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Against 3x Speed

• nightski 5y ago
  Or maybe speed really isn't that important. Just make sure that what you are learning is important. There is a lot of information out there that just doesn't matter. Focus on what actually has an impact to you and not all of the things you think you "should" learn because someone else said so.
• reificator 5y ago
  I've made meaningful progress on things I'm learning by listening to podcasts at 3x speed + "Smart Speed". Could I have made more progress by listening slower? Maybe, though that's debatable. Would I have even started? Absolutely not. Before I ever found speed controls I'd start listening to podcasts and then just give up because it felt so boring and slow. "Why would I listen to podcasts or audiobooks when I could read them at several times the speed, back up, reread things, copy sections into my notes, and skim past the parts I already know?" is a common thing I used to say. Podcasts don't have an index like a real book, and it's hard to flip back and forth between two sections. Now, I'm not listening to podcasts related to programming, despite that being my main profession. I'm listening to a podcast about a hobby and one I'd like to improve at, and I'm doing it while I work, drive, or otherwise do things that don't demand that part of my brain. I'm also not afraid to rewind or slow down, particularly if there's a guest on whose voice I'm not familiar with. There are over 600 episodes (maybe 700 by now?) in the backlog of the main podcast I'm listening to right now, each between 30 minutes and 4 hours, with an average around an hour and a half or so. That's a lot of audio. I've been listening for months and am around 175 or so episodes in. If I was listening at 1x speed then this podcast might be a 5 or more year commitment. If I was studying for a test, maybe I'd slow it down. Maybe I'd choose a format like text where available. But this particular show is not in lecture format. It's structured as an ongoing discussion between people who want to improve at something very intricate and ever changing. I'm listening to hear how different people approach these situations. So having the speed of the conversation be fast enough that I'm not losing the thread of what's going on is more important than catching every little detail. I'm listening to hear stories, or for debates between people who look at the problems in different ways and want to find holes in their own approaches. I'm listening for what people's mindsets are like and how their opinions change over time as they gain more experience and revisit topics they've covered in the past. I also listen with the intent of deliberately practicing the thing they're talking about, and use that to build up my own experience and opinions. For any given topic that comes up on the podcast I can typically tell you the stance of each of the hosts as well as any guests that were on, and I can tell you whether I think their reasoning is sound based on my own attempts. So while my listening is passive I actively engage with the content on a regular schedule.
• joshuakarl 5y ago
  For me, playback speed options is not about controlling "speed" but more about controlling the density of information, which varies a lot from content to content. When I listen to a very technical conference, I always keep x1 or even x0.75 but sometimes with a podcast with a low information output, I process everything at x2.
• dirtyid 5y ago
  Article is about experience but in terms of learning, I find listening to the same subject explained 3 times, preferably from 3 different talks, at 3x speed is vastly better at retaining info. Repetition helps. And there's something about listening to people talk faster inbue qualities of competence that makes me pay attention more. Somewhat related phenomenon, a lot of comedy podcasts, I can't listen to at 1x speed because people talking at 2x simply sounds wittier / snappier. Have been disappointed by more than a few live shows.
• tomrod 5y ago
  I used to be a "Mike" type. I realized I wanted to have impact -- that being a "consumer" of everything of boring. 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!
• marban 5y ago
  • hu3 5y ago
    For what is worth, that post was 9 days ago and has 1 comment. HN allows for sensible use of reposting.
• saivan 5y ago
  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.
  • daenz 5y ago
    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.
    • thepasswordis 5y ago
      Which addon are you using for youtube?
      • Topgamer7 5y ago
        Enhancer for Youtuber
        • michaelcampbell 5y ago
          This is a game changer.
      • razh 5y ago
        Ilya Grigorik's Video Speed Controller? https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
      • gonehome 5y ago
        I just modify it directly in the console (I have to search to look up the command every time).
• elchief 5y ago
  Meh. I did several AWS courses on Udemy at 1.75x speed, and did pretty well on the exams To me, that is reasonable evidence that video learning at speed works, at least in the short term Also, I suffer ADHD. I'd say listening at speed forces me to pay closer attention
• celeritascelery 5y ago
  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.
• JimTheMan 5y ago
  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.
  • lern_too_spel 5y ago
    And that is the trouble with the headline. If watching at 3x speed gets you to actually trying something faster, that is clearly the way to go.
  • resonious 5y ago
    I'm inclined to agree. There's a profound difference between how I remember something I've heard and how I remember something I've done - even if it's something I've heard through spaced repetition.
  • pha392 5y ago
    Totally trial and fail
  • legulere 5y ago
    I disagree, if you are just doing you won’t be learning new things. I work at a place where there a lot of of long-timers are there and at that time there were only people that can from different fields. Those people work since 10, 20 years without even mastering what they do. If they have to do something new they either give up or just try to come up with something on their own. Most of the time people have done things like that before and you can just read about them or look at their code.
    • farhanhubble 5y ago
      You're right! I'd say doing is important for actually understanding and retaining information while reading is important for understanding the triumphs and failures of others and "stealing" ideas. Interspersing the two is perhaps the best way of learning. For example you don't want to learn to swim by watching 12, hour-long videos on swimming techniques, costumes and its history. You do wanna watch a 15 minute instructions video on how to get your feet wet and then go ahead and actually get your feet wet and then come back and watch the next 15 minutes of video on how to step into the pool.
• strulovich 5y ago
  Interestingly, the author mentions people lose focus after 10-18 minutes anyhow. So maybe speeding up things gets them more information during that initial focus time? (Other than this silly note, I generally agree with a lot of the author’s sentiment)
• com2kid 5y ago
  > 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.
  • allknowingfrog 5y ago
    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.
• Reason077 5y ago
  > "He ... stopped taking the subway to work because the train noise made it impossible to hear the audiobook narrators. " He should try noise cancelling headphones! Surely one of the greatest inventions of the early 21st century.
  • khariel 5y ago
    It was when riding the subway with my noise-cancelling headphones that I realized how good an investment it was. Oh, the bliss.
