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Against 3x Speed

perell.com

523 pointsAriarule348 comments

I'm impressed more by the comments than the article itself. Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.

A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and opened his book. It was like if you showed your programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.

There's some scientific evidence as well:

1. Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things. https://www.science.org/content/article/lectures-arent-just-...

2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251

I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.

This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.

This is a core problem in education, BTW: people, regardless of age, are essentially unable to properly evaluate whether they actually learned something from e.g. a course they just completed, and what helped with these learning effects. Those after-course feedbacks mostly just reflect whether they liked the presenter and/or the group. This of course has problematic consequences if that after-course feedback is used as evaluation of the course itself, because it can penalize courses where people would actually learn - because learning sometimes simply isn't fun.

It takes a huge level of maturity to know when you understand something. You have to take yourself away from how pleasant the interaction was, and ask yourself questions that are on the limit of what you think you can answer. That whole not-too-easy-or-hard balance is really difficult to nail down, especially if you have a grade depending on it. It's also hard when you have nothing but your own satisfaction depending on it, eg after you've graduated and are just reading for interest.

The entertainment aspect is hard to get away from. It's like when you watch a good documentary, you're in awe of whatever field it's about. But have you really learned much? Hard to say.

Kind of a super power of mine is that I am very good at knowing whether or not I actually know or understand something.

This made university pretty stressful: it was always on my mind how little I had yet retained and understood from my current courses; i'd only be happy when grinding material through my brain on my own (i.e. actually learning).

I'd like to think I am good at it as well, but I doubt it. The number of times I've felt I've understood something, but then realized I could not answer follow-up questions or explain it properly to a third party, is uncountable.

I have the same thing! I've always found it deeply perplexing to see people that don't understand something but think that they do. Particularly, because when you actually understand something, it's so obvious.

When I'm learning something, I have kind of a map in my head. I can just accurately keep track of the parts that are still fuzzy. In any subject, unknown unknowns are what will really trip you up. I think a big part of it is that I can use tiny context clues to predict and calibrate my understanding. Often, just knowing the NAME of a concept is enough for me to figure out what it's going to look like. (I did that with feynman path integrals for example.) SO I absorb those context clues and use them to try to keep some idea of what I DON'T know yet in that map.

In fact, I think it's closely tied with prediction in general. I remember in math, I'd take what we knew, or had been learning, and just take it to the absolute limits of my knowledge, or find it's absolutely limits until the idea breaks. I did that constantly. In doing so, I could often predict the next section of study. I think that habit gives you lots of practice in self-assessment of what you really know.

Conversely... when it comes to complicated subjects of complex systems like history/economics/geopolitics, where there is relatively poor feedback on "correctness" of ideas, I feel like ALL of my opinions are completely unfounded bullshit. People still seem to value them, but they have such a tenuous grip on reality.

In most cases you'd care about, it's easy: ask them to apply it.

Yes, it is often a matter of sympathy, atmosphere and ambitions more than actual learning.

Many years ago as a grad student I was a teaching assistant.

One year I was instructing two classes.

One was an ordinary class. It was all very pleasant, cozy and relaxed. Students would often bake cake for the class. But I had trouble teaching because most of them did not do any homework and did not read the textbooks much. They all liked me. One even said in class that he would try to get me again next semester, meaning that he knew he would fail the exam. Which most of them did.

The other class was a special class for students that had failed the previous exams and because the curriculum had changed this was their last chance. They were a lot more motivated. And they were quite critical about me as an instructor. At one point they even made a complaint about me be because I had tried to prove a theorem on the blackboard and failed because I made a silly mistake. They were absolutely right that I messed up that proof. But we did handle it in that same class and had a good discussion about that theorem and how to prove things. And their critical attitude kept me on my toes. I worked hard preparing the classes. And the classes were focused and tense. In the end, except for one that fell sick, everyone passed the exam with good marks.

> Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things.

This may be, but studies also show that you should review the material before the lecture so that you can engage the lecturer.

I can count on a single hand and not use all the fingers the number of students I have taught who always reviewed the material before I lectured on it. Unsurprisingly, those students absolutely sailed through my class with very high grades.

So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?

Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are two parties to that bargain.

I also taught at commercial courses and in a university, trying to apply active learning, but it didn't go well, so I haven't an answer to this problem either.

That requires the material to be available in advance, which often isn't the case.

Every class I have ever taught required a syllabus and text/reading assignments to be available--generally the entire semester is laid out at the first class.

This is what I do when learning math and it works really well.

Lectures alone don't give you a deep understanding and a solid theoretical grasp of the concepts and their manipulations, books alone are very dense and often lack the intuition and human explanations of the concepts. But if you go book then lecture you get a double whammy of thick theory followed by an exposition of the intuition behind it and suddenly everything clicks together.

I imagine it's obvious to many, but I only realized it recently.

I've always loved the concept, and yet was always the student that would scoff when lecturers mentioned reviewing. The problem is "active learning" doesn't work outside of small groups at a similar "level" so to speak (as in background knowledge, dedication, and interest).

Very few college classes meet these requirements. When they did, they were amazing. But otherwise, reviewing just makes it nearly impossible to pay attention as the lecturer slowly speaks the material you already know. And then any questions you may have require too much detail to actually answer in the lecture. It's really quite miserable. Why would you do that to yourself?

In a course I teach when the isolation measures started in my country we got 2 weeks in advance to turn everything from in-person classes to virtual "maybe for a month, and then we'll go back" (you can imagine how that turned out).

So during 2020 we moved into a model where we recorded the lectures for students to watch on their own time, and then they'd have a questions-only class (or so they were told). This turned out to get 80-90% of the students to actually view the material before class, and then they'd ask questions about what they didn't understand. On a few difficult topics, we ended up having yet another lecture (but focused on the parts they had trouble following).

On some occasions where they didn't engage with many questions (I think it was the first few classes under this model, which was novel to the students) we the teachers picked up on doing a quick recap and focusing on what we knew beforehand tends to be hard to understand, and engaged them in the class (questions, explain the concepts themselves, etc).

Here's my take: it takes a lot of effort to do this, from recording the material beforehand, to "lying" that the class will be questions-only for clearing up (and we know we'll end up explaining yet again if they don't bring questions), to actively engaging and changing the pace of the lectures/classes.

Because of all this effort, out of 5 different courses I teach, I only managed to pull this in 1, and we're still tweaking a lot of content to make it work better under this model. But we're planning to keep it even after the restrictions are gone (we're still not giving in-person classes at my university, in theory they'll be back for 2022).

Also, confirming what you wrote: students who excelled at my courses, usually took some courses, like online, before that. Those who were great at maths in the university, said their parents were mathematicians, and they were exposed to advanced maths, like quadratic or trigonometric equations already at the age of 7-9.

I always thought lectures aren't for teaching, they are basically just some more detail on the syllabus. Basically it's the prof saying "you need to know this proof, I'll skim over it fast and you can figure it out in your own time".

I think for some subjects and some teachers, swapping homework time and lecture time can work. For example, if you are learning calculus, it may be more efficient for the teacher to assign reading a section of a textbook as homework and then in the classroom work through a bunch of problems and proofs using the homework material.

Hum, if people are engaging, it's not a lecture. Discussions are much more effective than lectures.

What I've never seen is a comparison between a pure lecture (like it would be on video) and reading a book. Those two fit the same stage on an effective "get pointed to the content, get the raw content, refine it with people and the real world" learning process.

Now, about your question, I have no idea :)

If they worked through the material prior to the lecture, perhaps the lectures were spurious for them, and the credit for the high grades goes to the individual work.

Credit for high grades always goes to individual work.

I like to think my lectures are good, but you can't learn material without doing the work yourself.

As for being spurious? They didn't have to show up for my lectures--they did anyway. I have never made that a condition for any of my classes.

> if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress

If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".

I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same proportions.

If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to make people feel smarter with the sample lessons. That being said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the important stuff. So I think it's important to find a balance. You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.

I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment? The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel good after learning stuff.

Are you referring to Noam Chomsky?

Unlikely, his specialty is syntax rather than phonology

I refer to Andrey Zalyznyak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Zaliznyak

> “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at a rate of four thousand words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”

> Slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has read. “We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”

-- Primary Education of the Camiroi, R. A. Lafferty [1]

[1] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/reading-at-spee...

I wonder the quality of learning if you listen to/watch something at 2x speed twice. Bonus if there is a delay in which your mind may formulate questions.

I'm guessing it would be superior unless it was a very high difficulty piece. Having a basic understanding and then formulating questions allows you have an input on the learning, as opposed to simply listening.

I would also say that with some material (esp. fiction), your "comprehension" may go up if you listen to it faster, because you don't give your mind a chance to wonder if something makes sense; I often fall for the trap of asking what I would do in a given situation, and then when the character does something nonsensical, I go looking for a good reason. I lose sight of what the author is trying to say because they made a mistake when trying to forward the plot.

Try this: after listening to a story or to a lecture, retell it to someone else in as much detail as possible. Or try defending lecturer's position or what their information implies. You'll be shocked to discover, you don't know enough details.

You'll have to listen another time, and off goes the profit of x2 speed. But even after listening multiple times, it's still very hard to argue for, or retell in details what's been said. Unless it's a radio show, where information is sparse.

