Requests Thread. Post requests for tacit knowledge videos below this comment.
This thread also serves as a memory jogger for those who might have seen videos of the requested types.
Updates Thread. Below are ~monthly updates with lists of new tacit knowledge videos so you don't have to scroll through the list again to find new videos.
You can subscribe to the Tacit Knowledge Video Updates Substack to have these emailed to you or sent to an RSS feed (https://tacitknowledgevideos.substack.com/feed).
Review of: Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise: GiveWell's Public Board Meetings (2007–2020 have audio).
I'm a college student with only pretty low-stakes work experience. I listened to the first 5–10 meetings as I would a podcast last week. Some takeaways, emphasizing that I only just watched them last week:
- It was interesting to follow the narrative of Holden and Elie getting started on the project. Like, anecdotes about people's experiences starting a startup are everywhere, but it was interesting hearing them actually talking about the struggles and business decisions they were making.
- Holden worked 100h/wk in the first year; that's a lot of time spent on a project! (Then 60h/wk in the second, afaict.)
- Interesting generally how assertive the business meetings were compared to everyday conversation.
- I am familiar with GiveWell as a popular charity in the Rat/EA space, but I never really spent the time to understand the research methodology. It was interesting hearing the practical and strategic discussions between the founders and the board on the methodology. It also seemed to change every year in the f
2Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon—the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules:
Note: I strongly recommend either changing this post to be a question (so that answers are more easily broken out), or enforcing a standard structure to comments to make the comments-section easy to skim. One of the things that was IMO most important for the success of the Best Textbooks On Every Subject thread were the requirements that each submission compared at least 3 textbooks, and that Luke kept editing the best submissions back into the main post body.
“Applied science” by Ben Krasnow. A YouTube channel about building physics-intensive projects in a home laboratory. Big ones are things like an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer, but the ones I find fascinating are smaller things like an electroluminescent display or a novel dye. He demonstrates the whole process of scientific experiment— finding and understanding references, setting up a process for trying stuff, failing repeatedly, learning from mistakes, noticing oddities… He doesn’t just show you the final polished procedure— “here’s how to make an X”. He shows you the whole journey— “Here’s how I discovered how to make X”.
You seem very concerned that people in the videos should have legible symbols of success. I don’t think that much affects how useful the videos are, but just in case I’m wrong, I looked on LinkedIn, where I found this self-assesment:
<begin copied text>
I specialize in the design and construction of electromechanical prototypes. My core skillset includes electronic circuit design, PCB layout, mechanical design, machining, and sensor/actuator selection. This allows me to implement and test ideas for rapid evalua...
For home cooking I would like to recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos). He's a well-loved professional chef who writes science-y cooking books, and his youtube channel is a joy because it's mostly just low production values: him in his home kitchen, making delicious food from simple ingredients, just a few cuts to speed things up.
“American financial criminal and businessman. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare, the co-founder and former CEO of pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, and the former CEO of start-up software company Gödel Systems, which he founded in August 2016” (Wikipedia).
It should at least be mentioned that Shkreli is a convicted fraudster.
Domain: Various: Startups, Events, Project Management, etc
Link: Manifund, Manifold, and Manifest {2023, 2024: meeting notes, docs, budget}
Person: Various: generally, the Manifold, Manifund, and Manifest teams
Why: This isn't a video, but it's probably relevantly close. All Manifold-sphere things are public — all meeting notes, budgets/finances, strategy docs, etc. I think that someone could learn a lot of tacit knowledge based on how the Manifold-sphere teams work by skimming e.g. our meeting notes docs, which are fairly comprehensive/extensive.
Love this idea, and +1 on Jon Gjengset and Neel Nanda.
For finance though, I'm skeptical of your recommendations (DeepFuckingValue and Martin Shkreli). The former made his money pumping-and-dumping meme stocks, and I get the impression the latter has been selected for fame (like recommending Neil deGrasse Tyson to learn physics).