• Nursie 5y ago
  > If we embraced the benefits of active learning, our classrooms would look nothing like they do today. The average classroom is set up for passive listening. It’s geared towards consuming knowledge, not integrating it. Desks are lined up in punitive rows To play devil's advocate, I learned actively in classrooms that looked very much like that. Mathematics, for instance, can be taught in such a way that kids at desks which are lined up to face the front can be shown a concept and then given exercises in which to apply it. I don't remember school being at all similar to university lectures, there was far more interaction with the teacher, and far more "now lets take some time to work through examples"
  • pha392 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with passive listening, but it's awful if it's the only way to teach
    • Nursie 5y ago
      Sure, but I don't think that classroom layout dictates that passive listening is the teaching method in use, personally. One can have the kids facing forward but still be engaging them with exercises and active learning.
• allenu 5y ago
  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.
  • klabb3 5y ago
    > 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. I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and striving for perfection, often upfront. I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find it"?
    • qaid 5y ago
      I will take a stab at this since I am transitioning away from this mindset myself. Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on each task, one at a time. If it’s not critical, let go of control and be okay failure, both from yourself and others. Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well, what didn’t go well, what could have improved) and use those to come up with action items. Or, if that’s too much, my original advice for you was “just do it.”
    • allenu 5y ago
      To me, a big part of my mental shift was just realizing how much code or process I follow doesn't actually deliver customer value. I want to make things that affect people or improve lives and the longer I spend polishing what I'm making, the less I'm getting feedback. I used to work in a large company on a team that essentially developed frameworks for other teams to use. I would often think through designs from several different angles and try to create an API that could work in any scenario. After shipping our frameworks, I often found that the "customer" (i.e. the other team) would use what I made in a different way from what I had expected. That meant a lot of the thinking I poured into the project was unnecessary. I really just had to look at that one particular use case and design for that. After a while I started working backwards and went directly in the customer team's codebase to start integrating potential API designs to ensure it would work for their use case. That saved a ton of guesswork and eliminated a lot of code waste. So I guess my advice is to question everything you work on and ask if there's a simpler/cheaper way to build just what you need. I usually aim for creating a proof of concept now to ensure that I only build what I need. It often means hacking things to make it work, and then afterwards clean up the hacks, but to be honest, a lot of hacks are good enough, if they are isolated. Also, try to develop a mindset of always aiming to deliver an output to ensure you don't get bogged down with analysis paralysis.
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  Reminds me of college - where you'd try to find ways to cram 4 months of lectures into 4 days. Unless you're on ADHD meds, studying 20 hours a day with laser focus, the next thing would be to take in as much information as possible...which included speeding up videos.
• Dylan16807 5y ago
  Most of this isn't really about the speed, it's against rushing your way through as many pieces of content as possible. If you decide a number of books per month up front, the question of how fast to read each one looks very different. Slowing down your first read will help retention to a point, but if you spend less time on the first read then you can do more spaced repetition later. Or if you read everything twice as fast, you could use the time you gain to work on projects. And while the optimal first time speed probably isn't 3.0x, we definitely shouldn't assume it's 1.0x.
• BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
  TTS ebooks at 500-600wpm is easy for me, though I usually top out at 2.5x for audiobooks. I'm not sure what the conversion factor between those is, but TTS is definitely faster.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Unfortunate title, because the most practical insight is that you don’t learn much by letting information wash over you. You need to repeat, engage with the data, do things with it.
• tptacek 5y ago
  Whatever you can say about listening to a sped-up audiobook, you can say about casually reading (or, as most people who don't nerd out about the theory of learning would put it, "reading"), so the framing of this around audiobooks seems pretty weird. Obviously, you don't master a subject by casually reading a book about it --- that's not really the premise of reading.
• antognini 5y ago
  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. [0]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about https://songofurania.com/about
  • rsanheim 5y ago
    This makes total sense. Whenever I've given a talk on a subject, I end up learning it much better than before, and these are topics I'm supposed to know quite a bit about =). The act of teaching or explaining something really helps you to see the subject in a new way and understand it in new and deeper ways. Probably one reason that good pair-programming helps everyone involved, even if its a much more senior person paired with someone with less experience.
  • geuis 5y ago
    Just subscribed. I’d recommend putting your RSS feed link higher up near the top.
• novok 5y ago
  Although I realize the article is about actually learning vs. skimming info, something I've realized about "2x" speed on videos is really just matching my natural rate of reading, and I speed up / slow down depending on the speed of the speaker itself.
• Jarwain 5y ago
  I feel like participating in a community, whether IRL or something like HN or reddit, exposes individuals to a set of memes on a repeated basis. Certain ideas get repeated at different times or in different contexts, and as a result tend to engrain themselves. A form of naturally occurring spaced repetition. One of the things that I like about HN is that these memes feel higher quality or more useful in some way. This can be in the form of coding philosophy (which could arguably just be the distillation of ideas from books large parts of the community have read like Clean Code or the GoF or the design of everyday things), or more general life philosophy (spaced repetition and this article's idea about, essentially, Slowing Down). Of course, this is probably how group think and social bubbles form, and exposure to new ideas can ideally shift the memescape. But it's interesting how my HN addiction results in this learning by osmosis. Although then This makes me think about advertising, in the branding sense, and how that repetition is used and abused to build familiarity with a brand and thus a product. Or how pop culture ends up being a sort of self-replicating meme.
• pha392 5y ago
  Probably any 60 minute video can be converted without loss of information in a 10 minute one. I understand that learning and retention are achieved through repetition, but repetition can be achieved in other ways.
• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  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.
• emodendroket 5y ago
  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.
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    that obviously isn't the authors point. The gist of the article is that treating the human mind like a hard-drive and trying to shove as much information into it, sort of like binge drinking, isn't a replacement for creativity, originality and contemplation, which is what genuine learning entails. And as far as speed goes, "1x" is the normal conversational speed we've been interacting at for many millennia, and regardless how fast you tune the podcast app, your brain likely hasn't evolved to follow a lecture at sonic speed. I actually think deliberately slowing down, if not in literal speed but at least by re-reading or re-listening is a skill more people should practice. More attention to what's already there and less attention scattered on novelty is an underrated ability. Think of it like this, if you want to be a great classical musician, you could study the same few Bach pieces for decades and you wouldn't stop learning. How bizarre is it to think you actually need to ingest hours of new information every week?