>and off goes the profit of x2 speed

I'm unconvinced. Is it better to listen to something once at 1x speed or twice at 2x speed?

It's better to think about what you have listened to. If 2x lets you do that then you are better of vs 1x. I personally only use 2x when the person is talking very slowly.

I believe the research supports fast reading as being better, because you get more of an overview, but presumably this peaks at some point, same as audio.

If 2x speed lets you listen twice then by all means it is probably better than only listening once. However, the people who think they can get away with listening once at 2x speed without pausing are just passing the time, they aren't learning.

This is one of the firsts principes of critical thinking: it's not only about understanding something, it's about being ready to challange it.

This lends credence to the educational reform that I always found the most compelling: kids/people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture, so the teacher can actually help students work through problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).

A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.

This is called a flipped classroom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

Many teachers/professors I had in my youth asked the class to read the material before lecture so the lecture could be a summary and then most of the time spent asking questions/discussing the topic. Few students actually did so.

It's not a matter of asking, it's mandatory. Reading is your homework, and if you don't read the night before you won't be able to do your problems and get help of you need it the day of.

But it's far simpler to check if students did 20 math problems then if they read a section of their textbook

There’s no need to check.

I suppose it's a question of pedagogy to determine how (and how much) teachers should encourage students to present behaviors that make them more likely to learn. My experience (and many others) is that inverting the classroom ends up with the majority of the students not doing the assigned reading/listening/watching.

Most students do their math homework begrudgingly because they get in trouble otherwise; this does not mean that doing the assigned problems does not help them learn...

Just give them a weekly quiz based on the content and grade that.

My math teacher in high school gave us a 15 minute test every week and would just randomly pick 4 students who must hand it in of which one presents their solution giving the teacher time to grade the tests. Doing something every week makes it less stressful.

I would go even further and argue that making students read or listen to lectures for any significant length of time without them being actively engaged with the lesson is sub-optimal.

Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between teaching the student something and checking whether they actually learned it to seconds rather than days.

After experiencing such systems for myself I'm blown away that they aren't already the norm.

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor.

I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using.

Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctly, my grammar in general sucks, and I can only comprehend real-life spoken German if the speaker talks very slowly and clearly and uses a sufficiently short sentences — from experience, the sort of conversation you’d find in an interview in a general interest magazine in the waiting room of a Hausarzt.

I’m also trying to learn Arabic on Duolingo. Over a year into that course, I still can’t even read the entire Arabic alphabet.

Sure, but it's also nowhere near the price of a private tutor. Regardless of subject, I don't think giving each student their own human private tutor is feasible. I've become convinced interactive, adaptive, software based learning is the next best thing, at least when done right.

For language specifically, the only way you're ever going to get anywhere close to the level of a native speaker is by actually conversing with native speakers. I'm still just starting out with Duolingo, but my plan is to finish the course I'm in (or at least get a decent way into it), then switch to Tandem or some other service that lets you trade lessons with native speakers of another language.

That may have to do with Duolingo optimizing for paying and returning customers instead of for fluency.

Their app has to be "fun" or in flow rather than in that difficult challenging place to actually help you grow.

In learning both German and Old Norse the most helpful thing for me was to translate texts, read them aloud to a fluent speaker and get feedback. Which is hard to scale.

Do you have any more detail to your approach? Do you use graded readers, or do you find that a dictionary and basic grasp on grammar is enough to struggle through pretty much anything?

... Do Old Norse graded readers exist?

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

Have you checked out the "tips" section for each lesson? That usually has pretty good descriptions of things like grammar rules.

Also, when you make a common mistake during a lesson, Duo Lingo will often interrupt the lesson with an impromptu tip showing you what your mistake was, why it was a mistake (what grammatical rules it broke, etc), and how to avoid that mistake in the future. Those have been pretty helpful in my (admittedly limited) experience, though I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course.

> I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course

Unfortunately the interstitial hints do vary by course. Spanish course has stuff like that very frequently in the early lessons (I have not done the later Spanish lessons); the German course barely has them at all anywhere, possibly not at all (if I had perfect memory it would be much easier to learn the languages).

For what it's worth, I've also used an app called Lingvist, which tends to tell you the grammar rules more directly. You might like its approach a little better. (But also, you might consider getting an old-fashioned grammar book, with tables of declensions and tenses and such, and keeping it nearby while doing Duolinguo exercises.)

Isn't it time to start reading German books? Duolingo was never meant to be an all in one solution.

Already started, but the books at my German reading level (stuck in the annoying gap above tourist and below truly useful) are boring — my search results are either kids books or textbooks depending on if I search for stuff for native speakers or not.

If you can recommend any novels for mid-skill non-native speaking adults, I’d be interested.

This is the Thayer method, iirc

https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

For each class, a text lesson is assigned. This assignment includes a reading and specific problems associated with the reading material. Each cadet is expected to "work the problems." (Note: Prior to 2000 these problems were called "drill problems"; the current terminology is "suggested problems.")

• "One learns mathematics by doing mathematics." Cadets are encouraged to be active learners and to "do" mathematics. Group work is encouraged and expected. Special projects are a major portion of each core mathematics course-work on these projects is done in teams of two or three.

• Cadets are required to study the concepts of each lesson in such a way as to be ready to use them in three ways: 1. To express them fluently in words and symbols 2. To use them in proof and analysis 3. To apply them to the solution of original problems

• The instructor's goal during each lesson is to cause the maximum number of cadets to actively participate in the day's lesson. One of the instructor's roles is to facilitate the learning activity in the classroom. This may take the form of a question or a remark to clarify a point.

• Class begins with the instructor's questions on the assigned text lesson. Cadets are asked if there are questions on the assignment. Example problems are worked and discussed. Cadets are sent to the boards to work in groups of two or three on specific problems that are provided (so called "board problems"). These board problems may be similar to the problems assigned with the text lesson or they may be "original."

• Cadets are selected to recite on the problems they work. Questions are encouraged.

• The instructor spends a few minutes to discuss the next lesson. This practice is commonly called the "pre-teach."

This also has a lot in common with the case study method in both law and business although the specifics are obviously different for a technical topic.

people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture

While it's been decades since I went to college, I'm surprised this is no longer how it's done. That was pretty much the routine when I was in school.

At the end of the class, the professor would say, "Next week, we'll be doing X, Y, and Z. It's chapters A, B, and C in the book." You'd prepare for it over the weekend. The following week, we'd have a mixture of lecture, discussion, and quizzes.

Is it the other way around now? Lecture first, then the books and papers?

I've never liked the flipped classroom structure.

First, I'm a slow reader, so I always feel penalized when it takes me twice as long to get through a text as classmates.

Second, math/engineering/science lessons typically build upon understanding the first example. If you don't understand or have questions about the earlier parts of the lesson you will have a hard time completing the lesson.

Third, most text books I have encountered are terrible. Grade and High schools typically are trying to get the cheapest books so their dollar stretches further. In college, too many Profs/Departments push certain books because of kickbacks.

Finally, too often enough people don't complete the readings, so you end up covering the material in class anyway. Or worse, not at all. I had several profs who's assigned reading was never to be discussed in class but was prominently featured in tests.

I much prefer the typical lecture that allows for questions and discussions during the class. That way I can quickly address the issues I have with the material when I encounter it instead of having to wait till the next class hoping I don't fall too far behind.

> so the teacher can actually help students work through problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).

This seems to be the continual heart of opposition to restructuring math curricula. Whether it's my parents generation recalling how their parents couldn't make heads or tails of new math or parents slightly older than me struggling to comprehend the Common Core math they're supposed to guide their children through, the essence of the complaint is the same: "how can I teach my child what I was never taught myself?"

When I first went back to school for tech stuff (ultimately a master's in EE), my instructor for the entire calculus sequence -- and later on for linear algebra -- struck what I found to be the ideal balance. Something like:

0. Homework is never collected or graded, but don't be fooled into thinking it's not required -- that is, if you don't do the homework, you are extremely unlikely to pass the exams/course. Essentially, this is not knowledge we were learning -- it is skills that require practice. Homework is an opportunity to practice and hone skills.

1. Each lecture introduces a concept and/or technique, and works through a few demonstrative problems to show what it means or how it is done. Homework is assigned from textbook problems that involve the same techniques with progressive difficulty or complexity. The textbook used that pattern where odd-numbered problems included solutions, and assignments usually involved the ones with solutions.

2. The last one-quarter to one-third of every class period was dedicated to review and questions about the homework assigned for the previous class. Because we had the correct solutions in the text, we knew what to ask about (i.e. the ones we couldn't get to come out right). This particular instructor was fantastic at thinking on his feet and working problems on the fly, correctly and without preparation, so usually he'd just work the problem on the board and we could stop him to ask for a more detailed explanation if necessary.

Granted, this model didn't work as well for his linear algebra class. Since many of those problems involve long slogs through tedious and error-prone matrix operations before/while you were really dealing with the concept or technique being introduced, he couldn't as easily demo entire solutions during the question/review periods. I suppose that difficulty would apply to several other higher-math topics, as well, but even so, later in my education I often found myself wishing this or that professor would follow the pattern of my humble calculus teacher.

