I'll never understand the drive to bury so much good information inside video and audio. Consuming info that way gives the impression that you're learning something but without organized text it's quite difficult to contextualize new information. Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.
I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.
Completely agree. Back in the before-before time when I would go to an office, the walk in to work was always a great chance to consume some interesting content.
I'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.
Do you prefer someone read you a book or reading it yourself?
As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.
Well, normally I read them myself, but I was replying to:
> Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things
which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.
It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.)
For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue.
Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.
Consume yes, but how much of that do you actually retain when you are doing anything that requires real attention? This seems like one of those things that give you the feeling of getting informed, but in reality you are mostly just wasting your time.
I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental resources to really listen to them.
Depends what you do at the same time. If you walk your dog or play a video game, you probably retain as much as reading. I mean it's not like people don't skip parts or start thinking about something else when they read.
I really doubt you'll retain as much as dedicated reading if you are listening to a podcast and playing a game. Unless it's a game where you don't need to think/read at all.
Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein
Why on earth would I listen to a podcast while playing a game? Though TBH I mostly don't much care for background audio when doing other things that involve any real thinking. Podcasts are mostly for driving, cleaning, etc.
I'm pretty much unable to do this. I think I focus too intently on what I'm consuming. Doing almost anything else lessens my focus on the podcast, and makes me mess up whatever else I'm trying to do. So I basically just sit there and stare into space while listening to one. Because of this I don't tend to consume them very often.
Audio/video is also very inconvenient when you need to slow down your processing rate. You have to tweak playback controls for this, while dealing with pure text only requires a slight adjustment of your eyeball muscles. And similarly when you encounter parts that can be skipped forward easily: text just requires some more motion of your eyeballs, while recorded audio/video is a lot more awkward to deal with.
Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.
I understand where you're coming from. There are some very smart people who refuse to listen to podcasts, but instead read the transcripts because they find the signal:noise to be higher.
That being said, one factor you might be discounting is that producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read. There are a lot of people who are great conversationalists, but not great writers.
> producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read
I'm not sure I agree. For example, I find myself fast-forwarding Coursera videos because the teachers just don't understand where it makes sense to slow the pace or where to pick it up. I find myself skipping huge parts of YouTube videos (my interest is hobby stuff) because the author just doesn't understand I already understood the idea, the take is getting boring (or just not showing the interesting stuff), and they should just cut ahead.
I find producing mediocre audio/video is easy. But quality audio/video is as hard as quality text, if not harder.
I actually agree with everything you’re saying. My kind of meta point was that those content producers might have never made anything accessible to you, if they didn’t have access to audio or video publishing platforms.
I’m not making any statement on the average quality of audiovisual content, just the barrier to entry for the production of that content.
FWIW I do a lot of skipping and fast replaying too. My podcasts are usually around 2.5x. Most people perform-talk way too slow. If I weren’t able to listen that quickly while doing dishes or similar, I’d normally prefer to read.
i forget who, but I remember reading someone who both writes and does podcasts saying that one of the nice things about audio is that you can't have your words screenshotted and mocked on social media.
which means you can express yourself less defensively and without having to worry about the worst possible interpretation of whatever you say.
Podcasts are a nice thing to hear while doing other stuff. There are also fiction and true crime podcasts that use music, narration, and dramatization to great effect. They can use recordings of their subjects instead of quoting them. The rhetorical power of elocution is a pleasure in itself, and I like to feel that I am not so alone – especially now.
> I'll never understand the drive to bury so much good information inside video and audio.
Important aspect is that it faster to produce then writing.
> Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.
Popular good podcasts are not like lectures. They tend to have less information per minute and light side chats where your brain rests. They can be consumed while cleaning, cooking or going somewhere and paying reasonable amount of attention to surrounding environment. You can not do it with lecture (I tried).
You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all, but at smaller pace then expected from lecture and it requires less attention.
Quality video, or audio[1] is not faster to produce than writing. Recording, editing, encoding, uploading are all very slow, time-consuming processes, per minute of content produced.