In general, I think finding good resources in finance requires a much stronger epistemic immune system than nearly any other field! There's so much adverse selection, and charlatans can hide behind noisy returns and flashy slide dec...
Domain: Engineering
Building Prototypes with Dan Gelbart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMP_AfiNlX4&list=PLSGA1wWSdWaTXNhz_YkoPADUUmF1L5x2F&index=1
Dan Gelbart has been Founder and CTO of hardware companies for over 40 years, and shares his deep knowledge of tips and tricks for fast, efficient, and accurate mechanical fabrication. He covers a variety of tools, materials, and techniques that are extremely valuable to have in your toolbox.
Promoted to curated: The original "The Best Textbooks on Every Subject" post was among the most valuable that LessWrong has ever featured. I really like this extension of it into the realm of tacit knowledge videos, which does feel like a very valuable set of content that I haven't seen curated anywhere else on the internet.
Thank you very much for doing this! And I hope this post will see contributions for many months and years to come.
Domain: Singing (especially theatre/musicals, but not just)
Link: Excerpt, full interview
Person: Philip Quast
Background: He played Javert in the 10th anniversary rendition of Les Mis.
Why: Philip Quast's has probably done the best performance of Javert, and in the interview he goes through the process of how he figures out how to sing his songs.
For math I'd like to submit this series: "A hard problem in elementary geometry" by fields medalist
Timothy Gowers. It's a 6 part series where each part is about an hour long, of him trying to solve this easy-seeming-but-actually-very-difficult problem.
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NwYbC5t-9w&pp=ygUJc29maWEgYnVl
A few channels on parenting and homemaking:
Lisa from a YouTube channel called Farmhouse on Boone walks through her house and discusses what items she keeps where and why, and how she avoids clutter. She is a mom of 8 with a successful YouTube channel (successful enough that her husband quit his job and now helps with the channel and homeschooling).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5slnHqMG22Q&pp=ygUjZmFybWhvdXNlIG9uIGJvb25lIG1pbmltYWxpc3QgaG91c2U%3D
This woman (whose name I don’t know) is a Christian mom who homeschools her 8 children. In this video she wal...
an all around handyman (the Essential Craftsman on youtube) talking about how to move big/cumbersome things without injuring yourself:
the same guy, about using a ladder without hurting yourself:
He has many other "tip" style videos.
Juggling: Anthony Gatto's juggling routine from 2000. Anthony Gatto holds several juggling world records. This routine is infamous in the juggling world (here's a decent juggler commenting on it). As well as the fact that he gave up juggling to work with concrete instead (because it pays the bills). Here's more context on Gatto and his routine (the guy picking up the balls for him in the video is his father, for example):
Domain: Philosophy of science
Link: Philosophical Psychology 1989 course lecturres
Person: Paul Meehl
Background: Deep introduction to 20c philosophy of science, using psychology rather than physics as the model science -- because it's harder!
Why: Meehl was a philosopher of science, a statistician, and a lifelong clinical psychologist. He wrote a book showing that statistical prediction usually beats clinical judgement in 1954, and a paper on the replication crisis in psychology in 1978. He personally knew people like Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc. a...
This guy Lance has grown a prolific permaculture food garden in the high deserts of Colorado for the last (iirc) 40 years. It provides almost all his food, including grains and legumes. Here they do a walkthrough of the garden and he discusses how it works: https://youtu.be/i5yUPau-F1c?si=S6lRE4a2Ns9HujGJ
I don’t have one video to recommend for each topic, but YouTube is a great source of videos of giving birth and of related activities like breastfeeding, babywearing, and even holding a baby.
I think simply searching ‘birth video’ or ‘homebirth’, ‘hospital birth’ or something similar gets you enough such videos, and watching a bunch of different women give birth is probably better than watching a single ‘expert’.