At conferences, people will say they liked and learned from talks that were complicated and largely incomprehensible, and that they found trivial and boring the talks that managed to explain the thing well enough that it was actually understood.

100%! This reminded me of a similar lesson beaten into us _repeatedly_ in college. I would study for a test and feel like everything was crystal clear. Then i walk into the exam and get absolutely destroyed by stuff i thought i understood.. over and over again. It was (unfortunately) a common experience.

Seeing the answers afterwards, they usually involved facts i knew applied in a way i could not. That experience convinced me that your internal assessment of how well you understand something can be wildly off without an objective yardstick. Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as getting rekt in an exam.

I also had a similar experience in college, but I'm having trouble understanding what the lesson you learned was. Did you eventually improve?

I think this is a problem solvable by doing practice problems.

For me with Math this is something I learned the hard way many times. In more advanced math tests you will be asked to prove something novel (to you) using skills/material from the covered subject. So it’s not enough to know the theorems, you need to understand them at a deeper level so you can apply them in new situations or use a similar practice from the theorem to prove something similar.

This is pretty straightforward for most math/physics/other stem courses since they’re usually accompanied by problem sets in their textbooks, and it’s rare to have to do absolutely all of them as HW.

For me, the act of programming has taught me epistemic humility much more forcefully and consistently than exams.

A bit off-topic, but I remember a college class in which I was completely lost. I wasn't even clear on the topic of the class. Nothing ever made sense. I got D's on most of the tests. I was enormously frustrated. Then, at the end, I got my final grade: B+.

My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.

I get the sense that history teachers talk about how history is the most important, physics teachers talk about how physics is the most important, gender politics the same, arts the same etc...

There's incentive to keep yourself employed however useless, bloated or out of time what you're teaching is.

I'm not sure how the school plan is evaluated in different places, but i feel like for example religion in a country like Sweden where most people don't believe in it[1] should be brought down to make space for something Swedes think is important.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Sweden

Are you just talking about grading on a curve? This happened to me in a graduate math class and I agree with you that it felt unnecessarily demoralizing. But it also seemed like a natural outcome of grading a hard class on a curve.

I had some upper division math classes that were offered for both undergrad and grad credits. I enjoyed the classes, but one thing I noticed was that the teacher seemed to be under some pressure to ensure the grad students passed. They didn't seem to care about the classes and performed horribly, I would do OK, and at the end of term all the undergrads like me would exit with an almost-guaranteed A.

Really helped to shape my perception that grades are meaningless and ultimately political.

It's not just that the grading was on a curve, it's that they learned nothing at all but still got a better grade than most of the class (implying that no one learned anything). Almost better to just have the whole class fail, then at least the department will notice that the professor is useless.

That wouldn't really be fair to the students who care about their GPAs, though.

> Almost better to just have the whole class fail, then at least the department will notice that the professor is useless.

You know it's the professor themselves that adjusts the grades? Of course the professor wouldn't fail the class if, as you suggest, it would make the professor look "useless".

I remember speaking to an engineering statistics (IIRC) professor once, who said that no one had ever gotten an 'A' in his class. (Presumably, the final grades were curved like yours.) He said it proudly. I considered asking him if he was teaching basket-weaving or underwater archaeology to his statistics students.

I heard a story from an academic coordinator once, of an instructor who had been hired for a required CS computer architecture class because he was a friend of the department chairman. He was an electrical engineer, which made some sense, but then students started showing up in the coordinator's office crying and trying to drop the class well after the last drop date. It seemed he thought CS undergraduates were supposed to be the same as electrical engineering grad students, and wanted to fail the entire class. (He did not, nor did he get hired for further classes. After many years, though, his friend was the department chairman again and hired him as a tenured professor and the department's external relations coordinator. This is part of the reason I did not go into academia.)

Many instructors are just stinking bad. Many aren't, and manage to tie together both interesting lectures and more active assignments. But the bad ones do leave marks.

I had to learn driving a car this spring, with manual transmission. Knowing these things helped a lot. I made notes of all the traffic regulations document, and made tables of all long and intricate rules (e.g. lists of places where u-turn is forbidden, or backpedal, or what are speed limits for different kinds of vehicles/roads).

This helped avoid learning all those 1000 test questions, what most students did.

And using computer simulator with 3 pedals helped to automate the movements, and think of subtleties. Reportedly, those who had no practice before driving school, under the pressure of the exam, didn't stall the engine, but failed exactly in higher-order matters, like they'd cross continuous lines or not notice speed limit signs.

If you can, teach your kid to drive at 13. On private property obviously, no traffic rules, just the mechanical part. Everything after that will be much easier.

Do you live somewhere with an unusually hard driving test? I don't remember studying much at all for the written test (Canada), let alone memorizing a bank of 1000 questions. I never heard of anyone failing the written test.

Plenty of people failed the driving test, though.

In the UK, the pass rate for the theory test was 54% for the last year. Lots of people fail it. You need to correctly answer 43 or more questions from 50 they ask, and there are over 700 possible questions. In addition to which, there's a simulated hazard perception test, which lots of people fail too.

Also, under 50% of learner drivers pass their first practical test, which involves a 40 minute drive on public roads with an independent driving section and manouvres like parallel parking and bay parking, plus a bunch of questions you have to get right. You'll fail for stuff like not checking your mirror often enough, not checking blind spots, going too fast, going too slow, incorrect positioning at junctions, and so on.

I live in Russia. Our country still hasn't adapted vision zero policy in street planning, the ministry of interior love cars and high speed. So the technocratic govt is trying to fight with traffic accidents (though it did reduce by x2 in the last decade) by ever harsher surveliance and exams.

If you're curious whether road police is corrupted, as many believe, the industrial approach to fighting this actually works and gradually decreases corruption. In 2000-2008 you could literally pay for a licence and get it without any effort. In 2010 more rules were introduced, and the risk for the bureaucrats for doing this increased drammatically, so you had to go to driving school, but could bribe the exam inspector. Since then, inspectors would try extorting bribes by making you fail. The federal govt is fighting this as well: couple of years ago, the exams started to be videotaped. The video is kept for some months. Any case of incidents or if bribery is reported, a team of investigators starts analyzing videos, and they may take away the issued licenses as well as make criminal charges against the exam inspectors. (When I was driving, the instructor was talking on the phone discussing that our local road police was being under such inspection right in those days, and everyone there were scared.) Stakes for bribery increased dramatically.

I personally would prefer less industrial approach and more social capital, trust and honesty among people, but that's another story.

You have compulsory 50 hours of lectures (though it's up to each driving school whether to enforce it or not), 27 compulsory driving lessons 1.5 hours each. Theory test is standardized for the entire country, to be exact it's 800 same questions for the whole country issued every year. The exam is done on computers, over internet, so that local police can't help the examinees. The exam is also videotaped to catch those who cheat.

Our driving school made preliminary test of 40 questions, and I think the success rate was 80%.

At driving test, roughly half of people failed.

The only thing that taught me is imposter syndrom and how to wake up in sweat after dreaming of still being at university.

You can think of lectures as showing the extremely conservative education industry not being able to reform itself since before the printing press.

> Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.

Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating your current ability", and more broadly being good at "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current ability", is a skill in itself.

Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the next step being the realization that you probably are incapable.

> A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress

There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion about whether video learning was useful or worked better for some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative correlation).

It is very clear to me that listening at 3x works after some training. (Not surprising, since almost everyone already reads way faster than normal speech)

The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.

I have listened, and it's amazing, but I'm not sure they are understanding more than I would if I were scanning the page for the navigation options. (I haven't heard someone listening to a long-form text for understanding.)

But people reading a long-form text faster than normal speech should be common and uncontroversial, I think.

Yea, this is why my IT program had such poor students in the higher grade levels. I would spend 8 hours on Saturday on labs and other students would breeze through them in a couple hours.

I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.

I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.

In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.

This makes me feel better about myself. I don't like reading or listening a ton before diving it. Just give me a spoonful and then I'll do what I can with that, and come back for the next spoonful when I'm ready.

The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.

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.

Which addon are you using for youtube?

Enhancer for Youtuber

This is a game changer.

Ilya Grigorik's Video Speed Controller?

https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

I just modify it directly in the console (I have to search to look up the command every time).

Hit the Up arrow key in the console; in Firefox at least, command history persists across sessions.

For reference; $('video').playbackRate=3.33

The playback engine mutes audio below 0.25x and above 4x, not configurable.

"<"/">" buttons decrease/increase playback speed (up to 2.0).

For Safari there’s Dynamo, too, that lets you skip ads apart from changing the speed:

https://dynamoformac.com/

(I am the author.)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-playback-s...

But I suspect they're all mostly similar

I wrote a bookmarklet. Works on all non-iframe audio and video.

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}();

> 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.

https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc

aaaaaaAAAAAA𝗔𝗔𝘼𝘼𝘼𝘼𝒜𝒜𝒜ΛΛΛ

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/

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".

That's a very good distinction, which my previous comment didn't really properly consider. Completely agree there.

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.

There are exceptions, but they are few.

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.

I've noticed that reading is faster than listening at 3x speed. A quick way to test this is to enable subtitles.

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...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

This lets you skip filler content automatically for many popular videos.

It is more that these days everything is a video. Even things that should be two to three paragraphs of text or maybe a picture or two.

