[HN Gopher] Against 3x Speed
___________________________________________________________________
Against 3x Speed
Author : Ariarule
Score : 470 points
Date : 2021-12-20 04:41 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (perell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (perell.com)
| semireg wrote:
| I haven't read the whole article but I'm deeply opinionated about
| this topic.
|
| I was a good but not great student in college. The computer
| science classes bored me to death.
|
| Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app
| development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn't stay
| focused until ... I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started
| making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few
| min at 1x.
|
| My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine.
| If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or
| purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.
|
| 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of
| YouTube at 2x. It's a sweet spot for me.
|
| When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I
| Built This w Guy Raz) I'll often pause to write down notes, but
| I'm almost never feeling like it's too fast to ingest.
|
| Sometimes I'm self conscious that I talk too fast around other
| people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and
| mouth don't have a 1/2x button. Ha!
| Kranar wrote:
| I am so happy you said this. I always felt like the majority of
| lectures and content overall is ceremony and that most of the
| actual substance comprises maybe 15-20% of the overall content.
| There are times when I can appreciate ceremony, especially if
| it's being given by a good performer, a great writer or a
| passionate lecturer. Unfortunately most teachers are not
| passionate or good lecturers, most educational videos are not
| that engaging, and many authors are not good writers, and so in
| most cases I could strip out 80% of the content and spare
| myself the boredom.
| madmax108 wrote:
| "I haven't read the whole article but I'm deeply opinionated
| about this topic."
|
| Sometimes I truly feel like this should be the unofficial motto
| of HN ;)
|
| > 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of
| YouTube at 2x
|
| The sweet spot for me is between 1.5x and 1.7x (Usually speed
| controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x but apps that
| do earn extra brownie points from me eg. VLC). It's always
| weird having to explain this to friends who tend to think that
| I'm always listening to is a rap documentary :-D
| nokcha wrote:
| > Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow
| 1.7x
|
| On most sites, you can set an arbitrary speed by executing a
| line of JavaScript in the debug console:
| document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 1.7;
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3027707/how-to-change-
| th...
| biesnecker wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat. 1.75x is probably the best speed for me
| for most speakers, but until I was able to speed up audio/video
| I also had a really hard time paying attention in lectures /
| watching informative content.
| tristanperry wrote:
| I watch Netflix at 1.25x and YouTube at 1.5x-2x - but this is
| mainly because I find some shows/channels a bit too slow at 1x
| speed.
|
| Some YouTube channels are unbearable at 1x speed due to the slow
| speaking speed.
|
| 3x speed probably is hard to genuinely acquire knowledge
| effectively for most people - although I have heard of blind
| people who do 2.5x-3x with ease, so who knows.
| nightski wrote:
| Or maybe speed really isn't that important. Just make sure that
| what you are learning is important. There is a lot of information
| out there that just doesn't matter. Focus on what actually has an
| impact to you and not all of the things you think you "should"
| learn because someone else said so.
| furyofantares wrote:
| ADHD prevents me from consuming lots of content at 1x speed _at
| all_. Trying to listen to a lecture is incredibly painful. I
| completed college in 2006, I believe YouTube launched 2x speed a
| few years later, it wasn 't until then that I discovered I'm
| perfectly capable of listening to a lecture at 2x.
|
| Now, perhaps I get less out of a 2x lecture than a neurotypical
| person who is otherwise my peer does from a 1x lecture. Maybe
| even a lot less. But it doesn't matter, because I get a lot out
| of a 2x lecture and nothing out of a 1x lecture.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| I was literally just watching a youtube video at 1x speed and
| now I realize that I somehow ended up on here and have missed
| the rest of the video. That never happens when I'm watching on
| 2x speed.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| For podcasts and video, I'm right with you. A decade ago when I
| was in the physical classroom, I didn't mind the 1x interaction
| because it was slow enough that my pencil could keep up when
| writing notes (which was my secret to getting much higher test
| grades than my classmates in spite of many fewer hours spent
| actively studying).
| colanderman wrote:
| 3x speed is an accessibility feature for anyone who has trouble
| paying attention at slower rates. The rules of grammar mean that
| people often need to speak far more words than is necessary for
| some concepts. Pause and rewind buttons exist for passages which
| are actually information dense.
|
| (The same is true of writing; entire paragraphs exist for no
| reason other than maintaining structure. Fortunately, well-edited
| works follow rules of paragraph style and structure -- first
| words, subect; final words, conclusion -- which enable effective
| skimming.)
| quadrangle wrote:
| I agree with other commenters: it's all about the content.
|
| I listen to most podcasts at 2x at least because they often are
| too much chatter or are repeating things I know. But sometimes I
| pause them to think when something new arises. In other cases,
| like some types of YouTube videos, I watch at 0.75x because they
| are way too fast and have no white-space, way too dense.
|
| And in all of this, the MAIN thing I learn is WHAT the podcast
| was. I don't learn the deepest understanding of some subject. I
| learn THAT the subject exists (a very specific bit within a
| subject sometimes).
|
| Here and there, I encounter some truly applicable, practical
| concepts, and then I have to put them to use and revisit them in
| order to really learn and master them.
| orangepanda wrote:
| It does depend on the content. Personally, if its for
| entertainment I default to x2 speed (thanks apple tv+ for
| including x2 speed instead of netflix's x1.5 half measure); but
| for educational purposes I go down to x1.5
|
| The downside is, after a few days of getting used to it, x1
| content feels like slow motion.
| elchief wrote:
| Meh. I did several AWS courses on Udemy at 1.75x speed, and did
| pretty well on the exams
|
| To me, that is reasonable evidence that video learning at speed
| works, at least in the short term
|
| Also, I suffer ADHD. I'd say listening at speed forces me to pay
| closer attention
| tdrdt wrote:
| This reminds me of the multi-tasking myth.
|
| People who multi-task think it works because they did a lot of
| different things throughout the day.
|
| But when performance is measured the conclusion is that multi-
| tasking does not work and only hurts the brain.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Mike has anxiety.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I think the playback speed should be variable depending on the
| information density of the content. I will generally listen at 2x
| speed, but for something that is really information dense I will
| slow it way down, sometimes all the way to 1x.
|
| Even sometimes when I am listening to something at higher speeds
| if they say something really interesting I will pause the content
| and just think about it for a few minutes.
|
| I think this is only possible because "completing X books per
| year" is not part of my identity.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I watch everything I can in 2x speed, except for exceptionally
| fast talkers (those I watch on 1.5x, usually).
|
| I think I could go up to 2.5x speed, but most video sites do not
| provide an option for that.
|
| 1x is just too slow.
|
| And yes, I get everything at 2x. Not everyone can. I know one
| person with an auditory processing disorder who cannot manage
| even 1.5x without a lot of effort. I suspect handling 2x is
| partly about skill, but not entirely.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| I'd argue that 95% of all learning, is learnt by doing.
|
| Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your
| understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and
| untested knowledge. At best, a boffin.
|
| It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.
| omgitsabird wrote:
| Semantic memory isn't procedural memory or episodic memory.
|
| Just listening to something is completely different than being
| able to do something with what you just listened to.
|
| Learning involves more than just recalling things from memory.
| serjester wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this dichotomy - you assume the two are
| mutually exclusive. There's analysis paralysis (no "doing") on
| one extreme and blind ambition on the other (no book
| knowledge). I doubt many people advocate either.
|
| Why can't you build things while setting aside time to learn
| from other peoples mistakes?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Not quite sure. Many things clicked while I was either idle or
| doing something completely unrelated.
|
| But then applying that insight and playing with it in various
| dimensions is what built an intuition.
| globular-toast wrote:
| If you mean time spent, then yes, about 95% of time spent
| learning is doing. But you're talking about the cost, not the
| benefit. Learning by doing is very inefficient. You gain much
| deeper knowledge, but it can only possibly be in a very narrow
| area. If you spend only 5% of your time
| reading/listening/watching stuff, this more than pays for
| itself. You don't need to have experience programming a network
| stack before knowledge of it becomes useful. For almost
| everyone out there, knowledge is enough.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| It really depends on who you are.
|
| I learned Indonesian more or less from reading an excellent
| grammar book about twenty times over years.
|
| And then I went there, and to my shock, I was able to speak it.
|
| The high point was when I had an argument with people in the
| airport about the amount of airport tax and got them to concede
| they'd done the exchange rate right, all in Indonesian.
|
| I would _not_ recommend that way of learning language to
| anyone, but I just love grammar books, and I had a lot of spare
| time those years.
|
| But I do agree with your point. Heck, I probably would have
| learned faster with a workbook and exercises.
| resonious wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. There's a profound difference between
| how I remember something I've heard and how I remember
| something I've done - even if it's something I've heard through
| spaced repetition.
| pha392 wrote:
| Totally trial and fail
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree, but I can't exactly build a reactor, a SARS variant,
| or the holocene.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| The first two are probably possible if legally dubious.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yeah it's not the same trial-and-error as, say, making a
| basic Rails web app.
| legulere wrote:
| I disagree, if you are just doing you won't be learning new
| things. I work at a place where there a lot of of long-timers
| are there and at that time there were only people that can from
| different fields. Those people work since 10, 20 years without
| even mastering what they do.
|
| If they have to do something new they either give up or just
| try to come up with something on their own. Most of the time
| people have done things like that before and you can just read
| about them or look at their code.
| farhanhubble wrote:
| You're right! I'd say doing is important for actually
| understanding and retaining information while reading is
| important for understanding the triumphs and failures of
| others and "stealing" ideas.
|
| Interspersing the two is perhaps the best way of learning.
| For example you don't want to learn to swim by watching 12,
| hour-long videos on swimming techniques, costumes and its
| history. You do wanna watch a 15 minute instructions video on
| how to get your feet wet and then go ahead and actually get
| your feet wet and then come back and watch the next 15
| minutes of video on how to step into the pool.
| habeebtc wrote:
| Strongly agree. I would always fall asleep in class in college.
|
| Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap
| by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed
| at learning specific new things.
|
| If I sat through talks or presentations I would just
| information dump into a text file which I would data mine
| later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but
| organizing it according to my own thought process helped make
| it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
|
| Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same
| thing.
| [deleted]
| strulovich wrote:
| Interestingly, the author mentions people lose focus after 10-18
| minutes anyhow. So maybe speeding up things gets them more
| information during that initial focus time?
|
| (Other than this silly note, I generally agree with a lot of the
| author's sentiment)
| ckuehne wrote:
| "The assumption is that people can acquire knowledge as if it's a
| substance they can pour into their minds. I call it the Water in
| a Cup method"
|
| In German-speaking countries, there has been a name for it since
| 1647: Nuernberger Trichter
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel
| reificator wrote:
| I've made meaningful progress on things I'm learning by listening
| to podcasts at 3x speed + "Smart Speed". Could I have made more
| progress by listening slower? Maybe, though that's debatable.
| Would I have even started? Absolutely not.
|
| Before I ever found speed controls I'd start listening to
| podcasts and then just give up because it felt so boring and
| slow. "Why would I listen to podcasts or audiobooks when I could
| read them at several times the speed, back up, reread things,
| copy sections into my notes, and skim past the parts I already
| know?" is a common thing I used to say. Podcasts don't have an
| index like a real book, and it's hard to flip back and forth
| between two sections.
|
| Now, I'm not listening to podcasts related to programming,
| despite that being my main profession. I'm listening to a podcast
| about a hobby and one I'd like to improve at, and I'm doing it
| while I work, drive, or otherwise do things that don't demand
| that part of my brain. I'm also not afraid to rewind or slow
| down, particularly if there's a guest on whose voice I'm not
| familiar with.
|
| There are over 600 episodes (maybe 700 by now?) in the backlog of
| the main podcast I'm listening to right now, each between 30
| minutes and 4 hours, with an average around an hour and a half or
| so. That's a lot of audio. I've been listening for months and am
| around 175 or so episodes in. If I was listening at 1x speed then
| this podcast might be a 5 or more year commitment.
|
| If I was studying for a test, maybe I'd slow it down. Maybe I'd
| choose a format like text where available. But this particular
| show is not in lecture format. It's structured as an ongoing
| discussion between people who want to improve at something very
| intricate and ever changing. I'm listening to hear how different
| people approach these situations. So having the speed of the
| conversation be fast enough that I'm not losing the thread of
| what's going on is more important than catching every little
| detail.
|
| I'm listening to hear stories, or for debates between people who
| look at the problems in different ways and want to find holes in
| their own approaches. I'm listening for what people's mindsets
| are like and how their opinions change over time as they gain
| more experience and revisit topics they've covered in the past.
