How to do arithmetic with tree diagrams | Understand math and philosophy better [CF Video]

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I like both the topic of the video as well as the presentation style where the visuals were there to enhance what you were talking about.

This was wonderfully done. The reasons for learning them, disadvantages were clearly mentioned which made it very clear for me as to why I should learn it.

Aside: the animation in the last slide looks cheap. I don’t know why. I think its something a kid would like. It’s kinda over the top. A direct cut to black screen would’ve been better.

Another aside: I’m pretty sure making this would’ve taken a lot of your time. That makes me feel a bit bad that your effort are channeled into increasing production quality. I feel such tasks aren’t worthy of your creativity. Your creativity is better used elsewhere. Either you should hire someone to do this stuff or maybe you’ll become great at this stuff pretty soon so it will become easy for you and it won’t take much time. Maybe I’m wrong about this stuff. Explain how you think about this stuff, point out some errors in this reasoning. This reasoning makes me pessimistic. I see improving at certain tasks as not worth which is one reason for my passivity. I see it as a waste like becoming better at a video game. Becoming better at chess is acceptable to me but something like call of duty seems not worth it and kinda waste of ones time.

How long do you think it took?

Would you explain more what you noticed about the style and how it seemed different than other videos? Thanks

Your reply makes me realize that what I said doesn’t make sense much sense unless I mention what I think is too long.

I’ve made videos before and it took me 5 to 6 hours (for everything - scripting, slides, recording, editing, etc.). If it took you anywhere close to that then I think it is too much and gives me that bad feeling based on the idea that your creative output is better utilized elsewhere. If its less than 2 then its great. If you improve and start making it in less than 1 hour then I would love it if you kept making more and more of them because it is easier for me to learn stuff from these videos than from any other format.

What are some key differences? I don’t play call of duty, but I am not opposed to it. I can imagine someone treating it as a serious learning project and finding out (then practising and automating) stuff of general application. Knowledge can be connected, have reach.

Or imagine this situation specifically: You have just garnered an interest in philosophy ideas. You also already play call of duty a lot and that’s what you’re comfortable with – that’s how you spend your spare time. Then it could be reasonable for you to pair the two things and start thinking about how those philosophy ideas appear in your play. For instance, you might think about the importance of excess capacity as applied to the ammo you take into a gun fight. OK, I need to make N shots to the head to kill my oponent (say), but also: I may miss some of them, some may hit the chest which can take more bullets, my opponent might have a shield or an additional health perk, there might be another opponent (I don’t know about) who joins the fight quickly after, and I’ll need to kill him too, I might want to shoot some more speculative rounds when my opponent goes behind a wall, etc. So, actually, I should ideally arrive to the fight with some N + M rounds in my magazine. That way I can account for a lot of different scenarios, unexpected factors, errors. After realising that, I might connect it to the general TOC idea about excess capacity. I might understand that idea more; maybe make a further contribution to it based on something learned from the specific ammo example.

This makes sense to me. Agree with you that you could connect two activities. You could take on the project of becoming better at call of duty and philosophically approach that project. Study your errors and try to find the cause and remove them. But why can’t you spend time on learning philosophy ideas directly instead of trying to apply philosophy to become better at the game. Or if you wanna apply the philosophy ideas to improve at something then there are a lot better things to improve on like finding errors you make while writing or understanding things when you read or improve your physics thinking.

Aside: I think it was nice that I started this discussion. It made me think what it means to become better at philosophy, reason which I hadn’t thought of before. I was just carrying around this idea in my head without knowing what it means. How does becoming better at philosophy + reason help you? What does becoming better at philosophy + reason help you with?

I don’t think in terms of total amount of time or track it. But let’s see:

Recording was one unscripted take for 19 minutes. That looks like maybe 30 cuts to remove silences. Not much but I did have to pay attention to animations. Let’s say 15min on editing. I didn’t use Recut because of all the animation.

YouTube stuff like title, description and table of contents was quick too. The thumbnail was a first version without brainstorming options. I did try a few other text colors besides red and orange.

