本文旨在汇集高质量的讲座系列，为读者提供构建学科深度理解的资源。作者借鉴了此前受欢迎的“最佳教科书”和“最佳隐性知识视频”的经验，创建了这份讲座目录。这些讲座由各大学公开，涵盖广泛的主题，并提供构建直觉和高级概述的有效途径。作者鼓励读者分享他们认为特别优秀的讲座系列，并提供详细的推荐格式，以帮助构建一个有价值的资源库，其中涵盖了统计力学等多个学科，并强调了讲座质量的重要性。

💡 推荐讲座的提交格式：文章要求读者按照特定格式提交推荐的讲座系列，包括学科领域、链接、讲师和推荐理由。这有助于创建一个结构化的目录，方便读者查找和评估。

🎓 讲座的适用范围：作者强调讲座对于构建学科直觉和提供高层次概述的价值。推荐的讲座系列既适合希望深入理解特定领域的学习者，也适合寻求快速掌握学科概览的读者。

📚 讲座的质量与多样性：文章强调了讲座质量的重要性，并鼓励推荐各种形式的讲座，包括视频、音频甚至文本形式。作者鼓励读者分享他们认为特别优秀的讲座系列，旨在汇集一个多样化的资源库。

Published on March 24, 2025 8:03 PM GMT

Previously on LessWrong:

The Best Textbooks on Every SubjectThe Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject

Having seen the popularity of those previous initiatives, I thought it would be valuable to have a similar collection of lecture series. Many universities have made some of their lectures freely available online, leaving a lot of options to choose from. Lectures also vary widely in their quality, and I've often found better alternatives to the lectures offered at my universities online. It would thus be great to have a catalogue of lectures that people have found particularly good.

While lectures are usually of secondary importance to textbooks and exercises when forming deep gears-level models of a field, good lectures are still highly useful for building intuition about a subject, and they're also helpful for those seeking a high-level overview of a field without the ambition to become an expert. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a classic example of a lecture series that serves both purposes. If this post introduces people to a couple of lecture series that they find as good as or better than Feynman's lectures, I'd consider it a great success!

How to submit?

For the submissions, I'll adopt a format similar to the one used in Parker Conley's post on tacit knowledge videos:

Domain: Statistical Mechanics

Link: Statistical Mechanics (Spring 2013) by Susskind Lectures

Lecturer: Leonard Susskind

Why? Susskind is a legendary physicist who is also excellent at conveying physical intuition and presenting topics in a highly engaging way. These lectures on Statistical Mechanics are no exception. I'll note that there are a few nonstandard choices in his approach to teaching the subject, such as not mentioning the concepts of microstates and macrostates at all in the first few lectures. Nevertheless, I liked it a lot overall.

For whom? The lectures were given for an introductory course and predominantly focus on building the right intuitions. I'd thus recommend it for people who don't yet have first-year physics undergrad-level knowledge in statistical mechanics.

Here are the rules:

Post your entry in the comment section with the above format.It would be preferable that the lectures are available at least in audio format, if not in video, but if the best lectures you've ever seen were given by an underappreciated professor at an obscure university in the 1950s and are consequently only available in text format, I'd still want to know of them. The lectures don't have to be from official university courses, but also shouldn't be short YouTube videos — for example, I wouldn't count PBS Space Time's Understanding the Holographic Universe playlist as a lecture series, but Steve Brunton's Engineering Math: Vector Calculus and Partial Differential Equations would be fine.If you have watched multiple lecture series on a single topic and can describe in your comment why your favorite one was better than the others, that would be ideal, but I won't make it a requirement.

On my end, I promise to create a section below with your recommendations once a critical mass of them has been posted, and to keep editing the post afterwards as dictated by the volume of new recommendations. Please share your favorite lecture series below!

Discuss