I get the point you're making - but honestly I have to raise the counter argument, which I think is equally valid. Take for example, the average lecture video. The information density is so low, that I'd imagine that a 60 minute video could be compressed into 10-12 minutes without any loss of information. It really depends on what you're listening to/watching.
I 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.
> When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the speed down to 1x to learn it.
An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature too.
Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially useful when you want to know more about a subject you already know about (say a programming language you've used but never formally learnt).
If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the information rate of a video is typically quite low.
I've noticed that I'm fairly unusual in my generation (late millennial) in that I strongly prefer to consume information through reading compared to listening or watching. My brothers and friends and girlfriend all love stuff like podcasts or casual YouTube watching, but I find that the increased effort needed to arbitrarily change speed or skip around always makes me end up not retaining or enjoying the content I consume as much.
It depends on the type of information, for me. I love podcasts (history, policy, some news) but when I'm trying to research a topic or find instructions on something, or that kind of thing, I also vastly prefer text. Kind of drives me crazy when the most relevant source I can find is a 15 minute youtube video explaining something that could be distilled into a paragraph of text.
Same. Especially Youtube videos explaining and showing something really simple that takes like 5 seconds but they go on for 10-15 minutes. I suspect it has something to do with Youtubes algorithms that encourages creators to make long videos.
In part. There was definitely a 10 min target time for a long while.
However, a lot of TV shows - particularly USA ones seem to needlessly repeat everything like there running a lecture for amnesiacs. Here's what we're going to say in the first part, here's the first part, we say what we said we would, now a recap, then a break so we review the whole first part ... now we're 10 minutes into the show and we've seen about two minutes of unique footage. It's harrowing -- I'll take overdrawn explanations in preference to that.
I'm familiar with the technique, and if the TV shows were educational it might be reasonable - but the content is inane trash (or to be more charitable, not things anyone has need to remember). It's like "we have 5 minutes of footage of Dave and Julie flipping this house; here's a 45 minute show".
I would add for practical skills (including some research!) videos and podcasts seem to offer more feedback. Nobody in a book ever tells me what a flange or spline or baulk ring actually is, nobody in a video does either, but in the latter I get to see it and make my own, usually fit-for-current-purpose, inferences.
Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well regarded!) in no way acknowledges the existence of this sub field. For whatever reason, and across multiple fields, I've never found static text to be good at "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being valuable.
I've long since come the the conclusion that most 800-page texts are terrible.
Nearly all very-large-texts I've read on technical subjects are poorly written. The early and later sections seem to have little relation to each other; Some parts will be too general and other parts too vague. It's like the author totally loses perspective.
There's a sweet spot of around 250 A5 pages where a subject can maintain consistent scope and have meaningful relationships between chapters.
I particularly miss the feeling of being in control: with text I can skip scan, reread and so on with just an eye motion.
The first time I encountered the concept of a 3xer was in the context of political radicalization, people infusing their mind with YouTube self-radicalization content on 3x (or higher) every day. My mind conjured up images of Malcolm McDowell in that A Clockwork Orange scene, only that it's self-inflicted and with content aiming at the exact opposite.
Are you ? After all, YouTube is a recent phenomenon for us, and we've even known a time without widespread Internet when knowledge was still overwhelmingly in books...
I agree with this, though it depends on what you're learning and what you already know.
For example, I do not care for videos about code. I'm experienced in that domain and I want to get right into the meat of things: scroll to the appropriate paragraph, see the example I'm looking for, and move one.
I could see why a beginner would need a slower pace with more "filler" explanation and background information. Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
But that's only considering programming. Other domains are better suited to videos. For example, visual arts in general: painting, photography, filmmaking... I couldn't imagine explaining a picture with words only, or a human interaction with pictures only. Perhaps when I have more experience, but for now, I like videos.
It is just sad when I you search for "how to do X in Linux" you get a video in search results first and only second some article where you can actually copy-paste the commands
> I could see why a beginner would need a slower pace with more "filler" explanation and background information.
But that's what links are for - allowing you to deduplicate information by merely providing a link to some other content instead of replicating it entirely.
Moreover, you don't know each beginner's background or desired pace. "Fixing" a certain set of information into the video is worse than providing the appropriate links that allow the beginner to read exactly what they're unfamiliar with, and videos hard-code the pace in a way that written material is not - they're the opposite of what a beginner needs.
> Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
The article specifically addresses this - passive consumption (which better describes videos than reading) is scientifically shown to be less effective for learning than active consumption:
> One study[1] found that active learning makes students think they’re learning less even when they’re actually learning more. That’s one reason why, even though they’re less effective, lectures have persisted for so long.
> Other domains are better suited to videos.
The parent comment ("It is more that these days everything is a video.") wasn't taking any issue with the fact that some things are represented as videos, but that everything is. Of course most filmmaking education (modulo some stuff like maybe an introduction to optics) is best done by video - but nobody is complaining about that.
Also, in terms of education, these subjects, while they exist, are a minority. The majority of stuff you learn in school is better done in a non-video format. Not a text format - diagrams and interactive simulation are incredibly valuable for understanding. But, specifically, video is almost exactly the opposite of a good format for learning most things.
In addition to what you're saying, it can also be _harder_ to watch something at 1x speed. I've found that at 1.25x-1.5x my mind is more engaged. If it's too slow, I start thinking about other things and end up getting less from the video.
I find this true on podcasts; I'm normally a 1.3-1.5x person listening to podcasts, except "No Such Thing as a Fish". That one I go slower on, just because they seem to talk quite quickly, comparatively.
I think the slowness of the videos is for non-english speakers. Meaning people who can understand english to a point, but aren't using english every day.
Some years ago when I used to play games there was these awesome guides to some hard challenges a guy made where he was speaking pretty fast because there was a lot to cover and it was narrated over live footage. It was perfectly understandable to me, but the comment section was full of complains about the speed and how it was too hard to follow. This to me suggests that most of people would prefer if you paused the action to make your point slowly and after that continued with the footage.
yes, but that's an option you need to select. Normal people aren't going to even try searching for an option like that. Also it was 8 years ago, so I don't know if that was an option back then and in any case that would slowdown the footage as well.
I also have this problem (it might be related to my ADHD). 2x speed (with occasional pauses/rewinds) works much better for my retention; I've often explicitly noticed myself not paying attention and learning nothing at 1x.
I think that tutors like Khan of Khan Academy kind of revolutionized the shortening down of lectures. The videos are split up into smaller chunks, they're much more direct, and go straight to the point.
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
Honestly, maybe I'm just some old, out-of-touch luddite, but I think that using videos to pass information is sub-optimal all around.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Nothing to do with your age, it's always been either a difference between users of the media, convenience for the producer, that it's easier to monetize video, or the ability for instant feedback when it's in-person or live.
Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text to pass information is just making your memory weak.
different people prefer different methods of learning
they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn new information is becoming harder and harder for me personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and social media use
I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to me
videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed
..so I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and hear someone explain something at length
They key advantage to video (and the reason why YouTube seems to keep expanding to encompass more and more subcultures) is that video formatting is also inclusive to text, audio, and still image formatting. You can only upload text to a blog, and you can only upload audio to SoundCloud, but you can upload everything to YouTube.
Blogs are perfectly capable of embedding media as appropriate, including videos.
On the contrary to your suggestion, blogs (or more specifically, webpages) are what can do more than anything else, since they can also feature interactive media. See <https://ncase.me/trust/> for an example.
Whether or not this is expected, standard, or the author thinks it's worth the effort is another thing.
Are we talking slide shows on a youtube video here? Because to me those are probably the worst of all worlds. Low information density and not searchable.
I think it's not really about the speed of the information, as long as you are able to process it, but the sheer amount of information. If you use time savings of 50 minutes to just consume more information, not much will settle in your long term memory. But if you process and repeat the information in those "saved" minutes, you'll get away with much more in the end. I think this is more the point of the author's view.
Long before audio books were a public thing I received a special tape player for listening to audio recordings of my school textbooks because I have low vision. I was ecstatic to learn that I could adjust the speed and could still understand the book at something around 2-2.5x speed. I don’t know to what extent other bling or impaired persons use the speed controls but I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly and this isn’t a bad thing per se. I also agree that the information glut is not a good habit but listening to something at a faster speed is not in abs of itself information glut. Sometimes the bottleneck in presentation speed is the speaker not the listener.
> I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly
Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.
It's not just density, many books are pure nonsense. So 200 books of pure nonsense a year won't teach you much. They'll just introduce you to a ton of terrible ideas.
Hey, that's how AI's learn as well. Reading up all the nonsense indiscriminately and making no effort to make the ideas consistent. But it's better than not reading because you get exposed to a larger variety of text so you can draw upon them when it's time to get creative.
