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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

There's another benefit of watching something at 2x too which wasn't mentioned which is it can put you into a more receptive mental state.

I don't know if anyone else is like this but inefficiencies tend to bug me. This is purely personal preference but folks who talk slow or use a lot of filler words can ruin a video for me to the point where I'm focusing on that instead of the material.

I tend to listen to everything at 2x (instructional videos, podcasts, etc.) and I don't really see any downsides even if it's only watched once. If it's something deep or you're following along with code then you'll be pausing the video no matter what speed you listen to it to apply what you're watching. When you factor all of that together you can IMO absorb things just as well as 1x.

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Exactly! It's possible you and I have ADHD, but it's worth giving out this tip. Watching at a sped up rate lets you filter out the crap and find the "real" content.

In a simple world you'd just slow it back down to 1x when you get to this point, and you wouldn't need 2x, you could just skip forwards 10 seconds at a time like most people until you find it.

Unfortunately there tends to be fillers throughout the video, even inside of the sentences people speak. The real lifehack is to keep the high speed and then pause when the video said something important, so you can digest what you just heard, and resume - rinse and repeat.

A variant solution I prefer is to always be regulating the speed according to the load on your attention span. Videos change so much in info density from one minute to the next, it's nothing short of strange to watch at one set speed throughout. I think the fact it's so common to "give up" and "accept" a given video speed is an artifact of the fact that people have never had the experience of letting their subconscious finely control the speed with muscle-memory. Doing it keeps your attention at 100% usage all the time. Low info density, high speed. High info density, low speed. Use a browser addon that gives you hotkey control over the speed, or use ff2mpv to exploit mpv's native speed controls.

I have basically the same approach. I don't absorb information that well from video because of the fixed pacing. I would much rather read which lets me speed up and slow down automatically. When I need to absorb a video, I find speed controls to be incredibly useful. For low density information, I set the speed as high as I can and still understand the speaker. This is like skimming a text. If the speaker gets to something high density, I will slow down or even listen to the section multiple times. This is like reading slowly for maximum understanding.

I am honestly a bit frustrated with how much information is getting locked up in videos as I find them a pretty poor format in comparison to text annotated with diagrams.

Ditto for me. when people speak, they tend to speak slow add a lot of unnecessary/repetitive information especially lectures. On the learner side, I tend to be much more focussed when watching at 2x speed, otherwise, i get distracted and think of something else during those slow paces. That was a big problem for me in classroom lectures, moments of important information gets overshadowed by low density information. WOnder how well I would have performed in college if it were through a video lecture!

Was waiting for this comment, as all the top ones were mostly dismissive of the findings. As someone with ADHD, this is exactly how it feels to me. Increasing the playback speed is like going into a mode where the content of what the speaker is saying becomes the only thing my brain cares about, as opposed to the secondary characteristics like their pauses between words, accent, speaking style, etc.

I don't know if I have ADHD but my brain will very much filter out what it perceives as inefficient waste and replace it with whatever thoughts are important at the time, such as would you get shocked if you put uncooked spaghetti into a live outlet.

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