    • cmeacham98 5y ago
      > The gist of the article is that treating the human mind like a hard-drive and trying to shove as much information into it, sort of like binge drinking, isn't a replacement for creativity, originality and contemplation It isn't, but sometimes to get to the point where you can be creative and original you need to have a bunch of boring information stored away in your hard drive as a prerequisite.
    • colanderman 5y ago
      > And as far as speed goes, "1x" is the normal conversational speed we've been interacting at for many millennia, and regardless how fast you tune the podcast app, your brain likely hasn't evolved to follow a lecture at sonic speed. In normal conversation, people speak in far too slowly for me, myself included at times. They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the first word, gesture, or even length of pause. Just because it's the optimal speech production rate for many people, doesn't mean it's the optimal speech consumption rate for all people.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• web007 5y ago
  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.
  • BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Also probably not so much about speed than not pausing to think about what you have just read/viewed/watched ?
• shamas 5y ago
  I do this, and I'm constantly in need of book recommendations. Please help
  • trevcanhuman 5y ago
    Read 1984 (Orwell)
• ulnarkressty 5y ago
  My problem was that I was watching Youtube videos (mostly pop-sci stuff) for too long and not doing anything. I solved this problem by watching them on 2x speed. My current problem is that I'm now watching 2x the videos.
• colanderman 5y ago
  3x speed is an accessibility feature for anyone who has trouble paying attention at slower rates. The rules of grammar mean that people often need to speak far more words than is necessary for some concepts. Pause and rewind buttons exist for passages which are actually information dense. (The same is true of writing; entire paragraphs exist for no reason other than maintaining structure. Fortunately, well-edited works follow rules of paragraph style and structure -- first words, subect; final words, conclusion -- which enable effective skimming.)
• quadrangle 5y ago
  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.
  • orangepanda 5y ago
    It does depend on the content. Personally, if its for entertainment I default to x2 speed (thanks apple tv+ for including x2 speed instead of netflix's x1.5 half measure); but for educational purposes I go down to x1.5 The downside is, after a few days of getting used to it, x1 content feels like slow motion.
• cryptonector 5y ago
  I watch everything I can in 2x speed, except for exceptionally fast talkers (those I watch on 1.5x, usually). I think I could go up to 2.5x speed, but most video sites do not provide an option for that. 1x is just too slow. And yes, I get everything at 2x. Not everyone can. I know one person with an auditory processing disorder who cannot manage even 1.5x without a lot of effort. I suspect handling 2x is partly about skill, but not entirely.
• btheshoe 5y ago
  I watch my lectures at between 2x(math classes) and 3.5x(business classes) speed. Most professors just talk unconscionably slow, and done kitties focus in material so basic that I don't really have to understand every word.
• trabant00 5y ago
  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.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    At 3x, sure. But I regularly listen to podcasts at about 1.3-1.4x, depending on how quickly the hosts talk. When you actually are paying attention, 1x can just be really slow sometimes. I think of it more like bringing it to a comfortable speed where I don't feel like I have to wait for them to get on with it, than trying to speed through it as quickly as possible. I, too, will sometimes pause to think (or talk) about what I've just heard though, so perhaps by your metric I'm at less than 1x on average too...
    • Aromasin 5y ago
      This is my issue also. I'm guilty of being a 2x'er, not because I believe I'll absorb more information faster, but because I find most narrators/podcast hosts tend to slow down their speech significantly when recording something for consumption. Be it because their reading speed is worse than their talking speed, or that they think they need to for effect like some 1940's Trans-Atlantic radio host, I find it painful to listen to most of the time.
  • porker 5y ago
    > 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 Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found the ones to keep my interest yet.
• nxpnsv 5y ago
  The optimal speed very much content and goal dependent. Some narrators just speak slowly, some books are very information dense, and are you trying to memorise the entire book or just pick out a few points?
• elil17 5y ago
  Listening at 3x speed and concentrating deeply on the material =\= listening at 3x speed while trying to multitask Most informative content is, I have observed, fairly slow and repetitious. This is a good way to produce content because it is fair to assume that most people will not be fully mentally engaged in what you’re trying to tell them. That’s not a bad thing - your audience may simply not understand the importance of what you’re trying to say until they’ve heard it once). However, viewers who want to fully engage with content may find themselves having trouble concentrating due to the slow speed of information. Personally, I use 1x for most entertainment and for informative material if I’m doing some other activity like chores or driving, 2x for entertainment content which has a lot of fluff (e.g. pretty much everything on YouTube these days), and 2.5x for informative content which I am giving my full attention to (although I often pause to consider what’s been said or rewind to rewatch a dense portion of the content at a slower speed). That’s a pretty good balance for me.
• another_story 5y ago
  Something I noticed is a lot of people replying are focused on the playback speed, and then defending their choice of faster playback speed, all why missing 80% of the article which had nothing really to do with how fast you watch videos.
  • terafo 5y ago
    Because author chose to make it the main point of the article. And the fact that half of the article has nothing to do with the main point just shows that it's badly written.
• afterburner 5y ago
  What if you remove Mike's conceit that he will "build" something? Then he's just learning for fun.
  • celeduc 5y ago
    Mike's "friend" is awfully judgemental.
• muzani 5y ago
  I find myself listening to recipe videos at max speed while Aristotle is practically at half speed. Some things are so information dense that you need to go over parts a few times. If you're listening to something at 3x speed, maybe it's a hint to be reading harder books? An exception might be something like a history book. The 48 Laws of Power doesn't make sense if you just read the summary, but the stories themselves are very easy to read. A lot of good books are very information dense though, where you have to stop after a few sentences and search for the meaning (internally or externally). Even for a good novel... sometimes you have to set it aside and lie down and stare at the ceiling for a moment.