This ignores the point (that Perell makes in the essay) that learning via lecture is a horrible way to learn much of anything to begin with.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
Off-tangent: modern lectures are still a better way to learn something than original lectiones were ― the lecturer would read the book by some prominent author, and students would listen to it and take notes... and that's it. That's what lectio literally means: "[an act of] reading". And before the invention and spread of the printing press, it absolutely made sense ― books were rare and expensive.
Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully considered to be the worst: a student too can read the textbook himself just fine!
If only this wasn't necessary - a lot of online stuff has had a single 'take' done and minimal editing out of such time-wasting utterances or silences. And once you start to notice such characteristics in some poor speakers it can be a complete deal-breaker in terms of actually learning something.
I have quite literally gone through long lectures and edited out such filler words (Audacity is good for this), where the material is sufficiently compelling (an extreme rarity).
It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI" school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything that features this.
For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
Not sure how well it removes "ehm"s, but I use unsilence[1] a lot for lectures. It removes the silent bits from a video file. It isn't a browser plugin however. You have to download the lecture before converting.
You describe a symptom of a high data/low effect situation that is pretty common these days.
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
From learning point of view? Unanimously do something with it. Or at least see some examples of someone doing something with it to make you care about what you just learned. It's very high to remember a fact, as in commit to long-term memory, if there was no feeling attached.
Listening to a lecture at a faster speed doesn't change the information density. You're just compressing everything; you're not editing out the useless bits.
Yes, it does: the useless bits remain as time to help you digest the information. It's just that you don't need as much time to do so, so making everything faster is just fine.
Using rate of speed up is probably a bad metric due to varying densities, but even if one were to account for that and use some kind of smart speed up app that maintains constant information throughput, the issue is with not taking pauses to ruminate.
It's more of an information retention problem rather than an information loss one. IE not committing to long term memory as the author states.
Yeah, I've noticed that with text I'm going to make more pauses thinking about what I just read (especially printed text for some reason). Video is the worst, while audio only in the middle. Maybe because of clunky controls ?
I'm very slow with books. I'll read a couple paragraphs and then ponder for a minute. And then maybe look up some tangential, maybe even radial stuff. Even audio books at 1X move too fast for me.
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
I'll often seek out both the written and lectures on material I'm particularly interested in.
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
I think some of the replies and likes to your reply are kinda hilarious.
You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information, not people who are using it to skip filler content and contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people corrected you in the reply.
But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
>, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information,
The author is making multiple points and it's fair to consider each claim in isolation.
One of the points is that that active learning is better passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the information multiple times is better than reading it fast once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
- 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so slowly than listeners tune out at 1x
- 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1 perspective in 1x time.
- 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
- 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in their head" when reading written text
The author should have titled his essay "Against Passive Learning" because that's the stronger point rather than highlight "3x".
To be fair, the article is quite long so I for example gave up reading after a while. Which from my brief skimming seems like what the author advocates for -- reading less things but more deeply.
I don't agree at all. The author doesn't mention filler content. He seems to implicitly assume that Mike's podcasts have no filler content. And he assumes Mike's motive to be trying to learn faster - rather than skipping filler - without presenting any evidence that Mike believes this.
I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman, that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis - Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the content a little boring.
I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
I really hate how everyone has shifted to video and podcasts over the last ten years or so.
Personally, I'm an "in one ear, out the other" type as far as auditory memory goes. So I can read something written out, or even just transcribed, in a fraction of the time and actually remember it.
I suspect someone with better understanding of psychology can tell me if I'm way off on this or not.
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Sometimes I'll put a lecture at 2x speed if the professor is talking way too slow. Every ten minutes, I will pause the lecture and try and "teach myself" what the professor just said, giving a quick summary of all the information I remember. If I feel like I got a reasonable understanding of the gist of it, then I keep going at 2x, and if I had a lot of trouble with the summarization process, I drop it back to 1x.
More often than not, I end up dropping back to 1x.
My experience is that speeding up low-quality content makes it more tolerable, whereas speeding up high quality content makes it less enjoyable.
So now I just don’t speed up. If the quality is low, I don’t listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time to think about what the speaker is saying, while they’re saying it.
And that's why reading a book or an article is 10x better than listening or watching a lecture.
There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.
> Every student could now study the same material, no matter where they lived. In tune with this post-industrial mindset, fuzzy and hard to quantify educational methods like apprenticeships and the singular teachings of local sages were overtaken by national benchmarks and one-size-fits-all curriculums.
