I'm impressed more by the comments than the article itself. Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.
A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and opened his book. It was like if you showed your programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.
This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.
100%! This reminded me of a similar lesson beaten into us _repeatedly_ in college. I would study for a test and feel like everything was crystal clear. Then i walk into the exam and get absolutely destroyed by stuff i thought i understood.. over and over again. It was (unfortunately) a common experience.
Seeing the answers afterwards, they usually involved facts i knew applied in a way i could not. That experience convinced me that your internal assessment of how well you understand something can be wildly off without an objective yardstick. Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as getting rekt in an exam.
This is a core problem in education, BTW: people, regardless of age, are essentially unable to properly evaluate whether they actually learned something from e.g. a course they just completed, and what helped with these learning effects. Those after-course feedbacks mostly just reflect whether they liked the presenter and/or the group. This of course has problematic consequences if that after-course feedback is used as evaluation of the course itself, because it can penalize courses where people would actually learn - because learning sometimes simply isn't fun.
This lends credence to the educational reform that I always found the most compelling: kids/people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture, so the teacher can actually help students work through problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).
A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.
> if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress
If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".
I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same proportions.
If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to make people feel smarter with the sample lessons. That being said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the important stuff. So I think it's important to find a balance. You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.
I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment? The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel good after learning stuff.
> Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things.
This may be, but studies also show that you should review the material before the lecture so that you can engage the lecturer.
I can count on a single hand and not use all the fingers the number of students I have taught who always reviewed the material before I lectured on it. Unsurprisingly, those students absolutely sailed through my class with very high grades.
So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?
Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are two parties to that bargain.
> “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at a rate of four thousand words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”
> Slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has read. “We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”
-- Primary Education of the Camiroi, R. A. Lafferty [1]
Yea, this is why my IT program had such poor students in the higher grade levels. I would spend 8 hours on Saturday on labs and other students would breeze through them in a couple hours.
I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.
I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.
In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.
I wonder the quality of learning if you listen to/watch something at 2x speed twice. Bonus if there is a delay in which your mind may formulate questions.
I'm guessing it would be superior unless it was a very high difficulty piece. Having a basic understanding and then formulating questions allows you have an input on the learning, as opposed to simply listening.
I would also say that with some material (esp. fiction), your "comprehension" may go up if you listen to it faster, because you don't give your mind a chance to wonder if something makes sense; I often fall for the trap of asking what I would do in a given situation, and then when the character does something nonsensical, I go looking for a good reason. I lose sight of what the author is trying to say because they made a mistake when trying to forward the plot.
It is very clear to me that listening at 3x works after some training. (Not surprising, since almost everyone already reads way faster than normal speech)
The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.
> A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress
There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion about whether video learning was useful or worked better for some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative correlation).
This makes me feel better about myself. I don't like reading or listening a ton before diving it. Just give me a spoonful and then I'll do what I can with that, and come back for the next spoonful when I'm ready.
The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.
> Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.
Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating your current ability", and more broadly being good at "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current ability", is a skill in itself.
Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the next step being the realization that you probably are incapable.
At conferences, people will say they liked and learned from talks that were complicated and largely incomprehensible, and that they found trivial and boring the talks that managed to explain the thing well enough that it was actually understood.
I get the point you're making - but honestly I have to raise the counter argument, which I think is equally valid. Take for example, the average lecture video. The information density is so low, that I'd imagine that a 60 minute video could be compressed into 10-12 minutes without any loss of information. It really depends on what you're listening to/watching.
I think some of the replies and likes to your reply are kinda hilarious.
You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information, not people who are using it to skip filler content and contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people corrected you in the reply.
But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
I use the same youtube plugin mentioned in the article, and watch many videos at 2.5x-3.0x speed, for the exact reason that you state. There is a lot of "filler" content that I either a) already know or b) is not relevant to what I'm trying to learn. I'm really just trying to get through that content quickly. When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the speed down to 1x to learn it.