|
| I also listen with the intent of deliberately practicing the
| thing they're talking about, and use that to build up my own
| experience and opinions. For any given topic that comes up on the
| podcast I can typically tell you the stance of each of the hosts
| as well as any guests that were on, and I can tell you whether I
| think their reasoning is sound based on my own attempts. So while
| my listening is passive I actively engage with the content on a
| regular schedule.
| austinl wrote:
| "You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is
| unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you
| wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting
| place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere." -- Seneca
| c. 65 AD
|
| I used to try to read a lot of books, but when I found I couldn't
| discuss them in detail in a conversation or recall their key
| points, I thought, "what is the point?" Now I try to re-read one
| book I thought was meaningful for every new book. I still enjoy
| reading new material, so this is just a rule of thumb. There's a
| ton a value in re-reading things!
| kej wrote:
| > Now I try to re-read one book I thought was meaningful for
| every new book.
|
| As a random piece of trivia, this was C.S. Lewis's rule as
| well: "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to
| allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in
| between."
|
| I think it's a good idea but I struggle to follow it when my
| list of books to read is so much longer then I'll ever
| complete.
| btheshoe wrote:
| I watch my lectures at between 2x(math classes) and 3.5x(business
| classes) speed. Most professors just talk unconscionably slow,
| and done kitties focus in material so basic that I don't really
| have to understand every word.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Listening to audiobooks at 3x speed is born out of a flawed
| model of learning
|
| Also out of a flawed model of writing books which mostly are
| bloat and take hundreds of pages for what could be explained in a
| page or two.
| ghaff wrote:
| I honestly don't think that any decent book can be effectively
| condensed into a page or two. The basic concept maybe but not
| useful background and examples.
|
| That said, it's true that publishing economics tend to force
| books to a minimum length of 250-300 pages. And it's true that
| a lot of business books for example would probably do fine with
| being something in the 100+ page range, i.e. longer than a
| magazine article but shorter than most books.
| adverbly wrote:
| Speeding up is an incredible tool for active consumption. As with
| all tools, you have to know when to use it.
|
| That said, most simple content I consume at 2x. Slower speeds
| waste time and dont provide enough info per sec for me to be
| fully engrossed in a topic.
|
| I make heavy use of slowing down and taking notes and rewinding.
| vmception wrote:
| clickbait.
|
| this has nothing to do with the speed, it has to do with quality
| of information and implementation of it. there are people that
| never absorb anything or implement anything.
|
| I can relate to Mike as well, I was one of those people that
| always had a side project hoping it would magically get big
| enough for me to quit my day job. No book helped with that, what
| did help was that I was at a company that ran out of money and
| eventually let my division off. I was raising capital on my lunch
| breaks and that was inefficient, so I realized that I actually
| didn't need to look for another job for once, and continued
| raising capital full time.
|
| Capital made the next project big enough, and it was non-dilutive
| capital too, which skips any organic side project growth hopes.
|
| So there should actually be more sympathy for the Mikes of the
| world. They are too comfortable, (or perhaps uncomfortable), to
| quit their job no matter what they learn.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" He ... stopped taking the subway to work because the train
| noise made it impossible to hear the audiobook narrators. "_
|
| He should try noise cancelling headphones! Surely one of the
| greatest inventions of the early 21st century.
| khariel wrote:
| It was when riding the subway with my noise-cancelling
| headphones that I realized how good an investment it was. Oh,
| the bliss.
| bluedino wrote:
| Reminds me of my shelf of O'Reilly books.
|
| Each one goes along side with a weekend or week of reading and
| learning. A few of them were something I needed to learn to get
| something done for work. A few more were things I learned for
| personal use.
|
| But the majority of them, I just read because "I might need to
| know more about" something. Building Microservices? Java 3D
| Graphics? Python for Data Analysis?
|
| Read at least a couple chapters of each. Wasted time for sure.
| Nursie wrote:
| > If we embraced the benefits of active learning, our classrooms
| would look nothing like they do today. The average classroom is
| set up for passive listening. It's geared towards consuming
| knowledge, not integrating it. Desks are lined up in punitive
| rows
|
| To play devil's advocate, I learned actively in classrooms that
| looked very much like that. Mathematics, for instance, can be
| taught in such a way that kids at desks which are lined up to
| face the front can be shown a concept and then given exercises in
| which to apply it.
|
| I don't remember school being at all similar to university
| lectures, there was far more interaction with the teacher, and
| far more "now lets take some time to work through examples"
| pha392 wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with passive listening, but it's awful if
| it's the only way to teach
| Nursie wrote:
| Sure, but I don't think that classroom layout dictates that
| passive listening is the teaching method in use, personally.
| One can have the kids facing forward but still be engaging
| them with exercises and active learning.
| polote wrote:
| First, listening 3x is impossible for most content, I almost
| never listen to x1 but I'm very rarely able to go past x2.5.
|
| Also at that speed it is almost impossible to understand complex
| things, so if you listen at x3 or x2 and you never go back or
| reduce the speed to understand specific parts then you are not
| listening.
|
| On Youtube
|
| - Shift+> or Shift+< let you increase or decrease the speed at
| all time
|
| - Left and Right let you go back 15 secondes backwards or
| forwardds
|
| This makes it super easy to skip or speed useless parts and go
| back and slow down usefull ones
|
| Last, people who say they listen to podcasts or videos to learn
| are not learning anything, podcasts or videos are just good ways
| to have a broad understanding of a topic
| trabant00 wrote:
| The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less.
| Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and
| rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even
| take notes if I find something that resonates with me.
|
| Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I
| don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed
| because there's really nothing there.
|
| It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if
| it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple
| times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily
| gained.
|
| If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not
| just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.
| tempestn wrote:
| At 3x, sure. But I regularly listen to podcasts at about
| 1.3-1.4x, depending on how quickly the hosts talk. When you
| actually are paying attention, 1x can just be really slow
| sometimes. I think of it more like bringing it to a comfortable
| speed where I don't feel like I have to wait for them to get on
| with it, than trying to speed through it as quickly as
| possible. I, too, will sometimes pause to think (or talk) about
| what I've just heard though, so perhaps by your metric I'm at
| less than 1x on average too...
| Aromasin wrote:
| This is my issue also. I'm guilty of being a 2x'er, not
| because I believe I'll absorb more information faster, but
| because I find most narrators/podcast hosts tend to slow down
| their speech significantly when recording something for
| consumption. Be it because their reading speed is worse than
| their talking speed, or that they think they need to for
| effect like some 1940's Trans-Atlantic radio host, I find it
| painful to listen to most of the time.
| porker wrote:
| > The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even
| less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by
| pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been
| said and even take notes if I find something that resonates
| with me
|
| Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking
| information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found
| the ones to keep my interest yet.
| sandgiant wrote:
| Psychology in Seattle has some excellent well researched
| content. It has very concretely changed or modified my
| perspectives on relationships, parenthood and mental illness.
|
| The "deep dives" are definitely the best.
| alexanderchr wrote:
| Sean Carrol's mindscape sometimes can be very good.
| alexfoxgill wrote:
| +1, i also like Sam Harris's Making Sense which is a little
| more pompous but still interesting
| trabant00 wrote:
| "The History of Rome" and "Philosophize This". I finished
| them both in a superficial way, while driving on my daily
| commute. Now I listen to them in my spare time and try to
| really dig deep, take notes and read the original material on
| topics that resonate to me. After I finish them again this
| way I will search for something of similar quality.
| "Revolutions" seems to be it.
| Errancer wrote:
| I highly recommend "History of philosophy without any
| gaps".
| sofixa wrote:
| I'm currently listening to the end of the Russian
| Revolutions part of the Revolutions podcast (the last one),
| and I'm quite happy with the quality and depth, i recommend
| it heartily. I had a decent understanding of the subject
| matter from generic history knowledge and The Great War
| series on YouTube ( which i also recommend!) and there was
| still a whole lot i learned. I do listen it on 1.1x
| however, the normal speed is a bit slow for me ( and
| slightly overflows the slot I've alloted for podcasts).
| aspyct wrote:
| Oh, the history of Rome. Don't know about this particular
| podcast, but the history is absolutely amazing and 1000%
| worth reading/listening about.
|
| I've always hated history lessons at school. But the
| history of Rome was amazing! Good teacher too. I guess it
| was the audiobook of the time :D
| the-alt-one wrote:
| Tides of History, In Our Time, Revolutions, Stronger by
| Science.
|
| I like finding and listening to lectures on Apple podcasts
| too, like Zizek.
| kreetx wrote:
| You don't need a plugin to increase/decrease speed, the following
| bookmarklet works for most sites to increase speed by 10%:
|
| javascript:(function(){ let speed
| =[...document.querySelectorAll('audio,video')].filter(v =>
| v.currentTime > 0)[0].playbackRate += .10; console.log('media
| speed', speed); })()
| allenu wrote:
| I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too much
| time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think it's a
| blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up being an
| excuse to not complete things. There's always something else that
| you "need to know" that blocks you.
|
| Nowadays, I realize that it feels good to learn new things, but
| if it's not in service of an actual "deliverable" of some sort, I
| don't end up using it.
|
| More recently I've gone the other way and just try to do and make
| things, even if I don't have an exact plan on how I'm going to do
| it. It ends up focusing my learning as well. Plus I'm actually
| more productive since I'm always focused on producing something
| as opposed to focusing on planning to produce something.
| VMtest wrote:
| Anyone can choose to learn new things or not
|
| Until the management starts asking what are the pros and cons
| of new tools to be introduced into the stack and nobody can
| answer them, they will hire new experts to join the company and
| who knows who else is going to be obsolete anyway
| klabb3 wrote:
| > I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too
| much time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think
| it's a blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up
| being an excuse to not complete things. There's always
| something else that you "need to know" that blocks you.
|
| I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do
| and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and
| striving for perfection, often upfront.
|
| I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out
| of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a
| better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find
| it"?
| qaid wrote:
| I will take a stab at this since I am transitioning away from
| this mindset myself.
|
| Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on
| each task, one at a time.
|
| If it's not critical, let go of control and be okay failure,
| both from yourself and others.
|
| Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate
| some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well,
| what didn't go well, what could have improved) and use those
| to come up with action items.
|
| Or, if that's too much, my original advice for you was "just
| do it."
| allenu wrote:
| To me, a big part of my mental shift was just realizing how
| much code or process I follow doesn't actually deliver
| customer value. I want to make things that affect people or
| improve lives and the longer I spend polishing what I'm
| making, the less I'm getting feedback.
|
| I used to work in a large company on a team that essentially
| developed frameworks for other teams to use. I would often
| think through designs from several different angles and try
| to create an API that could work in any scenario. After
| shipping our frameworks, I often found that the "customer"
| (i.e. the other team) would use what I made in a different
| way from what I had expected. That meant a lot of the
| thinking I poured into the project was unnecessary. I really
| just had to look at that one particular use case and design
| for that.
|
| After a while I started working backwards and went directly
| in the customer team's codebase to start integrating
| potential API designs to ensure it would work for their use
| case. That saved a ton of guesswork and eliminated a lot of
| code waste.
|
| So I guess my advice is to question everything you work on
| and ask if there's a simpler/cheaper way to build just what
| you need. I usually aim for creating a proof of concept now
| to ensure that I only build what I need. It often means
| hacking things to make it work, and then afterwards clean up
| the hacks, but to be honest, a lot of hacks are good enough,
| if they are isolated. Also, try to develop a mindset of
| always aiming to deliver an output to ensure you don't get
| bogged down with analysis paralysis.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| The optimal speed very much content and goal dependent. Some
| narrators just speak slowly, some books are very information
| dense, and are you trying to memorise the entire book or just
| pick out a few points?
| elil17 wrote:
| Listening at 3x speed and concentrating deeply on the material
| =\= listening at 3x speed while trying to multitask
|
| Most informative content is, I have observed, fairly slow and
| repetitious. This is a good way to produce content because it is
| fair to assume that most people will not be fully mentally
| engaged in what you're trying to tell them. That's not a bad
| thing - your audience may simply not understand the importance of
| what you're trying to say until they've heard it once). However,
| viewers who want to fully engage with content may find themselves
| having trouble concentrating due to the slow speed of
| information.
|
| Personally, I use 1x for most entertainment and for informative
| material if I'm doing some other activity like chores or driving,
| 2x for entertainment content which has a lot of fluff (e.g.
| pretty much everything on YouTube these days), and 2.5x for
| informative content which I am giving my full attention to
| (although I often pause to consider what's been said or rewind to
| rewatch a dense portion of the content at a slower speed). That's
| a pretty good balance for me.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Reminds me of college - where you'd try to find ways to cram 4
| months of lectures into 4 days. Unless you're on ADHD meds,
| studying 20 hours a day with laser focus, the next thing would be
| to take in as much information as possible...which included
| speeding up videos.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Most of this isn't really about the speed, it's against rushing
| your way through as many pieces of content as possible.