It also meant every student got at least something resembling an education, even if the quality of local educators was sub-par.
Mass production of almost anything tends towards results that are a bit below what people hope for, but the results are uniform.
I want to know where the author of this post expects to find all these amazing teachers at for every single small town and village around the country.
Yes, I also had some absolutely incredible teachers out there. I also had lecturers so good that I was able to pay attention for the entire hour. But in general, sure, I'll buy that most of my classes had maybe 20 minutes of focus in them. But I'd also say the majority of teachers were aware of this and, up until college, didn't try to talk for more than 10 or 15 minutes at one go.
We're mass-producing teachers, but we're also mass-producing students. In the example of a medieval university or a traditional apprenticeship, the students have some kind of vested interest in being there. These were limited opportunities, not universal requirements. In contrast, most teachers in most classrooms today are trying to impart knowledge that their students aren't particularly motivated to have.
Lectures are a great way to convey information to students who want the information in the first place. They are a terrible way to engage with involuntary participants.
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.
I'd argue that 95% of all learning, is learnt by doing.
Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and untested knowledge. At best, a boffin.
It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.
I'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.
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.
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.
Strongly agree. I would always fall asleep in class in college.
Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed at learning specific new things.
If I sat through talks or presentations I would just information dump into a text file which I would data mine later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but organizing it according to my own thought process helped make it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same thing.
If you mean time spent, then yes, about 95% of time spent learning is doing. But you're talking about the cost, not the benefit. Learning by doing is very inefficient. You gain much deeper knowledge, but it can only possibly be in a very narrow area. If you spend only 5% of your time reading/listening/watching stuff, this more than pays for itself. You don't need to have experience programming a network stack before knowledge of it becomes useful. For almost everyone out there, knowledge is enough.
I learned Indonesian more or less from reading an excellent grammar book about twenty times over years.
And then I went there, and to my shock, I was able to speak it.
The high point was when I had an argument with people in the airport about the amount of airport tax and got them to concede they'd done the exchange rate right, all in Indonesian.
I would not recommend that way of learning language to anyone, but I just love grammar books, and I had a lot of spare time those years.
But I do agree with your point. Heck, I probably would have learned faster with a workbook and exercises.
I’m not a fan of this dichotomy - you assume the two are mutually exclusive. There's analysis paralysis (no “doing”) on one extreme and blind ambition on the other (no book knowledge). I doubt many people advocate either.
Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?
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)
> 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"
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.
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.
> 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"?
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.”
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.
Until the management starts asking what are the pros and cons of new tools to be introduced into the stack and nobody can answer them, they will hire new experts to join the company and who knows who else is going to be obsolete anyway
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
>They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the first word
It might actually be worth considering if that's the result of people truly adding nothing, or if it's the result of not being attentive enough to how others communicate, and what they communicate. People pause for good reasons and they repeat themselves for good reasons that aren't always obvious. It takes time to mull over speech, and there is detail in speech that is not going to become apparent when someone thinks of a lecture or a book as just a means to 'consume information'.
In a sense true understanding always requires reproduction. People will think the lectures they attend are slow, yet they retain not even 20%. Because they do not know what they miss until they themselves reproduce it. It's even very questionable to think that something can be 'consumed' faster than it can be produced if the goal is genuine learning. You could read a book like SICP quickly and think you 'got all the information', but to actually learn everything that Sussman and Abelson put into it you probably need to work on it as long as it took them to write it.
If I can predict exactly which words someone is about to say, the words add no information for me. Maybe they are there due to the confines of grammar, or maybe they are useful to other listeners, but they are not useful to me, and I can afford to speed through them. I will pause and replay if I was wrong.
Except that there is no "standard speed" for speech, let alone one that we've been using across cultures and languages for "millennia." People speak at different speeds depending on many factors from personal idiosyncrasies to emotions to a desire to hit a specific timing (it's not an accident that radio presenters get exactly the same time every time; they modulate the speed at which they are reading depending on the density of the information they have to deliver). Lectures, in particular, are often intentionally delivered in an unnaturally slow pace, which makes sense for maximizing comprehension, but means the pace may be very, very slow for someone who wishes to review mostly-familiar material. The idea that it's impossible to follow a lecture sped-up under any circumstances is just not at all in accord with my experience.