[1] Never mind that in order to produce quality audio, you need to have written... Your script. Which is a lot harder than writing something readable.
So get two people to text-chat over WhatsApp on a subject for an hour, and clean it up after the fact. It's still easier to produce than a conversation podcast.
A text chat would be full of misunderstandings and needless clarifications that wouldn't have to be there if spoken with inflections hinting at how something was to be taken, or facial cues for in-person interviews.
It depends on the format. For a produced show with narration and excerpted segments of interviews, I agree with you. However, there are many good podcasts that are basically a conversation/interview and, while there's some degree of prepping and editing required, you can largely wing these with the right guests. This format is quite a bit easier than writing an equivalent length document from scratch.
It depends on the podcast. I tend to listen to podcasts over lectures because the podcasts are often more information rich and deeper than the lectures I've found on the same subject. Some podcasts even seem to include edited university lectures where extraneous parts were removed.
I noticed episodes that seems to be edited lectures in both Mark Goodacre's NT Pod and Philip Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Both are academic studies of the Christian New Testament (though the later also spends a lot of time on the surrounding society), and I enjoyed both a lot (though they can be a bit information dense at times). If you give the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast a listen I'd recommend considering starting at series 2 and coming back to series 1 later, as starting with a deep dive into Paul's letters and their historical context can be a difficult place to start for some people.
Another podcast I've learned a lot from is the Ottoman History Podcast (not to be confused with The History of the Ottoman Empire podcast). It often has episodes where academic historians are interviewing other academic historians about their areas of research. So you'll have a whole episode where a historian talks about their research into mining communities in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance.
For something a bit lighter, the Tides of History podcast is worth a listen. It's an academic historian who takes a look at various historical events.
>You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all
I don't think that's obvious at all. Learning is an active process. People listening to podcasts while doing work aren't going to actually develop some skill, they're just passively listening to some facts being thrown at them, much of it they probably won't even retain, let alone productively integrate.
You can listen to thousands of hours of guitar playing podcasts, it won't really help you play the guitar. Or you could listen to programming podcasts, but without ever writing a line of code you'd not be a any good as a programmer.
Why would you assume someone is trying to learn guitar or programming solely from podcasts?
And yes, I have some idea about how much I retained from podcasts I listened to. Seriously, remembering facts is also form of knowing, it beats up not remembering facts. It is not "just", many times it is the thing to go after when learning.
I agree with you - I think most of us are disdainful of watching television for long periods of time but there is value in getting the cultural context by audio. A lot of reading is not high quality - the interview Russ Roberts has with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning discusses the topic.
I listen to educational podcasts as I’m going to sleep at night and while I don’t retain everything, I do remember some of it and that’s time I’d otherwise have spent staring at the ceiling or whatever.
I’ve actually collected quite a large number of podcasts that hit my sweet spot of being just interesting enough to engage my attention but not interesting enough to keep me awake.
Contextualizing information with a human speaker can make it much easier to understand for me. It's easier to narrow down the meaning behind spoken words when it is sourced from a real person.
There are too many occurrences of reading anonymous text that can interpreted multiple ways without enough context to make it clear what is meant. If you attached a speaker to the same context; with intonation, character and a reliable history of quirks it becomes trivial to see what they meant.
People tend to use simple language when talking to another human so you're not always chasing a rabbit hole of terms that can be summarized for the sake of time in a podcast.
> I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.
I listen to a lot of podcasts about random topics while doing yardwork and (pre-pandemic) commuting. I find that I remember these podcasts rather clearly compared to reading articles, and I find that they "contextualize" well with my existing knowledge.
For instance, I recall a number of details from Dan Carlin's WWI podcast "Blueprint for Armageddon" because I was mulching the garden beds with 15yds of top dressing while listening to the series last year.
I don't know if the improved retention is due to the narrative/conversational style of podcasts, the "memory palace" effect of doing something mindless at the same time, or some other cognitive difference in spoken vs read information.