|
| If you decide a number of books per month up front, the question
| of how fast to read each one looks very different. Slowing down
| your first read will help retention to a point, but if you spend
| less time on the first read then you can do more spaced
| repetition later. Or if you read everything twice as fast, you
| could use the time you gain to work on projects.
|
| And while the optimal first time speed probably isn't 3.0x, we
| definitely shouldn't assume it's 1.0x.
| nabla9 wrote:
| >Despite all the information he's sped through his ear, he's
| never actually built anything. "Someday," he insists. "Right now,
| I'm still learning."
|
| It's similar to political hobbyism, by consuming politics as if
| it's a sport or a hobby. Following politics obsessively without
| ever engaging. Being well informed and knowing details but never
| using them in action except voting.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Wow, the article is describing me... although instead of podcasts
| I read books (not many, like at most 15-20 per year). But over
| the years, even if "True learning requires contemplation" (which
| I agree with), I have found out that I indeed have gained quite a
| lot of knowledge and nowadays the time I spent reading is paying
| off (i.e., I'm good enough at a job that pays well that I don't
| have to spent the official 40h/week, but instead I spent like
| half of it).
|
| > Mike is so busy preparing for the future that he never steps
| into it.
|
| This is what scares me because, again, it rings true. But some
| part of me thinks "You need to prepare yourself for the future!
| Whatever that future is!", so for me that preparation usually
| means "get more knowledge and get a better paycheck to have
| enough money to not depend on a company or government to live
| decently... or build something for yourself and found your own
| company". That's my paradox: either I relax a bit in the present
| and risk my (unknown) future, or I risk my present to allow me to
| be a bit more relaxed in the (unknown) future. I try to balance
| it, but it's hard.
| another_story wrote:
| Something I noticed is a lot of people replying are focused on
| the playback speed, and then defending their choice of faster
| playback speed, all why missing 80% of the article which had
| nothing really to do with how fast you watch videos.
| terafo wrote:
| Because author chose to make it the main point of the article.
| And the fact that half of the article has nothing to do with
| the main point just shows that it's badly written.
| jldugger wrote:
| Counterargument: most of the things you can consume at 3x speed
| are not worth remembering long term. For example, every day the
| APM: Marketplace podcast recites the returns on specific induces
| for the day. It can help put context to stories in other
| segments, but I have no need to retain it for more than an hour,
| if ever. And in general, the relevance of news rapidly decays; I
| forget where I read it (the irony!) but if you imagine a
| newspaper that only published once a month, it would have
| different headlines than one that published daily, and different
| again from one that published annually. In that context, speeding
| up news podcasts makes a bit of sense. You don't need to remember
| it long term, just long enough for this week's watercooler
| conversations to jog your memory until it disappears completely.
|
| In contrast, books I read by myself, at a relatively slow pace. I
| focus on timeless books, that teach knowledge or skill that I can
| apply on the job. The pace will vary depending on the type of
| book; the last university textbook I studied took me about 10
| pages a hour (including all the problems). For a pop sci book, I
| can do about a chapter an hour. I try not to spend more than an
| hour block on this, for the spaced repetition effects mentioned.
| Moreover, I typically try to get at least one Anki card per
| chapter (textbooks usually a dozen per chapter). I can't imagine
| trying to retain anything at 3x speed, especially the
| mathematical tomes I focus on.
|
| But I'm pretty sure most people can up their podcasts to 1.2x
| without even noticing. Most content is recorded at a leisurely
| pace, both because it's easier to pronounce clearly, and to
| accommodate non-native speakers. But it's not always about
| efficiency. For comedy podcasts, I set the rate to 1x, because
| the point is to enjoy it and as they say, timing is the essence
| of comedy.
| gibolt wrote:
| I am one of these people. I regularly watch movies, TV, and
| YouTube at 3-4x (with subtitles, if available).
|
| It is easy to forget several of the 4 movies I watch in a 2 hour
| period, but I have a watched list, and could remember any detail
| once I have the reference to latch onto.
|
| Worst case, I could watch any piece of content 3 times before a
| 'normal' finishes it once.
|
| For any thing confusing, double-tap back 10 seconds, slow down to
| 2x, and rewatch a few times if needed.
| moab wrote:
| Your post reminded me of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U This is fantastic
| satire :-)
| dgellow wrote:
| Wow, you do this for movies too? By speeding up that much
| you're completely changing the movie experience. Changing the
| pacing of a scene dramatically change it's tone.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I too fall into the trap of listening to things on sped up. But
| is it 2x speed and YouTube. Anything that I'm actually trying to
| learn ilI will slow down and rewatch. But there is so many crappy
| videos on YouTube I feel compelled to watch most of it on 2x
| speed to find the good ones.
|
| And unfortunately this habit gets strengthened, because plenty of
| people thing you are knowledgeable when you can pull out random
| bits of trivia you learned in YouTube videos, or are grateful
| when you can reference a YouTube video to them on a topic they
| are interested in.
| BrazzVuvuzela wrote:
| TTS ebooks at 500-600wpm is easy for me, though I usually top out
| at 2.5x for audiobooks. I'm not sure what the conversion factor
| between those is, but TTS is definitely faster.
| afterburner wrote:
| What if you remove Mike's conceit that he will "build" something?
| Then he's just learning for fun.
| celeduc wrote:
| Mike's "friend" is awfully judgemental.
| simion314 wrote:
| I would suggest that it might depend, "right speed for the job" ,
| I use TTS(text to speech" all the time with a large speed,
| regular people will not understand what it is spoken but for me
| is fine, I can read a news article like this one without no
| downsides versus someone that uses his eyes and reads at normal
| speed or someone that listens the TTS at regular speed and with
| some natural sounding voice.
|
| What if the 1X is a limitation of our vocals, we could maybe lose
| our air if we would speak much faster, if someone would like to
| do some sicence on this I suggest finding people with
| disabilities that use TTS technology and try to get some numbers.
|
| I personally don't use faster speed for the reason to listen to
| twice as mch content but probably to finish it faster. I
| listen/watch youtube at regular speed since I use this videos for
| entertaining and I did not consider to speed them up, though for
| audio books the app had a big speed button so I used it mostly at
| 1.5X
| quantum_state wrote:
| 3x turns a brain into a hard drive, a very dumb idea!
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| tptacek wrote:
| Whatever you can say about listening to a sped-up audiobook, you
| can say about casually reading (or, as most people who don't nerd
| out about the theory of learning would put it, "reading"), so the
| framing of this around audiobooks seems pretty weird. Obviously,
| you don't master a subject by casually reading a book about it
| --- that's not really the premise of reading.
| muzani wrote:
| I find myself listening to recipe videos at max speed while
| Aristotle is practically at half speed. Some things are so
| information dense that you need to go over parts a few times.
|
| If you're listening to something at 3x speed, maybe it's a hint
| to be reading harder books?
|
| An exception might be something like a history book. The 48 Laws
| of Power doesn't make sense if you just read the summary, but the
| stories themselves are very easy to read.
|
| A lot of good books are very information dense though, where you
| have to stop after a few sentences and search for the meaning
| (internally or externally). Even for a good novel... sometimes
| you have to set it aside and lie down and stare at the ceiling
| for a moment.
| antognini wrote:
| A year ago a friend encouraged me to start a podcast about the
| history of astronomy [0]. Talking to people who have listened to
| the podcast has been really eye-opening about the difference in
| comprehension/absorption between creating a podcast vs. listening
| to it.
|
| I would notice that other podcasters in the "History of..." genre
| would sometimes say things like "you might remember we talked
| about such-and-such related thing in Episode 43..." and I would
| always think "how do they remember that they mentioned this
| particular detail dozens of episodes back?" But as I've started
| writing a podcast, I've found that it's a lot easier than I
| thought it would be. When you're writing the material vs.
| passively listening to it, you just have a much more intimate
| memory of everything you've said and it's easy to make
| connections across the different episodes.
|
| I try to write the episodes to at have a few big points that I
| repeat throughout so that even someone passively listening will
| get the main message. But even still when I talk to people, they
| seem to have enjoyed it, but have a hard time remembering even
| some of the basic ideas. And I notice this with myself, too, when
| I listen to podcasts. Sometimes I'll be talking to someone and be
| reminded of some related story I heard in a podcast at one point,
| but when I try to recall the details, they're just not there.
|
| So, even though I was certainly aware of it intellectually, I
| know have a much more visceral appreciation for the fact tha if
| you want to learn something deeply, there's really no substitute
| for doing some creative work on the subject.
|
| [0]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about
| rsanheim wrote:
| This makes total sense. Whenever I've given a talk on a
| subject, I end up learning it much better than before, and
| these are topics I'm supposed to know quite a bit about =).
|
| The act of teaching or explaining something really helps you to
| see the subject in a new way and understand it in new and
| deeper ways. Probably one reason that good pair-programming
| helps everyone involved, even if its a much more senior person
| paired with someone with less experience.
| geuis wrote:
| Just subscribed. I'd recommend putting your RSS feed link
| higher up near the top.
| antognini wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that!
| makach wrote:
| I listen to some podcast at 1.5x 2x the speed because I think
| some speak extremely slow. Also, helps consuming interesting
| content in less time.
|
| When I skim over documents, information, I usually add to
| existing knowledge and it is easier to mentally TAG the what it
| is I need to learn. When I need to use this knowledge at least I
| know where to look, search or whom to ask if I need to dig into
| the material, and when I do - it is a slow process.
|
| When I want to learn something, I need to sit down and slow
| everything down. It is very important to me that I take detailed
| notes and discuss the content.
|
| I've been told that our memory has two modes; short term and long
| term. If you want to remember something you need to work getting
| it from short term memory and into the long time memory - and in
| order to do that you must iterate many times of the content you
| are trying to learn.
| novok wrote:
| Although I realize the article is about actually learning vs.
| skimming info, something I've realized about "2x" speed on videos
| is really just matching my natural rate of reading, and I speed
| up / slow down depending on the speed of the speaker itself.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| Perhaps if you didn't worry about reading so much, you could
| write more. Than you would have more essays about how you write
| so much, eh David?
| mattlondon wrote:
| I do 2x speed wherever I can.
|
| The benefit I find is I actually have to concentrate to pay
| attention, rather than at 1x speed some people talk so slowly my
| mind starts wandering as they slowly come around to actually
| making their point and before I know it I am replying to emails
| and ignoring the video.
|
| I generally find it harder to be distracted like that at 2x...
| Although after years I think I am a bit accustomed so might seek
| out that 3x extension (although I guess it won't work on our
| internal recorded sessions at work :( )
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Some people ie. Yaron Minsky are joy to listen, speeding up would
| feel like speeding up your favourite movie.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I feel like participating in a community, whether IRL or
| something like HN or reddit, exposes individuals to a set of
| memes on a repeated basis. Certain ideas get repeated at
| different times or in different contexts, and as a result tend to
| engrain themselves. A form of naturally occurring spaced
| repetition.
|
| One of the things that I like about HN is that these memes feel
| higher quality or more useful in some way. This can be in the
| form of coding philosophy (which could arguably just be the
| distillation of ideas from books large parts of the community
| have read like Clean Code or the GoF or the design of everyday
| things), or more general life philosophy (spaced repetition and
| this article's idea about, essentially, Slowing Down).
|
| Of course, this is probably how group think and social bubbles
| form, and exposure to new ideas can ideally shift the memescape.
| But it's interesting how my HN addiction results in this learning
| by osmosis.
|
| Although then This makes me think about advertising, in the
| branding sense, and how that repetition is used and abused to
| build familiarity with a brand and thus a product. Or how pop
| culture ends up being a sort of self-replicating meme.
| manigandham wrote:
| This is an incredible verbose article just to say that which we
| already know: quality of learning is more important than
| quantity; and focus, engagement, interest are all important
| context in addition to the raw speed of consumption.
|
| Ironically, jumping past so much filler is one of the main
| reasons for faster speeds.
| [deleted]
| shauntrennery wrote:
| I used https://speechify.com to listen to the post at 500wpm. It
| felt like the article was speaking directly to me.
| Zababa wrote:
| > The smartest people I've met reject the "Water in a Cup"
| theory. They focus less on consuming as much information as
| possible and more on cultivating the deepest possible
| understanding of the ideas that resonate with them most.
|
| There's a letter by Seneca that I think about a lot, called "On
| discursiveness in reading" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_
| letters_to_Lucilius/Let...):
|
| > Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and
| books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady.
| You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and
| digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win
| firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person
| spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many
| acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true
| of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but
| visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.