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.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251

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.

To me this is fairly dependent on how fast the speaker speaks. Most of the times 1.25x works well. Sometimes 1.5x is too fast.

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.

Wait, you can also slow down YouTube videos, can't you ?

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.

Yeah but it sounds like shut then since there are fewer samples per second of Playback.

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 have to use x1.7-x2.0 speed on pluralsight courses, even though English is not my native language, and I’m learning completely new stuff.

Otherwise I’d almost fall asleep.

It’s better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear sentences than wasting 2x the time.

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.

For an example at the extremes, you can run congressional testimony at 4x, but Andrej Karpathy or John Carmack at only 1x.

It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the content.

Yes anything about category theory is 0.1x speed. Or I need to watch 10 times at 1x speed to understand anything :-)

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.

you are not wrong or outdated

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

But video controls are tremendously worse than just being able to focus your eyes at any specific portion of the page in an instant ?

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.

> video formatting is also inclusive to text

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.

Subtitles matter! While a video is not equivalent to just text, reading at 3x with audio is similar to why people enjoy audio books.

Visual content is a bonus, to remain more engaged and maybe impart information via a third medium

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!

The article uses 3x speed as a metaphor for a broader mindset. It's not actually about 3x speed.

I would prefer a plugin that could remove "ehm"s and pauses from speakers that are new to the game.

I believe that’s what Overcast “Smart speed” does for podcasts. Would be nice to have for videos.

Pocketcast can remove silence at least. Not sure about filler sounds like ehm.

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 ...

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.

It works quite well in my experience.

[1] https://github.com/lagmoellertim/unsilence

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.

Not very unlike consuming food without chewing.

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.

And then there's that...

> some of the replies and likes to your reply are kinda hilarious

> 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 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.

Seriously. It depends entirely on the content

I could watch my work meetings at infinite speed, and the information density would still be zero.

I suspect someone with better understanding of psychology can tell me if I'm way off on this or not.

-----

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.

The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me.

Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed because there's really nothing there.

It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily gained.

If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.

At 3x, sure. But I regularly listen to podcasts at about 1.3-1.4x, depending on how quickly the hosts talk. When you actually are paying attention, 1x can just be really slow sometimes. I think of it more like bringing it to a comfortable speed where I don't feel like I have to wait for them to get on with it, than trying to speed through it as quickly as possible. I, too, will sometimes pause to think (or talk) about what I've just heard though, so perhaps by your metric I'm at less than 1x on average too...

This is my issue also. I'm guilty of being a 2x'er, not because I believe I'll absorb more information faster, but because I find most narrators/podcast hosts tend to slow down their speech significantly when recording something for consumption. Be it because their reading speed is worse than their talking speed, or that they think they need to for effect like some 1940's Trans-Atlantic radio host, I find it painful to listen to most of the time.

> The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me

Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found the ones to keep my interest yet.

Sean Carrol’s mindscape sometimes can be very good.

+1, i also like Sam Harris's Making Sense which is a little more pompous but still interesting

"The History of Rome" and "Philosophize This". I finished them both in a superficial way, while driving on my daily commute. Now I listen to them in my spare time and try to really dig deep, take notes and read the original material on topics that resonate to me. After I finish them again this way I will search for something of similar quality. "Revolutions" seems to be it.

I highly recommend "History of philosophy without any gaps".

Oh, the history of Rome. Don't know about this particular podcast, but the history is absolutely amazing and 1000% worth reading/listening about.

I've always hated history lessons at school. But the history of Rome was amazing! Good teacher too. I guess it was the audiobook of the time :D

I'm currently listening to the end of the Russian Revolutions part of the Revolutions podcast (the last one), and I'm quite happy with the quality and depth, i recommend it heartily. I had a decent understanding of the subject matter from generic history knowledge and The Great War series on YouTube ( which i also recommend!) and there was still a whole lot i learned. I do listen it on 1.1x however, the normal speed is a bit slow for me ( and slightly overflows the slot I've alloted for podcasts).

The History of Byzantium by Robin Pierson, which follows on where Duncan left off in The History of Rome is excellent too. In fact, I think Pierson is a better writer than Duncan was back when he did HoR, so I enjoy the HoB more. Duncan's got much better with Revolutions though.

I can recommend "the partially examined life" which features the person from "philosophize this" (stephen west I think?), along with a few others, where they discuss specific texts. Lots of rewindable moments.

Psychology in Seattle has some excellent well researched content. It has very concretely changed or modified my perspectives on relationships, parenthood and mental illness.

The "deep dives" are definitely the best.

Tides of History, In Our Time, Revolutions, Stronger by Science.

I like finding and listening to lectures on Apple podcasts too, like Zizek.

The article isn’t just about playback speed. It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.

It’s extra ironic, then, that much of the comment section here only seems to have absorbed the headline but not the content of the article.

I have noticed that my most voracious podcast and book consuming friends seem to have developed a lot of surface-level knowledge about a lot of subjects, but it’s difficult to discuss even the content of the books they’ve read. Listening on 1.5X or 2X speed is a common boast for them, as is the number of books or podcasts they’ve consume in a year (which is tracked for some reason). It seems the goal has become quantity, or simply filling time and providing background noise instead of studying a subject.

Learning happens in the space in between words. Without time for reflection, people inevitably just mirror information instead of integrating new ideas into what they know.

I'm with you here. The money line of the whole article was almost a throw-away at the end:

He should think more strategically about what he wants to learn and why.

The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education, with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of interactions between students.

In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge of C++.

Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python. "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked through the existing library of code they did, asked questions of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship I was writing programs that were performing vital business tasks.

I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind, and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time, from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that develop over repeated encounters.

> It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.

Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player.

However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing.

But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.

I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it offers anything substantial.

It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...?

Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations with real native speakers.

This. It's trading one hack for another.

This article is perhaps interesting, but it is not well-written, nor, I would argue, particularly well reasoned. The author makes gratituous assumptions about Mike's reasoning, assumptions that appear unlikely to many readers, and fails to provide any justification for them. Read it again - how much of Mike's reasoning comes from Mike, and how much from the author? Did the author even ask Mike?

It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's ironic that so many folks in this comment section are questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that you didn't deep read the article, including spending time considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously criticizing other people for not doing the same.

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.

Totally trial and fail

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.

Not quite sure. Many things clicked while I was either idle or doing something completely unrelated.

But then applying that insight and playing with it in various dimensions is what built an intuition.

I agree, but I can't exactly build a reactor, a SARS variant, or the holocene.

The first two are probably possible if legally dubious.

Yeah it's not the same trial-and-error as, say, making a basic Rails web app.

Semantic memory isn't procedural memory or episodic memory.

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.

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.

It really depends on who you are.

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?

I'd tend to agree with you and have perhaps leaned in a bit too hard on the doing for emphasis.

And that is the trouble with the headline. If watching at 3x speed gets you to actually trying something faster, that is clearly the way to go.

I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic.

I was a good but not great student in college. The computer science classes bored me to death.

Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn’t stay focused until … I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few min at 1x.

My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine. If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.

10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x. It’s a sweet spot for me.

When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I Built This w Guy Raz) I’ll often pause to write down notes, but I’m almost never feeling like it’s too fast to ingest.

Sometimes I’m self conscious that I talk too fast around other people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and mouth don’t have a 1/2x button. Ha!

I'm in a similar boat. 1.75x is probably the best speed for me for most speakers, but until I was able to speed up audio/video I also had a really hard time paying attention in lectures / watching informative content.

I am so happy you said this. I always felt like the majority of lectures and content overall is ceremony and that most of the actual substance comprises maybe 15-20% of the overall content. There are times when I can appreciate ceremony, especially if it's being given by a good performer, a great writer or a passionate lecturer. Unfortunately most teachers are not passionate or good lecturers, most educational videos are not that engaging, and many authors are not good writers, and so in most cases I could strip out 80% of the content and spare myself the boredom.

"I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic."

Sometimes I truly feel like this should be the unofficial motto of HN ;)

> 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x

The sweet spot for me is between 1.5x and 1.7x (Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x but apps that do earn extra brownie points from me eg. VLC). It's always weird having to explain this to friends who tend to think that I'm always listening to is a rap documentary :-D

> Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x

On most sites, you can set an arbitrary speed by executing a line of JavaScript in the debug console:

    document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 1.7;

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3027707/how-to-change-th...

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.

Anyone can choose to learn new things or not

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

3x speed mistakes form for substance and wastes time besides, because podcasts are much more for fun than self-improvement.

Let's be honest with ourselves here: no one listening to a podcast is ever just listening to a podcast. You're running or driving or doing the laundry or working out or working or walking the dog, so in terms of learning it's more than anything like hypnopaedia [1], which doesn't work. You're not really engaging with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio shows for since radio shows were invented.

That's not to say podcasts can't also be useful in the instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you've got a good memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.

Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your own story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it. Believe it or not, that's allowed too.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning

I never understood why I never listened to podcasts. But you explained it to me - I hate doing two things at once, because it means I do them both badly.

It depends a lot on the primary thing. One rarely needs much in the way of deep focus to fold laundry or do dishes or clean a bathroom, after all, and some light entertainment makes these tasks go by noticeably faster and more pleasantly than they do in its absence.