The flip side is to think about how much good information is already trapped in audio, but never transitioned to a better digestible format like podcasts. I’m thinking things like class lectures, quarterly results calls, company all-hands calls that often include an unnecessary video component.
I love podcasts, but I find annotation and pinning very difficult. So many gems are lost once I hear them. I do absorb it, but I cannot reference where I heard it. How do you save the snippets, how do you tag them? Same problem with Audible/audiobooks -- I write notes on the app's note-taking feature but those are mostly lost w/r/t context.
It took over a decade, but I finally realized that this is the original purpose of the dialectical journals I was required to write for my high-school English classes, before they were coopted as an assessment tool. As it’s a record of your own thinking about the various things you’ve read, it provides a way to figure out where ideas came from in a way that full-text search can’t handle.
These days, I use a traditional index card system combined with a spaced-repetition flashcard system. Each concept that I feel like collecting information about has a small stack of cards that starts with a 1- or 2-sentence definition, in case I’m using a term slightly differently from other people. Below that are cards that represent quotes, notes, summaries, and recommended reading on that topic.
The flash card deck is to make sure I know what things exist, and what words are used in the literature to refer to abstract things. If I need more detail than I can remember, those keywords will get me to a relevant wikipedia page, at least.
Not exactly; it’s more modeled on a library card catalog. Instead of indexing a physical collection, it’s indexing the things I’ve read. If I need to take detailed, long form notes on something, I’ll do it in a notebook which will then get its own entries in the card index.
One of the biggest realizations for me was that I need to be free with defining my own categories. It’s more about recording why I’m interested in something than its surface subject— I’m more likely in the future to do something related to my current interests than the article’s subject.
To take a concrete example, the April 2020 issue of Smithsonian has a feature about a tidal power generation startup. I filed that under “sustainable power generation”, as you might expect. I also filed it under “Island communities” because of only a single sentence I found in the article: The startup’s target market is small- or medium-sized islands that are powered by imported diesel fuel.
I've built a podcast app that lets you take notes at specific time stamps.
What I've personally found is it's way too cumbersome to pull the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, press the "Add Note" button (assuming the Now Playing screen is already showing, otherwise another click for that), type in your notes, and click save...and probably rewind 15 seconds because you lost track of the conversation.
But now that I write this out I realize a Siri shortcut could be apt here.
This is one of the benefits of listening to a text-to-speech article over a podcast. You just need to pull up the article's original text and highlight it in that app (if you're using something like Pocket). Still annoying that you need to get your phone out but less so than typing up a note.
I used to have the same issue. Looking for interesting tidbits in a podcast was like finding a needle in an 1hr long rant haystack, and I personally like to have some snippet as a reference for later when I'm learning, but I found this app https://www.airr.io that lets me save and share snippets of podcasts. Pretty useful!
Podcasts are nice but too often I'm already familiar with the basics of the subject and don't need the 5-10 minutes of introductory framing. I find it more efficient to skim a webpage where I can focus in on the stuff I haven't internalized yet.
The exception is stuff I have no idea about. Then all that coverage is useful. But for (I assume) some on HN, who are naturally curious and have a surface-level understanding of most topics, that 5-10 minutes of time out of a 25-minute podcast (with 2 minutes of ads each at the front and back) means you only get to scratch at the next level deeper without actually getting into any details, which doesn't seem worth the time when there are still Wikipedia articles about it.
It'd be cool if there was something like Q&A mixed with mini-podcasts.
You could be listening, then have a question, ask the computer, have it start up a mini-podcast at the segment that answers, then say "go back" and keep running the original.
This still relies on content curation rather than on-demand generation, which means you will encounter the same issues as if you were Googling about it. Principally, you won't find what you're looking for if no one has mentioned it or someone used a different concept to describe it.
But it does sound promising as an exploratory tool if you understand that the Qs will be basic and the As straightforward.
Well it is clearly the opposite for me, the more I consume video or audio content the less I build things. Audio and video put you in a position of comfort in which 'virtual' learning is easy.
