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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I'm an extreme version of this because it's my job to read several hundred articles every week and curate and summarize them, so my entire reading process has been optimized to rapidly grasping something, contextualizing it, and moving on. It's amazing how good you can get at this over time and I consider it to be a very positive thing in terms of my reading.

In other contexts, I think there have been a few slightly negative psychological side effects, such as struggling to watch full TV shows without fast forwarding through the "boring" bits, or choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily. But in general I seem to thrive on having an impatient, jumpy brain.. for now!

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"It's amazing how good you can get at this over time and I consider it to be a very positive thing in terms of my reading."

How do you check, how good you are? Do you have other persons reading the texts carefully and compare to your summaries?

For me it's more business-like than that: am I more productive? There's also an element of (occasional) reader feedback and the increasing size of the audience and positive reaction to the materials. These things do not measure quality with any finesse, but do at least provide a crude indication of whether the perceived quality is above or below audience-acceptable levels.

Would you be okay with providing more context ? What kind of articles are you summarizing and for how long have you been doing it ? Have you read Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work from Crawford ? Any opinion on his description of a content farm ?

Are you reading literature ? Any changes in your reading pattern ?

> choosing to watch other people playing computer games on YouTube rather than playing them myself because I get bored too easily

Could you please elaborate a little bit on this? I'm intrigued - I assumed that actively playing a game would be less boring than passively watching someone else play. I'm not a gamer though so I really have no idea.

I can't answer for parent comment, but one possibility is that youtube (in theory) allows skipping ahead, real games do not.

With "Let's Plays", you're there for the commentary, it's not just a quiet walkthrough. The downside of this is that you, as a viewer, have no timely input (episodes are sometimes done in batches and uploaded over a week or two). But.. maybe that's the attraction, back to the days of yore when you would yell at the Jeopardy/Wheel of Fortune contestants for not getting the obvious answer!

Source: I watch LPs constantly while working, it's good background noise and gives me an easy outlet to divert my attention.

I think it's a bit like watching TV vs reading a book for a lot of people. When something is on a conveyor belt into your brain, it's easier to let it flow even if the experience is cheaper, whereas playing a game or reading a book requires a significantly extra level of 'participation'.

Of course, it could just be that I'm getting old, the dopamine hits from gaming aren't there as much anymore and that I'd rather watch skilled people at work ;-)

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