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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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.

In summary, podcasts make people feel like they've learned something but they haven't really?

Unless it's trivia and current knowledge type stuff.

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.

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.

It depends. A lot of podcasts are just conversations with “script” being a set of interesting topics.

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.

Sounds interesting, do you have any suggestions?

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.

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