|
| > Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it
| leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure
| so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when
| one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved
| can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it
| can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of
| many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all
| the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as
| many books as you can read.
|
| I've personally found that when I spend more time with something,
| I get more out of it. For example, rereading books or rewatching
| movies. That's also a great way to separate the wheat from the
| chaff: if after the first time something starts feeling shallow,
| it's probably not worth keeping around.
| pha392 wrote:
| Probably any 60 minute video can be converted without loss of
| information in a 10 minute one.
|
| I understand that learning and retention are achieved through
| repetition, but repetition can be achieved in other ways.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Learning isn't water in a cup but in the other hand youtube and
| podcasts are so full of fluff that 3x makes a lot of sense.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| It isn't just that the absorption is poor. It's that the things
| you're absorbing are also generally poor. That's why you can
| listen to them at 3x in the first place, low information density.
| Febra33 wrote:
| Besides the fact that this is _extremely_ subjective and comes to
| each person 's own ability, I hate when articles try to introduce
| one of these cute oversimplified and exaggerated stories so that
| they can prove a point. Literally shifting the perspective so
| that the author can have the higher ground.
| arendtio wrote:
| The headline of the post misses the point. The problem the author
| describes, revolves around active vs. passive learning and the
| '3x Speed' part is just part of what he refers to as passive
| learning.
|
| I completely agree, that passive learning is what happens in many
| western classrooms and that active learning is a lot more
| valuable.
|
| However, listening to books or videos at 3x the normal speed is
| nothing I would condemn, because IMO it depends on the source
| material. Some audiobooks/videos are so slow that it is hard to
| keep the focus at normal speed. Consuming them at higher speeds
| keeps me from drifting to other topics. So I think the discussion
| about the speed doesn't lead anywhere. That said, I don't use 3x
| speed. Sometimes, I consume videos at 2x speed and I tend to keep
| audiobooks at 1x speed, because I like to consume them as
| secondary activities e.g. while driving. Certainly not the most
| effective way to consume the content, but I like it and it fits
| into my daily habits.
|
| I think the discussion should be about active/practical/self-
| directed learning vs. pure consumption of material, because this
| is what makes a difference.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Unfortunate title, because the most practical insight is that you
| don't learn much by letting information wash over you. You need
| to repeat, engage with the data, do things with it.
| ausbah wrote:
| like others have said about other commentes, the point isn't so
| much on consuming podcasts, audio books, or whatever faster -
| it's about how if that's the only thing you do, you won't end up
| actually learning anything
| plank wrote:
| Reading many of the comments, it seems most agree that listening
| at a factor>1 is better. As a fast reader (books, not audio nor
| video, never really tried that myself) I wonder how this can be
| understood with the 'common knowledge' that when speaking
| (presenting) one should slow down. E.g., let those meaningful
| pauses endure.
| ghaff wrote:
| You probably get an overrepresentation here of people for whom
| it's all about maximizing information density. Personally, if
| that's my objective unless it is a case of a photo (or video)
| being worth a thousand words, reading is mostly better.
|
| With respect to conferences presentations, I'm mostly a fan of
| shorter (<30 minute) presentations. If something piques my
| interest, I'll track it down afterwards at my own pace.
| some1else wrote:
| Not all speakers talk at the same rate and with the same
| information density. Some forms of content aren't worth listening
| to at the default playback rate.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > Though you can pick up the gist pretty fast, relationships need
| time to blossom.
|
| a lot of the arguments make me think of two different approaches
| to a task: breadth-first v.s. depth-first. for most tasks, you
| almost always want a balance of the two. in general, when you're
| young you explore the breadth of relationships; and after a time
| you understand which aspects are most important to you, and you
| pursue the depth of a smaller set of relationships.
|
| now there's a lot of surface-level media out there. the kind that
| tells you _about_ some thing without _explaining_ it. you might
| listen to a broad overview about current topics in electrical
| engineering. by doing so, you learn _about_ the avenues available
| to you and then later you go and do a deep dive into the
| _specific_ avenue you want.
|
| > The world rewards people who develop expertise in a specific
| subject.
|
| indeed (modulo that your "specific subject" could just as well be
| a niche _blend_ of classical subjects). pushing the envelope
| requires a deep approach to learning -- the version where you
| listen at 1x, pause, and then draw new conclusions /connections
| that even the author missed. but if you're still in the earlier,
| discovery phase of your growth? then what you really want is the
| 3x speed, breadth-first overviews.
|
| not all information is equally valuable. if, by using 3x speed,
| you can more quickly locate the areas of study which are highly
| valuable to you at the expense of failing to integrate a bunch of
| information that is of low value to you, that can be a fair
| tradeoff. understand the tradeoffs; be explicit.
| moron4hire wrote:
| The learning lock-in thing is something I've coached several
| people through, for both software and literature projects. I've
| found a very effective tool in getting them out of the lock-in:
| make a wager with them.
|
| I place a bet of $100 that they won't finish a small project in
| the next month. The project can be anything. It can be the
| smallest thing. But they have to finish it and release it in a
| predetermined, legitimate release channel (app store, website,
| self-publish on Amazon, whatever).
|
| I've found a lot of people's lock-in comes from a fear of the
| unknown, of not knowing all the steps to get from 0 to finished,
| and focusing all of their time on the parts they do understand.
| They rationaliz the delaying of learning about the others as
| being pointless until they have the beginning parts "perfect".
| The bet forces them to make their comfort zone the smallest part
| of their project.
|
| You can do it with yourself, too. Make a wager with yourself that
| you won't buy that new toy or have a drink or watch another movie
| until you finish a small project, completely, with a real
| release. You definitely need to time-box it, or you'll quit once
| you decide you'll "never" finish. And you need to setup a
| negative consequence: maybe get a friend to hold some money in
| escrow, or schedule a donation to an organization you hate that
| you can cancel when your project is complete.
|
| Every person I've coached in this way eventually developed a
| habit of releasing projects. It turns out people grossly over
| estimate the difficulty of releasing a project. Once you force
| them through it, it's no longer a scary unknown and it becomes a
| lot easier to "begin with end in mind".
| joshuakarl wrote:
| For me, playback speed options is not about controlling "speed"
| but more about controlling the density of information, which
| varies a lot from content to content. When I listen to a very
| technical conference, I always keep x1 or even x0.75 but
| sometimes with a podcast with a low information output, I process
| everything at x2.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I don't listen to podcasts and couldn't make one, because without
| non-verbal cues from my audience I can't adjust my speech to keep
| them engaged.
|
| It's like with this vampire who is familiar with mobile phones,
| but finds it weird that anyone would want to have a conversation
| without registering the other person's scent and feeling their
| heartbeat.
|
| I see why people listen at 3x - too many podacsters seem to be
| enamoured with their own voice to a point where they add
| irrelevant stuff like my vampire bit here. But while you can skip
| this in text, it's not easy to do when listening.
|
| I don't think that on average they actually lose anything because
| of that, since the conversation is one-sided anyway. They
| wouldn't have retained more had they listened to it at 1x speed.
|
| As for trying to consume as much literature as possible and
| feeling inadequate: this is a problem as old as printed press,
| for which there is no real solution aside from managing
| expectations.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I agree with the article's points about active learning and
| retention. I also agree that certain speed multipliers can become
| aspirational due to social media FOMO. However, most audio is
| listened to for entertainment or to pick out certain topics or
| keywords for closer listening. Tuning the speed helps with both
| of those goals. Depending on the listener, entertainment might be
| set at 1-1.5x with skipped silences. Scanning ranges higher, up
| to the cited 3x in some players.
| buybackoff wrote:
| Just last Friday I had to google how to increase YouTube speed
| above 2x. Found quick and dirty solution:
| `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3` in a
| browser console. Some people are just impossible to listen to due
| to their slow pace. In my case, it was possible to understand at
| 5x and quite comfortable at 3.5x.
| amonroe0805 wrote:
| I've felt since college that lectures are best likened to
| meetings, with all of the usual criticisms. If a lecture is
| merely a monologue of prepared information (usually available in
| the textbook anyways), the same "Why couldn't this have been an
| email?" concept applies.
|
| There are _legitimate_ reasons to pulling everyone into the same
| room at the same time to learn something, and those reasons
| almost entirely include frequent and direct interaction between
| the attendees.
|
| The value of the classroom is that you are surrounded by
| individuals who are all ostensibly trying to learn the same thing
| as you, with a similar current amount of knowledge, all the while
| having immediate access to a bone fide expert in the topic. I
| would suggest that this is an obviously great setup for learning!
| It's a shame to see it so often squandered by having a glorified
| textbook read-along session instead of genuine curious
| discussion.
|
| Great quote from the article: "A lecture has been well described
| as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes
| of the student without passing through the mind of either."
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| There are three kinds of learning
|
| - new contextual framework (There is no god, armies used to be
| retinues of retinues)
|
| - new skills (make fire from sticks, algebra and calculus)
|
| - new information (Henry V won at agincourt)
|
| The big important ones are the contextual frameworks. Without
| them humanity and individual humans are just floundering. And if
| there is any big political divide it's because people are not in
| same contextual framework (eg Brexit)
|
| Skills are how an individual can contribute inside that framework
| - and it needs practise. And information is the last. The
| strawman the author is moaning about is absorbing information
| without practise. This seems to be the failure to leap from
| podcast to khan academy.
|
| solving that one for millions of people will be an incredible
| leap. So far we only have "my tutor moans at me if i don't"
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| You make a fire with algebra and calculus because your brain
| overheats, right?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Darn that transitive comma...
| netcan wrote:
| Precisely.
|
| OP has his finger in some of the right places, but is overly
| broad about both learning methods and objects. If you're
| listening to conference keynotes @ 3X... that might be fine. A
| tutorial probably requires multiple listens, rewinds, a
| transcript and some DIY work.
| trees101 wrote:
| Im interested in your categorisation of learning. Can you
| elaborate on "contextual framework"? Are these your own
| concepts, if not where do you get them from?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Oh I see what you mean - plucked randomly from my own
| synapses
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human
| found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more
| intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed
| with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not
| know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ
| theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about
| writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or
| surveying, or maps.
|
| But we do because you understood the above conceptual
| frameworks.
|
| Germ theory is not a _fact_ , like who won the battle of
| Crecy. It is a whole ever-expanding concept that with it in
| place in your head, can guide your future actions. Similarly
| atheism, or logistics, or factory method or steam power ...
| trees101 wrote:
| Interesting. So perhaps another term for "contextual
| framework" is "mental model"? I like the way you've thought
| about this. I don't share your atheism, but without wanting
| to start a debate it would be interesting to hear why it
| features on your list as one of your most useful concepts?
| throwanem wrote:
| 3x speed mistakes form for substance and wastes time besides,
| because podcasts are much more for fun than self-improvement.
|
| Let's be honest with ourselves here: no one listening to a
| podcast is ever _just_ listening to a podcast. You 're running or
| driving or doing the laundry or working out or working or walking
| the dog, so in terms of learning it's more than anything like
| hypnopaedia [1], which doesn't work. You're not really engaging
| with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because
| it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio
| shows for since radio shows were invented.
|
| That's not to say podcasts can't _also_ be useful in the
| instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you 've got a good
| memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide
| fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the
| kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just
| finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of
| the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.
|
| Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can
| "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games
| from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at
| least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your _own_
| story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it.
| Believe it or not, that 's allowed too.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning
| TomSwirly wrote:
| I never understood why I never listened to podcasts. But you
| explained it to me - I hate doing two things at once, because
| it means I do them both badly.
| throwanem wrote:
| It depends a lot on the primary thing. One rarely needs much
| in the way of deep focus to fold laundry or do dishes or
| clean a bathroom, after all, and some light entertainment
| makes these tasks go by noticeably faster and more pleasantly
| than they do in its absence.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| I find that if I do that, I take twice as long.
|
| Music doesn't get me in my way, though.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Who says the 1x is the optimal speed to consume any information?
| Why stop there? Perhaps half, or even a quarter, would be better?
| Of course blowing through information as fast as possible doesn't
| do any good if you can't retain it, but I find it hard to believe
| that all the information out there is ideally paced for every
| listener.
|
| I've actually found that sometimes I will be watching a lecture
| at 2x for a lot of it and then want to drop down to regular speed
| for certain trickier parts.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| that obviously isn't the authors point. The gist of the article
| is that treating the human mind like a hard-drive and trying to
| shove as much information into it, sort of like binge drinking,
| isn't a replacement for creativity, originality and
| contemplation, which is what genuine learning entails.
|
| And as far as speed goes, "1x" is the normal conversational
| speed we've been interacting at for many millennia, and
| regardless how fast you tune the podcast app, your brain likely
| hasn't evolved to follow a lecture at sonic speed.