I find that if I do that, I take twice as long.

Music doesn't get me in my way, though.

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.

[0]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about

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.

Just subscribed. I’d recommend putting your RSS feed link higher up near the top.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that!

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.

Also probably not so much about speed than not pausing to think about what you have just read/viewed/watched ?

I agree with other commenters: it's all about the content.

I listen to most podcasts at 2x at least because they often are too much chatter or are repeating things I know. But sometimes I pause them to think when something new arises. In other cases, like some types of YouTube videos, I watch at 0.75x because they are way too fast and have no white-space, way too dense.

And in all of this, the MAIN thing I learn is WHAT the podcast was. I don't learn the deepest understanding of some subject. I learn THAT the subject exists (a very specific bit within a subject sometimes).

Here and there, I encounter some truly applicable, practical concepts, and then I have to put them to use and revisit them in order to really learn and master them.

It does depend on the content. Personally, if its for entertainment I default to x2 speed (thanks apple tv+ for including x2 speed instead of netflix's x1.5 half measure); but for educational purposes I go down to x1.5

The downside is, after a few days of getting used to it, x1 content feels like slow motion.

> 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.

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.

I am also a logical automaton robot. I have no emotions. I only listen to words that are useful to me and I use predictions to increase my efficiency.

My IQ is 250. I am an android built on the planet Zweebs.

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.

I'm not sure your first sentence really hits the mark. Not paying attention in class isn't really "having fun" :P

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.

Counterargument: most of the things you can consume at 3x speed are not worth remembering long term. For example, every day the APM: Marketplace podcast recites the returns on specific induces for the day. It can help put context to stories in other segments, but I have no need to retain it for more than an hour, if ever. And in general, the relevance of news rapidly decays; I forget where I read it (the irony!) but if you imagine a newspaper that only published once a month, it would have different headlines than one that published daily, and different again from one that published annually. In that context, speeding up news podcasts makes a bit of sense. You don't need to remember it long term, just long enough for this week's watercooler conversations to jog your memory until it disappears completely.

In contrast, books I read by myself, at a relatively slow pace. I focus on timeless books, that teach knowledge or skill that I can apply on the job. The pace will vary depending on the type of book; the last university textbook I studied took me about 10 pages a hour (including all the problems). For a pop sci book, I can do about a chapter an hour. I try not to spend more than an hour block on this, for the spaced repetition effects mentioned. Moreover, I typically try to get at least one Anki card per chapter (textbooks usually a dozen per chapter). I can't imagine trying to retain anything at 3x speed, especially the mathematical tomes I focus on.

But I'm pretty sure most people can up their podcasts to 1.2x without even noticing. Most content is recorded at a leisurely pace, both because it's easier to pronounce clearly, and to accommodate non-native speakers. But it's not always about efficiency. For comedy podcasts, I set the rate to 1x, because the point is to enjoy it and as they say, timing is the essence of comedy.

> The smartest people I’ve met reject the “Water in a Cup” theory. They focus less on consuming as much information as possible and more on cultivating the deepest possible understanding of the ideas that resonate with them most.

There's a letter by Seneca that I think about a lot, called "On discursiveness in reading" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...):

> Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.

> Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.

I've personally found that when I spend more time with something, I get more out of it. For example, rereading books or rewatching movies. That's also a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if after the first time something starts feeling shallow, it's probably not worth keeping around.

I used to be a "Mike" type. I realized I wanted to have impact -- that being a "consumer" of everything of boring.

I'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!

> "He ... stopped taking the subway to work because the train noise made it impossible to hear the audiobook narrators. "

He should try noise cancelling headphones! Surely one of the greatest inventions of the early 21st century.

It was when riding the subway with my noise-cancelling headphones that I realized how good an investment it was. Oh, the bliss.

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.

There are three kinds of learning

- new contextual framework (There is no god, armies used to be retinues of retinues)

- new skills (make fire from sticks, algebra and calculus)

- new information (Henry V won at agincourt)

The big important ones are the contextual frameworks. Without them humanity and individual humans are just floundering. And if there is any big political divide it's because people are not in same contextual framework (eg Brexit)

Skills are how an individual can contribute inside that framework - and it needs practise. And information is the last. The strawman the author is moaning about is absorbing information without practise. This seems to be the failure to leap from podcast to khan academy.

solving that one for millions of people will be an incredible leap. So far we only have "my tutor moans at me if i don't"

You make a fire with algebra and calculus because your brain overheats, right?

Darn that transitive comma...

Precisely.

OP has his finger in some of the right places, but is overly broad about both learning methods and objects. If you're listening to conference keynotes @ 3X... that might be fine. A tutorial probably requires multiple listens, rewinds, a transcript and some DIY work.

Im interested in your categorisation of learning. Can you elaborate on "contextual framework"? Are these your own concepts, if not where do you get them from?

The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or surveying, or maps.

But we do because you understood the above conceptual frameworks.

Germ theory is not a fact, like who won the battle of Crecy. It is a whole ever-expanding concept that with it in place in your head, can guide your future actions. Similarly atheism, or logistics, or factory method or steam power ...

Interesting. So perhaps another term for "contextual framework" is "mental model"? I like the way you've thought about this. I don't share your atheism, but without wanting to start a debate it would be interesting to hear why it features on your list as one of your most useful concepts?

Partly it's often a break through point (as in "I never knew there was an alternative allowed" - a conversation years ago with some people from Mid West reported that till a certain age they simply did not know Atheism was a thing - it was a choice between this God and that.

But more probably it is that once there stops being a prime mover, the question becomes how did the universe / world / us come into existence. I guess atheism is the model before evolution. But we needed to get to evolution first before atheism became the obvious solution.

Thank you - had not tried to work that one out before

So I have been trying to think about the major contextual frameworks - could we for example create a Ted talk that told you "everything you ever needed to know"

- Earth revolves round sun (transit of venus??)

- Earth spins (Foucaults pendulum)

I started this in "important experiments for kids" on github.

Oh I see what you mean - plucked randomly from my own synapses

“You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere." — Seneca c. 65 AD

I used to try to read a lot of books, but when I found I couldn't discuss them in detail in a conversation or recall their key points, I thought, "what is the point?" Now I try to re-read one book I thought was meaningful for every new book. I still enjoy reading new material, so this is just a rule of thumb. There's a ton a value in re-reading things!

> Now I try to re-read one book I thought was meaningful for every new book.

As a random piece of trivia, this was C.S. Lewis's rule as well: "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."

I think it's a good idea but I struggle to follow it when my list of books to read is so much longer then I'll ever complete.

For me, playback speed options is not about controlling "speed" but more about controlling the density of information, which varies a lot from content to content. When I listen to a very technical conference, I always keep x1 or even x0.75 but sometimes with a podcast with a low information output, I process everything at x2.

I often listen at 2x speed, not to increase the speed of comprehension, but because the information density is too low. Like forwarding through ads to get to content. Then when you get to the interesting part you slow down and repeat a few times (especially fix-it mechanical assembly youtubes) sometimes at fractional speed... it takes concentration.

Then you use it (or you'll forget it all anyway).

Alternately, I have a friend who listens to novels at 2x, which I don't understand...versus my partner who reads 100 books a year and she's frustrated she can't find new ones fast enough.

ADHD prevents me from consuming lots of content at 1x speed at all. Trying to listen to a lecture is incredibly painful. I completed college in 2006, I believe YouTube launched 2x speed a few years later, it wasn't until then that I discovered I'm perfectly capable of listening to a lecture at 2x.

Now, perhaps I get less out of a 2x lecture than a neurotypical person who is otherwise my peer does from a 1x lecture. Maybe even a lot less. But it doesn't matter, because I get a lot out of a 2x lecture and nothing out of a 1x lecture.

I was literally just watching a youtube video at 1x speed and now I realize that I somehow ended up on here and have missed the rest of the video. That never happens when I'm watching on 2x speed.

For podcasts and video, I'm right with you. A decade ago when I was in the physical classroom, I didn't mind the 1x interaction because it was slow enough that my pencil could keep up when writing notes (which was my secret to getting much higher test grades than my classmates in spite of many fewer hours spent actively studying).

3x speed is an accessibility feature for anyone who has trouble paying attention at slower rates. The rules of grammar mean that people often need to speak far more words than is necessary for some concepts. Pause and rewind buttons exist for passages which are actually information dense.

(The same is true of writing; entire paragraphs exist for no reason other than maintaining structure. Fortunately, well-edited works follow rules of paragraph style and structure -- first words, subect; final words, conclusion -- which enable effective skimming.)

The learning lock-in thing is something I've coached several people through, for both software and literature projects. I've found a very effective tool in getting them out of the lock-in: make a wager with them.

I place a bet of $100 that they won't finish a small project in the next month. The project can be anything. It can be the smallest thing. But they have to finish it and release it in a predetermined, legitimate release channel (app store, website, self-publish on Amazon, whatever).

I've found a lot of people's lock-in comes from a fear of the unknown, of not knowing all the steps to get from 0 to finished, and focusing all of their time on the parts they do understand. They rationaliz the delaying of learning about the others as being pointless until they have the beginning parts "perfect". The bet forces them to make their comfort zone the smallest part of their project.

