InDesign! Or anything on page layout / publishing / how to make a pretty and well formatted book

I would be interested in more studying/learning videos. I found Andy Matuschak's very interesting.

@Yoav Ravid [LW · GW]: "I'd be interested in tacit knowledge videos about writing, if anyone knows any."

I would find forecasting videos would be interesting to watch.

Fundraising videos?

@habryka [LW · GW] / @mods - would it be possible to pin (1) the 'Review Thread' and (2) this thread?

I think these will be the two most valuable comments on this post. The comment video submissions are a bit cluttered due to embeds and submissions are more accessible/navigatable through the OP.

Meal prepping Tacit Knowledge Videos?

I would be interested in hearing the thought processes behind experienced interviewers.

For example, Tyler Cowen has a few blog posts speaking to his interviewing tacit knowledge.

If there was something like this in a more information-dense video format, I would be keen to watch it.

Interior design, please!  I can never figure out which pieces of furniture will actually look good together or flow nice in a home.  Especially when combined with lighting and shelves and art.  

Networking, Relationship building, both professional and personal, I'm sure there are overlaps. And echoing another request: Sales

Sales tacit knowledge videos?

Tacit Knowledge Videos of eurogames.

At one point I had watched a video on YouTube like Upright Citizens Brigade - ASSSSCAT Improv, but with the ASSSSCAT actors rewatching their performance and providing commentary on their thought processes. I would be delighted if anyone knows the original video or has a similar video they know of.

Below are the new tacit knowledge videos added to the post since mid-April, 2024.

• Paul Meehl, Philosophical Psychology 1989 course lectures, "deep introduction to 20c philosophy of science, using psychology rather than physics as the model science -- because it's harder!" (via @Jonathan Stray [LW · GW])
  • "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. and brings their insights to life in these course lectures."
  • Me: I was hesitant to add a lecture series to this list at first. I changed my mind after listening to the first video, where Meehl provides interesting details (gossip, almost) about the life of an academic and the various personalities of his successful academic peers.
• Kenneth Folk, Guided Tour to 13 Jhanas.
  • “Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern practitioners” (Website).
• Dave Whipple, building a "[s]imple off grid Cabin that anyone can build & afford (and many other builds on his channel). (via @Vitor [LW · GW])
  • "Construction contractor, DIY living off-grid in Alaska and Michigan."
  • "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."
• Seymour Bernstein, teaching piano. (via @lfrymire [LW · GW])
  • "Pianist and composer, performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Music Education at New York University."
  • "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."
• RegLocal, advanced driving. (via @masasin [LW · GW])
  • "former police driving instructor; he has a book, but the videos themselves are so helpful"
• Ryan Farran (Missionary Bush Pilot), flying small aircraft in Papua New Guinea. (via @masasin [LW · GW])
  • "My job as a bush pilot is to fly missionaries, medical flights, and cargo into mountain and jungle airstrips throughout all of [Papua New Guinea]" (YouTube).
• Misha Glouberman, Recorded Coaching Session. (via @Misha Glouberman [LW · GW])
  • "Consultant, Business Coach, and Co-Author of The Chairs Are Where The People Go."
  • Testimonials: Mark Surman, President of Mozilla; Shenda Tanchak, Registrar & CEO of Ontario College of Pharmacists; Michael Bungay Stanier, Author of The Coaching Habit; others (Website).
• Max Egorov, "[b]ushcraft and off-grid craftsmanship". (Russian narration) (via @TANSTAAFL [LW · GW])
  • "Advoko has a site in the woods near Lake Ladoga in Russia where he films himself building various improvements by hand with local materials. Very competent craftsman, professional touch with no hype."
• Various skilled CAD users and instructors, CAD vs. CAD Speedrunning Tournament. (via @zookini [LW · GW])
  • "Watch some of the best SOLIDWORKS, OnShape, Fusion 360 and Inventor users Speedrun some challenging models while going head to head and sharing their screens" (YouTube).
• Scott Chacon, "So You Think You Know Git" (Part 2). (via @Max Entropy [LW · GW])
  • Co-founder of GitHub and author of Pro Git.
• Inigo Quilez, computer graphics programming. (via @Robert Diersing [LW · GW])
  • Has worked in roles dealing with computer graphics at Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus Story Studio, Oculus+Facebook, Adobe, and other places since 2003 (Website).
• Dan Gelbart, Building Prototypes (18 Part Series). (via @Adrian Kelly [LW · GW])
  • "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."
• Hrishi Olickel, creating a proof-of-concept Web App using LLMs.
  • CTO at Greywing (YC W21) (GitHub).
• Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls, Albert Ellis, Everett Shostrom, Arnold Lazurus, Aaron Beck: Three Approaches to Psychotherapy—recorded therapy sessions.
  • Carl Rogers. Founder of person-centered psychotherapy; one of the founders of humanistic psychology (Wikipedia).
  • Frederick Perls. Developed Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls (Wikipedia). 
  • Albert Ellis. Founder of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) (Wikipedia).
  • Everett Shostrom. Put together the film. "He also produced well known tests and inventories including the Personal Orientation Inventory, Personal Orientation Dimensions, the Pair Attraction Inventory, and the Caring Relationship Inventory " (Wikipedia).
  • Arnold Lazurus. "Authored the first text on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called Behaviour Therapy and Beyond" and won various awards including two from the American Psychological Association and the American Board of Professional Psychology (Wikipedia).
  • Aaron Beck. "He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)" (Wikipedia).
• Aswath Damodaran, "Reading a 10K".
  • "Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation. [...] Damodaran is best known as the author of several widely used academic and practitioner texts on Valuation, Corporate Finance and Investment Management as well as provider of comprehensive data for valuation purposes" (Wikipedia).
  • Anecdote from an experienced finance friend: "Damodaran is an NYU prof who's super credible and well regarded for his practical tutorials on valuations and corporate finance, I used to refer to his blog often."
• Zane Carney; composing, recording, and producing music live.
  •  Guitarist who has contributed to albums like Thundercat's "Drunk" and John Mayer's "Paradise Valley." Has toured with Jonny Land and John Mayer (Website).
• Shannon (House Improvements), "How to build a deck" (6 Part Series).
  • Has been in the construction industry for decades. Runs his own renovation business. 925K YouTube subscribers (Channel Trailer).
  • Me: A friend of mine successfully built a deck using this playlist as a guide.
• René Rebe, live streaming Linux, open source, and low-level programming hardware and software projects.
  • CEO of ExactCODE GmbH since 2005 (LinkedIn).
• BNYX, Olswelm, and other indie (?) music producers; music production livestream VODs.
  • Unsure of credibility. A friend into music production recommended some of the videos on this channel. He specifically liked BYNX and olswel.
• William Lin, competitive programming.
  • "[S]ophomore at MIT [...], IOI 2020 Winner, Codeforces Max Rating 2931 (International Grandmaster), CodeChef Max Rating 2916 (7 stars)" (YouTube About).
• Steven Ramsey,  200 days of woodworking projects during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
  • Hobbyist woodworker turned woodworking content creator (1.9M YouTube subscribers); formerly a professional graphic designer (Website).
• Ben Eater, "Build a 65c02-based computer from scratch".
  • Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks for ~9.5 years, Group Engineering Manager at Khan Academy for ~7.5 years, and YouTuber with 1.2M subscribers (LinkedIn, YouTube).

