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Comment by wzdd | Hacker News Reader

It’s a nice engineering approach, but I’m interested in the motivation. Um and ah is distracting in a transcript, where you can naturally pause to take in information; in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important. See https://medium.com/better-humans/dont-worry-about-saying-um-... for example. The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird.

Disfluencies aren’t necessarily bad even if the word starts with “dis”!

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Having heard radio interviews with and without 'internal editing' to remove ums and ahs, most of the time I'd rather the edited version. It's more concise and focused, and I find it easier to comprehend. Too many ums and ahs and my mind wanders, and if it's radio, I can't go easily go back to try again. When I've listened to podcasts or audiobooks, I could never easily go back a little to try again either, and I gave up on them (even though I have some content I really want to listen to, it's too frustrating, so it's not happening). But I'm sure other people have different preferences.

I also don't care for writing that could have been made a lot more concise. It's a lot of work to make things shorter, but I think it's worthwhile.

It just goes to show that people have very different views. I think when I hear people thinking out loud (ums and ahs) it's a marker that they are actually engaging with the question, thinking through an answer and not bullshitting without thinking.

I agree to you, when it's in person. I think what your describing is mostly the beginning of an answer.

Just randoms "um" inbetween because your struggling to build sentences can get annoying both in person and online

"Ummm, I think I agree with this description" vs "I, think, umm, I agree with, umm, this description"

The first one indicates something along the lines of "thinking, please stand by". The second one is a struggle.

Just sit there in silence whilst you cogitate.

this is the move

Space fillers are sadly important for group settings where you need to finish a thought before someone interjects.

But hearing them from an interviewee drives me crazy, along with "sort of", "kind of", etc. I once counted all of the "sorta"s in an NPR interview, it was brutal.

I think speaking fluidly while thinking out loud is a completely separate skill. Some people are really good at it, usually the ones who get a lot of practice at public speaking. I also suspect extroverts have an easier time with it than introverts. "Ums" and "ahs" aren't necessarily evidence that a person is thinking, but it's also true that a lot of very smart people are "inarticulate" in the conventional sense.

For a good example of this (maybe the one you heard?), see WNYC's On the Media segment (aired December 30 or 31, 2004) titled "Pulling Back the Curtain": https://wnyc.org/story/129437-pulling-back-the-curtain/

Thanks for the link. As a longtime listener, listening to Bob Garfield's voice brought a tear to my eye - I'm a big fan and was sad when he left OTM, as much as I admire Brooke.

The most popular academic theory (IIRC) is that "um" and "uh" are conversational placeholders that say, "don't talk, I'm not finished speaking yet". Which obviously serves no purpose in a monologue.

To me they just indicate lack of confidence on the part of the speaker.

There's a correlation between speaking with confidence and bullshitting / corner cutting. Hard, nuanced questions require more thinking time to produce a nuanced answer. But a bullshitter will just confidently answer subtly wrong stuff. But they won't say "uh"! Is that really better?

Sure, that figures. Much of this is surely subjective.

The gifted ones seem to manage to intelligently babble for the beginning part while simultaneously forming the real answer.

> in speech however it can serve as a focusing point to indicate the next part is important

it's... exact opposite?

the main (attempted) use for ummms is to keep continuation of speech despite the pause. And the main complaint is exactly that it ruins the focus and doesn't give respite

It can be a focusing point when someone wants to highlight the deliberate use of euphemism, removing those would be, um, unwise.

Although that is probably the less common use.

I think you’re both right. But you’re right regarding writing and your parent comment is right regarding speech.

A part of saying something like um is to continue your speech and prevent the other person or someone else in the group from interjecting.

Occasional ums and ahs are fine but when every other phrase starts with a long aaaaah it can be pretty unpleasant to listen to.

So, if this project's source Audio were Beavis and Butthead, you would be enthused?

I saw a video where the speaker spoke his words quickly, but had long pauses every words. Luckily NewPipe has a "fast forward during silence option".

Looking at it again he'd pause, probably trying to find the next word, doesn't find it, and goes "aaaah". So watching at >100% speed and with skip silences saved my sanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCO633KE7RA

You are almost certainly listening to a lot of audio with um's and ah's removed from it, without even realizing it. Via various methods including automated, manual, direction (re-takes), and talent-led (speaker consciously suppressing).

If you knew how much, you might not feel the same way.

The younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster. I think it’s a preference for a fast information dopamine hit. I may argue it’s even a shallow approach that prefers against pausing and time for careful reflection. Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.