• plank 5y ago
  Reading many of the comments, it seems most agree that listening at a factor>1 is better. As a fast reader (books, not audio nor video, never really tried that myself) I wonder how this can be understood with the 'common knowledge' that when speaking (presenting) one should slow down. E.g., let those meaningful pauses endure.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    You probably get an overrepresentation here of people for whom it's all about maximizing information density. Personally, if that's my objective unless it is a case of a photo (or video) being worth a thousand words, reading is mostly better. With respect to conferences presentations, I'm mostly a fan of shorter (<30 minute) presentations. If something piques my interest, I'll track it down afterwards at my own pace.
• wallacoloo 5y ago
  > Though you can pick up the gist pretty fast, relationships need time to blossom. a lot of the arguments make me think of two different approaches to a task: breadth-first v.s. depth-first. for most tasks, you almost always want a balance of the two. in general, when you're young you explore the breadth of relationships; and after a time you understand which aspects are most important to you, and you pursue the depth of a smaller set of relationships. now there's a lot of surface-level media out there. the kind that tells you about some thing without explaining it. you might listen to a broad overview about current topics in electrical engineering. by doing so, you learn about the avenues available to you and then later you go and do a deep dive into the specific avenue you want. > The world rewards people who develop expertise in a specific subject. indeed (modulo that your "specific subject" could just as well be a niche blend of classical subjects). pushing the envelope requires a deep approach to learning -- the version where you listen at 1x, pause, and then draw new conclusions/connections that even the author missed. but if you're still in the earlier, discovery phase of your growth? then what you really want is the 3x speed, breadth-first overviews. not all information is equally valuable. if, by using 3x speed, you can more quickly locate the areas of study which are highly valuable to you at the expense of failing to integrate a bunch of information that is of low value to you, that can be a fair tradeoff. understand the tradeoffs; be explicit.
• 1123581321 5y ago
  I agree with the article's points about active learning and retention. I also agree that certain speed multipliers can become aspirational due to social media FOMO. However, most audio is listened to for entertainment or to pick out certain topics or keywords for closer listening. Tuning the speed helps with both of those goals. Depending on the listener, entertainment might be set at 1-1.5x with skipped silences. Scanning ranges higher, up to the cited 3x in some players.
• michaelerule 5y ago
  I don't listen at 3× speed to learn more, I listen at 3× speed because anything slower is uncomfortably boring. (ADHD.)
• jldugger 5y ago
  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.
• gibolt 5y ago
  I am one of these people. I regularly watch movies, TV, and YouTube at 3-4x (with subtitles, if available). It is easy to forget several of the 4 movies I watch in a 2 hour period, but I have a watched list, and could remember any detail once I have the reference to latch onto. Worst case, I could watch any piece of content 3 times before a 'normal' finishes it once. For any thing confusing, double-tap back 10 seconds, slow down to 2x, and rewatch a few times if needed.
  • dgellow 5y ago
    Wow, you do this for movies too? By speeding up that much you’re completely changing the movie experience. Changing the pacing of a scene dramatically change it’s tone.
  • moab 5y ago
    Your post reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U This is fantastic satire :-)
• simion314 5y ago
  I would suggest that it might depend, "right speed for the job" , I use TTS(text to speech" all the time with a large speed, regular people will not understand what it is spoken but for me is fine, I can read a news article like this one without no downsides versus someone that uses his eyes and reads at normal speed or someone that listens the TTS at regular speed and with some natural sounding voice. What if the 1X is a limitation of our vocals, we could maybe lose our air if we would speak much faster, if someone would like to do some sicence on this I suggest finding people with disabilities that use TTS technology and try to get some numbers. I personally don't use faster speed for the reason to listen to twice as mch content but probably to finish it faster. I listen/watch youtube at regular speed since I use this videos for entertaining and I did not consider to speed them up, though for audio books the app had a big speed button so I used it mostly at 1.5X
• shauntrennery 5y ago
  I used https://speechify.com https://speechify.com to listen to the post at 500wpm. It felt like the article was speaking directly to me.
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  Speeding up playback buys you a small gain, but 2x or 3x is an absolute upper limit in most cases. And yes, retention suffers. It's not that I don't bump up speed in some cases, though it's not all. I also slow down, or replay (sometimes many times) especially good marterial. (Or especially confusing material, which often proves not to be especially good.) But ... ... the real gains aren't to be had in playing media at 2x or 3x realtime. It's in selecting sources which afford 10x, or 100x, or 1000x utility in information. Sturgeon's Law applies, there's far more content created (in any format: text, images, audio, video, data, software) than any one person could hope to attend to in 15,000 lifetimes.[1] Probably significantly more. Instead, one should recognise one's own limits of information exposure, goals in aquiring knowledge, and the available sources, and seek out at least higher quality sources amongst those available. These needn't necessarily be based strictly on truth value --- there's merit in reading discredited philosophy, mythologies, religion, and even perhaps for some, fiction and poetry.[2] Particularly such works as are of cultural significance, or which might help one achieve inner balance or simple amusement. But listening to crap at 3x speed ... is not true efficiency. It doesn't look as if anyone's mentioned Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book yet. I'd strongly recommend reading it, quickly or slowly, and incorporating the lessons it offers for how, and what, to read. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Not a number pulled from /dev/ass, for what it's worth, but at least a rough approximation. If a truly dedicated scholar might read 10,000 books over a dilligent lifetime, that's 167 books a year from age 20 onwards, and there are roughly 150 million books published, then reading the collected works of humanity would require roughly 15,000 lifetimes. That might be adjusted up or down a bit but is a good first approximation. 2. An attempte at humour, Dear Reader.
• some1else 5y ago
  Not all speakers talk at the same rate and with the same information density. Some forms of content aren't worth listening to at the default playback rate.
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Listening to audiobooks at 3x speed is born out of a flawed model of learning Also out of a flawed model of writing books which mostly are bloat and take hundreds of pages for what could be explained in a page or two.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    I honestly don't think that any decent book can be effectively condensed into a page or two. The basic concept maybe but not useful background and examples. That said, it's true that publishing economics tend to force books to a minimum length of 250-300 pages. And it's true that a lot of business books for example would probably do fine with being something in the 100+ page range, i.e. longer than a magazine article but shorter than most books.
