Smart People Should Read Fewer Books and Listen to More Podcasts | Hacker News Reader

Smart People Should Read Fewer Books and Listen to More Podcasts

nickwignall.com

8 pointsjpn11 comments

Going to have to argue the other direction...

First on the Input/ knowledge gain: 100 - 150 wpm is roughly what people speak at, versus average reading speed of 200 to 250 wpm all the way up to 1000 wpm for top speed readers. If we were to analyze straight by wpm you can put into you Reading is 2X-10X better... Not that it's even a good argument though.

Books take a long time to create because the information is curated. The author of the article makes a decent point that people should focus on great books... and the answer there is yea... they should focus on great books over listening to podcasts. And yes ... there are a lot of good books out there.

Plenty of non-speed readers read at 1000 wpm. If you read a lot, you get faster.

AFIK, just about the only people reading at 200-250 wpm are people who don't regularly do any sustained reading.

I'm in the top percentile of reading speed but my comprehension is average. It's not that I'm trying to read fast I just do. I don't know if more wpm means you're taking in more information. I guess it's useful for skimming for spaced repetition type learning techniques.

Generally I find I learn faster from reading regardless but I can listen to podcasts in situations where I can't read. E.G. doing a mindless repetitive task.

I can read infinitely faster than I can listen, which to me suggests that even if the signal to noise is lower the value for time is higher for reading. Podcasts are also rarely as well edited as books are. It is strange too, to attribute value to the medium rather than the content.

have to agree with the note about content over medium...

Smart people see headlines like this and know whatever the contents are, they are not worth their time.

Books take some time to generate in a professional manner.

the manuscript is one thing then finding a publisher, and getting through the legaleese.

as a result, a published book may be 5 or more years out of date by the time it is published.

This is why some of my "proffs" refused to endorse a particular text, but would publish reserves to the library, and recommend select portions of a text for background information to prime to collegiate for the lectures.

so you can read about how "it" was thought to be, and assimilate what is the most up to date take on "it" from the horses mouth, the person that is actually doing the science that is written about in the texts.

.....and of course i am typing about the uni lecture, and not recreational reading.

>spurious misclick of the D.O. but its not cool to delete it so if a mod wants to nuke this bit thats fine

Hilariously weak logic... reading has higher information rate than listening. Written content can be parsed rapidly to focus on interesting chapters and sections of books. Main use case for listening to podcasts (incl vs. scanning podcast written transcripts) is in the case of listening while doing another activity (e.g. driving a car).

I listen to a lot of the New Books Network podcasts. Usually the interview is better than the book, but the interview wouldn’t exist if the author hadn’t put the work into writing the book. But yeah, life is too short to see how everybody worked out every idea.

I often also listen to New Books Network, but my hope that the discussion will focus on the most important and original part of a book sometimes takes a beating. The interviewer often starts with a "Tell us about yourself" inquiry and follows with, "Why did you decide to write this book?" The answer to that question is almost always too long and rarely gives any significant knowledge about the content of the work. Add another 5 or 10 minutes near the end of the interview for, "What are you working on now?" Then you have a couple of ads or promos from the podcast site, introductions, closes, so even if the interviewer has read the book and is a very skilled questioner and the writer is also a very skilled conversationalist, the salience ratio of an hour podcast rarely exceeds 50%. YMMV.

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