I'm not in the younger generation, but I listen to most of youtube (apart from songs and comedy) at 2x speed, and wish it could be even faster most of the time (that's a feature of premium, but I'm not paying for that).

The problem is that people are producing longer videos because that earns them more advertising revenue. Many creators now speak so mind-numbingly slowly, that even at 2x speed it feels like it's about a normal presentation speed.

In almost all cases, even at 2x speed, it would be quicker to just read a transcript (if that was available). The problem is really that people are incentivised to make everything into at least a 10 minute youtube video, when a short blog post that could have taken only a minute to read would have been sufficient to convey all the same information, and probably more useful as you could easily refer back to specific sections if you wanted.

FYI NewPipe allows up to 4x playback; PipePipe up to 10x! And both block ads, while PipePipe also integrates Sponsorblock.

It's medium used in wrong way. If you want getting information efficiently, read carefully writen text. If you want immersive story, watch feature film. If you want dialogue, use audio.

Instead we use audio for info, text for stories and video for dialogues.

Podcasts and other media to which people often listen at faster speeds aren't produced with the professional fluency of a news broadcast from the fifties. The bitrate of information is relatively low. Of course many speed them up.

The democratization of media created a lot of folks who've no idea how to disseminate information in a structured format and at an optimal rate.

I listen to podcasts and videos at 2x speed or faster, I can still understand everything and it brings listening time about equal to what my reading time would be if I were reading an article or transcript. Average reading speed is generally about twice as fast as average speaking speed, and in produced media people tend to speak even slower. I realize it sounds insane to hear 2x speed audio if you aren't used to it, but I promise if you were to ramp up the speed over a couple weeks or so, you would have absolutely no trouble with it. There's no need to if you don't want to, I'm just saying that your first impression is not giving you an accurate experience of what it's actually like.

For audiobooks I usually want to have time to hear and process every word, so I still speed it up but usually more like 1.5x, it depends on the narrator and the book. For podcasts I'm not there to appreciate the prose, so I go as fast as I can while still understanding them. I don't think it's about dopamine, I just find I don't gain anything by getting the same amount of information slower.

That reminds me of the blind Microsoft developer that uses a screen reader at a very high speed to code

https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?is=K3nKVrpH-vOSem54

In my limited experience, it seems a high reading speed is common among users of screen readers.

i'm not a gen z but I routinely do that. a habit picked up from grad school work and having to assimilate several frameworks and techniques quickly.

arguably clickbait is the reason: i'm not here to listen to the video or all of the other fluff, i'm here to get the point as quickly as possible. it's a 'meeting could have been an email' sort of thing where lots of videos could really just be several bulletpoints.

AI youtubue summarizers are great in that regard.

> The younger generation seems to love listening at 1.2x or faster.

I do not belong to the younger generation. I refused to watch videos because it takes too long comparing with reading. But now I'm watching them at 2x. You can watch a 40 min video in 20 minutes. I'd like to compress it further to 10 min or so, but 3x is a paid option on youtube and I'm not sure I could digest English (which is a foreign language to me) at 3x.

> Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.

Oh, I read books too. But the content is different. You can't read some books at 2x. You can't listen to it on such a speed. In any book I think there are stretches of text you can consume at any speed, but sometimes you hit a dense packed information you need to think through. It happens with videos too. Like, try to watch Veritasium at 2x, you'll be forced to slow things down at least sometimes, because to get the message you need to learn how to think at 2x speed too, not just to listen.

In any case the most of videos dilute their message over tens of minutes and you can speed up things and have plenty of time to think things through while watching.

>The weirdly obsessive zeal that orgs like Toastmasters have about eliminating them is weird.

If you speak with disfluencies, you probably didn't sufficiently rehearse your speech. If you didn't rehearse enough, you probably didn't put much effort into writing it either, so why should I put much effort into listening? It's the same principle as AI slop.

Not necessarily true, more rehearsal isn't the key to fluent oratory.

Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.

Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.

More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".

> Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words.

I don't think that's true, we usually just don't notice filler words in the same way we are surprised that people usually don't even talk in whole sentences, in contrast to written text or movies (which also use written text).

As with all things ... Don't be opinionated and make it an option for the user.

So are you saying that every podcast should ship two episodes, an "unedited" version and an "umless" version? That's not really viable.

An occasional “um” is one thing. But utterly exhausting when every response in an interview starts with it…

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