|
| I actually think deliberately slowing down, if not in literal
| speed but at least by re-reading or re-listening is a skill
| more people should practice. More attention to what's already
| there and less attention scattered on novelty is an underrated
| ability. Think of it like this, if you want to be a great
| classical musician, you could study the same few Bach pieces
| for decades and you wouldn't stop learning. How bizarre is it
| to think you actually need to ingest hours of new information
| every week?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Except that there is no "standard speed" for speech, let
| alone one that we've been using across cultures and languages
| for "millennia." People speak at different speeds depending
| on many factors from personal idiosyncrasies to emotions to a
| desire to hit a specific timing (it's not an accident that
| radio presenters get exactly the same time every time; they
| modulate the speed at which they are reading depending on the
| density of the information they have to deliver). Lectures,
| in particular, are often intentionally delivered in an
| unnaturally slow pace, which makes sense for maximizing
| comprehension, but means the pace may be very, very slow for
| someone who wishes to review mostly-familiar material. The
| idea that it's _impossible_ to follow a lecture sped-up under
| any circumstances is just not at all in accord with my
| experience.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| > The gist of the article is that treating the human mind
| like a hard-drive and trying to shove as much information
| into it, sort of like binge drinking, isn't a replacement for
| creativity, originality and contemplation
|
| It isn't, but sometimes to get to the point where you can be
| creative and original you need to have a bunch of boring
| information stored away in your hard drive as a prerequisite.
| colanderman wrote:
| > And as far as speed goes, "1x" is the normal conversational
| speed we've been interacting at for many millennia, and
| regardless how fast you tune the podcast app, your brain
| likely hasn't evolved to follow a lecture at sonic speed.
|
| In normal conversation, people speak in far too slowly for
| me, myself included at times. They will spend an entire
| sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the
| first word, gesture, or even length of pause.
|
| Just because it's the optimal speech _production_ rate for
| _many_ people, doesn 't mean it's the optimal speech
| _consumption_ rate for _all_ people.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to
| what they conveyed with the first word
|
| It might actually be worth considering if that's the result
| of people truly adding nothing, or if it's the result of
| not being attentive enough to how others communicate, and
| what they communicate. People pause for good reasons and
| they repeat themselves for good reasons that aren't always
| obvious. It takes time to mull over speech, and there is
| detail in speech that is not going to become apparent when
| someone thinks of a lecture or a book as just a means to
| 'consume information'.
|
| In a sense true understanding always requires reproduction.
| People will think the lectures they attend are slow, yet
| they retain not even 20%. Because they do not know what
| they miss until they themselves reproduce it. It's even
| very questionable to think that something can be 'consumed'
| faster than it can be produced if the goal is genuine
| learning. You could read a book like SICP quickly and think
| you 'got all the information', but to actually learn
| everything that Sussman and Abelson put into it you
| probably need to work on it as long as it took them to
| write it.
| colanderman wrote:
| If I can predict exactly which words someone is about to
| say, the words add no information for me. Maybe they are
| there due to the confines of grammar, or maybe they are
| useful to other listeners, but they are not useful to
| _me_ , and I can afford to speed through them. I will
| pause and replay if I was wrong.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| I am also a logical automaton robot. I have no emotions.
| I only listen to words that are useful to me and I use
| predictions to increase my efficiency.
|
| My IQ is 250. I am an android built on the planet Zweebs.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I always hated school and I just recently realized why. When I
| could pay attention everything felt wayy too slow for me. But
| when I couldn't pay attention I'd miss critical information in
| what felt like seconds
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _But when I couldn 't pay attention I'd miss critical
| information in what felt like seconds_
|
| Time flies when you're having fun! It's also why we always
| hear "It just came out of nowhere! It all happened so fast!"
| when referring to automobile accidents. It's because our
| attention was not where it should have been.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I'm not sure your first sentence really hits the mark. Not
| paying attention in class isn't really "having fun" :P
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah, best I've seen is 2x and that was with a very slow speaking
| lecturer.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I'd love for all videos to have a "linked transcript" enabling
| the user to text search the transcript, then quickly seek the
| video to a particular statement.
|
| That way, I'd be able to skim read and "dip into" long lecture-
| style videos to extract targeted information.
|
| Since YouTube has captions on most videos, the data is available
| but I don't know of any apps that do this.
| tomrod wrote:
| I used to be a "Mike" type. I realized I wanted to have impact --
| that being a "consumer" of everything of boring.
|
| I've since built and delivered a lot of things, some even
| meaningful, and for myself it gives me stories to tell.
|
| The other side of things, Productivity Porn, is another meme that
| is seductive but unfulfilling in my opinion!
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Speeding up playback buys you a small gain, but 2x or 3x is an
| absolute upper limit in most cases. And yes, retention suffers.
|
| It's not that I don't bump up speed in some cases, though it's
| not all. I also slow down, or replay (sometimes many times)
| especially good marterial.
|
| (Or especially confusing material, which often proves not to be
| especially good.)
|
| But ...
|
| ... the real gains aren't to be had in playing media at 2x or 3x
| realtime. It's in selecting sources which afford 10x, or 100x, or
| 1000x utility in information. Sturgeon's Law applies, there's far
| more content created (in any format: text, images, audio, video,
| data, software) than any one person could hope to attend to in
| 15,000 lifetimes.[1] Probably significantly more.
|
| Instead, one should recognise one's own limits of information
| exposure, goals in aquiring knowledge, and the available sources,
| and seek out at least _higher quality_ sources amongst those
| available. These needn 't _necessarily_ be based strictly on
| truth value --- there 's merit in reading discredited philosophy,
| mythologies, religion, and even perhaps for some, fiction and
| poetry.[2] Particularly such works as are of cultural
| significance, or which might help one achieve inner balance or
| simple amusement.
|
| But listening to crap at 3x speed ... is not true efficiency.
|
| It doesn't look as if anyone's mentioned Mortimer J. Adler's _How
| to Read a Book_ yet. I 'd strongly recommend reading it, quickly
| or slowly, and incorporating the lessons it offers for how, and
| what, to read.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Not a number pulled from /dev/ass, for what it's worth, but at
| least a rough approximation. If a truly dedicated scholar might
| read 10,000 books over a dilligent lifetime, that's 167 books a
| year from age 20 onwards, and there are roughly 150 million books
| published, then reading the collected works of humanity would
| require roughly 15,000 lifetimes. That might be adjusted up or
| down a bit but is a good first approximation.
|
| 2. An attempte at humour, Dear Reader.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think 3x is the wrong target here, it's the learning by
| listening model aka "The Nurnberg Funnel" (or possibly Nuremberg
| Funnel for German speakers) that is harmful.
|
| I'd rather have a more focused lecture at 1x speed, the same as
| I'd rather have a good textbook, but skimming in both cases is
| fine if you want some info but the presentation available is too
| simple for you.
|
| But, learning by doing and finding out what you don't know by
| doing is important. That applies even to crappy end of chapter
| multiple choice quizzes or whatever their audiobook equivalent
| is, but I find project based learning to be where it's at for
| really cementing knowledge without boredom.
|
| edit to add: I'm not sure about the bit about pre-textbook
| lectures is historically accurate. I was under the impression the
| modern lecture mostly derived from the time when books were
| expensive, non-mass produced tech and the single copy was chained
| to the lectern and the person reading it out was doing so in
| order to let people make their own cheap copies.
|
| I'm a big fan of video lectures that people consume in their own
| time, but more because they can slow them down, and rewind, not
| because they can speed them up. If you're always speeding up, you
| could probably just get a denser text
| fatbird wrote:
| I know many teachers, and none that would agree that what they're
| doing is filling a cup. None stand there lecturing students, and
| expect them to recite it back. They all work hard to come up with
| different exercises, presentations, etc. just to do what the
| author says is necessary: creating direct experience. It's a core
| precept of modern education theory that experiential learning is
| best. His discussion of schools is a strawman.
| web007 wrote:
| The argument against 3x seems to be a false dichotomy. I'd like
| to see a comparison of the author's recommendation of spaced
| repetition _combined_ with "Mike's" 3x speed-listening. Increase
| your intake density and still get the superpowers of retention
| that SR proffers.
|
| Per the author's charts you can increase the information density
| by either switching languages or speeding up the current
| language, so find the maxima of the information density-vs-
| syllabic-speed graph and make your chosen language match either /
| both parameters. That may not end up at 3x, but human perception
| and understanding is certainly greater than 2x common speed for
| English speech. I don't have a citable reference at hand, but a
| motivational speaker from my youth made this point. He said he
| speaks at about double the standard rate because nearly everyone
| can still understand him, and it lets him give twice as much
| detail in a story, or tell a story twice as long as he otherwise
| could.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Also probably not so much about speed than not pausing to think
| about what you have just read/viewed/watched ?
| powersnail wrote:
| One big problem with Youtube and podcasts is that they are often
| interspersed with useless fillers, neither entertaining nor
| helpful for "retaining information". The excessive signposting in
| videos is especially ridiculous: spending more time on listing
| "what I'm going to talk about today" than actually talking about
| those things.
|
| 3X speed is usually just neutralizing the carelessly long
| scripts. A better way is not to give in to the habitual
| prattling, but a table of contents with clickable timestamps.
| Many thoughtful Youtubers are already doing it.
| marban wrote:
| hu3 wrote:
| For what is worth, that post was 9 days ago and has 1 comment.
|
| HN allows for sensible use of reposting.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The article isn't just about playback speed. It's a well-written
| piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing
| through spoken lectures alone.
|
| It's extra ironic, then, that much of the comment section here
| only seems to have absorbed the headline but not the content of
| the article.
|
| I have noticed that my most voracious podcast and book consuming
| friends seem to have developed a lot of surface-level knowledge
| about a lot of subjects, but it's difficult to discuss even the
| content of the books they've read. Listening on 1.5X or 2X speed
| is a common boast for them, as is the number of books or podcasts
| they've consume in a year (which is tracked for some reason). It
| seems the goal has become quantity, or simply filling time and
| providing background noise instead of studying a subject.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| Learning happens in the space in between words. Without time
| for reflection, people inevitably just mirror information
| instead of integrating new ideas into what they know.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| > It's a well-written piece about the importance of direct
| experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.
|
| Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with
| any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level.
| For example, at various points in the past couple of years I
| have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess
| knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching
| a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that
| you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a
| high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the
| best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal"
| I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played".
| But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my
| queen and lose to a 1000-level player.
|
| However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the
| problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate
| goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about
| people who want to do something like start a unicorn company,
| and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before
| getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn
| more by doing.
|
| But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the
| sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything
| wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into
| watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't
| expect them to be training to become a professional coach.
| Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x
| speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any
| problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to
| enough information to become an expert in a field if they study
| and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be
| training towards that goal.
| Mimmy wrote:
| I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it
| offers anything substantial.
|
| It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive
| consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost
| everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer
| anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience).
| Thanks...?
|
| Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a
| similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are
| looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only
| really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was
| one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and
| it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations
| with real native speakers.
| will4274 wrote:
| This article is perhaps interesting, but it is not well-
| written, nor, I would argue, particularly well reasoned. The
| author makes gratituous assumptions about Mike's reasoning,
| assumptions that appear unlikely to many readers, and fails to
| provide any justification for them. Read it again - how much of
| Mike's reasoning comes from Mike, and how much from the author?
| Did the author even ask Mike?
|
| It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed
| to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's
| ironic that so many folks in this comment section are
| questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly
| into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that
| you didn't deep read the article, including spending time
| considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously
| criticizing other people for not doing the same.
| padobson wrote:
| I'm with you here. The money line of the whole article was
| almost a throw-away at the end:
|
| _He should think more strategically about what he wants to
| learn and why._
|
| The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la
| podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education,
| with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of
| interactions between students.
|
| In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some
| research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book
| to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there
| was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I
| never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge
| of C++.
|
| Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to
| program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python.
| "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never
| opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked
| through the existing library of code they did, asked questions
| of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was
| contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship
| I was writing programs that were performing vital business
| tasks.
|
| I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a
| huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper
| lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is
| the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next
| to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind,
| and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time,
| from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the
| metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that
| develop over repeated encounters.
| adiamond4 wrote:
| I agree with a lot of this. It is well known at this point that
| passive learning strategies are not effective. What the author
| misses is that depending on the type of material being consumed,
| the learner could be in an input limited or processing limited
| regime.
|
| For dense textbooks it usually takes more time to process
| concepts (i.e. get to higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy with a
| concept) then it does to get the information into the mind
| through reading, so speed reading (fast input) is pointless. For
| the type of fiction books his friend is reading, 3x speed might
| make sense to get to the insights faster that need to be paused
| on and processed. Certainly the concepts need to be revisited
| with something like spaced repetition for deeper integration.