I always hated school and I just recently realized why. When I could pay attention everything felt wayy too slow for me. But when I couldn't pay attention I'd miss critical information in what felt like seconds
But when I couldn't pay attention I'd miss critical information in what felt like seconds
Time flies when you're having fun! It's also why we always hear "It just came out of nowhere! It all happened so fast!" when referring to automobile accidents. It's because our attention was not where it should have been.
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadI'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!
HN allows for sensible use of reposting.
https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
For reference; $('video').playbackRate=3.33
The playback engine mutes audio below 0.25x and above 4x, not configurable.
https://dynamoformac.com/
(I am the author.)
But I suspect they're all mostly similar
javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback rate%22))}();
Here's a non-interactive version
javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22audio,video%22).playbackRate=2.7}();
An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature too.
Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially useful when you want to know more about a subject you already know about (say a programming language you've used but never formally learnt).
If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the information rate of a video is typically quite low.
However, a lot of TV shows - particularly USA ones seem to needlessly repeat everything like there running a lecture for amnesiacs. Here's what we're going to say in the first part, here's the first part, we say what we said we would, now a recap, then a break so we review the whole first part ... now we're 10 minutes into the show and we've seen about two minutes of unique footage. It's harrowing -- I'll take overdrawn explanations in preference to that.
Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well regarded!) in no way acknowledges the existence of this sub field. For whatever reason, and across multiple fields, I've never found static text to be good at "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being valuable.
Nearly all very-large-texts I've read on technical subjects are poorly written. The early and later sections seem to have little relation to each other; Some parts will be too general and other parts too vague. It's like the author totally loses perspective.
There's a sweet spot of around 250 A5 pages where a subject can maintain consistent scope and have meaningful relationships between chapters.
There are exceptions, but they are few.
The first time I encountered the concept of a 3xer was in the context of political radicalization, people infusing their mind with YouTube self-radicalization content on 3x (or higher) every day. My mind conjured up images of Malcolm McDowell in that A Clockwork Orange scene, only that it's self-inflicted and with content aiming at the exact opposite.
This lets you skip filler content automatically for many popular videos.
For example, I do not care for videos about code. I'm experienced in that domain and I want to get right into the meat of things: scroll to the appropriate paragraph, see the example I'm looking for, and move one.
I could see why a beginner would need a slower pace with more "filler" explanation and background information. Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
But that's only considering programming. Other domains are better suited to videos. For example, visual arts in general: painting, photography, filmmaking... I couldn't imagine explaining a picture with words only, or a human interaction with pictures only. Perhaps when I have more experience, but for now, I like videos.
But that's what links are for - allowing you to deduplicate information by merely providing a link to some other content instead of replicating it entirely.
Moreover, you don't know each beginner's background or desired pace. "Fixing" a certain set of information into the video is worse than providing the appropriate links that allow the beginner to read exactly what they're unfamiliar with, and videos hard-code the pace in a way that written material is not - they're the opposite of what a beginner needs.
> Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
The article specifically addresses this - passive consumption (which better describes videos than reading) is scientifically shown to be less effective for learning than active consumption:
> One study[1] found that active learning makes students think they’re learning less even when they’re actually learning more. That’s one reason why, even though they’re less effective, lectures have persisted for so long.
> Other domains are better suited to videos.
The parent comment ("It is more that these days everything is a video.") wasn't taking any issue with the fact that some things are represented as videos, but that everything is. Of course most filmmaking education (modulo some stuff like maybe an introduction to optics) is best done by video - but nobody is complaining about that.
Also, in terms of education, these subjects, while they exist, are a minority. The majority of stuff you learn in school is better done in a non-video format. Not a text format - diagrams and interactive simulation are incredibly valuable for understanding. But, specifically, video is almost exactly the opposite of a good format for learning most things.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
Some years ago when I used to play games there was these awesome guides to some hard challenges a guy made where he was speaking pretty fast because there was a lot to cover and it was narrated over live footage. It was perfectly understandable to me, but the comment section was full of complains about the speed and how it was too hard to follow. This to me suggests that most of people would prefer if you paused the action to make your point slowly and after that continued with the footage.
Otherwise I’d almost fall asleep.
It’s better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear sentences than wasting 2x the time.
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the content.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text to pass information is just making your memory weak.
different people prefer different methods of learning
they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn new information is becoming harder and harder for me personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and social media use
I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to me
videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed ..so I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and hear someone explain something at length
On the contrary to your suggestion, blogs (or more specifically, webpages) are what can do more than anything else, since they can also feature interactive media. See <https://ncase.me/trust/> for an example.