Honestly, maybe I'm just some old, out-of-touch luddite, but I think that using videos to pass information is sub-optimal all around.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Long before audio books were a public thing I received a special tape player for listening to audio recordings of my school textbooks because I have low vision. I was ecstatic to learn that I could adjust the speed and could still understand the book at something around 2-2.5x speed. I don’t know to what extent other bling or impaired persons use the speed controls but I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly and this isn’t a bad thing per se. I also agree that the information glut is not a good habit but listening to something at a faster speed is not in abs of itself information glut. Sometimes the bottleneck in presentation speed is the speaker not the listener.
I think it's not really about the speed of the information, as long as you are able to process it, but the sheer amount of information. If you use time savings of 50 minutes to just consume more information, not much will settle in your long term memory. But if you process and repeat the information in those "saved" minutes, you'll get away with much more in the end. I think this is more the point of the author's view.
This ignores the point (that Perell makes in the essay) that learning via lecture is a horrible way to learn much of anything to begin with.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
I think that tutors like Khan of Khan Academy kind of revolutionized the shortening down of lectures. The videos are split up into smaller chunks, they're much more direct, and go straight to the point.
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
I'll often seek out both the written and lectures on material I'm particularly interested in.
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
It's not just density, many books are pure nonsense. So 200 books of pure nonsense a year won't teach you much. They'll just introduce you to a ton of terrible ideas.
You describe a symptom of a high data/low effect situation that is pretty common these days.
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
I'm very slow with books. I'll read a couple paragraphs and then ponder for a minute. And then maybe look up some tangential, maybe even radial stuff. Even audio books at 1X move too fast for me.
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me.
Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed because there's really nothing there.
It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily gained.
If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.
The article isn’t just about playback speed. It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.
It’s extra ironic, then, that much of the comment section here only seems to have absorbed the headline but not the content of the article.
I have noticed that my most voracious podcast and book consuming friends seem to have developed a lot of surface-level knowledge about a lot of subjects, but it’s difficult to discuss even the content of the books they’ve read. Listening on 1.5X or 2X speed is a common boast for them, as is the number of books or podcasts they’ve consume in a year (which is tracked for some reason). It seems the goal has become quantity, or simply filling time and providing background noise instead of studying a subject.
I'd argue that 95% of all learning, is learnt by doing.
Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and untested knowledge. At best, a boffin.
It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.
I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic.
I was a good but not great student in college. The computer science classes bored me to death.
Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn’t stay focused until … I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few min at 1x.
My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine. If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.
10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x. It’s a sweet spot for me.
When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I Built This w Guy Raz) I’ll often pause to write down notes, but I’m almost never feeling like it’s too fast to ingest.
Sometimes I’m self conscious that I talk too fast around other people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and mouth don’t have a 1/2x button. Ha!
I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too much time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think it's a blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up being an excuse to not complete things. There's always something else that you "need to know" that blocks you.
Nowadays, I realize that it feels good to learn new things, but if it's not in service of an actual "deliverable" of some sort, I don't end up using it.
More recently I've gone the other way and just try to do and make things, even if I don't have an exact plan on how I'm going to do it. It ends up focusing my learning as well. Plus I'm actually more productive since I'm always focused on producing something as opposed to focusing on planning to produce something.
3x speed mistakes form for substance and wastes time besides, because podcasts are much more for fun than self-improvement.
Let's be honest with ourselves here: no one listening to a podcast is ever just listening to a podcast. You're running or driving or doing the laundry or working out or working or walking the dog, so in terms of learning it's more than anything like hypnopaedia [1], which doesn't work. You're not really engaging with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio shows for since radio shows were invented.
That's not to say podcasts can't also be useful in the instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you've got a good memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.
Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your own story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it. Believe it or not, that's allowed too.
A year ago a friend encouraged me to start a podcast about the history of astronomy [0]. Talking to people who have listened to the podcast has been really eye-opening about the difference in comprehension/absorption between creating a podcast vs. listening to it.
I would notice that other podcasters in the "History of..." genre would sometimes say things like "you might remember we talked about such-and-such related thing in Episode 43..." and I would always think "how do they remember that they mentioned this particular detail dozens of episodes back?" But as I've started writing a podcast, I've found that it's a lot easier than I thought it would be. When you're writing the material vs. passively listening to it, you just have a much more intimate memory of everything you've said and it's easy to make connections across the different episodes.
