Limiting the amount of thinking that other people do for you

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After years of thinking that educational content is good and I should watch it to learn new things because it will make me smarter I now think it is not worth it. Educational entertainment (as it should be called) first an entertainment form that has all the motivation to keep you hooked but no incentive to actually educate you. It’s not their problem or their goal. I think the real kicker is that you think you are getting educated but that’s just actually part of the seduction of these content forms. If you actually learned something new you would spend a lot of time being confused and frustrated before getting the feeling of enlightenment. When I consume an educational entertainment video I just get this superficial feeling of enlightenment. It’s not really learning!

YouTube is like this a lot. I can even say that even as the amount of deep technical information in some of these videos (like Veritasium) keeps getting higher and higher I still don’t learn.

You can’t learn by watching. You can't outsource thinking.