• nabla9 5y ago
  >Despite all the information he’s sped through his ear, he’s never actually built anything. “Someday,” he insists. “Right now, I’m still learning.” It's similar to political hobbyism, by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. Following politics obsessively without ever engaging. Being well informed and knowing details but never using them in action except voting.
• GabeIsko 5y ago
  Perhaps if you didn't worry about reading so much, you could write more. Than you would have more essays about how you write so much, eh David?
• Zababa 5y ago
  > 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. 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/Letter_2 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.
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  There are three kinds of learning - 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"
  • extrememacaroni 5y ago
    You make a fire with algebra and calculus because your brain overheats, right?
    • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      Darn that transitive comma...
  • netcan 5y ago
    Precisely. OP has his finger in some of the right places, but is overly broad about both learning methods and objects. If you're listening to conference keynotes @ 3X... that might be fine. A tutorial probably requires multiple listens, rewinds, a transcript and some DIY work.
  • trees101 5y ago
    Im interested in your categorisation of learning. Can you elaborate on "contextual framework"? Are these your own concepts, if not where do you get them from?
    • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or surveying, or maps. But we do because you understood the above conceptual frameworks. Germ theory is not a fact, like who won the battle of Crecy. It is a whole ever-expanding concept that with it in place in your head, can guide your future actions. Similarly atheism, or logistics, or factory method or steam power ...
• powersnail 5y ago
  One big problem with Youtube and podcasts is that they are often interspersed with useless fillers, neither entertaining nor helpful for "retaining information". The excessive signposting in videos is especially ridiculous: spending more time on listing "what I'm going to talk about today" than actually talking about those things. 3X speed is usually just neutralizing the carelessly long scripts. A better way is not to give in to the habitual prattling, but a table of contents with clickable timestamps. Many thoughtful Youtubers are already doing it.
• culebron21 5y ago
  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. 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-boring-theyre-ineffective-too-study-finds 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 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.
  • bildung 5y ago
    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.
    • nelgaard 5y ago
      Yes, it is often a matter of sympathy, atmosphere and ambitions more than actual learning. Many years ago as a grad student I was a teaching assistant. One year I was instructing two classes. One was an ordinary class. It was all very pleasant, cozy and relaxed. Students would often bake cake for the class. But I had trouble teaching because most of them did not do any homework and did not read the textbooks much. They all liked me. One even said in class that he would try to get me again next semester, meaning that he knew he would fail the exam. Which most of them did. The other class was a special class for students that had failed the previous exams and because the curriculum had changed this was their last chance. They were a lot more motivated. And they were quite critical about me as an instructor. At one point they even made a complaint about me be because I had tried to prove a theorem on the blackboard and failed because I made a silly mistake. They were absolutely right that I messed up that proof. But we did handle it in that same class and had a good discussion about that theorem and how to prove things. And their critical attitude kept me on my toes. I worked hard preparing the classes. And the classes were focused and tense. In the end, except for one that fell sick, everyone passed the exam with good marks.
• polote 5y ago
  First, listening 3x is impossible for most content, I almost never listen to x1 but I'm very rarely able to go past x2.5. Also at that speed it is almost impossible to understand complex things, so if you listen at x3 or x2 and you never go back or reduce the speed to understand specific parts then you are not listening. On Youtube - Shift+> or Shift+< let you increase or decrease the speed at all time - Left and Right let you go back 15 secondes backwards or forwardds This makes it super easy to skip or speed useless parts and go back and slow down usefull ones Last, people who say they listen to podcasts or videos to learn are not learning anything, podcasts or videos are just good ways to have a broad understanding of a topic
• sdevonoes 5y ago
  Wow, the article is describing me... although instead of podcasts I read books (not many, like at most 15-20 per year). But over the years, even if "True learning requires contemplation" (which I agree with), I have found out that I indeed have gained quite a lot of knowledge and nowadays the time I spent reading is paying off (i.e., I'm good enough at a job that pays well that I don't have to spent the official 40h/week, but instead I spent like half of it). > Mike is so busy preparing for the future that he never steps into it. This is what scares me because, again, it rings true. But some part of me thinks "You need to prepare yourself for the future! Whatever that future is!", so for me that preparation usually means "get more knowledge and get a better paycheck to have enough money to not depend on a company or government to live decently... or build something for yourself and found your own company". That's my paradox: either I relax a bit in the present and risk my (unknown) future, or I risk my present to allow me to be a bit more relaxed in the (unknown) future. I try to balance it, but it's hard.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mattlondon 5y ago
  I do 2x speed wherever I can. The benefit I find is I actually have to concentrate to pay attention, rather than at 1x speed some people talk so slowly my mind starts wandering as they slowly come around to actually making their point and before I know it I am replying to emails and ignoring the video. I generally find it harder to be distracted like that at 2x... Although after years I think I am a bit accustomed so might seek out that 3x extension (although I guess it won't work on our internal recorded sessions at work :( )
• mirekrusin 5y ago
  Some people ie. Yaron Minsky are joy to listen, speeding up would feel like speeding up your favourite movie.
• ar_kan 5y ago
  Two important takeaways to remember: 1. Think more strategically about what you want to learn and why. 2. Proper knowledge requires proper contemplation & synthesis.
• tristanperry 5y ago
  I watch Netflix at 1.25x and YouTube at 1.5x-2x - but this is mainly because I find some shows/channels a bit too slow at 1x speed. Some YouTube channels are unbearable at 1x speed due to the slow speaking speed. 3x speed probably is hard to genuinely acquire knowledge effectively for most people - although I have heard of blind people who do 2.5x-3x with ease, so who knows.
• tdrdt 5y ago
  This reminds me of the multi-tasking myth. People who multi-task think it works because they did a lot of different things throughout the day. But when performance is measured the conclusion is that multi-tasking does not work and only hurts the brain.