|
| Spaced repetition is boring, that is one of the motivations
| behind Memory Maps, a learning tool that enables you to use the
| memory palace technique in Google Street View along with
| mnemonics generating AI to supercharge your memory capacity.
|
| https://www.memorymaps.io/
|
| https://www.memorymaps.io/main-page/how-it-works
| shamas wrote:
| I do this, and I'm constantly in need of book recommendations.
| Please help
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| Read 1984 (Orwell)
| kurthr wrote:
| I often listen at 2x speed, not to increase the speed of
| comprehension, but because the information density is too low.
| Like forwarding through ads to get to content. Then when you get
| to the interesting part you slow down and repeat a few times
| (especially fix-it mechanical assembly youtubes) sometimes at
| fractional speed... it takes concentration.
|
| Then you use it (or you'll forget it all anyway).
|
| Alternately, I have a friend who listens to novels at 2x, which I
| don't understand...versus my partner who reads 100 books a year
| and she's frustrated she can't find new ones fast enough.
| saivan wrote:
| I get the point you're making - but honestly I have to raise the
| counter argument, which I think is equally valid. Take for
| example, the average lecture video. The information density is so
| low, that I'd imagine that a 60 minute video could be compressed
| into 10-12 minutes without any loss of information. It really
| depends on what you're listening to/watching.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I have to use x1.7-x2.0 speed on pluralsight courses, even
| though English is not my native language, and I'm learning
| completely new stuff.
|
| Otherwise I'd almost fall asleep.
|
| It's better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear
| sentences than wasting 2x the time.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| You describe a symptom of a high data/low effect situation that
| is pretty common these days.
|
| The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after
| distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more
| data or do something with it?
| lrem wrote:
| From learning point of view? Unanimously do something with
| it. Or at least see some examples of someone doing something
| with it to make you care about what you just learned. It's
| very high to remember a fact, as in commit to long-term
| memory, if there was no feeling attached.
| JackPoach wrote:
| It's not just density, many books are pure nonsense. So 200
| books of pure nonsense a year won't teach you much. They'll
| just introduce you to a ton of terrible ideas.
| visarga wrote:
| Hey, that's how AI's learn as well. Reading up all the
| nonsense indiscriminately and making no effort to make the
| ideas consistent. But it's better than not reading because
| you get exposed to a larger variety of text so you can draw
| upon them when it's time to get creative.
| onion2k wrote:
| Listening to a lecture at a faster speed doesn't change the
| information density. You're just compressing everything; you're
| not editing out the useless bits.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yes, it does: the useless bits remain as time to help you
| digest the information. It's just that you don't need as much
| time to do so, so making everything faster is just fine.
| tombert wrote:
| I suspect someone with better understanding of psychology can
| tell me if I'm way off on this or not.
|
| -----
|
| Sometimes I'll put a lecture at 2x speed if the professor is
| talking way too slow. Every ten minutes, I will pause the
| lecture and try and "teach myself" what the professor just
| said, giving a quick summary of all the information I remember.
| If I feel like I got a reasonable understanding of the gist of
| it, then I keep going at 2x, and if I had a lot of trouble with
| the summarization process, I drop it back to 1x.
|
| More often than not, I end up dropping back to 1x.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I think that tutors like Khan of Khan Academy kind of
| revolutionized the shortening down of lectures. The videos are
| split up into smaller chunks, they're much more direct, and go
| straight to the point.
|
| Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
| fossuser wrote:
| For an example at the extremes, you can run congressional
| testimony at 4x, but Andrej Karpathy or John Carmack at only
| 1x.
|
| It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the
| content.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes anything about category theory is 0.1x speed. Or I need
| to watch 10 times at 1x speed to understand anything :-)
| cush wrote:
| Seriously. It depends entirely on the content
| Nursie wrote:
| Honestly, maybe I'm just some old, out-of-touch luddite, but I
| think that using videos to pass information is sub-optimal all
| around.
|
| Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of
| text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my
| speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search
| it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
| gibolt wrote:
| Subtitles matter! While a video is not equivalent to just
| text, reading at 3x with audio is similar to why people enjoy
| audio books.
|
| Visual content is a bonus, to remain more engaged and maybe
| impart information via a third medium
| chronogram wrote:
| Nothing to do with your age, it's always been either a
| difference between users of the media, convenience for the
| producer, that it's easier to monetize video, or the ability
| for instant feedback when it's in-person or live.
|
| Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text
| to pass information is just making your memory weak.
| albert_e wrote:
| you are not wrong or outdated
|
| different people prefer different methods of learning
|
| they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are
| more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
|
| sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn
| new information is becoming harder and harder for me
| personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and
| social media use
|
| I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to
| me
|
| videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed ..so
| I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and
| sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
|
| ...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream
| that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and
| hear someone explain something at length
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| But video controls are tremendously worse than just being
| able to focus your eyes at any specific portion of the page
| in an instant ?
| sb057 wrote:
| They key advantage to video (and the reason why YouTube seems
| to keep expanding to encompass more and more subcultures) is
| that video formatting is also inclusive to text, audio, and
| still image formatting. You can only upload text to a blog,
| and you can only upload audio to SoundCloud, but you can
| upload everything to YouTube.
| cthor wrote:
| Blogs are perfectly capable of embedding media as
| appropriate, including videos.
|
| On the contrary to your suggestion, blogs (or more
| specifically, webpages) are what can do more than anything
| else, since they can also feature _interactive_ media. See
| <https://ncase.me/trust/> for an example.
|
| Whether or not this is expected, standard, or the author
| thinks it's worth the effort is another thing.
| Nursie wrote:
| > video formatting is also inclusive to text
|
| Are we talking slide shows on a youtube video here? Because
| to me those are probably the worst of all worlds. Low
| information density and not searchable.
| someRandoJunk wrote:
| I think some of the replies and likes to your reply are kinda
| hilarious.
|
| You went through the entire article, misunderstood the point
| (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information,
| not people who are using it to skip filler content and
| contemplate over the actual information like you do), and this
| misinterpretation is fair, it happens to all of us. Few people
| corrected you in the reply.
|
| But a lot of people instead of reading the article, took the
| title of the article and your comment as what the article
| meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned.
| Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
| phgn wrote:
| To be fair, the article is quite long so I for example gave
| up reading after a while. Which from my brief skimming seems
| like what the author advocates for -- reading less things but
| more deeply.
| mcguire wrote:
| And then there's that...
| will4274 wrote:
| I don't agree at all. The author doesn't mention filler
| content. He seems to implicitly assume that Mike's podcasts
| have no filler content. And he assumes Mike's motive to be
| trying to learn faster - rather than skipping filler -
| without presenting any evidence that Mike believes this.
|
| I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman,
| that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as
| fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis -
| Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the
| content a little boring.
|
| I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by
| pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author
| is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's
| misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people
| who are cramming information,_
|
| The author is making _multiple points_ and it 's fair to
| consider each claim in isolation.
|
| One of the points is that that active learning is better
| passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the
| information multiple times is better than reading it fast
| once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim
| that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't
| true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
|
| - 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so
| slowly than listeners _tune out_ at 1x
|
| - 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic
| for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1
| perspective in 1x time.
|
| - 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow
| down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
|
| - 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the
| normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in
| their head" when reading written text
|
| The author should have titled his essay _" Against Passive
| Learning"_ because that's the stronger point rather than
| highlight "3x".
| float4 wrote:
| > some of the replies and likes to your reply are kinda
| hilarious
|
| > You [...] misunderstood the point
|
| > Few people corrected you
|
| > Kinda hilarious
|
| If you genuinely want people to understand why they're wrong,
| then know that this is not the way to do it.
| 18al wrote:
| Using rate of speed up is probably a bad metric due to varying
| densities, but even if one were to account for that and use
| some kind of smart speed up app that maintains constant
| information throughput, the issue is with not taking pauses to
| ruminate.
|
| It's more of an information retention problem rather than an
| information loss one. IE not committing to long term memory as
| the author states.
|
| Not very unlike consuming food without chewing.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed that with text I'm going to make more
| pauses thinking about what I just read (especially printed
| text for some reason). Video is the worst, while audio only
| in the middle. Maybe because of clunky controls ?
| luguenth wrote:
| I think it's not really about the speed of the information, as
| long as you are able to process it, but the sheer amount of
| information. If you use time savings of 50 minutes to just
| consume more information, not much will settle in your long
| term memory. But if you process and repeat the information in
| those "saved" minutes, you'll get away with much more in the
| end. I think this is more the point of the author's view.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm very slow with books. I'll read a couple paragraphs and
| then ponder for a minute. And then maybe look up some
| tangential, maybe even radial stuff. Even audio books at 1X
| move too fast for me.
|
| I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people
| do 100.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I could watch my work meetings at infinite speed, and the
| information density would still be zero.
| rsanheim wrote:
| This ignores the point (that Perell makes in the essay) that
| learning via lecture is a horrible way to learn much of
| anything to begin with.
|
| Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture,
| find the new information that interests you, and then use that
| as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper
| into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying
| what you've learned, and so on.
|
| But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at
| 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-
| term learning.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Off-tangent: modern lectures are still a better way to learn
| something than original _lectiones_ were -- the lecturer
| would read the book by some prominent author, and students
| would listen to it and take notes... and that 's it. That's
| what _lectio_ literally means: "[an act of] reading". And
| before the invention and spread of the printing press, it
| absolutely made sense -- books were rare and expensive.
|
| Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply
| reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully
| considered to be the worst: a student too can read the
| textbook himself just fine!
| thrower123 wrote:
| I really hate how everyone has shifted to video and podcasts
| over the last ten years or so.
|
| Personally, I'm an "in one ear, out the other" type as far as
| auditory memory goes. So I can read something written out, or
| even just transcribed, in a fraction of the time and actually
| remember it.
| dqpb wrote:
| My experience is that speeding up low-quality content makes it
| more tolerable, whereas speeding up high quality content makes
| it less enjoyable.
|
| So now I just don't speed up. If the quality is low, I don't
| listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time
| to think about what the speaker is saying, while they're saying
| it.
| skrebbel wrote:
| The article uses 3x speed as a metaphor for a broader mindset.
| It's not actually about 3x speed.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'll often seek out _both_ the written _and_ lectures on
| material I 'm particularly interested in.
|
| I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems
| to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides
| ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
|
| But ...
|
| ... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very
| different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's
| intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies _both_
| where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases,
| where not, _if_ the reader knows the material and its author
| well.
|
| This of course depends on the material and ones level of
| interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex
| material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth
| this in my view.
| daenz wrote:
| I use the same youtube plugin mentioned in the article, and
| watch many videos at 2.5x-3.0x speed, for the exact reason that
| you state. There is a lot of "filler" content that I either a)
| already know or b) is not relevant to what I'm trying to learn.
| I'm really just trying to get through that content quickly.
| When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the
| speed down to 1x to learn it.
| elil17 wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
|
| This lets you skip filler content automatically for many
| popular videos.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| It is more that these days everything is a video. Even
| things that should be two to three paragraphs of text or
| maybe a picture or two.
| aspyct wrote:
| I agree with this, though it depends on what you're
| learning and what you already know.
|
| For example, I do not care for videos about code. I'm
| experienced in that domain and I want to get right into
| the meat of things: scroll to the appropriate paragraph,
| see the example I'm looking for, and move one.
|
| I could see why a beginner would need a slower pace with
| more "filler" explanation and background information.
| Videos are a nice format for this, because they allow one
| to just sit back like we did at school and take in the
| information.
|
| But that's only considering programming. Other domains
| are better suited to videos. For example, visual arts in
| general: painting, photography, filmmaking... I couldn't
| imagine explaining a picture with words only, or a human
| interaction with pictures only. Perhaps when I have more
| experience, but for now, I like videos.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| It is just sad when I you search for "how to do X in
| Linux" you get a video in search results first and only
| second some article where you can actually copy-paste the
| commands
| gumby wrote:
| > When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn
| the speed down to 1x to learn it.
|
| An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and
| simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click
| to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature
| too.
|
| Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially
| useful when you want to know more about a subject you already
| know about (say a programming language you've used but never
| formally learnt).
|
| If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the
| information rate of a video is typically quite low.
| saghm wrote:
| I've noticed that I'm fairly unusual in my generation (late
| millennial) in that I strongly prefer to consume
| information through reading compared to listening or
| watching. My brothers and friends and girlfriend all love
| stuff like podcasts or casual YouTube watching, but I find
| that the increased effort needed to arbitrarily change
| speed or skip around always makes me end up not retaining
| or enjoying the content I consume as much.
