I recently stumbled on this tweet from Andrej Karpathy :
# on shortification of “learning” There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It’s like snacking on those “Garden Veggie Straws”, which feel like you’re eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn’t have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It’s not that the quickie doesn’t do anything, it’s just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You’ll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.
So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of “Learn XYZ in 10 minutes”. Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don’t just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get “sweaty”, especially in today’s era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we’ll learn something.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1756380066580455557
After reading this I was reminded of a line I heard in a meetup from a speaker. Which goes something like this:
If not anything I hope I have sparked your curiosity on the topic and that you feel like you want to go and learn more about it.
I view short form learning content the same way, I think the idea for them would be to see if the topic/idea/language piques your interest.
I think the short, quick tutorials, learn x in y minutes certainly shouldn’t be used as a subsitute for the long form text books and one should still strive to learn fundamentals and things the hard way.
The down side about the short form of learning is that it is easy to get a false sense of understanding of a topic.And what is even more dangerous is the “self-proclaimed gurus” creating short-form content who trivialize the subject and learning, to increase their views.
Learning is a lifelong endeavor one that doesn’t stop and mastery in any field takes time and effort. Recognizing this is part of the mastery journey.