You can do it with yourself, too. Make a wager with yourself that you won't buy that new toy or have a drink or watch another movie until you finish a small project, completely, with a real release. You definitely need to time-box it, or you'll quit once you decide you'll "never" finish. And you need to setup a negative consequence: maybe get a friend to hold some money in escrow, or schedule a donation to an organization you hate that you can cancel when your project is complete.

Every person I've coached in this way eventually developed a habit of releasing projects. It turns out people grossly over estimate the difficulty of releasing a project. Once you force them through it, it's no longer a scary unknown and it becomes a lot easier to "begin with end in mind".

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.

I’ve felt since college that lectures are best likened to meetings, with all of the usual criticisms. If a lecture is merely a monologue of prepared information (usually available in the textbook anyways), the same “Why couldn’t this have been an email?” concept applies.

There are _legitimate_ reasons to pulling everyone into the same room at the same time to learn something, and those reasons almost entirely include frequent and direct interaction between the attendees.

The value of the classroom is that you are surrounded by individuals who are all ostensibly trying to learn the same thing as you, with a similar current amount of knowledge, all the while having immediate access to a bone fide expert in the topic. I would suggest that this is an obviously great setup for learning! It’s a shame to see it so often squandered by having a glorified textbook read-along session instead of genuine curious discussion.

Great quote from the article: “A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.”

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.

Listening at 3x speed and concentrating deeply on the material =\= listening at 3x speed while trying to multitask

Most informative content is, I have observed, fairly slow and repetitious. This is a good way to produce content because it is fair to assume that most people will not be fully mentally engaged in what you’re trying to tell them. That’s not a bad thing - your audience may simply not understand the importance of what you’re trying to say until they’ve heard it once). However, viewers who want to fully engage with content may find themselves having trouble concentrating due to the slow speed of information.

Personally, I use 1x for most entertainment and for informative material if I’m doing some other activity like chores or driving, 2x for entertainment content which has a lot of fluff (e.g. pretty much everything on YouTube these days), and 2.5x for informative content which I am giving my full attention to (although I often pause to consider what’s been said or rewind to rewatch a dense portion of the content at a slower speed). That’s a pretty good balance for me.

I listen to some podcast at 1.5x 2x the speed because I think some speak extremely slow. Also, helps consuming interesting content in less time.

When I skim over documents, information, I usually add to existing knowledge and it is easier to mentally TAG the what it is I need to learn. When I need to use this knowledge at least I know where to look, search or whom to ask if I need to dig into the material, and when I do - it is a slow process.

When I want to learn something, I need to sit down and slow everything down. It is very important to me that I take detailed notes and discuss the content.

I've been told that our memory has two modes; short term and long term. If you want to remember something you need to work getting it from short term memory and into the long time memory - and in order to do that you must iterate many times of the content you are trying to learn.

This is an incredible verbose article just to say that which we already know: quality of learning is more important than quantity; and focus, engagement, interest are all important context in addition to the raw speed of consumption.

Ironically, jumping past so much filler is one of the main reasons for faster speeds.

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.

> 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"

There's nothing wrong with passive listening, but it's awful if it's the only way to teach

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 find myself listening to recipe videos at max speed while Aristotle is practically at half speed. Some things are so information dense that you need to go over parts a few times.

If you're listening to something at 3x speed, maybe it's a hint to be reading harder books?

An exception might be something like a history book. The 48 Laws of Power doesn't make sense if you just read the summary, but the stories themselves are very easy to read.

A lot of good books are very information dense though, where you have to stop after a few sentences and search for the meaning (internally or externally). Even for a good novel... sometimes you have to set it aside and lie down and stare at the ceiling for a moment.

First, listening 3x is impossible for most content, I almost never listen to x1 but I'm very rarely able to go past x2.5.

Also at that speed it is almost impossible to understand complex things, so if you listen at x3 or x2 and you never go back or reduce the speed to understand specific parts then you are not listening.

On Youtube

- Shift+> or Shift+< let you increase or decrease the speed at all time

- Left and Right let you go back 15 secondes backwards or forwardds

This makes it super easy to skip or speed useless parts and go back and slow down usefull ones

Last, people who say they listen to podcasts or videos to learn are not learning anything, podcasts or videos are just good ways to have a broad understanding of a topic

This reminds me of the multi-tasking myth.

People who multi-task think it works because they did a lot of different things throughout the day.

But when performance is measured the conclusion is that multi-tasking does not work and only hurts the brain.

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.

I think 3x is the wrong target here, it's the learning by listening model aka "The Nurnberg Funnel" (or possibly Nuremberg Funnel for German speakers) that is harmful.

I'd rather have a more focused lecture at 1x speed, the same as I'd rather have a good textbook, but skimming in both cases is fine if you want some info but the presentation available is too simple for you.

But, learning by doing and finding out what you don't know by doing is important. That applies even to crappy end of chapter multiple choice quizzes or whatever their audiobook equivalent is, but I find project based learning to be where it's at for really cementing knowledge without boredom.

edit to add: I'm not sure about the bit about pre-textbook lectures is historically accurate. I was under the impression the modern lecture mostly derived from the time when books were expensive, non-mass produced tech and the single copy was chained to the lectern and the person reading it out was doing so in order to let people make their own cheap copies.

I'm a big fan of video lectures that people consume in their own time, but more because they can slow them down, and rewind, not because they can speed them up. If you're always speeding up, you could probably just get a denser text

> Though you can pick up the gist pretty fast, relationships need time to blossom.

a lot of the arguments make me think of two different approaches to a task: breadth-first v.s. depth-first. for most tasks, you almost always want a balance of the two. in general, when you're young you explore the breadth of relationships; and after a time you understand which aspects are most important to you, and you pursue the depth of a smaller set of relationships.

now there's a lot of surface-level media out there. the kind that tells you about some thing without explaining it. you might listen to a broad overview about current topics in electrical engineering. by doing so, you learn about the avenues available to you and then later you go and do a deep dive into the specific avenue you want.

> The world rewards people who develop expertise in a specific subject.

indeed (modulo that your "specific subject" could just as well be a niche blend of classical subjects). pushing the envelope requires a deep approach to learning -- the version where you listen at 1x, pause, and then draw new conclusions/connections that even the author missed. but if you're still in the earlier, discovery phase of your growth? then what you really want is the 3x speed, breadth-first overviews.

not all information is equally valuable. if, by using 3x speed, you can more quickly locate the areas of study which are highly valuable to you at the expense of failing to integrate a bunch of information that is of low value to you, that can be a fair tradeoff. understand the tradeoffs; be explicit.

I agree with a lot of this. It is well known at this point that passive learning strategies are not effective. What the author misses is that depending on the type of material being consumed, the learner could be in an input limited or processing limited regime.

For dense textbooks it usually takes more time to process concepts (i.e. get to higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy with a concept) then it does to get the information into the mind through reading, so speed reading (fast input) is pointless. For the type of fiction books his friend is reading, 3x speed might make sense to get to the insights faster that need to be paused on and processed. Certainly the concepts need to be revisited with something like spaced repetition for deeper integration.

Spaced repetition is boring, that is one of the motivations behind Memory Maps, a learning tool that enables you to use the memory palace technique in Google Street View along with mnemonics generating AI to supercharge your memory capacity.

https://www.memorymaps.io/

https://www.memorymaps.io/main-page/how-it-works

Reminds me of my shelf of O'Reilly books.

Each one goes along side with a weekend or week of reading and learning. A few of them were something I needed to learn to get something done for work. A few more were things I learned for personal use.

But the majority of them, I just read because "I might need to know more about" something. Building Microservices? Java 3D Graphics? Python for Data Analysis?

Read at least a couple chapters of each. Wasted time for sure.

Wow, the article is describing me... although instead of podcasts I read books (not many, like at most 15-20 per year). But over the years, even if "True learning requires contemplation" (which I agree with), I have found out that I indeed have gained quite a lot of knowledge and nowadays the time I spent reading is paying off (i.e., I'm good enough at a job that pays well that I don't have to spent the official 40h/week, but instead I spent like half of it).

> Mike is so busy preparing for the future that he never steps into it.

This is what scares me because, again, it rings true. But some part of me thinks "You need to prepare yourself for the future! Whatever that future is!", so for me that preparation usually means "get more knowledge and get a better paycheck to have enough money to not depend on a company or government to live decently... or build something for yourself and found your own company". That's my paradox: either I relax a bit in the present and risk my (unknown) future, or I risk my present to allow me to be a bit more relaxed in the (unknown) future. I try to balance it, but it's hard.

The headline of the post misses the point. The problem the author describes, revolves around active vs. passive learning and the '3x Speed' part is just part of what he refers to as passive learning.

I completely agree, that passive learning is what happens in many western classrooms and that active learning is a lot more valuable.

However, listening to books or videos at 3x the normal speed is nothing I would condemn, because IMO it depends on the source material. Some audiobooks/videos are so slow that it is hard to keep the focus at normal speed. Consuming them at higher speeds keeps me from drifting to other topics. So I think the discussion about the speed doesn't lead anywhere. That said, I don't use 3x speed. Sometimes, I consume videos at 2x speed and I tend to keep audiobooks at 1x speed, because I like to consume them as secondary activities e.g. while driving. Certainly not the most effective way to consume the content, but I like it and it fits into my daily habits.

