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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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