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> So much of our information is received through indirect means... I suspect it is worse than that. Much of the actionable information that our civilization re

> So much of our information is received through indirect means... I suspect it is worse than that. Much of the actionable information that our civilization relies upon seems effectively "binary-only" and behind "firewalls" of field practice. Take water sanitation, for example. Exactly how does one set up an industrial-scale water sanitation plant for say, 5,000 residential units? There are design books and guides aplenty. But that aeration pump they say you need on page 315, how are you to know who makes one that will last, and is supported well? It's not like McMaster-Carr shows reviews from customers like Amazon. If you are outside the field, or new to it, then you come down to blindly guessing, getting told what to do by corporate policy, or getting the scoop from the grizzled veterans. This seems pervasive to me, everywhere I turn. There seems to be a Simplifying Assumptions Field (SAF) around not just how information is presented, but how we actually model the information we consume, and it take assiduous effort to turn off in most people. Unless you place yourself into the mindset of "okay, if civilization ended and I could turn to no one else to figure this out, what problems will I run into trying to reproduce what I'm being told here from scratch, by myself?", it is all too easy to blindly accept the kinds of tricks you see on media, and one of the most pernicious tricks is accepting that being told information about something is almost as good as doing it, and doing it well. I suppose this is why I'm not a fan of even most Internet-delivered broadcast media like Netflix/Hulu/Amazon-Video (not to speak of conventional media, aside from books): actionable information, that is, information I can take and reproduce an action/insight/process/result/object/etc. to the same fidelity/quality level (given enough practice), is very sparse in that part of the world. Documentaries are a gray area for me: if I could read a transcript and get the information 2-5X faster, I'd like them more, but I grow restless with the slow presentation in most documentaries (documentaries at 2X speed on YouTube generally can get my attention, though). Maker and MOOC content for example, seems more actionable to me, though of course YMMV. I sometimes wonder if we are too harsh on those presenting information to make the information easily-digestible, and too rigid to accept that sometimes we simply don't know pieces of information or can't get the perfect video shot, and settle for entertainment value instead of actionable value.

skybrian 9y ago
I think of them like movie trailers for the in-depth stuff. (Particularly Ted talks.) Nothing wrong with that, but the problem is when you try to go deeper and there's nothing there.
dwaltrip 9y ago
I mainly watch some of the fluffier informational content like semi-educational youtube videos and documentaries as a blend of relaxation and low efficiency passive learning. I find that information density and technical depth are inversely proportional to my ability watch this content when I'm trying to relax or if I'm tired :) Not a terribly surprising finding, but I'm glad some of this "more digestible" informative content is increasingly available. I'd usually rather watch that type of stuff than most fictional shows. I do like a good novel now and then though.
noir_lord 9y ago
When I was a child I thought BBC science documentaries where amazing but at some point I realised I was just seeing the same material repeated over and over again at the same level with flashier graphics. Same with documentaries on engineering, I've seen 5-6 on jet engines and none of them goes into proper detail.
- Kluny 9y ago
  I noticed when I was trying to learn how to program, everyone seemed to think it was trivial to just take a course online and learn it. Only once you've gone through a few tutorials do you realize how shallow most of them are. If you want to get beyond Hello World level, you need to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college, and there's precious little instruction available at the intermediate level. You have to learn everything on the job whether you like it or not.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Agreed. I've just inherited a legacy software system and I've been hunting down every podcast episode I can related to handling legacy projects holistically and there is a dearth of material. Lots of the real world things I've learnt over the years I haven't even seen in books, at best books are incomplete and at worst hopelessly naive. I've considered writing a book called "The hitchikers guide to software development: Surviving the bosses, the deadlines, the insane team members, this weeks buzzword management style - Towel is optional", I want material on programming in the real world not the idealised "and of course you should allocate time for <insert thing your boss will never understand the benefit off>". Also on a similar related topic, why the hell are software visualisation systems so bloody useless, everything is optimised for creation not maintenance, I know my IDE has the data since it has internal state for things like autocompletion/jump to definition but when I do a "find usages" it gives me a table with each line and the filename...which is a pretty horrible way of visualising it, why can't I see a neat graph and re-orientate it around things like "find usages in this class and it's descendants" or "show me the class with the most usages of <foo>". Even the best IDE's (I use intellij which is generally wonderful) still approach the problem from the wrong side sometimes, even the limited diagramming tools it has are very useful but you can't do much to interact with them.

skybrian 9y ago

I think of them like movie trailers for the in-depth stuff. (Particularly Ted talks.) Nothing wrong with that, but the problem is when you try to go deeper and there's nothing there.

dwaltrip 9y ago

I mainly watch some of the fluffier informational content like semi-educational youtube videos and documentaries as a blend of relaxation and low efficiency passive learning. I find that information density and technical depth are inversely proportional to my ability watch this content when I'm trying to relax or if I'm tired :) Not a terribly surprising finding, but I'm glad some of this "more digestible" informative content is increasingly available. I'd usually rather watch that type of stuff than most fictional shows. I do like a good novel now and then though.

noir_lord 9y ago

When I was a child I thought BBC science documentaries where amazing but at some point I realised I was just seeing the same material repeated over and over again at the same level with flashier graphics. Same with documentaries on engineering, I've seen 5-6 on jet engines and none of them goes into proper detail.

Kluny 9y ago
I noticed when I was trying to learn how to program, everyone seemed to think it was trivial to just take a course online and learn it. Only once you've gone through a few tutorials do you realize how shallow most of them are. If you want to get beyond Hello World level, you need to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college, and there's precious little instruction available at the intermediate level. You have to learn everything on the job whether you like it or not.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Agreed. I've just inherited a legacy software system and I've been hunting down every podcast episode I can related to handling legacy projects holistically and there is a dearth of material. Lots of the real world things I've learnt over the years I haven't even seen in books, at best books are incomplete and at worst hopelessly naive. I've considered writing a book called "The hitchikers guide to software development: Surviving the bosses, the deadlines, the insane team members, this weeks buzzword management style - Towel is optional", I want material on programming in the real world not the idealised "and of course you should allocate time for <insert thing your boss will never understand the benefit off>". Also on a similar related topic, why the hell are software visualisation systems so bloody useless, everything is optimised for creation not maintenance, I know my IDE has the data since it has internal state for things like autocompletion/jump to definition but when I do a "find usages" it gives me a table with each line and the filename...which is a pretty horrible way of visualising it, why can't I see a neat graph and re-orientate it around things like "find usages in this class and it's descendants" or "show me the class with the most usages of <foo>". Even the best IDE's (I use intellij which is generally wonderful) still approach the problem from the wrong side sometimes, even the limited diagramming tools it has are very useful but you can't do much to interact with them.