No, it's not about the "optimal way", it's about the oft-cited the factoid "90% of people are haptic learners, 30% are visual learners, 15% are auditory learners, 25% are text-based learners". Somebody did an experiment and found out 90% of subjects remembered something later when they had to learn to do it, but only 25% remembered when they had to read it. (All numbers made up, does not matter in the context of this comment)

Of course, this completely misrepresents the experiment! After learning to do something, you are 90% likely to retain it for a certain duration, after you read about it, you are only 25% likely to retain it, so in aggregate you only retain 25% of what you read.

The idea was never to find people who are "visual learning type" or the "non-learning-by-doing type".

That's what became of this idea in education through the game of telephone that mangles experimental results on their way from developmental psychology and cognitive science into education departments, and then into future high school teachers during undergrad lectures. Even my own high school teachers in Germany talked about learning types as if there was such a thing.

Sorry if I was unclear. There is no singular optimal way of teaching. But for every subject, there is an optimal way to teach it. And usually that optimal way is a combination of visuals, auditory, reading, etc.

Way too often, someone achieves understanding when information happens to be presented in an optimal way for that information and they instead believe that the way was optimized for them rather than for the information.

Then they get stuck on "I need to watch videos to truly understand it".

This is a self report of a self assessment. So the most unreliable form of reporting coupled with the most unreliable form of assessment.

I believe you believe all of that, but I don't believe it is true. Even in your case.

> you can actually see where the steps are performed. It's sometimes faster than reading a bullet point than finding out where on the screen it is

If and only if the steps are performed in the correct order without any fluffs. In one particularly bad example that I saw someone was showing how to use an updated feature in Photoshop. The sequence went something like

* the instructor showed the old way of doing things

* they then did 'undo' a few times to get back to the point where the new feature was different

* they started showing the new way

* they then realised they'd made a mistake earlier on - missing out a step in the new sequence

* they did undo a few times

* they did the step they'd omitted

* they then carried on from that point

I had to watch several times to work out the actual sequence of correct operations. To my mind they should have re-recorded from the beginning rather than show their disrespect for the viewers.