Learning can't be easy, that's the point of learning, and often the best way to learn is to experience and test by yourself, which is clearly the opposite of listening to podcasts.
Also I do find that the content in podcast is almost always the same and only less than 5% of the talk is actually interesting
As for people who explains that they are as much productive when coding only than coding and listening podcast at the same time, this is probably wrong, humans are not very good at doing two things at the same time
I think listening to audio is more conducive to "drive by learning". It allows your eyes to get distracted and you can maintain some level of attention for a longer period. Our brains are also simply better at picking clues signalling the important stuff, when listening to someone speaking.
I have turned HN into a personal data-oriented wikipedia and I want to test consuming the resulting feed through audio (like a npr for data-based facts) [0].
If some of you would like to take part into the experiment, leave a comment below !
Podcasts can certainly be fun, but audio is so inferior to written text. Am I the only one that gets inexplicably annoyed with most podcasts and podcast culture? I know I shouldn't be so grouchy, but dammit I don't want to hear about your podcasts or listen to them.
Using the apple podcast app as a search engine is very underrated for me. You find all sorts of ancillary sources and takes that you wouldn't find through something like google or youtube
> Well, other than writing "if... else..." logics, there are actually a lot of "low thinking" tasks in modern software engineering, e.g., writing unit tests, refactoring code, copying & pasting code from Stack Overflow, tweaking CSS styling, tweaking config files for some server software, playing with 3rd party APIs, messing with HTML, configuring IDE, setting up dev environment, waiting for CI to finish, writing throwaway code to test out new technology, experimenting some low risk DevOps tasks on local dev or staging, testing coworker's code locally for code review, manually doing QA for certain product features...
If you can learn that way, great. My experience though is that a lot of these tasks are high thinking (and high-risk) tasks. Config changes can cause production outages. It's easy to miss something in refactoring and introduce a bug. The point of writing throwaway code to test new technology isn't the code, it's the understanding that comes with it.
even though podcasts are great. nothing matches written content. easier to search, archive n create a copy. faster to consume too, if you're a faster reader. n I would say, personally I remember more when I read compared to passive consumption on podcasts | videos etc
I can't tolerate most audio/video information except for very narrow fields of interest (hobby stuff on YouTube, mostly). I find the pace and editing irritating, and the format distracting and long-winded.
I don't see how the use cases of podcasts and Wikipedia, as described, are at all similar. For "informal information", someone mentions a topic and I look for it in Wikipedia. This takes me a few seconds, more if I want to delve a bit deeper. How would that work for podcasts? Google a podcast on $TOPIC, pick one that looks (or is it "sounds"?) promising, then fast forward it until someone mentions what it is in few words? I understand an in-depth, long-winded description of $TOPIC in a podcast, but that's very different from quickly looking in Wikipedia to get the gist of it.
So no, podcasts cannot be my new Wikipedia, even if I tolerated audio/video explanations better than I do.
You made me realize that podcasts do take the place of Wikipedia for me, especially when I have a lot of busy work. For example, someone mentioned Jurgen Schmidhuber in an AI thread here the other day and I was able to find a bunch of podcasts interviewing him or mentioning him. I threw them in a playlist and got a lot of what I wanted, passively for the most part and while multitasking.
Listening to Samuel Pepys doesn't give me a deep dive into history but it goes go wide in a way reading the Wiki entry for the great fire of london does not. That information is compressed does not mean it is more useful. Suppose there is a second great fire or flooding - I believe locating friends with secure lodgings to store consumer goods would come immediately to mind after listening to Pepys but this would not occur by just having read the wiki.
you should try to listen to podcasts where you think the hosts are interesting. they’re useful for uncovering new threads of information of and modes of thought, which are more usually associated with what you gain from personal conversations. podcasts are probably never the supreme mode of conveying information, but they’re a cool window into peoples’ brains. they’re great for storytelling as well, and in quarantine, they’re acceptable substitutes for social engagement.
