Expertise in the Age of YouTube

As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I&#x27;ve come to general law regarding expertise or &#x27;how to&#x27; videos. There&#x27;s an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.)<p>The majority of good polished videos have the least accurate or useful information. These I&#x27;ve surmised are people that would rather be into video production or youtube stardom than they would being actually good at the subject they profess. Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I&#x27;ve seen, usually on the jobsite, are some of the best practices, tricks of the trade or just informational rich videos you can get. These are people that are not into being youtube stars and are just part of the &#x27;sharing community&#x27; as it maybe was originally envisioned. But as Rumsfeld said, there&#x27;s known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and when you&#x27;re a homeowner watching how-to videos, its very difficult to know what you should know.... so most of them go by, instinctively, the quality of video production as their guide to what they should be doing.<p>Sure there are great craftsmen with great video quality and there are some really poor craftsmen with poor video quality but these are not the bulk of what&#x27;s out there. What rises to the top of search offerings seems to be equally what&#x27;s been marketed (poor craftsmen, high quality, &quot;please like,share, and subscribe&quot;) or what&#x27;s been organically liked (poor quality, high craftsmanship).<p>For the tradesmen out there dealing with homeowners, its now sometimes a bit of an uphill battle after homeowners have done their &#x27;youtube&#x27; research and have determined how hard the job they&#x27;ve asked you to bid is going to be.

Skillful coaching is important, but a big part of it is simply accountability: knowing that someone will check on your progress at regular intervals and that you need to do some work in between interviews to not look like a fool.<p>That&#x27;s the concept behind the &quot;accountability partner&quot;: someone who is not an expert into what you&#x27;re trying to achieve, but who bugs you regularly to make sure you&#x27;re moving forward.<p>After searching for &quot;accountability partner as a service&quot; I couldn&#x27;t find anything other than weird marketing websites that looked more than a little scammy, so I built a simple tool that sends me an email everyday for each task defined in the system, and that lets me record progress by responding to those emails.<p>The concept is akin to Jerry Seinfeld&#x27;s productivity hack: &quot;don&#x27;t break the chain&quot;, meaning you need to do something about your craft every day. If you skip a day, the chain breaks and restarts at zero.<p>The effectiveness of this is surprising; the accountability system can&#x27;t assess the quality of the work in any way and isn&#x27;t even a person that I could disappoint, but having to respond to an automated email every day to log my progress and store ideas, etc., pushes me in ways I would never have expected.

I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it&#x27;s one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills).<p>The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidly deteriorating due to this democratization of information. Credentials mean less today than they ever have in history. Specialists will have to be on top of the ever-expanding spigot of new information in order to remain competitive and justify their fees in a time when anybody can just search Google&#x2F;Youtube for the answer.<p>None of those would be problems if workers weren&#x27;t financially dependent on their jobs, such as if we had a universal basic income. But since most of us our financially dependent on our jobs, we&#x27;re basically in an arms race against each other to the bottom. Stay at the bleeding edge, or get replaced by a more financially desperate harder working 20 year old from an Asian country who learned everything you know from Youtube &#x2F; the internet. Many will instinctively deny this now, but just watch how this continues to play out over the next 10-20 years.

I think it&#x27;s especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started and people making professional quality works in said area has gone down significantly too.<p>For instance, my go to example are video game mods and ROM hacks. In the olden days, these communities grew quite slowly, and it took a fair amount of time for people to get to understand the workings of a new game&#x27;s engine and how it could be built upon.<p>And you can see this if you look at Super Mario 64. In it early days, mods were really basic, and even the fanciest ones looked super primitive by today&#x27;s standards:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U</a><p>It then took years to go from stuff like that to more advanced original game mods like Super Mario 64 Star Road, and even longer before ASM coding became something many people understood and used for custom enemies, bosses, gimmicks, etc (like in Kaze Emanuar&#x27;s current works).<p>Now contrast to Super Mario Odyssey. It took just months for mods to get made for that game, and under a year for fancy looking ones like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg</a><p>And even that&#x27;s a slower example. Since then, we&#x27;ve gone from seeing modding scenes take years to develop, to seeing them a week or two after release, to in some cases seeing mods getting made BEFORE the game officially hit store shelves altogether.<p>Seriously, Smash Bros Ultimate got mods before the game was available to buy, all based on leaked copies posted online.<p>Outside of games, same thing happens in web development too. New framework pops up, professional looking sites&#x2F;apps&#x2F;whatever get made in the first week. It&#x27;s gotten to the point that those jokes about looking for &#x27;rockstar ninjas in [new programming language here]&#x27; may not be jokes anymore.<p>But yeah, the quality baseline goes up significantly quicker now.