Tacit Knowledge Videos added to the list from May–August, 2024. Enjoy!

• Kenneth Folk, pranayama breathing.
  • “Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern practitioners" (Website).
• Keith Johnstone, teaching improv.
  • Author of Impro.
  • "A pioneer of improvisational theatre, he was best known for inventing the Impro System, part of which are the Theatresports" (Wikipedia).
• Gwern, "Internet Search Case Studies"
  • Gwern blogs at his well-known gwern.net.
  • Per his about, Gwern has also "worked for, published in, or consulted for: Wired, MIRI/SIAI, CFAR, GiveWell, the FBI, Cool Tools, Quantimodo, New Work Encyclopedia, Bitcoin Weekly, Mobify, Bellroy, Dominic Frisby, and private clients" (Website).

I’ve had a busy past few months (if a three-month meditation retreat counts as busy). There have been more videos submitted than videos added to the post in this batch. I will add these in the coming months.

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 first three years (I haven't watched beyond the first three years).
• Interesting from a marketing and fundraising perspective to watch as GiveWell, which seems to have found its market now, tested and went about finding one. 
• Interesting to instantiate generally 'what are board meetings? who are the people in board meetings? what are their skills?'
• Discussions around productivity were interesting. I've learn 'productivity' skills to improve my time spent studying and working on projects. I was surprised to hear that this is something that was talked about in board meetings, let alone for 10s of minutes.

I would be curious to hear a review from someone with more business experience. If you are to go about watching them, I recommend starting from the beginning. I've tried watching a few more recent recordings before this past week and found them less engaging, maybe due to me having less context about the organization.

"Mise En Place", "[i]nterviews and kitchen walkthroughs:

Qualifies as tacit knowledge, in that people are showing what they're doing that you seldom have a chance to watch first-hand. Reasonably entertaining, seems like you could learn a bit here.

Caveat: most of the dishes are really high-class/meat/fish etc. that you aren't very likely to ever cook yourself, and knowledge seems difficult to transfer.

Thank you for the recommendation! I think I agree. I will be editing the comments back into the body, but I think it would be useful for the comments to be more legible.

