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Comment by someRandoJunk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>, 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".

> 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.

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...

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