There's some great opportunities here to learn social skills for various kinds of high-performance environments (e.g. "business communication" vs Y Combinator office hours).
Often, just listening and paying attention to how they talk and think results in substantial improvement to social habits. I was looking for stuff like this around 2018, wish I had encountered a post like this; most people who are behind on this are surprisingly fast learners, but didn't because actually going out and accumulating social status was too much of a deep dive. There's no reason that being-pleasant-to-talk-with should be arcane knowledge (at least not here of all places).
I think speedrunning videos should count, though many people may not find them useful. Likewise for watching high level competitions.
As someone who researches and trains tacit knowledge, I appreciate this effort. Wish I had some better public resources!
Watching Simon from Cracking the Cryptic has given me a good feel for how to solve a hard Sudoku. Not exactly revolutionary, but there's some really clever logic there. (Watching anyone think aloud as they do a task is going to be great for tacit knowledge)
https://youtu.be/hAyZ9K2EBF0?si=65SYQQSpE0V_m3ah
A really good debate between two people is another thing I would recommend to watch. You can learn a lot about rationality and rhetoric f...
This is not a video, but I think it counts as a useful example of tacit knowledge.
Domain: Google-fu
Link: https://gwern.net/search-case-studies
Person: Gwern
Background: Creator of consistently thorough essays
Why: Gwern talks you through what he did to hunt down obscure resources on the internet and in the process shows you how much dakka you could bring to bear on googling things you don't know.
[pasting a comment of mine on Zvi's recent monthly roundup]
If anyone has anecdotes as to why they think the videos have been useful to them I'd be curious to hear. I'm still unsure of their benefit; the interest could just be novelty/insight-porn (Andy Matuschak speculates something in this direction, though he too seems ambivalent). I wrote the post partly as a test to see if there is much use.
...Do people really learn anything from these streams? People certainly claim to learn things from my note-writing stream. I can believe it, maybe, but I wonder to wha
Domain: Piano
Link: Seymour Bernstein Teaches Piano https://youtu.be/pRLBBJLX-dQ?si=-6EIvGDRyw0aJ0Sq
Person: Seymour Bernstein
Background: Pianist and composer, performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Music Education at New York University.
Why: Tonebase (a paid music learning service) recorded a number of free to watch conversations with Bernstein while he plays through or teaches a piece. Bernstein is about 90 years old at the time of recording and shares an incredible amount of tacit knowledge, especially about body mechanics when playing piano.
Interviews and kitchen walkthroughs with the head chefs at Michelin-star restaurants; I particularly like one with the head chef at a wild seafood restaurant demonstrating his daily ingredient procurement processes: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUeEVLHfB5-T7E5TPxSphcDweIL5ioLrj
Esther Perel’s podcast called ‘Where Shall We Begin?’ where she does a live couples’ therapy session with a guest couple. It is rare to get access to a recorded therapy session, and she is at least world-renowned as a relationship therapist (although that doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s good at it).
Domain: Music composition / arrangement / production
Link: Logic Session Breakdowns playlist
Person: Jacob Collier
Background: 6-time (at 29 yo) Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist.
Why: Most of the videos in the playlist are walkthroughs and commentary of the Logic sessions containing hit songs. The #IHarmU marathon (directly linked) is probably the best, featuring livestreamed music-making.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Here’s a weird one. The YouTube channel of Andrew Camarata communicates a great deal about small business, heavy machinery operation and construction. Some of it he narrates what he’s doing, but he mostly just does it, and you say “Oh, I never realized I could do that with a Skid Steer” or “that’s how to keep a customer happy”. Lots of implicit knowledge about accomplishing heavy engineering projects between an hour and a week long. Of course, if you‘re looking for lessons that would be helpful for an ambitious person in Silicon Valley, i...
Alexey Guzey, walkthrough of his computer setup and productivity workflow.
- Founder of New Science. Popular blogger (eg, author of Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors).