I try to write the episodes to at have a few big points that I repeat throughout so that even someone passively listening will get the main message. But even still when I talk to people, they seem to have enjoyed it, but have a hard time remembering even some of the basic ideas. And I notice this with myself, too, when I listen to podcasts. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and be reminded of some related story I heard in a podcast at one point, but when I try to recall the details, they're just not there.
So, even though I was certainly aware of it intellectually, I know have a much more visceral appreciation for the fact tha if you want to learn something deeply, there's really no substitute for doing some creative work on the subject.
The argument against 3x seems to be a false dichotomy. I'd like to see a comparison of the author's recommendation of spaced repetition combined with "Mike's" 3x speed-listening. Increase your intake density and still get the superpowers of retention that SR proffers.
Per the author's charts you can increase the information density by either switching languages or speeding up the current language, so find the maxima of the information density-vs-syllabic-speed graph and make your chosen language match either / both parameters. That may not end up at 3x, but human perception and understanding is certainly greater than 2x common speed for English speech. I don't have a citable reference at hand, but a motivational speaker from my youth made this point. He said he speaks at about double the standard rate because nearly everyone can still understand him, and it lets him give twice as much detail in a story, or tell a story twice as long as he otherwise could.
I agree with other commenters: it's all about the content.
I listen to most podcasts at 2x at least because they often are too much chatter or are repeating things I know. But sometimes I pause them to think when something new arises. In other cases, like some types of YouTube videos, I watch at 0.75x because they are way too fast and have no white-space, way too dense.
And in all of this, the MAIN thing I learn is WHAT the podcast was. I don't learn the deepest understanding of some subject. I learn THAT the subject exists (a very specific bit within a subject sometimes).
Here and there, I encounter some truly applicable, practical concepts, and then I have to put them to use and revisit them in order to really learn and master them.
> Every student could now study the same material, no matter where they lived. In tune with this post-industrial mindset, fuzzy and hard to quantify educational methods like apprenticeships and the singular teachings of local sages were overtaken by national benchmarks and one-size-fits-all curriculums.
It also meant every student got at least something resembling an education, even if the quality of local educators was sub-par.
Mass production of almost anything tends towards results that are a bit below what people hope for, but the results are uniform.
I want to know where the author of this post expects to find all these amazing teachers at for every single small town and village around the country.
Yes, I also had some absolutely incredible teachers out there. I also had lecturers so good that I was able to pay attention for the entire hour. But in general, sure, I'll buy that most of my classes had maybe 20 minutes of focus in them. But I'd also say the majority of teachers were aware of this and, up until college, didn't try to talk for more than 10 or 15 minutes at one go.
We're mass-producing teachers, but we're also mass-producing students. In the example of a medieval university or a traditional apprenticeship, the students have some kind of vested interest in being there. These were limited opportunities, not universal requirements. In contrast, most teachers in most classrooms today are trying to impart knowledge that their students aren't particularly motivated to have.
Lectures are a great way to convey information to students who want the information in the first place. They are a terrible way to engage with involuntary participants.
Who says the 1x is the optimal speed to consume any information? Why stop there? Perhaps half, or even a quarter, would be better? Of course blowing through information as fast as possible doesn't do any good if you can't retain it, but I find it hard to believe that all the information out there is ideally paced for every listener.
I've actually found that sometimes I will be watching a lecture at 2x for a lot of it and then want to drop down to regular speed for certain trickier parts.
I think the playback speed should be variable depending on the information density of the content. I will generally listen at 2x speed, but for something that is really information dense I will slow it way down, sometimes all the way to 1x.
Even sometimes when I am listening to something at higher speeds if they say something really interesting I will pause the content and just think about it for a few minutes.
I think this is only possible because "completing X books per year" is not part of my identity.
Counterargument: most of the things you can consume at 3x speed are not worth remembering long term. For example, every day the APM: Marketplace podcast recites the returns on specific induces for the day. It can help put context to stories in other segments, but I have no need to retain it for more than an hour, if ever. And in general, the relevance of news rapidly decays; I forget where I read it (the irony!) but if you imagine a newspaper that only published once a month, it would have different headlines than one that published daily, and different again from one that published annually. In that context, speeding up news podcasts makes a bit of sense. You don't need to remember it long term, just long enough for this week's watercooler conversations to jog your memory until it disappears completely.