I’m someone that could never really get into talk shows, radio shows or podcasts because I tended to find the speakers too long winded, slow to get their points across and the formats generally encouraged the kind of runtime that discouraged me from giving it my full attention. I mean an hour to listen to something all the way through plus the ads? Pass.
Going back about a dozen years ago if I wanted to watch a video to get some kind of information out of it, I generally found a way to load it up into QuickTime Player and play it back at 2x or 3x.
Nowadays I listen to too many podcasts because two pieces of technology fixed that for me: truly wireless headphones, AirPods originally, Powerbeats Pro presently, and podcast players with variable audio acceleration, namely Overcast, but I think Castro can do it too, and I’m sure there’s equivalents out there in Android. Overcast has two major quality of life improvements that make talk shows not just tolerable, but if you like the speakers, enjoyable. It decreases the playback time by about 40% for me using a combination of a fixed speed adjustment and Smart Speed, and it evens out the voice volume of the speakers so if someone has a bad mic or speaks softly, I can hear what the hell they’re saying.
Without either of these, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate podcasts as a format at all. Even now I favor podcasts that still have shorter base runtimes, Overcast is going to decrease the length regardless, but I don’t want to listen to something for more than 35 minutes, if that.
There’s a lot of good interviews, talk shows, news podcasts and so on that I find superior than the crap I would find on the web, I can easily skip past ads, and I can relax be play a game while the podcast runs more or less in the background. There’s plenty I just wouldn’t hear about or learn about simply because it really isn’t on the web. It might be in a book somewhere, but hearing someone explain their position on this or that or another thing in their own voice in a conversational format is much more enjoyable to me than following their writing and piecing their positions together.
Now you might give this all a try and find you still don’t care for podcasts, or maybe you already did. That’s fine, also fine if you’re not interested at all. Just figured I would give my 2¢ as someone who previously thought along the same lines as you about audio/video mediums. Text has a myriad of advantage over audio and video, but I’m finding audio and video have some advantages as well over text. Having technology available to make it a fair bit less miserable and time consuming an experience was part of what helped me realize that.
A recent change I made to podcast listening was to stop playing at faster speeds.
I noticed that my natural speaking pace increased so much that it was confusing people who are used to slower cadences and listening to others who speak at a natural pace was grating to me.
Switching to 1x speed has helped me slow down a bit and digest as I go instead of racing through everything.
I prefer Reader Mode in Firefox and the Narrate feature, it turns every web article in a podcast. Samantha voice on macOS is real enough and speeding it up to 150% is faster than reading the article.
So basically he puts the individual podcasts into a playlist and also can play random podcasts and search for podcats? I'm still not getting how this is like wikipedia at all. It's just listening to a playlist. What am I missing? They seem completely orthogonal to me.
Since most people who produce information of any form written, spoken, visual, musical, whatever, produce very little that is novel or interesting, and since I can skim to find the interesting parts or new-to-me parts in written material much easier than I can in any of the others, including podcasts, the bar to me listening to a random person's podcast is much higher than the bar to me reading an article on some random person's blog.
There are some great podcasts out there, but the standards are much higher than for writing and it's way harder to get noticed if you aren't already known for something else[0].
[0]: I mean, you can get noticed for courting controversy or being super political or something, but that is entertainment.
software is fine (and thanks for the tip I will check it out).
the audible reader repurposes back to back 15 seconds for example.
what I was wondering about though was why don't (for example) bluetooth headphone manufacturers have a prominent, dedicated skip back or skip forward button?
> Why'd it take me 10 years to realize I could listen to a podcast or audio book and code at the same time without losing much productivity or comprehension?
I absolutely can't listen to any podcasts or audiobooks while working, I will simply tune out all the noise and focus all of my attention on the task at hand. Then the podcast simply turns into background voices that I don't listen to (I also easily tune out any nearby conversations in open office settings). By the time I'm done with my task, I have already lost too much of the conversation so might as well just stop listening. The good thing is that any noise doesn't hurt my productivity, because it just bypasses me completely.
I can only multitask with audiobooks if the other task is fairly mindless.