It seems like Guzey has changed his mind about a bunch of things, including needing all those huge monitors.
Makes me think this video is no longer relevant.
Blogpost
Into Quilez is a phenomenal computer graphics programmer. His videos show him making works of art from pure code without importing textures. https://youtube.com/@InigoQuilez?si=P468pB_dPf_Icq57
I was enthusiastic about the title of this post, hoping for something different from the usual lesswrong content, but disappointed by most of the examples. In my view if you take this idea of learning tacit knowledge with video seriously, it shouldn't affect just how you learn, but what you learn, rather then trying to learn book subjects by watching videos.
Domain: Farming, Construction, & Craftsmanship
Link: https://www.youtube.com/@Advoko (English narration)
https://www.youtube.com/user/advocatttt (Russian narration)
Person: Max Egorov
Background: Unknown
Why: Bushcraft and off-grid craftsmanship. Advoko has a site in the woods near Lake Ladoga in Russia where he films himself building various improvements by hand with ...
Domain: Business & Business Communication, Mastering Difficult Conversations, Coaching
Link: Misha Glouberman - Recorded Coaching Sessions
Person: Misha Glouberman (That's me)
Background: Consultant, Business Coach, and Co-Author of The Chairs Are Where The People Go.
Why:
While there’s lots of reading materials on this kind of work, this recording offers the unique opportunity to actually listen and experience the coaching work and learnings happening in real-time. The concepts discussed can be applied to work-related, ...
I have a bunch that I like watching. I'll add more in separate comments as I remember, but some highlights for transportation are Reg Local for driving cars (former police driving instructor; he has a book, but the videos themselves are so helpful) and Missionary Bushpilot for flying small aircraft in Papua New Guinea (gorgeous shots, very careful pilot).
Domain: Farming Construction and Craftsmanship
Link: Simple off grid Cabin that anyone can build & afford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOXmfkXpkM (and many other builds on his channel)
Person: Dave Whipple
Background: Construction contractor, DIY living off-grid in Alaska and Michigan.
Why: He and his wife bootstrapped themselves building their own cabin, then house, sell at a profit, rinse and repeat a few times. There are many, many videos of people building their own cabins, etc. Dave's are simple, clear, lucid, from a guy who's done it many times and has skin in the game.
Tacit knowledge videos for CAD modelling:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzMIhOgu1Y5fwotlIEKNnuIXcEbVIZ7Qm
Domain: Linguistics
Link: [The Art of Language Invention, Episode 25: Ghost Segments]
Person: David J. Peterson
Background: Writer of many 'conlangs' (artificial languages) such as Dothraki from Game of Thrones
Why: 30+ part video-series about conlangs. In theory, it's meant as a resource to guide your own creation of a language. But it's also just a really good resource for absorbing how a linguist thinks about language. He talks about sounds/words/grammar, how they change over time, and what mechanisms are involved in that. IIRC he doesn't use very many tech...
Domain: Technology
Link: [https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550](Primitive technology)
Person: Anon
Background: He became pretty famous, and published a book of the same name
Why: from youtube description "Primitive technology is a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials. This is the strict rule. If you want a fire- use fire sticks, an axe- pick up a stone and shape it, a hut- build one from trees, mud, rocks etc. The challenge is seeing how far you can go without modern technology."
Domain: Math and Game Dev
Link: Shaders for Game Devs
Person: Freya Holmer
Why: She shares a lot of practical knowledge about math and shaders in her streams. She explains not just what, but why, answering people's questions as she goes using her in-depth industry knowledge.
Domain: VFX
Link: Vfx artists react to bad & great cgi
Person: Corridor Crew
Why: They're skilled VFX artists reacting to good and bad VFX in movies. In doing so, they share tacit knowledge on compositing, lighting, 3D modelling, etc. They have lots of high profile guests from Seth Rogen to Adam Savage.