I don’t remember if I watched the video. Sometimes I edit, export, watch, and then make a few more edits. At 2x speed or higher, watching would have taken up to 6 minutes.

Sometimes I play back a lot of the video in Final Cut (at 2x) while editing. Other times I just look at waveforms and do edits with little playback (or use a tool like Recut). In that case, I’m more likely to watch the video through after editing to check for issues and see what it’s like.

We could put video creation into categories:

  • writing slides
  • slide art and animation
  • script
  • recording
  • editing
  • YouTube stuff

These categories use different amounts of creativity and mental energy. I bolded the harder ones.

Writing slides or scripts is writing. It’s like writing essays. By contrast, editing, animating and reading a script is mentally easier. To some extent, it competes for time with watching YouTube or playing video games, rather than with writing. (BTW, for me forum use is mostly easy.)

Unscripted recording is closer to writing – I have to use creativity and think about what to say. Figuring out what to say uses mental energy but only once – either to write a script or to do it while recording, but not both. In this case, I didn’t use a script.

The harder, creative stuff is rewarding in a similar way to writing essays. It’s just writing or talking about ideas. Animating is less rewarding but also easier so it’s OK.

I worked on this over two days. The first day I made some slides. Second day I decided it needed to be more focused and I cut some slides. I put them in another presentation for a potential other video covering some math topics like infix/prefix/postfix. Then I added a few more slides to complete this video. Then I recorded and edited. On the second day, afterwards, I also did another video of similar length from start to finish which I think took under 2 hours because I know it wasn’t that late in the day when I finished it. I did some of the YouTube stuff days later and batched it – I think I made 5 thumbnails in a row.

So, total time excluding the unused slides? Hard to tell but probably under 3 hours.

That only includes direct time use, not e.g. time watching animation or editing tutorial videos. And not counting the extra time that previous videos took because I was newer at animating and editing.

In general, I think days of work is a more accurate/useful metric than hours of work.

If you think 3 hours means the video cost 20% of a day, you’d be wrong. It definitely cost more than that. I can’t write for 15 hours a day. Not even close. Even the easier stuff like animating or editing would be too hard to do for that long per day.

3 hours of good focus and creativity in a day is plenty. Add 5 hours of easier stuff and that’s enough to burn most people out if they average that much, 7 days a week, for a few months. (That’s assuming they weren’t tired out at the start and they get enough sleep, or it’d be worse.)

Those aren’t incompatible. They can support each other. You can learn the philosophy before you play. Or after. The examples can be used as a reference to understand something, make it less abstract. Or as practice for applying an idea which is a different skill. You’ll notice that Elliot uses a lot of examples in his CF articles. Doing this in a range of contexts benefits your learning. It might also lead to an opportunity (e.g. you uniquely know about the relationship between theory A and example B, and people pay you to use that knowledge to solve their problems).

This depends on your goals, problem-situation, skill level, what is realistic for you, what doesn’t involve you tyrannising yourself, etc.

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I’m glad I raised my point. I got a peek into how you work and how you organize your work. I was having very high unrealistic expectations about how much creative work can be done in a day. I was expecting 8 to 10 hours per day. I really like the idea of categorizing work into easier stuff vs one that requires creativity. I am gonna be more mindful about the possibility of burnout. I’m gonna give sleep more importance.

What’s your max output in number of hours? How long can you continue at your peak performance. Do you take breaks to recharge? What’s your average output?

I will try to notice I’m looking to tyrannize myself and try to stop it. Thanks for pointing it out.

In my previous comment I think that I intuitively mainly compared this video to podcast videos, the “auto texted videos”, and the live streams. Not the grammar videos. I haven’t watched the grammar videos - they might be similar to this one in style.

I think the style of this video was more “traditionally” structured with bullet points which I found useful. There was also a clear introduction here about what you were going to talk about, who might benefit from it, and what problem it was addressing - which I also found useful.

I also liked the examples you were showing in the video.


Additional feedback:
I think that the intro image (topic title and your name) was a little bit to short / fast. Maybe it could last for roughly 1-2 sec longer.