• arendtio 5y ago
  The headline of the post misses the point. The problem the author describes, revolves around active vs. passive learning and the '3x Speed' part is just part of what he refers to as passive learning. I completely agree, that passive learning is what happens in many western classrooms and that active learning is a lot more valuable. However, listening to books or videos at 3x the normal speed is nothing I would condemn, because IMO it depends on the source material. Some audiobooks/videos are so slow that it is hard to keep the focus at normal speed. Consuming them at higher speeds keeps me from drifting to other topics. So I think the discussion about the speed doesn't lead anywhere. That said, I don't use 3x speed. Sometimes, I consume videos at 2x speed and I tend to keep audiobooks at 1x speed, because I like to consume them as secondary activities e.g. while driving. Certainly not the most effective way to consume the content, but I like it and it fits into my daily habits. I think the discussion should be about active/practical/self-directed learning vs. pure consumption of material, because this is what makes a difference.
• makach 5y ago
  I listen to some podcast at 1.5x 2x the speed because I think some speak extremely slow. Also, helps consuming interesting content in less time. When I skim over documents, information, I usually add to existing knowledge and it is easier to mentally TAG the what it is I need to learn. When I need to use this knowledge at least I know where to look, search or whom to ask if I need to dig into the material, and when I do - it is a slow process. When I want to learn something, I need to sit down and slow everything down. It is very important to me that I take detailed notes and discuss the content. I've been told that our memory has two modes; short term and long term. If you want to remember something you need to work getting it from short term memory and into the long time memory - and in order to do that you must iterate many times of the content you are trying to learn.
• HPsquared 5y ago
  I'd love for all videos to have a "linked transcript" enabling the user to text search the transcript, then quickly seek the video to a particular statement. That way, I'd be able to skim read and "dip into" long lecture-style videos to extract targeted information. Since YouTube has captions on most videos, the data is available but I don't know of any apps that do this.
• buybackoff 5y ago
  Just last Friday I had to google how to increase YouTube speed above 2x. Found quick and dirty solution: `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3` in a browser console. Some people are just impossible to listen to due to their slow pace. In my case, it was possible to understand at 5x and quite comfortable at 3.5x.
• throwanem 5y ago
  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. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    I never understood why I never listened to podcasts. But you explained it to me - I hate doing two things at once, because it means I do them both badly.
    • throwanem 5y ago
      It depends a lot on the primary thing. One rarely needs much in the way of deep focus to fold laundry or do dishes or clean a bathroom, after all, and some light entertainment makes these tasks go by noticeably faster and more pleasantly than they do in its absence.
      • TomSwirly 5y ago
        I find that if I do that, I take twice as long. Music doesn't get me in my way, though.
• manigandham 5y ago
  This is an incredible verbose article just to say that which we already know: quality of learning is more important than quantity; and focus, engagement, interest are all important context in addition to the raw speed of consumption. Ironically, jumping past so much filler is one of the main reasons for faster speeds.
• Tade0 5y ago
  I don't listen to podcasts and couldn't make one, because without non-verbal cues from my audience I can't adjust my speech to keep them engaged. It's like with this vampire who is familiar with mobile phones, but finds it weird that anyone would want to have a conversation without registering the other person's scent and feeling their heartbeat. I see why people listen at 3x - too many podacsters seem to be enamoured with their own voice to a point where they add irrelevant stuff like my vampire bit here. But while you can skip this in text, it's not easy to do when listening. I don't think that on average they actually lose anything because of that, since the conversation is one-sided anyway. They wouldn't have retained more had they listened to it at 1x speed. As for trying to consume as much literature as possible and feeling inadequate: this is a problem as old as printed press, for which there is no real solution aside from managing expectations.
• ckuehne 5y ago
  "The assumption is that people can acquire knowledge as if it’s a substance they can pour into their minds. I call it the Water in a Cup method" In German-speaking countries, there has been a name for it since 1647: Nuernberger Trichter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel
• quantum_state 5y ago
  3x turns a brain into a hard drive, a very dumb idea!
• moron4hire 5y ago
  The learning lock-in thing is something I've coached several people through, for both software and literature projects. I've found a very effective tool in getting them out of the lock-in: make a wager with them. I place a bet of $100 that they won't finish a small project in the next month. The project can be anything. It can be the smallest thing. But they have to finish it and release it in a predetermined, legitimate release channel (app store, website, self-publish on Amazon, whatever). I've found a lot of people's lock-in comes from a fear of the unknown, of not knowing all the steps to get from 0 to finished, and focusing all of their time on the parts they do understand. They rationaliz the delaying of learning about the others as being pointless until they have the beginning parts "perfect". The bet forces them to make their comfort zone the smallest part of their project. You can do it with yourself, too. Make a wager with yourself that you won't buy that new toy or have a drink or watch another movie until you finish a small project, completely, with a real release. You definitely need to time-box it, or you'll quit once you decide you'll "never" finish. And you need to setup a negative consequence: maybe get a friend to hold some money in escrow, or schedule a donation to an organization you hate that you can cancel when your project is complete. Every person I've coached in this way eventually developed a habit of releasing projects. It turns out people grossly over estimate the difficulty of releasing a project. Once you force them through it, it's no longer a scary unknown and it becomes a lot easier to "begin with end in mind".