For those reading this, here is the format I recommend (I've since edited this recommendation into the body):

Domain: Programming, Game Design

Link: Programming livestream VODs

Person: Jonathan Blow

Background: Creator of Braid and The Witness.

Why: Blow livestreams himself coding games and creating a programming language. I imagine people who do similar things would find his livestreams interesting.

Domain: PCB Design, Electronics
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySuUZEjARPY
Person: Rick Hartley
Background: Has worked in electronics since the 60s, senior principal engineer at L-3 Avionics Systems, principal of RHartley Enterprises
Why: Rick Hartley is capable of explaining electrical concepts intuitively, and linking them directly to circuit design. He uses a lot of stories and examples visually to describe what's happening in a circuit. I'm not sure it counts as Tacit Knowledge since this is lecture format, but it includes a bunch of things that you might not know you don't know, coming into the field. I never "got" how electrical circuits really work before watching this video, despite having been a hobbyist for years.

I'm gonna quote from this article about why you'd prefer to learn tacit knowledge from "believable people" i.e. those who have 1) a record of at least 3 different successes and 2) have great explanations of their approach when probed. 

 

Believability works for two reasons: a common-sense one, and a more interesting, less obvious one.

The common-sense reasoning is pretty obvious: when you want advice for practical skills, you should talk to people who have those skills. For instance, if you want advice on swimming, you don’t go to someone who has never swum before, you go to an accomplished swimmer instead. For some reason we seem to forget this when we talk about more abstract skills like marketing or investing or business.

The two requirements for believability makes more sense when seen in this light: many domains in life are more probabilistic than swimming, so you’ll want at least three successes to rule out luck. You’ll also want people to have ‘great explanations’ when you probe them because otherwise they won’t be of much help to you.

The more interesting, less obvious reason that believability works is because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I’m quoting from a famous article by John Salvatier, which you should read in its entirety. Salvatier opens with a story about building stairs, and then writes:

It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.

The point that Salvatier makes is that everything is more complex and fiddly than you think. At the end of the piece, Salvatier argues that if you’re not aware of this fact, it’s likely you’ll miss out on some obvious cue in the environment that will then cause you — and other novices — to get stuck.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters once you consider the fact that practical advice has to account for all of this fiddliness — but in a roundabout way: good practical advice nearly never provides an exhaustive description of all the fiddliness you will experience. It can’t: it would make the advice too long-winded. Instead, good practical advice will tend to focus on the salient features of the skill or the domain, but in a way that will make the fiddliness of reality tractable.

In practice, how this often feels like is something like “Ahh, I didn’t get why the advice was phrased that way, but I see now. Ok.”

Think about what this means, though. It means that you cannot tell the difference between advice from a believable person and advice from a non-believable person from examination of the advice alone. To a novice, advice from a non-believable person will seem just as logical and as reasonable as advice from a more believable person, except for the fact that it will not work. And the reason it will not work (or that it will work less well) is that advice from less believable individuals will either focus on the wrong set of fiddly details, or fail to account for some of the fiddliness of reality.

To put this another way, when you hear the words “I don’t see why X can’t work …” from a person who isn’t yet believable in that domain, alarm bells should go off in your head. This person has not tested their ideas against reality, and — worse — they are not likely to know which set of fiddly details are important to account for.

Domain: Physics

Link: "Applied Science"

Person: Ben Krasnow

Background: From his LinkedIn: "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 evaluation or iteration. Much of the work that I did for my research devices business included a fast timeline, going from customer sketch to final product in less than a month. These products were used to collect data for peer-reviewed scientific papers, and I enjoyed working closely with the end user to solve their data collection challenges. I did similar work at Valve to quickly implement and test internal prototypes."

(I've since changed the formatting standards for this post; I hope you don't mind me reposting your information to make it more legible for new readers.)

Perfect—thanks for the links! Will add this and the other submission to the post when I get the chance.

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 [...]

The main driving motivation for this was seeing that The Best Textbooks on Every Subject [LW · GW] received traction due to a similar mechanism. Another reason was wanting the tacit knowledge in the videos to be knowledge that's appealing to learn.

I don't want the mechanism to stop the post from receiving submissions though; this resource-submission genre seems like the kind that benefits from network effects. If anyone has any thoughts as to whether the mechanism is useful or counterproductive, I would be curious to hear.

Thanks for sharing! Added. I'd be curious if anyone has this but for meal prepping instead of cooking a single meal.

Agreed and added.

I've since created a requests thread where comments like these can go. Maybe the requests can serve as memory joggers for readers who've seen a certain type of Tacit Knowledge Video but don't recall the video after first reading the post.

Thanks for the Git recommendation; added!

Thanks for the feedback! I too am skeptical of the finance videos, agreeing that the video probably came across my radar due to the figures being popular rather than displaying believable tacit knowledge.

