father tells teenage Spielberg that it would be better if he ditched this filmmaking hobby and started doing something more meaningful with his life.
Steven Spielberg did turn out to be exceptional but in a completely different way from his father.
Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. Plus it’s fun to see people explore the world. We’ve been fascinated by this stuff since the beginning of humanity.
Reality videos and reality TV all show elements of how relationship dynamics work. They often are fraught with bad narratives, but they model conflict and resolution between people. This can be helpful as a guide to understanding human interaction.
I’m not saying that it is all bringing value to their lives, but there is something inherently interesting about the content they’re consuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be.
The challenge for you is to go into their world and understand what they value. You might even change your definition of the word “value”
For example, I know my younger cousins like certain topics that they cant get enough off, but if I see them busy with exams or homework I hold back on pointing it out.
The last 7 months of real travel, or watching YouTube videos of travel? Feel like you’re making a big leap here.
Same thing with travel
There is no doubt however that it has pulled off the magic trick of incentivizing thoughtful and knowledgeable people to produce good videos. This seems as close as we’ll get to a mutually beneficial arrangement in the attention economy.
How did you try to do this? This sounds like a horror story I'm scared of happening when I have kids.
OTOH
I have a family member who is into those "shallow" videos but she is tuning her social media posts to be more interactive and her posts are "very extra". Many of these vloggers do a lot of behind the scenes in depth trade secret videos once in awhile and she seems to find out video trends. Her hobby is content creation, selfies, and making homevideos that other people watch.
Reminds me of my dads and uncles lugging around cameras at every social function and upgrading to digital but she's now at the level of compressing it to something quick and watchable and a slideshow of what happened rather than a full recording like it was a documentary. She's gotten the engagement factor dialed in.
It's nice to have her taking and editing videos as that's something of worth. Taking boring events (get together) where a straight video or group photos is the usual and making them personalized and basically something people want to add and to share on their wall if they were at those locations.
Otherwise she's been watching a ton of home-based businesses walkthroughs and interviews with small business entrepreneurs. Those are big in niche communities and these shows are in our mothertongue.
She does bounce ideas off me a ton for business ideas. She's more interested in retail ideas and wanted to advertise using social media than is interested in selling her services as a social media person.
She's in her 60s. I'm in my 30s. She's more tech literate than me in regards to social media use even if I work at one. She's also more in tune with what people my age range are interested in and willing to pay for.
If she does go into business I don't mind funding her, lol. She has a way of breaking into trends before mainstream moves into those trends.
Science and math and other cool stuff might help round out young people but I don't push that stuff to my older family members. I'm the "youth" and none of my generation as kids yet. I don't see a reason to push the older folks into those subjects on YouTube. I might send them gardening tips, ideas, and a boring lectures or someone building out some fancy yard feature but I doubt they sit through it. I did send some tree planting advice and they fell asleep to it.
Very opposing to what people push to youth. But there's still value in "wasting time" I think
I just delete them from my homepage and they stay away for 30 days. If they return I only notice it because they sneakily start eating my attention again. Maybe there's a setting that doesn't make them return.
When I grew up, and computers and the internet was new, we were mostly using it for entertainment and fun as well. I learned programming early, but I was an exception at my school (now lots of kids learn programming at an even earlier age). And I still wasted a lot of high school playing Anarchy Online (MMORPG), to the point where it affected my grades.
I'm not sure the value they'd get is the videos they watch regularly.. but just the knowledge/habit/skills around finding a video to help learn a new topic or solve a problem.
I've heard that they're losing the skills around using a general purpose PC though, since they're so used to smart phones, iPad and simple ready-made web solutions for everything. Not sure that's a big problem though.
Guess who's become a successful software engineer and happy human as a result?
Don't dismiss what your kids are into because you don't understand it. Their peers will, and their peers will give them money for it.
I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc.
I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. I see the same things in their friends and classmates. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
I’m sure there are a few youths who are using their time productively and it will pay dividends for them. But, from what I’ve seen, the vast majority aren’t interested.