In contrast, books I read by myself, at a relatively slow pace. I focus on timeless books, that teach knowledge or skill that I can apply on the job. The pace will vary depending on the type of book; the last university textbook I studied took me about 10 pages a hour (including all the problems). For a pop sci book, I can do about a chapter an hour. I try not to spend more than an hour block on this, for the spaced repetition effects mentioned. Moreover, I typically try to get at least one Anki card per chapter (textbooks usually a dozen per chapter). I can't imagine trying to retain anything at 3x speed, especially the mathematical tomes I focus on.
But I'm pretty sure most people can up their podcasts to 1.2x without even noticing. Most content is recorded at a leisurely pace, both because it's easier to pronounce clearly, and to accommodate non-native speakers. But it's not always about efficiency. For comedy podcasts, I set the rate to 1x, because the point is to enjoy it and as they say, timing is the essence of comedy.
> The smartest people I’ve met reject the “Water in a Cup” theory. They focus less on consuming as much information as possible and more on cultivating the deepest possible understanding of the ideas that resonate with them most.
> Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.
> Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.
I've personally found that when I spend more time with something, I get more out of it. For example, rereading books or rewatching movies. That's also a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if after the first time something starts feeling shallow, it's probably not worth keeping around.
It isn't just that the absorption is poor. It's that the things you're absorbing are also generally poor. That's why you can listen to them at 3x in the first place, low information density.
- new contextual framework (There is no god, armies used to be retinues of retinues)
- new skills (make fire from sticks, algebra and calculus)
- new information (Henry V won at agincourt)
The big important ones are the contextual frameworks. Without them
humanity and individual humans are just floundering. And if there is
any big political divide it's because people are not in same contextual framework (eg Brexit)
Skills are how an individual can contribute inside that framework - and it needs practise. And information is the last. The strawman the author is moaning about is absorbing information without practise. This seems to be the failure to leap from podcast to khan academy.
solving that one for millions of people will be an incredible leap. So far we only have "my tutor moans at me if i don't"
[+] [-] culebron21|4 years ago|reply
A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and opened his book. It was like if you showed your programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
There's some scientific evidence as well:
1. Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things. https://www.science.org/content/article/lectures-arent-just-...
2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.
This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|4 years ago|reply
Seeing the answers afterwards, they usually involved facts i knew applied in a way i could not. That experience convinced me that your internal assessment of how well you understand something can be wildly off without an objective yardstick. Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as getting rekt in an exam.
[+] [-] bildung|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|4 years ago|reply
A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".
I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same proportions.
If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to make people feel smarter with the sample lessons. That being said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the important stuff. So I think it's important to find a balance. You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.
I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment? The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel good after learning stuff.
[+] [-] bsder|4 years ago|reply
This may be, but studies also show that you should review the material before the lecture so that you can engage the lecturer.
I can count on a single hand and not use all the fingers the number of students I have taught who always reviewed the material before I lectured on it. Unsurprisingly, those students absolutely sailed through my class with very high grades.
So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?
Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are two parties to that bargain.
[+] [-] twic|4 years ago|reply
> Slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has read. “We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”
-- Primary Education of the Camiroi, R. A. Lafferty [1]
[1] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/reading-at-spee...
[+] [-] enominezerum|4 years ago|reply
I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.
I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.
In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|4 years ago|reply
I'm guessing it would be superior unless it was a very high difficulty piece. Having a basic understanding and then formulating questions allows you have an input on the learning, as opposed to simply listening.
I would also say that with some material (esp. fiction), your "comprehension" may go up if you listen to it faster, because you don't give your mind a chance to wonder if something makes sense; I often fall for the trap of asking what I would do in a given situation, and then when the character does something nonsensical, I go looking for a good reason. I lose sight of what the author is trying to say because they made a mistake when trying to forward the plot.
[+] [-] jordic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petters|4 years ago|reply
The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.
[+] [-] fouric|4 years ago|reply
There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion about whether video learning was useful or worked better for some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative correlation).
