I had a nice discussion with a member on our Discord server. The topic was roughly, “What role do my videos serve, compared to, say, 3Blue1Brown?”
If you aren’t familiar with 3Blue1Brown I encourage you to look him up. He teaches difficult and concrete math concepts with visuals, unlocking an understanding of topics normally opaque to almost everyone, even those who pass the math courses he covers.
My videos, on the other hand, are boring. They cover textbooks. They introduce concepts and say, “Now go solve the homework problems.”
My intention has always been to allow people a ladder to climb out of their ignorance to a complete and full understanding. In that sense, 3Blue1Brown and I share similar goals. I believe we both want people to get smarter, to gain knowledge and understanding.
I have long detested the science shows on PBS and the BBC for many reasons, the least of which is they often get the science wrong, and sometimes dangerously so. That is, if you were to watch certain programs, you would come to understand so many things that simply aren’t so, that you’re probably better off not watching the shows at all.
The real reason I detest those shows, however, is because they give the false sense of understanding. I have met many, many people who understand but don’t know, or haven’t learned. They can talk about black holes but they cannot reason about them. They can talk about the double-slit experiment but they cannot think about a single-slit experiment, or any number of other scenarios. They can describe how to calculate the integral but can’t actually calculate any integrals.
On YouTube today, there are probably hundreds of good people making science videos that convey understanding, but not knowledge. You’ll come away like I do after watching a 3Blue1Brown video with new tidbits of information and an understanding of one or two concepts. But you’ll also completely lack any skills or any depth of knowledge of the topic, and so you’re left as a layperson, unable to climb up to the status of the elite experts in the field.
So much of math and physics occurs inside your own head. You must fill in the blanks, you must make the connections, and it must be done in terms you understand and ways you can appreciate. So much of it also occurs between the pencil and paper when you are trying to solve problems you’ve never even though of before. If there was another way to learn these things, I am sure we would’ve discovered it. So far, the read-lecture-homework cycle is the one with proven results in turning regular people into experts in their field.
The textbook, in my mind, remains the ideal instrument of communicating knowledge and conveying learning. Someone who is a leading expert in the field condensed as much information as he could into a book only a few hundred pages long. He organized it into sections that build on one another. He gives away just enough information to allow you to try and solve the problems and figure out the rest. He allows you to develop skills seen and unseen until you can gain true proficiency in the subject.
That’s my goal. I don’t want to hand out certificates. I don’t want to convey understanding without knowledge. I want to give people the same skills I have, so that we are peers and together we can find new and interesting things.