Books exist. A well-written book usually condenses years and years of knowledge and experience into a few hundred pages.
Honestly the modern trend of having to make all educational content always engaging, with immediate rewards at all times seems wrong to me. Sometimes, its better to just chug through a book and boring formalization for 50 hours until you get to a point of clarity, because getting to the same knowledge via dozens of half-complete blogs and online sources takes MUCH more time in the long run. Books assume you will read the whole thing, so they build up the mental framework "breadth-first", so it seems less useful until you get to a sufficiently high depth. Once you get over the hump though, its great. With quick online learning, they give you a few good "depth-first" dives, but leave the foundational "knowledge/concept tree" underdeveloped.
Books aren't distracting, they aren't internet enabled and make it easy to just sit down and go through page by page. Online stuff is usually a great supplement if you miss some intuition but it hasn't quite replaced books. Everyone is looking for some way to make the fundamental act of paying attention and learning easier.. but paying attention IS difficult. That is why its valuable.
No. Books were the most cost-effective medium for transfering knowledge for a long time, but that's in the past. They were never the most efficient - a few hours of one on one chat with domain expert, possibly with a whiteboard (or, failing that, some sand and a stick) at hand, could easily be an equivalent of ten times as much time of reading a book. Now that there's negligible difference in distribution cost between a flat text and a full-blown multimedia presentation, sticking with text is simply a waste of time.
I agree that learning directly from an expert is much more efficient. A multimedia presentation can be just as good as a book or better. Its just that as of today, I haven't seen many websites that match the depth and completeness of books yet.
3blue1brown is awesome, many people are writing linear algebra ebooks, quantum country looks great for quantum computation but as of _now_, none are complete or comprehensive the way a textbook is.
> I haven't seen many websites that match the depth and completeness of books yet.
Give it time. We're not even one generation into web as a viable knowledge distribution platform. Authors who wrote books for their entire lives are not going to learn to create good presentations overnight, if at all. That's ok, the following generations, native to interactive, engaging, immersive ways of presenting knowledge, will fill that gap with time.
The potential of the medium, however, is incredible and easily visible today. Better Explained is one of the greatest examples (in my experience). It will only get better from now on. Flat text won't ever disappear, I hope, as there are many subjects where text is the most suitable way of presenting knowledge, like in liberal arts. Most of science, however, will move to interactive presentations, simply because the time/knowledge gained ratio is much better in this case.
Honestly the modern trend of having to make all educational content always engaging, with immediate rewards at all times seems wrong to me. Sometimes, its better to just chug through a book and boring formalization for 50 hours until you get to a point of clarity, because getting to the same knowledge via dozens of half-complete blogs and online sources takes MUCH more time in the long run. Books assume you will read the whole thing, so they build up the mental framework "breadth-first", so it seems less useful until you get to a sufficiently high depth. Once you get over the hump though, its great. With quick online learning, they give you a few good "depth-first" dives, but leave the foundational "knowledge/concept tree" underdeveloped.
Books aren't distracting, they aren't internet enabled and make it easy to just sit down and go through page by page. Online stuff is usually a great supplement if you miss some intuition but it hasn't quite replaced books. Everyone is looking for some way to make the fundamental act of paying attention and learning easier.. but paying attention IS difficult. That is why its valuable.
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