This speaks to me. I do a bunch of DIY work on my cars and various maintenance on my house, thanks to youtube videos, that I highly doubt I would have ever had the skill or confidence to tackle in a time before the internet. Many of these things are literally less work to do myself than the hassle of getting someone else to do it, let alone the cost. But in an earlier time, absent knowing someone who could teach you the skill, it just wouldn&#x27;t have been an option.<p>Despite the problems platforms like YouTube cause (or enable), I certainly wouldn&#x27;t want to do without it.

I have been starting the process of learning hand woodworking by watching the likes of Paul Sellers. It is amazing how much knowledge there is available on YouTube about craftsmanship. Combining YouTube with niche web forums multiplies the learning power. I&#x27;m already able to dimension boards with nothing but a hand plane, a combination square, a depth gauge, and winding sticks. I&#x27;m just at the start of my journey but I&#x27;m so thankful YouTube and all these creators are out there to introduce me to this new hobby!

I&#x27;m interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning.<p>What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?

In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It&#x27;s still what I use today.<p>Roll forward a couple of more years and I&#x27;m working on my Ph.d. and have the thought that someone must have done more optimization on keyboard layouts: Meet <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkweb.bcgsc.ca&#x2F;carpalx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mkweb.bcgsc.ca&#x2F;carpalx</a>. That inspired me to learn QFMLWY, something I have yet to do.<p>Roll forward to a few months ago and I&#x27;m experiencing some slight wrist pain; a coworker uses a Kinesis Advantage and recommends it. In true punk style (and unhappy with the Kinesis&#x27; outdated appearence), I endeavor to find a superior product. I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal.<p>This is a niche path involving one skill set: Improving the human-keyboard interface. And, it involved real-world interaction with people and the resources that people on the internet have provided. I&#x27;m convinced that either only in-real-life (IRL) or only online interactions would have inhibited my growth in this domain.<p>I&#x27;m sure that this same concept applies to every web development framework or conlang or beauty style or any human endeavor. As an aside: These ideas are also related to why I&#x27;m confident that an artificial general intelligence developed in the vacuum of the internet will not succeed relative to a competing technology that is able to benefit from both offline, interactive experiences and also online information trawling.

I’ve been working on my YouTube educational channel html&#x2F;css&#x2F;design (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;FollowAndrew" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;FollowAndrew</a>) for a bit now. Pickup is slow, but it’s been fun helping a greater audience learn new skills!

One project that anyone reading Hacker News ought to not be afraid of taking on is that which involves under-sink plumbing. There are so many valuable instructional videos on YouTube that will show you how to do the work correctly. If you mess up, the materials are inexpensive and easily replaceable. The risk of doing the work incorrectly is relatively low. The greatest cost is of personal time. You&#x27;ll end up making several trips to a supply store if you aren&#x27;t prepared.<p>It&#x27;s a valuable skill to have that will save you thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Give it a try next time you need work done.

A superb reflection on the accelerated potential technology affords learning.<p>I would add an additional note that the choice of topics to dive into is now both more vast and accessible than it has ever been.<p>Not only can you learn what you want to, but you can stumble across that which you&#x27;d never thought of or scarcely knew existed and discover more about yourself along the way.<p>When you search for things to learn you&#x27;re merely bolstering your predisposition, but when other things emerge before you and stick, something altogether more interesting is taking place.

&gt; And it feels like a category error to ask which accountant, or political pundit, is the Greatest of All Time, but the answers surely matter more for the human project than the ones for Scrabble or League of Legends—where data and answers are readily available.<p>It feels like a category error because it <i>is</i> a category error. Competitive games have a finite set of explicitly defined rules and win conditions; jobs do not.<p>&gt; Even small changes along these lines would be a big deal. Imagine if each of us got as good at our jobs as the average teenager is at Fortnite.<p>I think the average person is already probably better at their job than the average teenager is at Fortnite; it&#x27;s just that the &quot;win conditions&quot; for an average person at a job are significantly more complex and can vary quite a bit between different people and situations.<p>For example, besides whatever people themselves consider to be a &quot;win&quot; at their jobs, there&#x27;s also things like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2012-05-29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2012-05-29</a>

Me and my friend are fixing, renovating old bikes as a hobby. A rule of thumb is that each repair requires watching 2-3 youtube videos first.<p>We are joking that people no longer are flying to the Moon because NASA have lost all of the videos of how to assemble a rocket. ;-)

What &quot;absurdly demanding online game&quot; is the author referring to in the first paragraph ? He mentions Overwatch later in the article but in another context so I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s the one he meant.

I love imagining what Johnny5 would be if it had youtube.