Videos

I tried that last week with a different video, where I did manage to think about that aspect, but it still was not well-received. Probably b/c "what is a bacteriophage" is too juvenile for this crowd.

The thing is, when I see such videos, I get excited - not even for myself who knows the material, but that it is now that much easier for others to follow. Like having climbed the ladder, rather than pull it up after us they are doing the hard and very necessary and quite frankly often under-appreciated effort of collating this information, packaging it in a form that is easily consumed, and delivering it to those who need it. I don't think I learned about bacteriophages until college! And I did not know that such diverse matters as e.g. allergies and chocolate cravings could be traced back to their presence (& absence) until much later (when scientists themselves discovered that much later).

Kids who cannot afford to go to private schools, people in lower-income nations that nonetheless may have internet access, at least sporadically, women who are not allowed to learn in certain portions of the world (like almost Florida these days?), etc. - these videos are, if not quite college-level courses (such as the variety of Crash Course series), then at least preparatory material that can help! Also, someone who knows even extremely higher-level technical skills such as databases, Unix systems coding, and the likes of Rust, Go, etc., may likewise want to learn about "bacteriophages" (or "vaccines", or "the actual, not most news-worthy, ways that most people die in the Western world"). So I am extremely happy that these videos exist (yes! I am not exaggerating there - it literally fills me with an amount of full-on joy!:-), for the sake of the love of learning and knowledge. It's basically Wikipedia, put into video form, for the sake of the younger generations who won't read and for whom these bright colors and neat voiceover effects will nonetheless still manage to spoon-feed them this knowledge (also, perhaps once someone knows a little bit... maybe they will read, after that?).

But perhaps most of all, the counter-culture side to me has a nice "take that!" moment when someone absolutely refuses to learn anything at all - even though there's a brightly-colored, nicely-narrated, extremely condensed yet easy to receive video that will tell you pretty much all the basics of most subjects. Now I can look down on people who refuse to know things, b/c I know that they could know, if only they would. :-)

But I'm weird - and loving it - yet still if these videos aren't wanted, then I should stop sharing them. Or at least find some other community that might want them more.