The written word is vastly more information dense than any other medium. Say you want to know something more about a subject: maybe it's wormholes, maybe it's the Taiping Rebellion, maybe it's about music theory. Well if you want to get even the slightest bit of insight it requires reading a text. A youtube video cannot approach virtually any subject with the required depth. Listening to someone read a text is just inefficient; the audiobook version of the book I read over Thanksgiving weekend runs 53 hours. And some subjects require a combination of plain and pictorial text/illustrations to get across key concepts.
If you want to learn anything about any academic subject, there is no substitute for reading.
Wiki is an encyclopedia; it's a primer on a topic, and a good resource for finding more in-depth resources, but not a substitute for actual academic work. A good academic history, for example, will go far beyond what is able to be captured in a wikipedia article. For example, the wikipedia article on the Thirty Years' War has a bit shy of 16,000 words (and much of that is devoted to the bibliography/footnotes). A recent prominent history on the subject that I read has ~256,000.
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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
The written word is vastly more information dense than any other medium. Say you want to know something more about a subject: maybe it's wormholes, maybe it's the Taiping Rebellion, maybe it's about music theory. Well if you want to get even the slightest bit of insight it requires reading a text. A youtube video cannot approach virtually any subject with the required depth. Listening to someone read a text is just inefficient; the audiobook version of the book I read over Thanksgiving weekend runs 53 hours. And some subjects require a combination of plain and pictorial text/illustrations to get across key concepts.
If you want to learn anything about any academic subject, there is no substitute for reading.
Does include wiki? Wikipedia articles about major events are not uncommonly as long as short books.
Wiki is an encyclopedia; it's a primer on a topic, and a good resource for finding more in-depth resources, but not a substitute for actual academic work. A good academic history, for example, will go far beyond what is able to be captured in a wikipedia article. For example, the wikipedia article on the Thirty Years' War has a bit shy of 16,000 words (and much of that is devoted to the bibliography/footnotes). A recent prominent history on the subject that I read has ~256,000.
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