I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes, for example. But coding takes too much cognitive load for me to multitask. I even find music distracting when trying to think deeply about a problem.
Why can't podcasts just be podcasts - and Wikipedia be Wikipedia? I fail to see the point in trivializing these two communications technologies from the vantage point of this senseless apples-to-oranges comparison.
There is a nice connection shared between the two in that RSS and Wikipedia are both strongly associated with Aaron Swartz, though that's never addressed in the article.
The author uses podcasts as an audio Wikipedia, and the article explains what benefits they see and how their system works. I don't see how this trivializes anything, nor is there a need to detail the history of the systems.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadI feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.
As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.
> Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things
which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.
It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.)
For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue.
Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.
I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental resources to really listen to them.
Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein
Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.
That being said, one factor you might be discounting is that producing 1 hour of quality audio information takes much less time than producing a quality 1 hour read. There are a lot of people who are great conversationalists, but not great writers.
I'm not sure I agree. For example, I find myself fast-forwarding Coursera videos because the teachers just don't understand where it makes sense to slow the pace or where to pick it up. I find myself skipping huge parts of YouTube videos (my interest is hobby stuff) because the author just doesn't understand I already understood the idea, the take is getting boring (or just not showing the interesting stuff), and they should just cut ahead.
I find producing mediocre audio/video is easy. But quality audio/video is as hard as quality text, if not harder.
I’m not making any statement on the average quality of audiovisual content, just the barrier to entry for the production of that content.
FWIW I do a lot of skipping and fast replaying too. My podcasts are usually around 2.5x. Most people perform-talk way too slow. If I weren’t able to listen that quickly while doing dishes or similar, I’d normally prefer to read.
Disclosure: I work on PN on the tech side.
which means you can express yourself less defensively and without having to worry about the worst possible interpretation of whatever you say.
Important aspect is that it faster to produce then writing.
> Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing.
Popular good podcasts are not like lectures. They tend to have less information per minute and light side chats where your brain rests. They can be consumed while cleaning, cooking or going somewhere and paying reasonable amount of attention to surrounding environment. You can not do it with lecture (I tried).
You are still learning, much more then if not listening at all, but at smaller pace then expected from lecture and it requires less attention.
[1] Never mind that in order to produce quality audio, you need to have written... Your script. Which is a lot harder than writing something readable.
Another podcast I've learned a lot from is the Ottoman History Podcast (not to be confused with The History of the Ottoman Empire podcast). It often has episodes where academic historians are interviewing other academic historians about their areas of research. So you'll have a whole episode where a historian talks about their research into mining communities in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance.
For something a bit lighter, the Tides of History podcast is worth a listen. It's an academic historian who takes a look at various historical events.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Learning is an active process. People listening to podcasts while doing work aren't going to actually develop some skill, they're just passively listening to some facts being thrown at them, much of it they probably won't even retain, let alone productively integrate.
You can listen to thousands of hours of guitar playing podcasts, it won't really help you play the guitar. Or you could listen to programming podcasts, but without ever writing a line of code you'd not be a any good as a programmer.
Unless it's trivia and current knowledge type stuff.
And yes, I have some idea about how much I retained from podcasts I listened to. Seriously, remembering facts is also form of knowing, it beats up not remembering facts. It is not "just", many times it is the thing to go after when learning.
I’ve actually collected quite a large number of podcasts that hit my sweet spot of being just interesting enough to engage my attention but not interesting enough to keep me awake.
There are too many occurrences of reading anonymous text that can interpreted multiple ways without enough context to make it clear what is meant. If you attached a speaker to the same context; with intonation, character and a reliable history of quirks it becomes trivial to see what they meant.
People tend to use simple language when talking to another human so you're not always chasing a rabbit hole of terms that can be summarized for the sake of time in a podcast.
I listen to a lot of podcasts about random topics while doing yardwork and (pre-pandemic) commuting. I find that I remember these podcasts rather clearly compared to reading articles, and I find that they "contextualize" well with my existing knowledge.
