Here's a gem of educator. Check out his other videos.
Strikes a balance between sounding engaging and soothing at the same time.
He uses elegant hand-drawn notes rather than Manim - although 3blue1brown's open sourced visualization library is beautiful too, I think this makes it extra impressive.
3b1b's main selling point is the extreme level of polish on his visualizations - something that takes a lot of time (money) to develop
the sad part is that it takes extreme luck to make it on yt. i wish educating skills counted for more but unfortunately they don't, really.
Perhaps some automation/ai combination where you feed it learning videos and it helps create the "other" content.
The algorithm is very good at rewarding good content. (It’s also good at rewarding other things, but that is besides the point)
I can give you something analogous though: I’m a big fan of old school east coast hip-hop. You have the established mainline artists from back then (“Nas”, “Jay-Z”, “Big L”, etc), then you have a the established underground artists (say, “Lord Finesse” or “Kool G Rap”), and then you have the really really underground guys like “Mr. Low Kash ‘n Da Shady Bunch”, “Superscientifiku”, “Punk Barbarians”, “Harlekinz”, etc.
A lot of those in that third “tier” are every bit as good as the second tier. And both tiers contain a lot of artists that could hit the quality point of the mainline artists, they just never had access to the producer and studio time that the mainline did.
I know these artists because I love going digging for the next hidden gem. Spotify recommended me perhaps one or two of all the super-underground guys.
Ironically more West-coast style, but here is a great example (explicit!): https://youtu.be/BUwJMVKSMtY?t=129
Dude could’ve measured up to the best of the west coast. Spotify monthly listener count? 891.
Algorithms are sadly win-more.
Now I’m just silently hoping a math nerd will feel inclined to share their hidden math channel gems :+)
When my kiddo was a sophomore in HS he decided that he wanted to be an engineer, and I thought that it would be really good for him to learn calc- my feeling was that if he got out of HS without at least getting through Calculus he'd have a really hard time.
So _I_ learned calculus. I started with basic math on Kahn and moved to the end of the Calc AB syllabus. I have, like, 500K points there. And I've watched a whole lot of STEM on YT.
Yesterday I finished a lab with Moritz Klein's Voltage Controlled Oscillators, where I was able to successfully understand the function of all the sections in the circuit.
I've been trying to follow Aaron Lanterman's Georgia Tech lectures on analog electronics.
The issue is that I have other stuff going on in my life. Like, my son studies more than I work at my full time job.
And I don't really have the pressure on me to learn the more advanced math that he's using. In fact, in the couple of years since he graduated HS, I've not really found a use for calc in my day-to-day work on any of the technical things I've done (mostly programming) and so I've lost a lot of it.
So, by contrast, my son who will be graduating as a BS in ME in May, has a far better and deeper understanding of the engineering material than I do.
And it's not just a time issue- I quit my programming job last summer because I have just enough work as a musician to pay the rent, which leaves me plenty of time to do stuff. And it's not that I don't know how to learn at a college level- I taught in an English Dept for 8 years and quit a PhD in the humities ABD.
That's all just my experience.
I love STEM (and trades education) material on Youtube, but I really think that it's missing something to think that you could get " a better undergraduate education in STEM on youtube".
https://www.3blue1brown.com/blog/some2
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnQX-jgAF5pTZXPiD8ciE...
1. With advanced math I feel I retain at the n-1 level. Unless I’m using it, it fades. That’s frustrating but I don’t think it’s the fault of the deliverer.
I do think working through problems has to be part of the practice, I’ve bought workbooks to have something to try to drive the knowledge into muscle memory. It still fades, but maybe not as much.
2. Calculus, in particular seems super unimportant to real life. Stats and Linear Algebra, somewhat similar in Math Level, seem much more applicable. I’m very happy to see Stats being offered in high school now as an alternative to Calculus. For Calculus, you almost need to learn 3-4 rules and someone says “trust me, just memorize these, don’t spend too much time on this.” And you would be able to live a happy productive life.
MOCs are great for access, but they are not, and definitely should not be treated as, replacements. That I am certain will have a net negative result. I'm in grad school and there's something I tell students on the first day:
> The main value in you paying (tuition) and attending is not just to hear me lecture, but to be able to stop, interrupt, and ask questions or visit me in office hours. If you are just interested in lectures I've linked several on our website from high quality as well as several books, blogs, and other resources. Everyone should all use these. But you can't talk to a video or book, but you can to me. You should use all of these resources to maximize your learning. I will not be taking attendance.
I'm sure many of you have had lectures with a hundred students if you went to a large school (I luckily did not). You're probably aware how different that is from a smaller course. It's great for access and certainly is monetarily efficient, but its certainly not the most efficient for educating an individual. MOCs are great because they increase the ability of educators to share notes. We pull from one another all the time (with credit of course), because if someone else teaches in a better way than I do, I should update the way I teach. MOCs are more an extension of books. Youtube is the same, but at the end of the day you can't learn math without doing math. Even Grant states this explicitly.
For both tier 2 and tier 3 its basically the same process. This is for Spotify btw, I have no idea how different the workflow would be for something like Apple Music.
Say the genre you want to dig around in is Hip-Hop. You are aware of Eminem and Mac Miller, and vaguely aware of a guy named Nas. By intuition you'd probably already be able to tell that Nas is more at the edge among the mainline artists.
You click on "Nas", and scroll down to Fans also like. Right now, for "Nas", it is showing "Mobb Deep", "Mos Def", "Rakim", "Big L", "Wu-Tang Clan", "Gang Starr", "Ghostface Killah", "Method Man" and "Common".
This is a mix T1 and T2. "Wu-Tang"s in there along with assorted members, but some of the other artists are much lesser known quantities.
Its a bit hard for me to decide what a Hip-Hop layman would consider the most unknown name here, but I'd venture it'd be "Big L". We click on him, do the same thing. Now we're really getting somewhere, with guys like "Inspectah Deck" and "Smif-n-Wessun". Click, dig, we get a bunch of names amongst which "Lord Finesse" stands out. The Show more at the end of Fans Like is also invaluable.
In total the dig order for me to get to the very bottom of the undeground is "Nas" > "Big L" > "Smif-n-Wessun" > "Lord Finesse" > "Channel Live" > "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs" > "Trends of Culture" > "Brokin English Klik" (358 monthly listeners).
I wouldn't consider each of those going a tier (layer) deeper. As a guy who knows waaay too much about Hip-Hop, I'd separate them into:
- T1: "Nas", "Big L"
- T2 "Smif-n-Wessun", "Lord Finesse"
- T3 "Channel Live", "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs", "Trends of Culture", "Brokin English Klik"
Perhaps "Brokin English Klik" should be in its own T4 and 3 tiers lacks the fidelity to be necessarily accurate. Not sure.
A little shortcut would be using "The Edge of $Genre" playlists. They're the pair playlists to "The Sound of $Genre" (broad slice) and "The Pulse of $Genre" (most popular) generated via everynoise.com, although as that guy got fired from Spotify its up in the air how long those will keep working.
Edit: oh, and if you run into a playlist that caters to that deep underground (in my case, that was "90's Tapes"*), that's worth its bytes in gold.
*https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2H0rNGEBShvHSGebM2m37c?si=...
TikTok's recommendation algorithm is probably one of the best. It puts content first, giving what seems only a passing weight to follower count.
That doesn't mean that having a big follower count doesn't increase you chance to go viral and gain a lot of views, but it is much more likely for great content from a small creator to go viral, than mediocre content from someone with 500.000 followers.
You can also see this in that successful TikTok profiles often have a much higher view-to-follower ratio than something like YouTube.