I’d usually start with easily digestible content like YouTube videos or ChatGPT. At this point, I’m not too concerned about the correctness of the information. It mainly gives me vocabulary that I can then look up for further reading along with the perspective of one or two individuals. That might be all I care about, and if so, I’d stop there and go on with my day. If I want to dive deeper, I’ll look up textbooks and papers on the topic, or any other relevant primary sources. Basically do a light literature review.
Wikipedia and books, depending on the subject matter and my degree of interest. For example, I’ve been reading historical research books because I love history. If it was something about the moon, it’d be Wikipedia and good enough.
You have to set a goal of what you want to understand and why you want to understand it, then read accordingly. If your goal is to know the usual number of eggs laid by a bird because you are trying to identify one from its nest in your yard, sure just read some Wikipedia and maybe read its sources. If you need to understand a broad topic in the social sciences in order to do your job or organize politically, well sucks yo be you, you need to spend months to years getting a handle on the various schools of thought and approaching them humbly and critically, reading many books.
I read everything I can find about it, especially if its people arguing thoughtfully, or sharing their advice/experience, or if its about the history of the topic. I get kind of obsessive about researching things so I usually come at a topic from a lot of directions.
I watch videos and read articles and use LLMs to give me the key points to grasp the basics. Then build upon that knowledge with more focused learning.
Why do we have teachers then? Listening and watching is absolutely a valid strategy of learning. You just need to make sure that the speakers are trustworthy on the subject.
Probably meant don’t rely on youtube, (as people produce fake info) while text books are rypically vetted, except in USA where Texas writes the curriculum supporting oil and gas and denying clinate change–and the other states purchase the Texas curriculum
Reading papers and contacting people in that field. I’ve found that university professors can especially direct you to materials in their field, and even like to chat about it sometimes. Half of my book collection was found this way.
A review paper from a reputable journal. The Annual Reviews series was great for this. Some of the Nature journals also used to run mini-reviews associated with research papers in the issue.