Comment on Is there any such thing as "edutainment" shows for adults?
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 days ago
[There are some problems with Kurzgesagt.(www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjmsfOXy5oM) mentioned in another comment. Although xkcd’s “What If?” can be a fun way to kill a few minutes in a similar-ish vein.
Something I’ve quickly come to embrace after watching this Zoe Bee video about Peterson “University” is the concept of “friction”, namely that your brain will trick you into thinking you’re learning a lot when there’s little friction (e.g. a lecture, an infographic, etc.) and vice-versa when there’s a lot of friction (e.g. solving problems on your own, having to teach others, etc.). She remarks that there needs to be friction for learning to happen (albeit that it is not sufficient for learning) and that people are consistently terrible at self-evaluating what they’ve learned because of this inverted thinking.
I think 3Blue1Brown can achieve this edutainment ideal, for example, but I firmly believe that unless you already know the subject, those “pause and ponder” opportunities aren’t just a formality.
It’s on the lower–medium end of “friction”, but I genuinely think undergraduate-level history textbooks (where you don’t need to know a ton going in, unlike e.g. a STEM textbook where you could be lost) can be a great form of edutainment on their own. I’ve been reading “A Concise History of Korea” (2nd ed., 2016) by Michael J. Seth. It concisely (read: ~500 fairly dense pages, but hey, it’s an entire-ass country dating to at least 676 as a cohesive nation) covers the history of Korea that we know of from ancient times until 2015. The prose is engaging and understandable but not flowery, the end of every chapter has primary source material you can read, there are tons of interesting one-off stories (especially as it pertains to folklore), and to me, the coherence of the reality – the running threads throughout – are more interesting than fiction.
What I just said sounds absurd, but please, if your library has one of these and you have spare time for entertainment, spare it a thought the next time you’re picking out a book (or generally looking for something to do).
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Very interesting