
Why lectures do not work - Ptyx
http://intellectualmathematics.com/blog/the-right-way-to-argue-that-lecture-doesnt-work/
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daly
I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I think lectures matter. Often I can't understand a paper
until after I've heard a lecture on the subject. This is particularly true in
logic as a lot of the papers are written in greek letters (seriously). The
lecture includes the words that give meaning to the symbols. The symbols are
rarely fully explained in a papers (e.g. what is Gamma?) since they assume the
reader already knows and they have a limited amount of page space.

On the other hand, I took a course from John White where we were given a few
dozen papers. Each person was assigned a paper to present for 20 minutes but
we were all required to read all the papers. It was an amazingly productive
class and I learned a lot.

Lectures and textbooks are where papers go to die. Papers are where ideas have
their funerals. Conferences are where papers get their all-too-short life. In
order to get to the leading edge of a subject you have to start with the
lectures and textbooks, read the recent papers, attend the conferences, and
then create a presentation.

Universities are basically the "shopping mall" of ideas. Lectures are the
sales talk of ideas. Not everybody buys the product but you can't expect
people to read a textbook (e.g. calculus) without the sales pitch (the
lecture). So I think lectures matter as a "natural selection" mechanism to
find people who will go further in a subject.