• Febra33 5y ago
  Besides the fact that this is extremely subjective and comes to each person's own ability, I hate when articles try to introduce one of these cute oversimplified and exaggerated stories so that they can prove a point. Literally shifting the perspective so that the author can have the higher ground.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Learning isn’t water in a cup but in the other hand youtube and podcasts are so full of fluff that 3x makes a lot of sense.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I think 3x is the wrong target here, it's the learning by listening model aka "The Nurnberg Funnel" (or possibly Nuremberg Funnel for German speakers) that is harmful. I'd rather have a more focused lecture at 1x speed, the same as I'd rather have a good textbook, but skimming in both cases is fine if you want some info but the presentation available is too simple for you. But, learning by doing and finding out what you don't know by doing is important. That applies even to crappy end of chapter multiple choice quizzes or whatever their audiobook equivalent is, but I find project based learning to be where it's at for really cementing knowledge without boredom. edit to add: I'm not sure about the bit about pre-textbook lectures is historically accurate. I was under the impression the modern lecture mostly derived from the time when books were expensive, non-mass produced tech and the single copy was chained to the lectern and the person reading it out was doing so in order to let people make their own cheap copies. I'm a big fan of video lectures that people consume in their own time, but more because they can slow them down, and rewind, not because they can speed them up. If you're always speeding up, you could probably just get a denser text
• vmception 5y ago
  clickbait. this has nothing to do with the speed, it has to do with quality of information and implementation of it. there are people that never absorb anything or implement anything. I can relate to Mike as well, I was one of those people that always had a side project hoping it would magically get big enough for me to quit my day job. No book helped with that, what did help was that I was at a company that ran out of money and eventually let my division off. I was raising capital on my lunch breaks and that was inefficient, so I realized that I actually didn't need to look for another job for once, and continued raising capital full time. Capital made the next project big enough, and it was non-dilutive capital too, which skips any organic side project growth hopes. So there should actually be more sympathy for the Mikes of the world. They are too comfortable, (or perhaps uncomfortable), to quit their job no matter what they learn.
• kreetx 5y ago
  You don't need a plugin to increase/decrease speed, the following bookmarklet works for most sites to increase speed by 10%: javascript:(function(){ let speed =[...document.querySelectorAll('audio,video')].filter(v => v.currentTime > 0)[0].playbackRate += .10; console.log('media speed', speed); })()
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I think every serialized media is presented at a set speed, but that speed is rarely a carefully determined value. It’s just an artifact of the creator’s speaking or editing characteristics. Which leads me to personally conclude: there is probably no single correct speed and the author likely hasn’t picked an ideal speed either. Speed up or slow down based on your personal needs.
• bluedino 5y ago
  Reminds me of my shelf of O'Reilly books. Each one goes along side with a weekend or week of reading and learning. A few of them were something I needed to learn to get something done for work. A few more were things I learned for personal use. But the majority of them, I just read because "I might need to know more about" something. Building Microservices? Java 3D Graphics? Python for Data Analysis? Read at least a couple chapters of each. Wasted time for sure.
• Decabytes 5y ago
  I too fall into the trap of listening to things on sped up. But is it 2x speed and YouTube. Anything that I’m actually trying to learn ilI will slow down and rewatch. But there is so many crappy videos on YouTube I feel compelled to watch most of it on 2x speed to find the good ones. And unfortunately this habit gets strengthened, because plenty of people thing you are knowledgeable when you can pull out random bits of trivia you learned in YouTube videos, or are grateful when you can reference a YouTube video to them on a topic they are interested in.
• JoshTko 5y ago
  Mike has anxiety.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
  • pcmaffey 5y ago
    Learning happens in the space in between words. Without time for reflection, people inevitably just mirror information instead of integrating new ideas into what they know.
  • padobson 5y ago
    I'm with you here. The money line of the whole article was almost a throw-away at the end: He should think more strategically about what he wants to learn and why. The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education, with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of interactions between students. In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge of C++. Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python. "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked through the existing library of code they did, asked questions of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship I was writing programs that were performing vital business tasks. I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind, and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time, from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that develop over repeated encounters.
• anotheryou 5y ago
  I speed up not to become disengaged out of boredom. A also listen twice and often slower for important sections, pause to process if something was dense. Sounds and video are just super restrictive in timing, of course it's too slow for some and too fast for others. In a similar fashion a good movie has enough depth to keep you attached, even if the story progresses slow. A sitcom is boring at times and lacks it. But a good movie has a depth and realism that let's you get lost in the unsaid backstories, the ambience etc. You don't have that in a lecture.
• amonroe0805 5y ago
  I’ve felt since college that lectures are best likened to meetings, with all of the usual criticisms. If a lecture is merely a monologue of prepared information (usually available in the textbook anyways), the same “Why couldn’t this have been an email?” concept applies. There are _legitimate_ reasons to pulling everyone into the same room at the same time to learn something, and those reasons almost entirely include frequent and direct interaction between the attendees. The value of the classroom is that you are surrounded by individuals who are all ostensibly trying to learn the same thing as you, with a similar current amount of knowledge, all the while having immediate access to a bone fide expert in the topic. I would suggest that this is an obviously great setup for learning! It’s a shame to see it so often squandered by having a glorified textbook read-along session instead of genuine curious discussion. Great quote from the article: “A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.”
• ausbah 5y ago
  like others have said about other commentes, the point isn't so much on consuming podcasts, audio books, or whatever faster - it's about how if that's the only thing you do, you won't end up actually learning anything
• adiamond4 5y ago
  I agree with a lot of this. It is well known at this point that passive learning strategies are not effective. What the author misses is that depending on the type of material being consumed, the learner could be in an input limited or processing limited regime. For dense textbooks it usually takes more time to process concepts (i.e. get to higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy with a concept) then it does to get the information into the mind through reading, so speed reading (fast input) is pointless. For the type of fiction books his friend is reading, 3x speed might make sense to get to the insights faster that need to be paused on and processed. Certainly the concepts need to be revisited with something like spaced repetition for deeper integration. Spaced repetition is boring, that is one of the motivations behind Memory Maps, a learning tool that enables you to use the memory palace technique in Google Street View along with mnemonics generating AI to supercharge your memory capacity. https://www.memorymaps.io/ https://www.memorymaps.io/ https://www.memorymaps.io/main-page/how-it-works https://www.memorymaps.io/main-page/how-it-works
• kurthr 5y ago
  I often listen at 2x speed, not to increase the speed of comprehension, but because the information density is too low. Like forwarding through ads to get to content. Then when you get to the interesting part you slow down and repeat a few times (especially fix-it mechanical assembly youtubes) sometimes at fractional speed... it takes concentration. Then you use it (or you'll forget it all anyway). Alternately, I have a friend who listens to novels at 2x, which I don't understand...versus my partner who reads 100 books a year and she's frustrated she can't find new ones fast enough.
• semireg 5y ago
  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!