Domain: Combat Sports
Link: Muay Thai Library
Person: Sylvie Von Duuglas-Ittu
Background: Muay Thai fighter with over 200 fights.
Why: Sylvie shows herself learning with her 'Muay Thai Library' videos. She narrates how she explores learning someone's technique or strategy.
More than any particular technique, these videos show someone's learning process. This is applicable to all combat sports.
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
Domain: Mathematics
Link: Thinking about math problems in real time
Person: Tim Gowers
Background: Fields medallist
Why: Livestreams himself thinking about math problems
For biology, JoVE ("Journal of Visual Experiments") is a very good source of videos like this. https://www.jove.com/ Unfortunately it's paywalled.
Domain: Language Learning
Link: YouTube Channel
Person: Alexander Arguelles
Background: Polyglot and director of foreign language education at various institutions, known in the community for his rigorous and inventive study methods
Why: He has various videos of him live-studying different languages which give learners direct insight into his methods.
Game Design
The videos under this category fits better the label "game development" instead. Game Design is more focused on designing rules, mechanics, sometimes narratives, instead of programming.
Beginner-friendly pottery tutorials and start-to-finish production explainers: Florian Gadsby on youtube. Notable in part for the high production values and clear explanations. The tutorials were particularly helpful for me earlier this year as I was just getting into pottery.
Domain: Software engineering, mech interp
Bryce Meyer (primary maintainer of TransformerLens, and software engineer with many years of experience) has a weekly coding stream event where he does live coding on TransformerLens--resolving bugs, adding features and tests, etc. I've found it to be useful!
You can find it in the Open Source Mechanistic Interpretability Slack, under the "code-sessions" channel (feel free to DM for an invite).
For the category Research/Studying, I recommend the series "Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend is Wrong" by F. Perry Wilson. Bite-sized videos explaining how to approach medical research people.
Last updated July 30 2020, so hopefully it reached many people during those confusing times and helped them strenghten their intellectual self defense. I wish I found out about it sooner, so that I could have recommended it earlier.
(sample comment, to set a standard for quality)
Domain: Video Editing
Link: World's Most Advanced Video Editing Tutorial (Premiere Pro)
Person: Taran Van Hemert
Background: "Editor, Camera Operator, Writer, Host at Linus Tech Tips" for ~10 years (Website).
Why: Incredibly in-depth look into Taran's video editing workflow for a YouTube channel with 15M subscribers.
TL;DR
Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, Tyler Cowen, George Hotz, and others.
What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?
Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:
In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I’m not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward.
For the purpose of this post, a Tacit Knowledge Video is any video that communicates “knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. Here are some examples:
For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matuschak also has some working notes about this idea generally. @Jared Peterson, who "researches and trains tacit knowledge" recommends the book Working Minds "which teaches how to do Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) which is a major interviewing technique for uncovering tacit knowledge."
How to Submit
Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon—the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules:
To make the comments easy to navigate, please format your comment as follows:[2]
List of Tacit Knowledge Videos
(last updated 08-25-2024)
To receive ~monthly updates with lists of new videos, subscribe to the 'Tacit Knowledge Video Updates' Substack.
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Competitive Programming
Game Development
Web Development
Other
Research, Studying, & Problem Solving
Research
Studying
Problem Solving
Business & Business Communication
Construction & Craftsmanship
Cooking
Engineering & Machining
Farming
Finance
Disclaimer, copy-pasting a comment from @Max Entropy:
Housekeeping & Parenting
Media & Arts
Design
Filmmaking
Music
Productivity
Sports & Games
Therapy
Transportation
Writing
Miscellaneous
What valuable project did they ship? How many years have they worked for their prestigious company or university? How many papers have they published? What awards have they won? What other domain-relevant metric did this person perform well on? You could also give your feedback based on your expertise. Ideally, these are proxies for the knowledge and expertise of these practitioners being good.
Feel free to leave out the 'Background' and 'Why' sections.