You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information, not people who are using it to skip filler content and contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people corrected you in the reply.
But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
The author is making multiple points and it's fair to consider each claim in isolation.
One of the points is that that active learning is better passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the information multiple times is better than reading it fast once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
- 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so slowly than listeners tune out at 1x
- 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1 perspective in 1x time.
- 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
- 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in their head" when reading written text
The author should have titled his essay "Against Passive Learning" because that's the stronger point rather than highlight "3x".
> You [...] misunderstood the point
> Few people corrected you
> Kinda hilarious
If you genuinely want people to understand why they're wrong, then know that this is not the way to do it.
I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman, that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis - Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the content a little boring.
I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
For reference; $('video').playbackRate=3.33
The playback engine mutes audio below 0.25x and above 4x, not configurable.
(I am the author.)
But I suspect they're all mostly similar
javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback rate%22))}();
Here's a non-interactive version
javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22audio,video%22).playbackRate=2.7}();
An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature too.
Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially useful when you want to know more about a subject you already know about (say a programming language you've used but never formally learnt).
If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the information rate of a video is typically quite low.
However, a lot of TV shows - particularly USA ones seem to needlessly repeat everything like there running a lecture for amnesiacs. Here's what we're going to say in the first part, here's the first part, we say what we said we would, now a recap, then a break so we review the whole first part ... now we're 10 minutes into the show and we've seen about two minutes of unique footage. It's harrowing -- I'll take overdrawn explanations in preference to that.
Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well regarded!) in no way acknowledges the existence of this sub field. For whatever reason, and across multiple fields, I've never found static text to be good at "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being valuable.
Nearly all very-large-texts I've read on technical subjects are poorly written. The early and later sections seem to have little relation to each other; Some parts will be too general and other parts too vague. It's like the author totally loses perspective.
There's a sweet spot of around 250 A5 pages where a subject can maintain consistent scope and have meaningful relationships between chapters.
There are exceptions, but they are few.
The first time I encountered the concept of a 3xer was in the context of political radicalization, people infusing their mind with YouTube self-radicalization content on 3x (or higher) every day. My mind conjured up images of Malcolm McDowell in that A Clockwork Orange scene, only that it's self-inflicted and with content aiming at the exact opposite.
This lets you skip filler content automatically for many popular videos.
For example, I do not care for videos about code. I'm experienced in that domain and I want to get right into the meat of things: scroll to the appropriate paragraph, see the example I'm looking for, and move one.
I could see why a beginner would need a slower pace with more "filler" explanation and background information. Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
But that's only considering programming. Other domains are better suited to videos. For example, visual arts in general: painting, photography, filmmaking... I couldn't imagine explaining a picture with words only, or a human interaction with pictures only. Perhaps when I have more experience, but for now, I like videos.
But that's what links are for - allowing you to deduplicate information by merely providing a link to some other content instead of replicating it entirely.
Moreover, you don't know each beginner's background or desired pace. "Fixing" a certain set of information into the video is worse than providing the appropriate links that allow the beginner to read exactly what they're unfamiliar with, and videos hard-code the pace in a way that written material is not - they're the opposite of what a beginner needs.
> Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one to just sit back like we did at school and take in the information.
The article specifically addresses this - passive consumption (which better describes videos than reading) is scientifically shown to be less effective for learning than active consumption:
> One study[1] found that active learning makes students think they’re learning less even when they’re actually learning more. That’s one reason why, even though they’re less effective, lectures have persisted for so long.
> Other domains are better suited to videos.
The parent comment ("It is more that these days everything is a video.") wasn't taking any issue with the fact that some things are represented as videos, but that everything is. Of course most filmmaking education (modulo some stuff like maybe an introduction to optics) is best done by video - but nobody is complaining about that.
Also, in terms of education, these subjects, while they exist, are a minority. The majority of stuff you learn in school is better done in a non-video format. Not a text format - diagrams and interactive simulation are incredibly valuable for understanding. But, specifically, video is almost exactly the opposite of a good format for learning most things.
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.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text to pass information is just making your memory weak.
different people prefer different methods of learning
they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn new information is becoming harder and harder for me personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and social media use
I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to me
videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed ..so I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and hear someone explain something at length
On the contrary to your suggestion, blogs (or more specifically, webpages) are what can do more than anything else, since they can also feature interactive media. See <https://ncase.me/trust/> for an example.
Whether or not this is expected, standard, or the author thinks it's worth the effort is another thing.
Are we talking slide shows on a youtube video here? Because to me those are probably the worst of all worlds. Low information density and not searchable.
Visual content is a bonus, to remain more engaged and maybe impart information via a third medium
Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully considered to be the worst: a student too can read the textbook himself just fine!
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
Otherwise I’d almost fall asleep.
It’s better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear sentences than wasting 2x the time.
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.
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?
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the content.
According to Pocketcast I've "saved" over 3 days by trimming silence and over a month by speeding up. I've listened to a lot of podcasts it seems ...
It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI" school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything that features this.
For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
It works quite well in my experience.
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.
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.
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Sometimes I'll put a lecture at 2x speed if the professor is talking way too slow. Every ten minutes, I will pause the lecture and try and "teach myself" what the professor just said, giving a quick summary of all the information I remember. If I feel like I got a reasonable understanding of the gist of it, then I keep going at 2x, and if I had a lot of trouble with the summarization process, I drop it back to 1x.
More often than not, I end up dropping back to 1x.
So now I just don’t speed up. If the quality is low, I don’t listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time to think about what the speaker is saying, while they’re saying it.
There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.