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Comment by abainbridge | Hacker News Reader

I feel that you can assign a separate IQ-like score to many different components of human intelligence. I score badly on book comprehension relative to other components.

I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book. I'm probably slightly dyslexic or something. At university I made sure I never missed a lecture but hardly ever read a book. I did above averagely well.

This is a disadvantage though. I have friends who can read books in a couple of hours and absorb the content. I'd have to sit through more hours of video to get the same content, even watching the videos at 2x speed.

Wild speculation: being intellectual used to require being good at book comprehension. Maybe only 10% of the population are good at that. Maybe some of the remaining 90% are still clever. If so, video content could allow those book-comprehension-limited people to become intellectual. That'd be nice.

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> I find it easier to concentrate for an hour or two on a video than a book.

That is because video does not requires you to concentrate. Imagine a book which is required to be read in 1x or 1.25x or 1.5x or 2x only. Pretty impossible to read, isn't it? You know, some paragraphs may require several hours to be read. Video just doesn't support to be consumed at different speeds per paragraph.

How can you seriously say "video does not requires you to concentrate". I'm genuinely curious as to why you would think this is true.

While reading you're more prone to analyze and think about the subject, while videos are sort of mechanized, in which generally people don't pause and reflect on what's being said.

> "video does not requires you to concentrate"

My English is not enough eloquent yet, so I share my anecdotal evidence. Some sentences in books is not understandable if reading only once, and we usually do not go to next one if the previous has been not understood. It is OK to read a sentence 5 times and to read another 2 places in previous parts of a book in order to understand that sentence. Going to a special place from previous parts of lecture might be a pain because of needness to re-listen some extra materials.

While watching video it is too easy to skip that hard sentences especially if professor is too charismatic to let us feel the needness to stop his lecture for a moment in order to think. And it is too hard to re-listen only the part is needed for re-listening, like when you can not parse one word (0.5 seconds long), so you press backwards and you realize that you need to relisten extra 4.5 seconds each re-reading.

That circumstances leads us to just keep listening while the pyramid of non-understanding actually grows on.

I can't even read light fiction. I read the first Harry Potter book once. To give a feeling of how hard reading is for me: it took me longer than working out how car understeer and oversteer physics work from first principles and making a simulation in C++ [1].

[1] Admittedly crap 2D car sim https://github.com/abainbridge/car_sim

I'll appeal to aphantasia here again. For me, I love to watch videos, but the visual images vanish the moment I stop watching. As such, they are an inefficient way for me to learn. I retain more when I read.

I suspect this is at the root of disagreements about 'visual learners', etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

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