| tempestn wrote:
| It depends on the type of information, for me. I love
| podcasts (history, policy, some news) but when I'm trying
| to research a topic or find instructions on something, or
| that kind of thing, I also vastly prefer text. Kind of
| drives me crazy when the most relevant source I can find
| is a 15 minute youtube video explaining something that
| could be distilled into a paragraph of text.
| yodelshady wrote:
| I would add for practical skills (including some
| research!) videos and podcasts seem to offer more
| feedback. Nobody in a book ever _tells_ me what a flange
| or spline or baulk ring actually _is_ , nobody in a video
| does either, but in the latter I get to see it and make
| my own, usually fit-for-current-purpose, inferences.
|
| Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a
| supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement
| learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used
| (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well
| regarded!) _in no way acknowledges the existence of this
| sub field_. For whatever reason, and across multiple
| fields, I 've never found static text to be good at
| "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't
| think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being
| valuable.
| Thlom wrote:
| Same. Especially Youtube videos explaining and showing
| something really simple that takes like 5 seconds but
| they go on for 10-15 minutes. I suspect it has something
| to do with Youtubes algorithms that encourages creators
| to make long videos.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In part. There was definitely a 10 min target time for a
| long while.
|
| However, a lot of TV shows - particularly USA ones seem
| to needlessly repeat everything like there running a
| lecture for amnesiacs. Here's what we're going to say in
| the first part, here's the first part, we say what we
| said we would, now a recap, then a break so we review the
| whole first part ... now we're 10 minutes into the show
| and we've seen about two minutes of unique footage. It's
| harrowing -- I'll take overdrawn explanations in
| preference to that.
| stavros wrote:
| https://youtu.be/7MFtl2XXnUc
| exikyut wrote:
| aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLL
| exikyut wrote:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/
| usrusr wrote:
| I particularly miss the feeling of being in control: with
| text I can skip scan, reread and so on with just an eye
| motion.
|
| The first time I encountered the concept of a 3xer was in
| the context of political radicalization, people infusing
| their mind with YouTube self-radicalization content on 3x
| (or higher) every day. My mind conjured up images of
| Malcolm McDowell in that A Clockwork Orange scene, only
| that it's self-inflicted and with content aiming at the
| exact opposite.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Are you ? After all, YouTube is a recent phenomenon for
| us, and we've even known a time without widespread
| Internet when knowledge was still overwhelmingly in
| books...
| jules wrote:
| I've noticed that reading is faster than listening at 3x
| speed. A quick way to test this is to enable subtitles.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| In addition to what you're saying, it can also be _harder_ to
| watch something at 1x speed. I've found that at 1.25x-1.5x my
| mind is more engaged. If it's too slow, I start thinking
| about other things and end up getting less from the video.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I think the slowness of the videos is for non-english
| speakers. Meaning people who can understand english to a
| point, but aren't using english every day.
|
| Some years ago when I used to play games there was these
| awesome guides to some hard challenges a guy made where he
| was speaking pretty fast because there was a lot to cover
| and it was narrated over live footage. It was perfectly
| understandable to me, but the comment section was full of
| complains about the speed and how it was too hard to
| follow. This to me suggests that most of people would
| prefer if you paused the action to make your point slowly
| and after that continued with the footage.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wait, you can also slow _down_ YouTube videos, can 't you
| ?
| freemint wrote:
| Yeah but it sounds like shut then since there are fewer
| samples per second of Playback.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| yes, but that's an option you need to select. Normal
| people aren't going to even try searching for an option
| like that. Also it was 8 years ago, so I don't know if
| that was an option back then and in any case that would
| slowdown the footage as well.
| khariel wrote:
| To me this is fairly dependent on how fast the speaker
| speaks. Most of the times 1.25x works well. Sometimes 1.5x
| is too fast.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I find this true on podcasts; I'm normally a 1.3-1.5x
| person listening to podcasts, except "No Such Thing as a
| Fish". That one I go slower on, just because they seem to
| talk quite quickly, comparatively.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Which addon are you using for youtube?
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Enhancer for Youtuber
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| This is a game changer.
| razh wrote:
| Ilya Grigorik's Video Speed Controller?
|
| https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
| fossuser wrote:
| I just modify it directly in the console (I have to search
| to look up the command every time).
| CompuHacker wrote:
| Hit the Up arrow key in the console; in Firefox at least,
| command history persists across sessions.
|
| For reference; $('video').playbackRate=3.33
|
| The playback engine mutes audio below 0.25x and above 4x,
| not configurable.
| daenz wrote:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-
| playback-s...
|
| But I suspect they're all mostly similar
| vbezhenar wrote:
| "<"/">" buttons decrease/increase playback speed (up to
| 2.0).
| zoul wrote:
| For Safari there's Dynamo, too, that lets you skip ads
| apart from changing the speed:
|
| https://dynamoformac.com/
|
| (I am the author.)
| jholman wrote:
| I wrote a bookmarklet. Works on all non-iframe audio and
| video.
|
| javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22vide
| o,audio%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20p
| layback rate%22))}();
|
| Here's a non-interactive version
|
| javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22audi
| o,video%22).playbackRate=2.7}();
| memco wrote:
| Long before audio books were a public thing I received a
| special tape player for listening to audio recordings of my
| school textbooks because I have low vision. I was ecstatic to
| learn that I could adjust the speed and could still understand
| the book at something around 2-2.5x speed. I don't know to what
| extent other bling or impaired persons use the speed controls
| but I'm guessing it's designed because some people can process
| the information and others more slowly and this isn't a bad
| thing per se. I also agree that the information glut is not a
| good habit but listening to something at a faster speed is not
| in abs of itself information glut. Sometimes the bottleneck in
| presentation speed is the speaker not the listener.
| sschueller wrote:
| I would prefer a plugin that could remove "ehm"s and pauses
| from speakers that are new to the game.
| tsmeets wrote:
| Not sure how well it removes "ehm"s, but I use unsilence[1] a
| lot for lectures. It removes the silent bits from a video
| file. It isn't a browser plugin however. You have to download
| the lecture before converting.
|
| It works quite well in my experience.
|
| [1] https://github.com/lagmoellertim/unsilence
| dgellow wrote:
| I believe that's what Overcast "Smart speed" does for
| podcasts. Would be nice to have for videos.
| Thlom wrote:
| Pocketcast can remove silence at least. Not sure about
| filler sounds like ehm.
|
| According to Pocketcast I've "saved" over 3 days by
| trimming silence and over a month by speeding up. I've
| listened to a lot of podcasts it seems ...
| mb_72 wrote:
| If only this wasn't necessary - a lot of online stuff has had
| a single 'take' done and minimal editing out of such time-
| wasting utterances or silences. And once you start to notice
| such characteristics in some poor speakers it can be a
| complete deal-breaker in terms of actually learning
| something.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I have quite literally gone through long lectures and edited
| out such filler words (Audacity is good for this), where the
| material is sufficiently compelling (an extreme rarity).
|
| It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to
| allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be
| released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI"
| school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything
| that features this.
|
| For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with
| sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams
| described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
| ar_kan wrote:
| Two important takeaways to remember: 1. Think more strategically
| about what you want to learn and why. 2. Proper knowledge
| requires proper contemplation & synthesis.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| My problem was that I was watching Youtube videos (mostly pop-sci
| stuff) for too long and not doing anything. I solved this problem
| by watching them on 2x speed. My current problem is that I'm now
| watching 2x the videos.
| michaelerule wrote:
| I don't listen at 3x speed to learn more, I listen at 3x speed
| because anything slower is uncomfortably boring. (ADHD.)
| anotheryou wrote:
| I speed up not to become disengaged out of boredom.
|
| A also listen twice and often slower for important sections,
| pause to process if something was dense.
|
| Sounds and video are just super restrictive in timing, of course
| it's too slow for some and too fast for others.
|
| In a similar fashion a good movie has enough depth to keep you
| attached, even if the story progresses slow. A sitcom is boring
| at times and lacks it. But a good movie has a depth and realism
| that let's you get lost in the unsaid backstories, the ambience
| etc. You don't have that in a lecture.
| jcranberry wrote:
| Secondary school is one thing but in university, lectures aren't
| there to build your understanding for you. They're there for one
| of 3 reasons: 1) auditory learning of the same material, 2) to
| give you additional material not present in reading, or 3) to
| give a different perspective of the same material. Lectures are
| also just not long enough to do the work for you - building your
| understanding is your own responsibility.
|
| I'm also skeptical about this type of complaint on textbooks. I'm
| not going to say all textbooks are great but this idea that a
| textbook is a direct impediment or flawed tool for active
| learning has had no bearing in reality for me personally. Poor
| textbooks are poor tools. Good textbooks are good tools (I
| personally don't find there to be a lack of good textbooks). In
| the subject I majored in at university, mathematics, I can't
| imagine any amount of teacher input can take the place of problem
| sets and time spent poring over a textbook struggling to grok
| something.
|
| I agree that active learning is a necessary part of a successful
| education. However, almost all the specific targets of this
| article to be off the mark. In my experience, lectures and
| textbooks are not what keeps active learning from taking place,
| in fact they are what necessitates active learning.
|
| I agree with the stated point, however using the university
| education style as a target frustrates me, because the critique
| of Mike this article gives is exactly the kind of objection I
| might have to to claiming that textbooks and lectures are
| insufficient for learning. Engage, don't just consume!
|
| On more of a quibble than critique, I think 3x playback is poor
| as the titular metaphor for shallow learning. Listening to an
| audio book at ordinary speed I find to be far too fast to allow
| any kind of useful contemplation, and too slow to retain my
| interest (possibly due to my ADHD, perhaps others find this
| easier). If I need to think about something, I pause it. Not all
| information has equal utility, nor do all information streams
| have equal density. Depending on the narration and content of an
| audio book I find listening at a higher rate to often be ideal
| for trialing information for greater analysis. For something
| else, such as a video feed of a sports game, real time is often
| too fast for me to even consume all the information I would like
| (although when watching a sports game I may be more interested in
| the experience than tactics or particulars of a play).
| com2kid wrote:
| > Every student could now study the same material, no matter
| where they lived. In tune with this post-industrial mindset,
| fuzzy and hard to quantify educational methods like
| apprenticeships and the singular teachings of local sages were
| overtaken by national benchmarks and one-size-fits-all
| curriculums.
|
| It also meant every student got at least something resembling an
| education, even if the quality of local educators was sub-par.
|
| Mass production of almost anything tends towards results that are
| a bit below what people hope for, but the results are uniform.
|
| I want to know where the author of this post expects to find all
| these amazing teachers at for every single small town and village
| around the country.
|
| Yes, I also had some absolutely incredible teachers out there. I
| also had lecturers so good that I was able to pay attention for
| the entire hour. But in general, sure, I'll buy that most of my
| classes had maybe 20 minutes of focus in them. But I'd also say
| the majority of teachers were aware of this and, up until
| college, didn't try to talk for more than 10 or 15 minutes at one
| go.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| We're mass-producing teachers, but we're also mass-producing
| students. In the example of a medieval university or a
| traditional apprenticeship, the students have some kind of
| vested interest in being there. These were limited
| opportunities, not universal requirements. In contrast, most
| teachers in most classrooms today are trying to impart
| knowledge that their students aren't particularly motivated to
| have.
|
| Lectures are a great way to convey information to students who
| want the information in the first place. They are a terrible
| way to engage with involuntary participants.
| culebron21 wrote:
| I'm impressed more by the comments than the article itself. Some
| people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed
| any practical measurements of own skills.
|
| A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and
| everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in
| details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and
| opened his book. It was like if you showed your programming code
| to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My
| complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
|
| There's some scientific evidence as well:
|
| 1. Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things.
| https://www.science.org/content/article/lectures-arent-just-...
|
| 2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it
| usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice
| actually does make you progress:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
|
| I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make
| progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any
| systematic understanding.
|
| This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by
| practical task or by serious questioning.
| jordic wrote:
| This is one of the firsts principes of critical thinking: it's
| not only about understanding something, it's about being ready
| to challange it.
| asimpletune wrote:
| > if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress
|
| If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit
| dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively
| avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".
|
| I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same
| proportions.
|
| If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to
| make people _feel_ smarter with the sample lessons. That being
| said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the
| important stuff. So I think it 's important to find a balance.
| You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them
| feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually
| negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going
| to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.
|
| I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment?
| The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel
| good after learning stuff.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| At conferences, people will say they liked and learned from
| talks that were complicated and largely incomprehensible, and
| that they found trivial and boring the talks that managed to
| explain the thing well enough that it was actually understood.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but
| nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.