I've gone back and forth on whether to remove the videos from the list or just add your expert anecdata as a disclaimer on the videos. In the spirit of quantity vs. quality, I'm leaning toward keeping the videos on the list.

Thanks! Added.

Glad to see that people find the post useful! I hope it will see many future contributions as well. In case interesting to anyone, I've just put together a google form Substack (edited 5.6.24) to create an email list for those who would like to be sent lists of newly added videos every month or so.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Interesting, got anymore? Especially for toddlers and so on, or would you go through everything those women have uploaded?

Thanks for sharing! Added to the post.

Thanks! Added.

Domain: Juggling

Link: Anthony Gato's juggling routine from 2000

Person: Anthony Gato

Background: Anthony Gato 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).

(I've since changed the formatting standards for this post; I hope you don't mind me reposting your information to make it more legible for new readers.)

Thanks! Added.

Relevant note from the entry:

Me: I was hesitant to add a lecture series to this list at first. I changed my mind after listening to the first video, where Meehl provides interesting details (gossip, almost) about the life of an academic and the various personalities of his successful academic peers.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! I didn't add this as I couldn't readily think of a way to make it fit the format. But I've upvoted the comment to make it more visable.

Did you find anything interesting in 2018? Did you use it, and, if yes, how'd it go?

Agreed. I added the link to speedrun.com/games to the post. From there readers can navigate to individual games and their respective leaderboards, click on a player, and watch the player's speedrun YouTube video.

Thanks Jared! I've added the channel as well as the book recommendation to the post.

Thanks!

If there were a bunch of videos of people Google-fu-ing like this, I wouldn't add this article to the post.

However, since this is one of the few good resources on Google-fu that I know of, I'm adding it to the post. Despite it not being a video.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks, added!

Thanks! Added.

I was on the fence as to whether or not to include those.

Domain: Heavy Machinery Operation, Farming

Link: FarmCraft101

Person: N/A

Background: No legible symbols of success, other than speaking standard American English like he’s been to college, owning a large farm, and clearly being intelligent.

Why: The channel is nice because he includes all his failures, and goes into articulate detail on how he debugged them.  I feel like learned some implicit knowledge about repair strategies. I particularly recommend the series of videos in which he purchases, accidentally sets on fire, and revives an ancient boom lift truck.

(I've since changed the formatting standards for this post; I hope you don't mind me reposting your information to make it more legible for new readers.)

Domain: Small Business, Heavy Machinery Operation, Construction

Link: Andrew Camarata

Background: He has no legible success that I know of, except that he’s wealthy enough to afford many machines, and he’s smart enough that the house he designed and built came out stunning (albeit eccentric).

Why: 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, it will only help in a very meta way. 

(I've since changed the formatting standards for this post; I hope you don't mind me reposting your information to make it more legible for new readers.)

I've added this as a note. Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words! I'd be curious to hear more about what makes you think that!

Thanks! Added.

If you have recommendations, post them! I doubt the author tried to filter the subjects very much by "book subjects" it's just what people seem to have found good ones so far. 

Thanks for the feedback! I'd be curious to hear more about (1) what subjects you're referring to and (2) how learning tacit knowledge with video has changed your learning habits (if your view here is based on your own experience).

Thanks! Added.

Added. Thanks!

Thanks, added! I look forward to seeing what else you have.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

I did not know 'conlangers' were a thing. Thanks for sharing and added.

Thanks for sharing! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Thanks! Added.

Oh nice, I didn't know Evan had a YouTube channel. He's one of the most renowned olympiad coaches and seems highly competent

Added, thanks! (x2)

Added, thanks!

Edited - thanks!

(another one)

Domain: Business, Business Communication

Link: GiveWell's Public Board Meetings (2007–2020 have audio).

People: Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others.

Backgrounds:

• Holden Karnofsky. “Director of AI Strategy (formerly CEO) of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell” (Website).
• Elie Hassenfeld. co-founder and CEO of GiveWell (LinkedIn).
• Timothy Ogden. Chief Knowledge Officer at Geneva Global, Inc.; founding editor of Gartner Press; founder of Sona Partners; chairman of GiveWell (Aspen Institute).
• Rob Reich. Political Science professor at Stanford for 26 years (Stanford).
• Tom Rutledge. Has worked in finance since 1989 (LinkedIn). 
• Brigid Sliplka. Director of Philanthropy at ACLU (LinkedIn).
• Cari Tuna. President at Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures (Wikipedia).
• Julia Wise. Community Liaison at Centre for Effective Altruism (LinkedIn).

Why: I've personally found it interesting to listen to these meetings for generally instantiating "what actually is a board meeting?". They can be listened to just like you would listen to a podcast, in a multi-tasking sort of way.