3 ms·

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.

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.
cactus2093 5y ago
> It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone. Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player. However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing. But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.
Mimmy 5y ago
I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it offers anything substantial. It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...? Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations with real native speakers.
- paulmooreparks 5y ago
  This. It's trading one hack for another.
will4274 5y ago
This article is perhaps interesting, but it is not well-written, nor, I would argue, particularly well reasoned. The author makes gratituous assumptions about Mike's reasoning, assumptions that appear unlikely to many readers, and fails to provide any justification for them. Read it again - how much of Mike's reasoning comes from Mike, and how much from the author? Did the author even ask Mike? It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's ironic that so many folks in this comment section are questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that you didn't deep read the article, including spending time considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously criticizing other people for not doing the same.

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.

cactus2093 5y ago

> It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone. Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player. However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing. But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.

Mimmy 5y ago

I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it offers anything substantial. It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...? Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations with real native speakers.

paulmooreparks 5y ago
This. It's trading one hack for another.

will4274 5y ago

This article is perhaps interesting, but it is not well-written, nor, I would argue, particularly well reasoned. The author makes gratituous assumptions about Mike's reasoning, assumptions that appear unlikely to many readers, and fails to provide any justification for them. Read it again - how much of Mike's reasoning comes from Mike, and how much from the author? Did the author even ask Mike? It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's ironic that so many folks in this comment section are questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that you didn't deep read the article, including spending time considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously criticizing other people for not doing the same.