I think the discussion should be about active/practical/self-directed learning vs. pure consumption of material, because this is what makes a difference.

>Despite all the information he’s sped through his ear, he’s never actually built anything. “Someday,” he insists. “Right now, I’m still learning.”

It's similar to political hobbyism, by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. Following politics obsessively without ever engaging. Being well informed and knowing details but never using them in action except voting.

I would suggest that it might depend, "right speed for the job" , I use TTS(text to speech" all the time with a large speed, regular people will not understand what it is spoken but for me is fine, I can read a news article like this one without no downsides versus someone that uses his eyes and reads at normal speed or someone that listens the TTS at regular speed and with some natural sounding voice.

What if the 1X is a limitation of our vocals, we could maybe lose our air if we would speak much faster, if someone would like to do some sicence on this I suggest finding people with disabilities that use TTS technology and try to get some numbers.

I personally don't use faster speed for the reason to listen to twice as mch content but probably to finish it faster. I listen/watch youtube at regular speed since I use this videos for entertaining and I did not consider to speed them up, though for audio books the app had a big speed button so I used it mostly at 1.5X

I don't listen to podcasts and couldn't make one, because without non-verbal cues from my audience I can't adjust my speech to keep them engaged.

It's like with this vampire who is familiar with mobile phones, but finds it weird that anyone would want to have a conversation without registering the other person's scent and feeling their heartbeat.

I see why people listen at 3x - too many podacsters seem to be enamoured with their own voice to a point where they add irrelevant stuff like my vampire bit here. But while you can skip this in text, it's not easy to do when listening.

I don't think that on average they actually lose anything because of that, since the conversation is one-sided anyway. They wouldn't have retained more had they listened to it at 1x speed.

As for trying to consume as much literature as possible and feeling inadequate: this is a problem as old as printed press, for which there is no real solution aside from managing expectations.

Just last Friday I had to google how to increase YouTube speed above 2x. Found quick and dirty solution: `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3` in a browser console. Some people are just impossible to listen to due to their slow pace. In my case, it was possible to understand at 5x and quite comfortable at 3.5x.

clickbait.

this has nothing to do with the speed, it has to do with quality of information and implementation of it. there are people that never absorb anything or implement anything.

I can relate to Mike as well, I was one of those people that always had a side project hoping it would magically get big enough for me to quit my day job. No book helped with that, what did help was that I was at a company that ran out of money and eventually let my division off. I was raising capital on my lunch breaks and that was inefficient, so I realized that I actually didn't need to look for another job for once, and continued raising capital full time.

Capital made the next project big enough, and it was non-dilutive capital too, which skips any organic side project growth hopes.

So there should actually be more sympathy for the Mikes of the world. They are too comfortable, (or perhaps uncomfortable), to quit their job no matter what they learn.

You don't need a plugin to increase/decrease speed, the following bookmarklet works for most sites to increase speed by 10%:

javascript:(function(){ let speed =[...document.querySelectorAll('audio,video')].filter(v => v.currentTime > 0)[0].playbackRate += .10; console.log('media speed', speed); })()

Or maybe speed really isn't that important. Just make sure that what you are learning is important. There is a lot of information out there that just doesn't matter. Focus on what actually has an impact to you and not all of the things you think you "should" learn because someone else said so.

Something I noticed is a lot of people replying are focused on the playback speed, and then defending their choice of faster playback speed, all why missing 80% of the article which had nothing really to do with how fast you watch videos.

Because author chose to make it the main point of the article. And the fact that half of the article has nothing to do with the main point just shows that it's badly written.

Meh. I did several AWS courses on Udemy at 1.75x speed, and did pretty well on the exams

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

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)

I watch my lectures at between 2x(math classes) and 3.5x(business classes) speed. Most professors just talk unconscionably slow, and done kitties focus in material so basic that I don't really have to understand every word.

Speeding up playback buys you a small gain, but 2x or 3x is an absolute upper limit in most cases. And yes, retention suffers.

It's not that I don't bump up speed in some cases, though it's not all. I also slow down, or replay (sometimes many times) especially good marterial.

(Or especially confusing material, which often proves not to be especially good.)

But ...

... the real gains aren't to be had in playing media at 2x or 3x realtime. It's in selecting sources which afford 10x, or 100x, or 1000x utility in information. Sturgeon's Law applies, there's far more content created (in any format: text, images, audio, video, data, software) than any one person could hope to attend to in 15,000 lifetimes.[1] Probably significantly more.

Instead, one should recognise one's own limits of information exposure, goals in aquiring knowledge, and the available sources, and seek out at least higher quality sources amongst those available. These needn't necessarily be based strictly on truth value --- there's merit in reading discredited philosophy, mythologies, religion, and even perhaps for some, fiction and poetry.[2] Particularly such works as are of cultural significance, or which might help one achieve inner balance or simple amusement.

But listening to crap at 3x speed ... is not true efficiency.

It doesn't look as if anyone's mentioned Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book yet. I'd strongly recommend reading it, quickly or slowly, and incorporating the lessons it offers for how, and what, to read.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Not a number pulled from /dev/ass, for what it's worth, but at least a rough approximation. If a truly dedicated scholar might read 10,000 books over a dilligent lifetime, that's 167 books a year from age 20 onwards, and there are roughly 150 million books published, then reading the collected works of humanity would require roughly 15,000 lifetimes. That might be adjusted up or down a bit but is a good first approximation.

2. An attempte at humour, Dear Reader.

My problem was that I was watching Youtube videos (mostly pop-sci stuff) for too long and not doing anything. I solved this problem by watching them on 2x speed. My current problem is that I'm now watching 2x the videos.

One big problem with Youtube and podcasts is that they are often interspersed with useless fillers, neither entertaining nor helpful for "retaining information". The excessive signposting in videos is especially ridiculous: spending more time on listing "what I'm going to talk about today" than actually talking about those things.

3X speed is usually just neutralizing the carelessly long scripts. A better way is not to give in to the habitual prattling, but a table of contents with clickable timestamps. Many thoughtful Youtubers are already doing it.

Article is about experience but in terms of learning, I find listening to the same subject explained 3 times, preferably from 3 different talks, at 3x speed is vastly better at retaining info. Repetition helps. And there's something about listening to people talk faster inbue qualities of competence that makes me pay attention more. Somewhat related phenomenon, a lot of comedy podcasts, I can't listen to at 1x speed because people talking at 2x simply sounds wittier / snappier. Have been disappointed by more than a few live shows.

I too fall into the trap of listening to things on sped up. But is it 2x speed and YouTube. Anything that I’m actually trying to learn ilI will slow down and rewatch. But there is so many crappy videos on YouTube I feel compelled to watch most of it on 2x speed to find the good ones.

And unfortunately this habit gets strengthened, because plenty of people thing you are knowledgeable when you can pull out random bits of trivia you learned in YouTube videos, or are grateful when you can reference a YouTube video to them on a topic they are interested in.

Probably any 60 minute video can be converted without loss of information in a 10 minute one.

I understand that learning and retention are achieved through repetition, but repetition can be achieved in other ways.

I speed up not to become disengaged out of boredom.

A also listen twice and often slower for important sections, pause to process if something was dense.

Sounds and video are just super restrictive in timing, of course it's too slow for some and too fast for others.

In a similar fashion a good movie has enough depth to keep you attached, even if the story progresses slow. A sitcom is boring at times and lacks it. But a good movie has a depth and realism that let's you get lost in the unsaid backstories, the ambience etc. You don't have that in a lecture.

I do 2x speed wherever I can.

The benefit I find is I actually have to concentrate to pay attention, rather than at 1x speed some people talk so slowly my mind starts wandering as they slowly come around to actually making their point and before I know it I am replying to emails and ignoring the video.

I generally find it harder to be distracted like that at 2x... Although after years I think I am a bit accustomed so might seek out that 3x extension (although I guess it won't work on our internal recorded sessions at work :( )

I used https://speechify.com to listen to the post at 500wpm. It felt like the article was speaking directly to me.

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.

I agree with the article's points about active learning and retention. I also agree that certain speed multipliers can become aspirational due to social media FOMO. However, most audio is listened to for entertainment or to pick out certain topics or keywords for closer listening. Tuning the speed helps with both of those goals. Depending on the listener, entertainment might be set at 1-1.5x with skipped silences. Scanning ranges higher, up to the cited 3x in some players.

I know many teachers, and none that would agree that what they're doing is filling a cup. None stand there lecturing students, and expect them to recite it back. They all work hard to come up with different exercises, presentations, etc. just to do what the author says is necessary: creating direct experience. It's a core precept of modern education theory that experiential learning is best. His discussion of schools is a strawman.

Not all speakers talk at the same rate and with the same information density. Some forms of content aren't worth listening to at the default playback rate.

I am one of these people. I regularly watch movies, TV, and YouTube at 3-4x (with subtitles, if available).

It is easy to forget several of the 4 movies I watch in a 2 hour period, but I have a watched list, and could remember any detail once I have the reference to latch onto.

Worst case, I could watch any piece of content 3 times before a 'normal' finishes it once.

For any thing confusing, double-tap back 10 seconds, slow down to 2x, and rewatch a few times if needed.

