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Comment by mvieira38 | Hacker News Reader

Listening to a lecture is a far more passive form of learning than reading a book. Being an avid reader is seen as special because it requires more time and effort to do: you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests. Also, by reading challenging books you learn the valuable skills of backtracking and skimming, which may be applied to better and more quickly understand difficult texts. The lecture equivalent is taking notes and asking questions, but you really can't do that with online recorded stuff.

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Ok I'm going to invert that thought, and say: if books are so intelectually more efficient, why do we even have universities? Why do we have lectures, and why doesn't everyone just read?

Spoken word is one of the most primitive and human ways of communicating information. Written word appeared as a replacement to spoken word, because there was no other capable medium of information. Now we have mediums capable of doing so, why not use them instead.

Also you're somehow implying that because I'm doing the dishes I'm paying less attention? I think that's a really big assumption, and will probably vary a lot from person to person.

We have universities so students can have help with their work and their expert teachers about any issues they had with the study material. But since printing has become so efficient, a few hundred years ago, universities have gradually tapered off the long lecture times and have been given more and more reading assignments and homework. In fact, in classes that don't take attendance, many students do "just read", and when the classes do take attendance someone will usually beg the teacher to post the slides somewhere so they can read them... And do I even need to talk about how much reading is involved in professional academics?

> you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests

this is literally what audiobooks are for. And I concentrate significantly better on audio if I'm multitasking with a mindless activity

I would very much dispute your claim that you are actually concentrating "significantly better" while multitasking, but we don't even need to go there. By the nature of an audiobook, you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0 (especially if you aren't actively managing the player and instead are "multitasking"). Sure, it can be fine if you're just listening to Critical Role or the 100th true crime podcast of the week, but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless. I guess that's why most books recommended by audiobook enthusiasts are dumb self help stuff or contemporary genre fiction, no one is reading Goethe while doing the dishes

> you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0

my earbuds have a double-tap to play/pause. What makes you think I don't use it??

> but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless

reading is reading. For nonfiction where my goal is to learn I do audio and pause to take notes. For entertainment I read speculative fiction usually as audio-only, sometimes also with text (Malazan and Terra Ignota being notable for when I wanted text). But that doesn't mean that what I listen to with audio only is somehow lower quality.

And it's kind of funny to me that you say "improve my comprehension of language" because I listen to audiobooks somewhere between 3.5x and 4.3x speed generally (and still working on improving my comprehension at higher speeds). You're probably going to say that this necessarily means I don't understand what I read but...no, actually, listening to audio has drastically improved my language processing ability. And even if mostly I'm listening to fiction for entertainment, this improvement in comprehension carries over to reading nonfiction.

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