  • biesnecker 5y ago
    I'm in a similar boat. 1.75x is probably the best speed for me for most speakers, but until I was able to speed up audio/video I also had a really hard time paying attention in lectures / watching informative content.
  • Kranar 5y ago
    I am so happy you said this. I always felt like the majority of lectures and content overall is ceremony and that most of the actual substance comprises maybe 15-20% of the overall content. There are times when I can appreciate ceremony, especially if it's being given by a good performer, a great writer or a passionate lecturer. Unfortunately most teachers are not passionate or good lecturers, most educational videos are not that engaging, and many authors are not good writers, and so in most cases I could strip out 80% of the content and spare myself the boredom.
  • madmax108 5y ago
    "I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic." Sometimes I truly feel like this should be the unofficial motto of HN ;) > 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x The sweet spot for me is between 1.5x and 1.7x (Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x but apps that do earn extra brownie points from me eg. VLC). It's always weird having to explain this to friends who tend to think that I'm always listening to is a rap documentary :-D
• fatbird 5y ago
  I know many teachers, and none that would agree that what they're doing is filling a cup. None stand there lecturing students, and expect them to recite it back. They all work hard to come up with different exercises, presentations, etc. just to do what the author says is necessary: creating direct experience. It's a core precept of modern education theory that experiential learning is best. His discussion of schools is a strawman.
• austinl 5y ago
  “You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere." — Seneca c. 65 AD I used to try to read a lot of books, but when I found I couldn't discuss them in detail in a conversation or recall their key points, I thought, "what is the point?" Now I try to re-read one book I thought was meaningful for every new book. I still enjoy reading new material, so this is just a rule of thumb. There's a ton a value in re-reading things!
  • kej 5y ago
    > Now I try to re-read one book I thought was meaningful for every new book. As a random piece of trivia, this was C.S. Lewis's rule as well: "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." I think it's a good idea but I struggle to follow it when my list of books to read is so much longer then I'll ever complete.
• adverbly 5y ago
  Speeding up is an incredible tool for active consumption. As with all tools, you have to know when to use it. That said, most simple content I consume at 2x. Slower speeds waste time and dont provide enough info per sec for me to be fully engrossed in a topic. I make heavy use of slowing down and taking notes and rewinding.
• furyofantares 5y ago
  ADHD prevents me from consuming lots of content at 1x speed at all. Trying to listen to a lecture is incredibly painful. I completed college in 2006, I believe YouTube launched 2x speed a few years later, it wasn't until then that I discovered I'm perfectly capable of listening to a lecture at 2x. Now, perhaps I get less out of a 2x lecture than a neurotypical person who is otherwise my peer does from a 1x lecture. Maybe even a lot less. But it doesn't matter, because I get a lot out of a 2x lecture and nothing out of a 1x lecture.
  • thescriptkiddie 5y ago
    I was literally just watching a youtube video at 1x speed and now I realize that I somehow ended up on here and have missed the rest of the video. That never happens when I'm watching on 2x speed.
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    For podcasts and video, I'm right with you. A decade ago when I was in the physical classroom, I didn't mind the 1x interaction because it was slow enough that my pencil could keep up when writing notes (which was my secret to getting much higher test grades than my classmates in spite of many fewer hours spent actively studying).
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah, best I've seen is 2x and that was with a very slow speaking lecturer.
• jcranberry 5y ago
  Secondary school is one thing but in university, lectures aren't there to build your understanding for you. They're there for one of 3 reasons: 1) auditory learning of the same material, 2) to give you additional material not present in reading, or 3) to give a different perspective of the same material. Lectures are also just not long enough to do the work for you - building your understanding is your own responsibility. I'm also skeptical about this type of complaint on textbooks. I'm not going to say all textbooks are great but this idea that a textbook is a direct impediment or flawed tool for active learning has had no bearing in reality for me personally. Poor textbooks are poor tools. Good textbooks are good tools (I personally don't find there to be a lack of good textbooks). In the subject I majored in at university, mathematics, I can't imagine any amount of teacher input can take the place of problem sets and time spent poring over a textbook struggling to grok something. I agree that active learning is a necessary part of a successful education. However, almost all the specific targets of this article to be off the mark. In my experience, lectures and textbooks are not what keeps active learning from taking place, in fact they are what necessitates active learning. I agree with the stated point, however using the university education style as a target frustrates me, because the critique of Mike this article gives is exactly the kind of objection I might have to to claiming that textbooks and lectures are insufficient for learning. Engage, don't just consume! On more of a quibble than critique, I think 3x playback is poor as the titular metaphor for shallow learning. Listening to an audio book at ordinary speed I find to be far too fast to allow any kind of useful contemplation, and too slow to retain my interest (possibly due to my ADHD, perhaps others find this easier). If I need to think about something, I pause it. Not all information has equal utility, nor do all information streams have equal density. Depending on the narration and content of an audio book I find listening at a higher rate to often be ideal for trialing information for greater analysis. For something else, such as a video feed of a sports game, real time is often too fast for me to even consume all the information I would like (although when watching a sports game I may be more interested in the experience than tactics or particulars of a play).
• paulmooreparks 5y ago
  TL;DR: I'm generally suspicious of life hacks. Doing what seems natural generally gets it done. The advice regarding spaced repetition strikes me as being as too-pat a solution as listening at 3x. A combination of approaches works for me. If I'm listening to an audio or video presentation for the first time, I prefer to listen at 1.8x to 2x to get through the material more quickly, but I'm COMPLETELY focused on it while I'm listening. No browsing the web or driving or whatever. I'll stop and write notes, or back up and maybe slow down if something isn't clear, but I default to high speed. The same with reading: the first time through I'll "speed read" or even skim just to get an overview and load the material into my mental cache. Once I have a good map of the material, I'll revisit it with a better understanding of what I want to cover and where my understanding is still weak. Sometimes it takes a couple of iterations, or I'll try to put the knowledge into practice and return to review the parts that the practice shows that I have an imperfect grasp of. Effectively, this approach ends up being spaced repetition without Anki decks or reminders to review material.