Wow, you do this for movies too? By speeding up that much you’re completely changing the movie experience. Changing the pacing of a scene dramatically change it’s tone.

Your post reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U This is fantastic satire :-)

Secondary school is one thing but in university, lectures aren't there to build your understanding for you. They're there for one of 3 reasons: 1) auditory learning of the same material, 2) to give you additional material not present in reading, or 3) to give a different perspective of the same material. Lectures are also just not long enough to do the work for you - building your understanding is your own responsibility.

I'm also skeptical about this type of complaint on textbooks. I'm not going to say all textbooks are great but this idea that a textbook is a direct impediment or flawed tool for active learning has had no bearing in reality for me personally. Poor textbooks are poor tools. Good textbooks are good tools (I personally don't find there to be a lack of good textbooks). In the subject I majored in at university, mathematics, I can't imagine any amount of teacher input can take the place of problem sets and time spent poring over a textbook struggling to grok something.

I agree that active learning is a necessary part of a successful education. However, almost all the specific targets of this article to be off the mark. In my experience, lectures and textbooks are not what keeps active learning from taking place, in fact they are what necessitates active learning.

I agree with the stated point, however using the university education style as a target frustrates me, because the critique of Mike this article gives is exactly the kind of objection I might have to to claiming that textbooks and lectures are insufficient for learning. Engage, don't just consume!

On more of a quibble than critique, I think 3x playback is poor as the titular metaphor for shallow learning. Listening to an audio book at ordinary speed I find to be far too fast to allow any kind of useful contemplation, and too slow to retain my interest (possibly due to my ADHD, perhaps others find this easier). If I need to think about something, I pause it. Not all information has equal utility, nor do all information streams have equal density. Depending on the narration and content of an audio book I find listening at a higher rate to often be ideal for trialing information for greater analysis. For something else, such as a video feed of a sports game, real time is often too fast for me to even consume all the information I would like (although when watching a sports game I may be more interested in the experience than tactics or particulars of a play).

I watch everything I can in 2x speed, except for exceptionally fast talkers (those I watch on 1.5x, usually).

I think I could go up to 2.5x speed, but most video sites do not provide an option for that.

1x is just too slow.

And yes, I get everything at 2x. Not everyone can. I know one person with an auditory processing disorder who cannot manage even 1.5x without a lot of effort. I suspect handling 2x is partly about skill, but not entirely.

"The assumption is that people can acquire knowledge as if it’s a substance they can pour into their minds. I call it the Water in a Cup method"

In German-speaking countries, there has been a name for it since 1647: Nuernberger Trichter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel

I'd love for all videos to have a "linked transcript" enabling the user to text search the transcript, then quickly seek the video to a particular statement.

That way, I'd be able to skim read and "dip into" long lecture-style videos to extract targeted information.

Since YouTube has captions on most videos, the data is available but I don't know of any apps that do this.

I think every serialized media is presented at a set speed, but that speed is rarely a carefully determined value. It’s just an artifact of the creator’s speaking or editing characteristics.

Which leads me to personally conclude: there is probably no single correct speed and the author likely hasn’t picked an ideal speed either.

Speed up or slow down based on your personal needs.

I watch Netflix at 1.25x and YouTube at 1.5x-2x - but this is mainly because I find some shows/channels a bit too slow at 1x speed.

Some YouTube channels are unbearable at 1x speed due to the slow speaking speed.

3x speed probably is hard to genuinely acquire knowledge effectively for most people - although I have heard of blind people who do 2.5x-3x with ease, so who knows.

Reading many of the comments, it seems most agree that listening at a factor>1 is better. As a fast reader (books, not audio nor video, never really tried that myself) I wonder how this can be understood with the 'common knowledge' that when speaking (presenting) one should slow down. E.g., let those meaningful pauses endure.

You probably get an overrepresentation here of people for whom it's all about maximizing information density. Personally, if that's my objective unless it is a case of a photo (or video) being worth a thousand words, reading is mostly better.

With respect to conferences presentations, I'm mostly a fan of shorter (<30 minute) presentations. If something piques my interest, I'll track it down afterwards at my own pace.

What if you remove Mike's conceit that he will "build" something? Then he's just learning for fun.

Mike's "friend" is awfully judgemental.

Besides the fact that this is extremely subjective and comes to each person's own ability, I hate when articles try to introduce one of these cute oversimplified and exaggerated stories so that they can prove a point. Literally shifting the perspective so that the author can have the higher ground.

Speeding up is an incredible tool for active consumption. As with all tools, you have to know when to use it.

That said, most simple content I consume at 2x. Slower speeds waste time and dont provide enough info per sec for me to be fully engrossed in a topic.

I make heavy use of slowing down and taking notes and rewinding.

The optimal speed very much content and goal dependent. Some narrators just speak slowly, some books are very information dense, and are you trying to memorise the entire book or just pick out a few points?

> Listening to audiobooks at 3x speed is born out of a flawed model of learning

Also out of a flawed model of writing books which mostly are bloat and take hundreds of pages for what could be explained in a page or two.

I honestly don't think that any decent book can be effectively condensed into a page or two. The basic concept maybe but not useful background and examples.

That said, it's true that publishing economics tend to force books to a minimum length of 250-300 pages. And it's true that a lot of business books for example would probably do fine with being something in the 100+ page range, i.e. longer than a magazine article but shorter than most books.

Two important takeaways to remember: 1. Think more strategically about what you want to learn and why. 2. Proper knowledge requires proper contemplation & synthesis.

Perhaps if you didn't worry about reading so much, you could write more. Than you would have more essays about how you write so much, eh David?

I don't listen at 3× speed to learn more, I listen at 3× speed because anything slower is uncomfortably boring. (ADHD.)

Learning isn’t water in a cup but in the other hand youtube and podcasts are so full of fluff that 3x makes a lot of sense.

Some people ie. Yaron Minsky are joy to listen, speeding up would feel like speeding up your favourite movie.

TL;DR: I'm generally suspicious of life hacks. Doing what seems natural generally gets it done.

The advice regarding spaced repetition strikes me as being as too-pat a solution as listening at 3x. A combination of approaches works for me.

If I'm listening to an audio or video presentation for the first time, I prefer to listen at 1.8x to 2x to get through the material more quickly, but I'm COMPLETELY focused on it while I'm listening. No browsing the web or driving or whatever. I'll stop and write notes, or back up and maybe slow down if something isn't clear, but I default to high speed. The same with reading: the first time through I'll "speed read" or even skim just to get an overview and load the material into my mental cache.

Once I have a good map of the material, I'll revisit it with a better understanding of what I want to cover and where my understanding is still weak. Sometimes it takes a couple of iterations, or I'll try to put the knowledge into practice and return to review the parts that the practice shows that I have an imperfect grasp of.

Effectively, this approach ends up being spaced repetition without Anki decks or reminders to review material.

like others have said about other commentes, the point isn't so much on consuming podcasts, audio books, or whatever faster - it's about how if that's the only thing you do, you won't end up actually learning anything

Yeah, best I've seen is 2x and that was with a very slow speaking lecturer.

I do this, and I'm constantly in need of book recommendations. Please help

Read 1984 (Orwell)

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.

3x turns a brain into a hard drive, a very dumb idea!

I've made meaningful progress on things I'm learning by listening to podcasts at 3x speed + "Smart Speed". Could I have made more progress by listening slower? Maybe, though that's debatable. Would I have even started? Absolutely not.

Before I ever found speed controls I'd start listening to podcasts and then just give up because it felt so boring and slow. "Why would I listen to podcasts or audiobooks when I could read them at several times the speed, back up, reread things, copy sections into my notes, and skim past the parts I already know?" is a common thing I used to say. Podcasts don't have an index like a real book, and it's hard to flip back and forth between two sections.

Now, I'm not listening to podcasts related to programming, despite that being my main profession. I'm listening to a podcast about a hobby and one I'd like to improve at, and I'm doing it while I work, drive, or otherwise do things that don't demand that part of my brain. I'm also not afraid to rewind or slow down, particularly if there's a guest on whose voice I'm not familiar with.

There are over 600 episodes (maybe 700 by now?) in the backlog of the main podcast I'm listening to right now, each between 30 minutes and 4 hours, with an average around an hour and a half or so. That's a lot of audio. I've been listening for months and am around 175 or so episodes in. If I was listening at 1x speed then this podcast might be a 5 or more year commitment.

If I was studying for a test, maybe I'd slow it down. Maybe I'd choose a format like text where available. But this particular show is not in lecture format. It's structured as an ongoing discussion between people who want to improve at something very intricate and ever changing. I'm listening to hear how different people approach these situations. So having the speed of the conversation be fast enough that I'm not losing the thread of what's going on is more important than catching every little detail.

I'm listening to hear stories, or for debates between people who look at the problems in different ways and want to find holes in their own approaches. I'm listening for what people's mindsets are like and how their opinions change over time as they gain more experience and revisit topics they've covered in the past.

I also listen with the intent of deliberately practicing the thing they're talking about, and use that to build up my own experience and opinions. For any given topic that comes up on the podcast I can typically tell you the stance of each of the hosts as well as any guests that were on, and I can tell you whether I think their reasoning is sound based on my own attempts. So while my listening is passive I actively engage with the content on a regular schedule.

Mike has anxiety.

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.

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