For instance, I recall a number of details from Dan Carlin's WWI podcast "Blueprint for Armageddon" because I was mulching the garden beds with 15yds of top dressing while listening to the series last year.
I don't know if the improved retention is due to the narrative/conversational style of podcasts, the "memory palace" effect of doing something mindless at the same time, or some other cognitive difference in spoken vs read information.
For non-audio, I use EverNote heavily.
These days, I use a traditional index card system combined with a spaced-repetition flashcard system. Each concept that I feel like collecting information about has a small stack of cards that starts with a 1- or 2-sentence definition, in case I’m using a term slightly differently from other people. Below that are cards that represent quotes, notes, summaries, and recommended reading on that topic.
The flash card deck is to make sure I know what things exist, and what words are used in the literature to refer to abstract things. If I need more detail than I can remember, those keywords will get me to a relevant wikipedia page, at least.
To take a concrete example, the April 2020 issue of Smithsonian has a feature about a tidal power generation startup. I filed that under “sustainable power generation”, as you might expect. I also filed it under “Island communities” because of only a single sentence I found in the article: The startup’s target market is small- or medium-sized islands that are powered by imported diesel fuel.
What I've personally found is it's way too cumbersome to pull the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, press the "Add Note" button (assuming the Now Playing screen is already showing, otherwise another click for that), type in your notes, and click save...and probably rewind 15 seconds because you lost track of the conversation.
But now that I write this out I realize a Siri shortcut could be apt here.
Happy to get involved if you take the above route
The exception is stuff I have no idea about. Then all that coverage is useful. But for (I assume) some on HN, who are naturally curious and have a surface-level understanding of most topics, that 5-10 minutes of time out of a 25-minute podcast (with 2 minutes of ads each at the front and back) means you only get to scratch at the next level deeper without actually getting into any details, which doesn't seem worth the time when there are still Wikipedia articles about it.
You could be listening, then have a question, ask the computer, have it start up a mini-podcast at the segment that answers, then say "go back" and keep running the original.
But it does sound promising as an exploratory tool if you understand that the Qs will be basic and the As straightforward.
Podcasts: bring people of knowledge to talk about subjects.
Wikipedia: Brings the end result of all the talking to one written place.
https://www.breaker.audio/
(though it can get a bit unstable at times…)
Learning can't be easy, that's the point of learning, and often the best way to learn is to experience and test by yourself, which is clearly the opposite of listening to podcasts.
Also I do find that the content in podcast is almost always the same and only less than 5% of the talk is actually interesting
As for people who explains that they are as much productive when coding only than coding and listening podcast at the same time, this is probably wrong, humans are not very good at doing two things at the same time
I have turned HN into a personal data-oriented wikipedia and I want to test consuming the resulting feed through audio (like a npr for data-based facts) [0].
If some of you would like to take part into the experiment, leave a comment below !
[0] http://datum.alwaysdata.net
For me they're by no means a replacement for written information, though. They're complementary. They fulfil a different purpose.
If you can learn that way, great. My experience though is that a lot of these tasks are high thinking (and high-risk) tasks. Config changes can cause production outages. It's easy to miss something in refactoring and introduce a bug. The point of writing throwaway code to test new technology isn't the code, it's the understanding that comes with it.
I don't see how the use cases of podcasts and Wikipedia, as described, are at all similar. For "informal information", someone mentions a topic and I look for it in Wikipedia. This takes me a few seconds, more if I want to delve a bit deeper. How would that work for podcasts? Google a podcast on $TOPIC, pick one that looks (or is it "sounds"?) promising, then fast forward it until someone mentions what it is in few words? I understand an in-depth, long-winded description of $TOPIC in a podcast, but that's very different from quickly looking in Wikipedia to get the gist of it.
So no, podcasts cannot be my new Wikipedia, even if I tolerated audio/video explanations better than I do.
Of course, I don't like podcasts so that alone makes Wikipedia better for me, but this is not what I was arguing.
I was arguing podcasts can never be a replacement for Wikipedia.