Whether or not this is expected, standard, or the author thinks it's worth the effort is another thing.
Are we talking slide shows on a youtube video here? Because to me those are probably the worst of all worlds. Low information density and not searchable.
Visual content is a bonus, to remain more engaged and maybe impart information via a third medium
Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully considered to be the worst: a student too can read the textbook himself just fine!
According to Pocketcast I've "saved" over 3 days by trimming silence and over a month by speeding up. I've listened to a lot of podcasts it seems ...
It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI" school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything that features this.
For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
It works quite well in my experience.
[1] https://github.com/lagmoellertim/unsilence
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
It's more of an information retention problem rather than an information loss one. IE not committing to long term memory as the author states.
Not very unlike consuming food without chewing.
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information, not people who are using it to skip filler content and contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people corrected you in the reply.
But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
The author is making multiple points and it's fair to consider each claim in isolation.
One of the points is that that active learning is better passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the information multiple times is better than reading it fast once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
- 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so slowly than listeners tune out at 1x
- 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1 perspective in 1x time.
- 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
- 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in their head" when reading written text
The author should have titled his essay "Against Passive Learning" because that's the stronger point rather than highlight "3x".
> You [...] misunderstood the point
> Few people corrected you
> Kinda hilarious
If you genuinely want people to understand why they're wrong, then know that this is not the way to do it.
I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman, that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis - Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the content a little boring.
I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
Personally, I'm an "in one ear, out the other" type as far as auditory memory goes. So I can read something written out, or even just transcribed, in a fraction of the time and actually remember it.
-----
Sometimes I'll put a lecture at 2x speed if the professor is talking way too slow. Every ten minutes, I will pause the lecture and try and "teach myself" what the professor just said, giving a quick summary of all the information I remember. If I feel like I got a reasonable understanding of the gist of it, then I keep going at 2x, and if I had a lot of trouble with the summarization process, I drop it back to 1x.
More often than not, I end up dropping back to 1x.
So now I just don’t speed up. If the quality is low, I don’t listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time to think about what the speaker is saying, while they’re saying it.
There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed at learning specific new things.
If I sat through talks or presentations I would just information dump into a text file which I would data mine later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but organizing it according to my own thought process helped make it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same thing.
But then applying that insight and playing with it in various dimensions is what built an intuition.
Just listening to something is completely different than being able to do something with what you just listened to.
Learning involves more than just recalling things from memory.
I learned Indonesian more or less from reading an excellent grammar book about twenty times over years.
And then I went there, and to my shock, I was able to speak it.
The high point was when I had an argument with people in the airport about the amount of airport tax and got them to concede they'd done the exchange rate right, all in Indonesian.
I would not recommend that way of learning language to anyone, but I just love grammar books, and I had a lot of spare time those years.
But I do agree with your point. Heck, I probably would have learned faster with a workbook and exercises.
Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?
(Other than this silly note, I generally agree with a lot of the author’s sentiment)
He should try noise cancelling headphones! Surely one of the greatest inventions of the early 21st century.
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"
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.
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"?
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.”
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.
Until the management starts asking what are the pros and cons of new tools to be introduced into the stack and nobody can answer them, they will hire new experts to join the company and who knows who else is going to be obsolete anyway
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.
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
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.
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.
I understand that learning and retention are achieved through repetition, but repetition can be achieved in other ways.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It might actually be worth considering if that's the result of people truly adding nothing, or if it's the result of not being attentive enough to how others communicate, and what they communicate. People pause for good reasons and they repeat themselves for good reasons that aren't always obvious. It takes time to mull over speech, and there is detail in speech that is not going to become apparent when someone thinks of a lecture or a book as just a means to 'consume information'.
In a sense true understanding always requires reproduction. People will think the lectures they attend are slow, yet they retain not even 20%. Because they do not know what they miss until they themselves reproduce it. It's even very questionable to think that something can be 'consumed' faster than it can be produced if the goal is genuine learning. You could read a book like SICP quickly and think you 'got all the information', but to actually learn everything that Sussman and Abelson put into it you probably need to work on it as long as it took them to write it.
My IQ is 250. I am an android built on the planet Zweebs.
Time flies when you're having fun! It's also why we always hear "It just came out of nowhere! It all happened so fast!" when referring to automobile accidents. It's because our attention was not where it should have been.
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.