[+] [-] hdjrudni|4 years ago|reply
The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.
[+] [-] tomxor|4 years ago|reply
Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating your current ability", and more broadly being good at "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current ability", is a skill in itself.
Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the next step being the realization that you probably are incapable.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _aaed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saivan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someRandoJunk|4 years ago|reply
You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information, not people who are using it to skip filler content and contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people corrected you in the reply.
But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
[+] [-] daenz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|4 years ago|reply
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
[+] [-] memco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luguenth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsanheim|4 years ago|reply
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
[+] [-] faeyanpiraat|4 years ago|reply
Otherwise I’d almost fall asleep.
It’s better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear sentences than wasting 2x the time.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
[+] [-] JackPoach|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomLensman|4 years ago|reply
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the content.
[+] [-] trabant00|4 years ago|reply
Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed because there's really nothing there.
It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily gained.
If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
It’s extra ironic, then, that much of the comment section here only seems to have absorbed the headline but not the content of the article.
I have noticed that my most voracious podcast and book consuming friends seem to have developed a lot of surface-level knowledge about a lot of subjects, but it’s difficult to discuss even the content of the books they’ve read. Listening on 1.5X or 2X speed is a common boast for them, as is the number of books or podcasts they’ve consume in a year (which is tracked for some reason). It seems the goal has become quantity, or simply filling time and providing background noise instead of studying a subject.
[+] [-] JimTheMan|4 years ago|reply
Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and untested knowledge. At best, a boffin.
It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.
[+] [-] semireg|4 years ago|reply
I was a good but not great student in college. The computer science classes bored me to death.
Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn’t stay focused until … I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few min at 1x.
My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine. If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.
10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x. It’s a sweet spot for me.
When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I Built This w Guy Raz) I’ll often pause to write down notes, but I’m almost never feeling like it’s too fast to ingest.
Sometimes I’m self conscious that I talk too fast around other people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and mouth don’t have a 1/2x button. Ha!
[+] [-] allenu|4 years ago|reply
Nowadays, I realize that it feels good to learn new things, but if it's not in service of an actual "deliverable" of some sort, I don't end up using it.
More recently I've gone the other way and just try to do and make things, even if I don't have an exact plan on how I'm going to do it. It ends up focusing my learning as well. Plus I'm actually more productive since I'm always focused on producing something as opposed to focusing on planning to produce something.
[+] [-] throwanem|4 years ago|reply
Let's be honest with ourselves here: no one listening to a podcast is ever just listening to a podcast. You're running or driving or doing the laundry or working out or working or walking the dog, so in terms of learning it's more than anything like hypnopaedia [1], which doesn't work. You're not really engaging with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio shows for since radio shows were invented.
That's not to say podcasts can't also be useful in the instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you've got a good memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.
Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your own story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it. Believe it or not, that's allowed too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning
[+] [-] antognini|4 years ago|reply
I would notice that other podcasters in the "History of..." genre would sometimes say things like "you might remember we talked about such-and-such related thing in Episode 43..." and I would always think "how do they remember that they mentioned this particular detail dozens of episodes back?" But as I've started writing a podcast, I've found that it's a lot easier than I thought it would be. When you're writing the material vs. passively listening to it, you just have a much more intimate memory of everything you've said and it's easy to make connections across the different episodes.
I try to write the episodes to at have a few big points that I repeat throughout so that even someone passively listening will get the main message. But even still when I talk to people, they seem to have enjoyed it, but have a hard time remembering even some of the basic ideas. And I notice this with myself, too, when I listen to podcasts. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and be reminded of some related story I heard in a podcast at one point, but when I try to recall the details, they're just not there.
So, even though I was certainly aware of it intellectually, I know have a much more visceral appreciation for the fact tha if you want to learn something deeply, there's really no substitute for doing some creative work on the subject.
[0]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about
[+] [-] web007|4 years ago|reply
Per the author's charts you can increase the information density by either switching languages or speeding up the current language, so find the maxima of the information density-vs-syllabic-speed graph and make your chosen language match either / both parameters. That may not end up at 3x, but human perception and understanding is certainly greater than 2x common speed for English speech. I don't have a citable reference at hand, but a motivational speaker from my youth made this point. He said he speaks at about double the standard rate because nearly everyone can still understand him, and it lets him give twice as much detail in a story, or tell a story twice as long as he otherwise could.
