"Fools say they learn from experience; I prefer to learn from the experience of others".
Today, I talked to a high school student, and I told them this story from memory. I looked it up and found it was said by Bismarck, the first Chancellor of the German Empire.
I used it in the context of a warning against empiricism. Experience is essential, and if you don't have a vision of what you want the world to be like, you can refine that vision through experience. But if there's one thing that's easier than experience, it's "Studying". Studying is like having a conversation with the greats of the past; it allows you to follow their successes and failures to a level that you could never have experienced in your own life alone. Studying is great because you don't have to experience it yourself, you don't have to fail, and you get to know more than you ever did.
Also, I've recently experienced a new way of studying without realising it, and I think this will become a global trend, so I'll introduce it to you.
Instead of using books to study, there are audiobooks and YouTube, so people disseminate knowledge written in books. We can learn from these summaries. However, after a bit of research, it seems that the market for both paper books and eBooks is still growing.
Some people say, "people don't read books anymore", but I think it's a new form of learning, where you can study on YouTube and then read a book. I believe that multimedia learning is easier to understand and more efficient than just reading books. However, when I want to go back and study, it is pretty hard to watch the same video again. If it's an abridged video, that's fine, but if it's a two-hour online course, you're not going to watch it again. In that case, if you have the abridged book or the online course textbook at hand, you can turn the pages and get the information you need instantly, without having to watch the video again. Paper books are easier to remember which page was written on, but the search function of the eBook allows you to get the information differently. We all remember more knowledge than we think we do. The problem is how to find it in your head. Once you have found the link to the information you want from the book, it will be easy to recall the rest of the information. So a book is much more efficient than a video or an eBook, as you only need to read half a page to find the beginning.
We believe that this type of multimedia study material will become more common in the future.