My point is that this isn't at all a replacement for Wikipedia. Even the time investment is wildly different between the two.
I mean, both get you places and have wheels.
Going back about a dozen years ago if I wanted to watch a video to get some kind of information out of it, I generally found a way to load it up into QuickTime Player and play it back at 2x or 3x.
Nowadays I listen to too many podcasts because two pieces of technology fixed that for me: truly wireless headphones, AirPods originally, Powerbeats Pro presently, and podcast players with variable audio acceleration, namely Overcast, but I think Castro can do it too, and I’m sure there’s equivalents out there in Android. Overcast has two major quality of life improvements that make talk shows not just tolerable, but if you like the speakers, enjoyable. It decreases the playback time by about 40% for me using a combination of a fixed speed adjustment and Smart Speed, and it evens out the voice volume of the speakers so if someone has a bad mic or speaks softly, I can hear what the hell they’re saying.
Without either of these, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate podcasts as a format at all. Even now I favor podcasts that still have shorter base runtimes, Overcast is going to decrease the length regardless, but I don’t want to listen to something for more than 35 minutes, if that.
There’s a lot of good interviews, talk shows, news podcasts and so on that I find superior than the crap I would find on the web, I can easily skip past ads, and I can relax be play a game while the podcast runs more or less in the background. There’s plenty I just wouldn’t hear about or learn about simply because it really isn’t on the web. It might be in a book somewhere, but hearing someone explain their position on this or that or another thing in their own voice in a conversational format is much more enjoyable to me than following their writing and piecing their positions together.
Now you might give this all a try and find you still don’t care for podcasts, or maybe you already did. That’s fine, also fine if you’re not interested at all. Just figured I would give my 2¢ as someone who previously thought along the same lines as you about audio/video mediums. Text has a myriad of advantage over audio and video, but I’m finding audio and video have some advantages as well over text. Having technology available to make it a fair bit less miserable and time consuming an experience was part of what helped me realize that.
I noticed that my natural speaking pace increased so much that it was confusing people who are used to slower cadences and listening to others who speak at a natural pace was grating to me.
Switching to 1x speed has helped me slow down a bit and digest as I go instead of racing through everything.
> Of course, I use AirPods to listen to podcasts!
Of course, you would mention that!
There are some great podcasts out there, but the standards are much higher than for writing and it's way harder to get noticed if you aren't already known for something else[0].
[0]: I mean, you can get noticed for courting controversy or being super political or something, but that is entertainment.
I doubt this person is producing good code or learning anything from the podcast.
I used to listen to podcasts on public transit, but somewhere along the way I stopped and haven't picked up the habit again.
I don't have a commute... and, at the gym, again, I listen to music.
I'm running long distances these days, but I prefer to listen to nothing when running, esp since I run with my partner.
What I hate is that I listen to audiobooks and podcasts all the time.
And no car or portable audio device acknowledges this fact.
Why doesn't anyone do skip-back and skip-forward and pause and where-i-am-in-the-program-robustly ???
I need dedicated buttons for skip-back/forward and pause. I need my place to be saved, maybe the last 5 places.
sheesh.
Podcast Republic has proved reasonably un-sucky.
the audible reader repurposes back to back 15 seconds for example.
what I was wondering about though was why don't (for example) bluetooth headphone manufacturers have a prominent, dedicated skip back or skip forward button?
I absolutely can't listen to any podcasts or audiobooks while working, I will simply tune out all the noise and focus all of my attention on the task at hand. Then the podcast simply turns into background voices that I don't listen to (I also easily tune out any nearby conversations in open office settings). By the time I'm done with my task, I have already lost too much of the conversation so might as well just stop listening. The good thing is that any noise doesn't hurt my productivity, because it just bypasses me completely.
I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes, for example. But coding takes too much cognitive load for me to multitask. I even find music distracting when trying to think deeply about a problem.
There is a nice connection shared between the two in that RSS and Wikipedia are both strongly associated with Aaron Swartz, though that's never addressed in the article.
I use http://podcasttranscribe.com for converting it to text.