[+] [-] quadrangle|4 years ago|reply
I listen to most podcasts at 2x at least because they often are too much chatter or are repeating things I know. But sometimes I pause them to think when something new arises. In other cases, like some types of YouTube videos, I watch at 0.75x because they are way too fast and have no white-space, way too dense.
And in all of this, the MAIN thing I learn is WHAT the podcast was. I don't learn the deepest understanding of some subject. I learn THAT the subject exists (a very specific bit within a subject sometimes).
Here and there, I encounter some truly applicable, practical concepts, and then I have to put them to use and revisit them in order to really learn and master them.
[+] [-] com2kid|4 years ago|reply
It also meant every student got at least something resembling an education, even if the quality of local educators was sub-par.
Mass production of almost anything tends towards results that are a bit below what people hope for, but the results are uniform.
I want to know where the author of this post expects to find all these amazing teachers at for every single small town and village around the country.
Yes, I also had some absolutely incredible teachers out there. I also had lecturers so good that I was able to pay attention for the entire hour. But in general, sure, I'll buy that most of my classes had maybe 20 minutes of focus in them. But I'd also say the majority of teachers were aware of this and, up until college, didn't try to talk for more than 10 or 15 minutes at one go.
[+] [-] allknowingfrog|4 years ago|reply
Lectures are a great way to convey information to students who want the information in the first place. They are a terrible way to engage with involuntary participants.
[+] [-] emodendroket|4 years ago|reply
I've actually found that sometimes I will be watching a lecture at 2x for a lot of it and then want to drop down to regular speed for certain trickier parts.
[+] [-] celeritascelery|4 years ago|reply
Even sometimes when I am listening to something at higher speeds if they say something really interesting I will pause the content and just think about it for a few minutes.
I think this is only possible because "completing X books per year" is not part of my identity.
[+] [-] jldugger|4 years ago|reply
In contrast, books I read by myself, at a relatively slow pace. I focus on timeless books, that teach knowledge or skill that I can apply on the job. The pace will vary depending on the type of book; the last university textbook I studied took me about 10 pages a hour (including all the problems). For a pop sci book, I can do about a chapter an hour. I try not to spend more than an hour block on this, for the spaced repetition effects mentioned. Moreover, I typically try to get at least one Anki card per chapter (textbooks usually a dozen per chapter). I can't imagine trying to retain anything at 3x speed, especially the mathematical tomes I focus on.
But I'm pretty sure most people can up their podcasts to 1.2x without even noticing. Most content is recorded at a leisurely pace, both because it's easier to pronounce clearly, and to accommodate non-native speakers. But it's not always about efficiency. For comedy podcasts, I set the rate to 1x, because the point is to enjoy it and as they say, timing is the essence of comedy.
[+] [-] Zababa|4 years ago|reply
There's a letter by Seneca that I think about a lot, called "On discursiveness in reading" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...):
> Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.
> Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.
I've personally found that when I spend more time with something, I get more out of it. For example, rereading books or rewatching movies. That's also a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if after the first time something starts feeling shallow, it's probably not worth keeping around.
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
I've since built and delivered a lot of things, some even meaningful, and for myself it gives me stories to tell.
The other side of things, Productivity Porn, is another meme that is seductive but unfulfilling in my opinion!
[+] [-] Reason077|4 years ago|reply
He should try noise cancelling headphones! Surely one of the greatest inventions of the early 21st century.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
- new contextual framework (There is no god, armies used to be retinues of retinues)
- new skills (make fire from sticks, algebra and calculus)
- new information (Henry V won at agincourt)
The big important ones are the contextual frameworks. Without them humanity and individual humans are just floundering. And if there is any big political divide it's because people are not in same contextual framework (eg Brexit)
Skills are how an individual can contribute inside that framework - and it needs practise. And information is the last. The strawman the author is moaning about is absorbing information without practise. This seems to be the failure to leap from podcast to khan academy.
solving that one for millions of people will be an incredible leap. So far we only have "my tutor moans at me if i don't"