|
| Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating
| your current ability", and more broadly being good at
| "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current
| ability", is a skill in itself.
|
| Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring
| these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the
| next step being the realization that you probably are
| incapable.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 100%! This reminded me of a similar lesson beaten into us
| _repeatedly_ in college. I would study for a test and feel like
| everything was crystal clear. Then i walk into the exam and get
| absolutely destroyed by stuff i thought i understood.. over and
| over again. It was (unfortunately) a common experience.
|
| Seeing the answers afterwards, they usually involved facts i
| knew applied in a way i could not. That experience convinced me
| that your internal assessment of how well you understand
| something can be _wildly_ off without an objective yardstick.
| Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as
| getting rekt in an exam.
| turdnagel wrote:
| I also had a similar experience in college, but I'm having
| trouble understanding what the lesson you learned was. Did
| you eventually improve?
| opportune wrote:
| I think this is a problem solvable by doing practice
| problems.
|
| For me with Math this is something I learned the hard way
| many times. In more advanced math tests you will be asked
| to prove something novel (to you) using skills/material
| from the covered subject. So it's not enough to know the
| theorems, you need to understand them at a deeper level so
| you can apply them in new situations or use a similar
| practice from the theorem to prove something similar.
|
| This is pretty straightforward for most math/physics/other
| stem courses since they're usually accompanied by problem
| sets in their textbooks, and it's rare to have to do
| absolutely all of them as HW.
| dqpb wrote:
| For me, the act of programming has taught me epistemic
| humility much more forcefully and consistently than exams.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but I remember a college class in which I
| was completely lost. I wasn't even clear on the topic of the
| class. Nothing ever made sense. I got D's on most of the
| tests. I was enormously frustrated. Then, at the end, I got
| my final grade: B+.
|
| My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced
| by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in
| the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject
| us all to such nonsense.
| mcguire wrote:
| I remember speaking to an engineering statistics (IIRC)
| professor once, who said that no one had ever gotten an 'A'
| in his class. (Presumably, the final grades were curved
| like yours.) He said it proudly. I considered asking him if
| he was teaching basket-weaving or underwater archaeology to
| his statistics students.
|
| I heard a story from an academic coordinator once, of an
| instructor who had been hired for a required CS computer
| architecture class because he was a friend of the
| department chairman. He was an electrical engineer, which
| made some sense, but then students started showing up in
| the coordinator's office crying and trying to drop the
| class well after the last drop date. It seemed he thought
| CS undergraduates were supposed to be the same as
| electrical engineering grad students, and wanted to fail
| the entire class. (He did not, nor did he get hired for
| further classes. After many years, though, his friend was
| the department chairman again and hired him as a tenured
| professor and the department's external relations
| coordinator. This is part of the reason I did not go into
| academia.)
|
| Many instructors are just stinking bad. Many aren't, and
| manage to tie together both interesting lectures and more
| active assignments. But the bad ones do leave marks.
| blakesley wrote:
| Are you just talking about grading on a curve? This
| happened to me in a graduate math class and I agree with
| you that it felt unnecessarily demoralizing. But it also
| seemed like a natural outcome of grading a hard class on a
| curve.
| titanomachy wrote:
| It's not just that the grading was on a curve, it's that
| they learned nothing at all but still got a better grade
| than most of the class (implying that no one learned
| anything). Almost better to just have the whole class
| fail, then at least the department will notice that the
| professor is useless.
|
| That wouldn't really be fair to the students who care
| about their GPAs, though.
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| I had some upper division math classes that were offered
| for both undergrad and grad credits. I enjoyed the
| classes, but one thing I noticed was that the teacher
| seemed to be under some pressure to ensure the grad
| students passed. They didn't seem to care about the
| classes and performed horribly, I would do OK, and at the
| end of term all the undergrads like me would exit with an
| almost-guaranteed A.
|
| Really helped to shape my perception that grades are
| meaningless and ultimately political.
| mcguire wrote:
| In most graduate programs, grades are meaningless---what
| matters is that dissertation at the end.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I get the sense that history teachers talk about how
| history is the most important, physics teachers talk about
| how physics is the most important, gender politics the
| same, arts the same etc...
|
| There's incentive to keep yourself employed however
| useless, bloated or out of time what you're teaching is.
|
| I'm not sure how the school plan is evaluated in different
| places, but i feel like for example religion in a country
| like Sweden where most people don't believe in it[1] should
| be brought down to make space for something Swedes think is
| important.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Sweden
| culebron21 wrote:
| I had to learn driving a car this spring, with manual
| transmission. Knowing these things helped a lot. I made notes
| of all the traffic regulations document, and made tables of
| all long and intricate rules (e.g. lists of places where
| u-turn is forbidden, or backpedal, or what are speed limits
| for different kinds of vehicles/roads).
|
| This helped avoid learning all those 1000 test questions,
| what most students did.
|
| And using computer simulator with 3 pedals helped to automate
| the movements, and think of subtleties. Reportedly, those who
| had no practice before driving school, under the pressure of
| the exam, didn't stall the engine, but failed exactly in
| higher-order matters, like they'd cross continuous lines or
| not notice speed limit signs.
| laurent92 wrote:
| If you can, teach your kid to drive at 13. On private
| property obviously, no traffic rules, just the mechanical
| part. Everything after that will be much easier.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Do you live somewhere with an unusually hard driving test?
| I don't remember studying much at all for the written test
| (Canada), let alone memorizing a bank of 1000 questions. I
| never heard of anyone failing the written test.
|
| Plenty of people failed the driving test, though.
| petters wrote:
| It is very clear to me that listening at 3x works after some
| training. (Not surprising, since almost everyone already reads
| way faster than normal speech)
|
| The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their
| screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even
| what language it is.
| mcguire wrote:
| I have listened, and it's amazing, but I'm not sure they are
| understanding more than I would if I were scanning the page
| for the navigation options. (I haven't heard someone
| listening to a long-form text for understanding.)
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I wonder the quality of learning if you listen to/watch
| something at 2x speed twice. Bonus if there is a delay in which
| your mind may formulate questions.
|
| I'm guessing it would be superior unless it was a very high
| difficulty piece. Having a basic understanding and then
| formulating questions allows you have an input on the learning,
| as opposed to simply listening.
|
| I would also say that with some material (esp. fiction), your
| "comprehension" may go up if you listen to it faster, because
| you don't give your mind a chance to wonder if something makes
| sense; I often fall for the trap of asking what I would do in a
| given situation, and then when the character does something
| nonsensical, I go looking for a good reason. I lose sight of
| what the author is trying to say because they made a mistake
| when trying to forward the plot.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I believe the research supports fast reading as being better,
| because you get more of an overview, but presumably this
| peaks at some point, same as audio.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Try this: after listening to a story or to a lecture, retell
| it to someone else in as much detail as possible. Or try
| defending lecturer's position or what their information
| implies. You'll be shocked to discover, you don't know enough
| details.
|
| You'll have to listen another time, and off goes the profit
| of x2 speed. But even after listening multiple times, it's
| still very hard to argue for, or retell in details what's
| been said. Unless it's a radio show, where information is
| sparse.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| >and off goes the profit of x2 speed
|
| I'm unconvinced. Is it better to listen to something once
| at 1x speed or twice at 2x speed?
| 1equalsequals1 wrote:
| Are you referring to Noam Chomsky?
| culebron21 wrote:
| I refer to Andrey Zalyznyak.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Zaliznyak
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Unlikely, his specialty is syntax rather than phonology
| enominezerum wrote:
| Yea, this is why my IT program had such poor students in the
| higher grade levels. I would spend 8 hours on Saturday on labs
| and other students would breeze through them in a couple hours.
|
| I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they
| claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot
| everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands
| and performing sequences.
|
| I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try
| to break them or complete the lab again.
|
| In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have
| accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but
| throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.
| twic wrote:
| > "When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at a rate of
| four thousand words a minute," the girl said. "They had quite a
| time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and
| my parents were ashamed of me. Now I've learned to read almost
| slow enough."
|
| > Slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has
| read. "We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than
| you on Earth," one of the adults says. "We cannot afford to
| waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of
| a shallowness that lends itself to scanning."
|
| -- Primary Education of the Camiroi, R. A. Lafferty [1]
|
| [1] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/reading-at-
| spee...
| bsder wrote:
| > Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things.
|
| This may be, but studies _also_ show that you should review the
| material before the lecture so that you can _engage the
| lecturer_.
|
| I can count on a single hand and not use all the fingers the
| number of students I have taught who always reviewed the
| material before I lectured on it. Unsurprisingly, those
| students absolutely sailed through my class with very high
| grades.
|
| So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?
|
| Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are
| _two_ parties to that bargain.
| foerbert wrote:
| I've always loved the concept, and yet was always the student
| that would scoff when lecturers mentioned reviewing. The
| problem is "active learning" doesn't work outside of small
| groups at a similar "level" so to speak (as in background
| knowledge, dedication, and interest).
|
| Very few college classes meet these requirements. When they
| did, they were amazing. But otherwise, reviewing just makes
| it nearly impossible to pay attention as the lecturer slowly
| speaks the material you already know. And then any questions
| you may have require too much detail to actually answer in
| the lecture. It's really quite miserable. Why would you do
| that to yourself?
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| In a course I teach when the isolation measures started in
| my country we got 2 weeks in advance to turn everything
| from in-person classes to virtual "maybe for a month, and
| then we'll go back" (you can imagine how that turned out).
|
| So during 2020 we moved into a model where we recorded the
| lectures for students to watch on their own time, and then
| they'd have a questions-only class (or so they were told).
| This turned out to get 80-90% of the students to actually
| view the material before class, and then they'd ask
| questions about what they didn't understand. On a few
| difficult topics, we ended up having yet another lecture
| (but focused on the parts they had trouble following).
|
| On some occasions where they didn't engage with many
| questions (I think it was the first few classes under this
| model, which was novel to the students) we the teachers
| picked up on doing a quick recap and focusing on what we
| knew beforehand tends to be hard to understand, and engaged
| them in the class (questions, explain the concepts
| themselves, etc).
|
| Here's my take: it takes a lot of effort to do this, from
| recording the material beforehand, to "lying" that the
| class will be questions-only for clearing up (and we know
| we'll end up explaining yet again if they don't bring
| questions), to actively engaging and changing the pace of
| the lectures/classes.
|
| Because of all this effort, out of 5 different courses I
| teach, I only managed to pull this in 1, and we're still
| tweaking a lot of content to make it work better under this
| model. But we're planning to keep it even after the
| restrictions are gone (we're still not giving in-person
| classes at my university, in theory they'll be back for
| 2022).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum, if people are engaging, it's not a lecture. Discussions
| are much more effective than lectures.
|
| What I've never seen is a comparison between a pure lecture
| (like it would be on video) and reading a book. Those two fit
| the same stage on an effective "get pointed to the content,
| get the raw content, refine it with people and the real
| world" learning process.
|
| Now, about your question, I have no idea :)
| culebron21 wrote:
| Also, confirming what you wrote: students who excelled at my
| courses, usually took some courses, like online, before that.
| Those who were great at maths in the university, said their
| parents were mathematicians, and they were exposed to
| advanced maths, like quadratic or trigonometric equations
| already at the age of 7-9.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That requires the material to be available in advance, which
| often isn't the case.
| criddell wrote:
| I think for some subjects and some teachers, swapping
| homework time and lecture time can work. For example, if you
| are learning calculus, it may be more efficient for the
| teacher to assign reading a section of a textbook as homework
| and then in the classroom work through a bunch of problems
| and proofs using the homework material.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I always thought lectures aren't for teaching, they are
| basically just some more detail on the syllabus. Basically
| it's the prof saying "you need to know this proof, I'll skim
| over it fast and you can figure it out in your own time".
| rfrey wrote:
| If they worked through the material prior to the lecture,
| perhaps the lectures were spurious for them, and the credit
| for the high grades goes to the individual work.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| This is what I do when learning math and it works really
| well.
|
| Lectures alone don't give you a deep understanding and a
| solid theoretical grasp of the concepts and their
| manipulations, books alone are very dense and often lack the
| intuition and human explanations of the concepts. But if you
| go book then lecture you get a double whammy of thick theory
| followed by an exposition of the intuition behind it and
| suddenly everything clicks together.
|
| I imagine it's obvious to many, but I only realized it
| recently.
| culebron21 wrote:
| I also taught at commercial courses and in a university,
| trying to apply active learning, but it didn't go well, so I
| haven't an answer to this problem either.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You can think of lectures as showing the extremely conservative
| education industry not being able to reform itself since before
| the printing press.
| naasking wrote:
| This lends credence to the educational reform that I always
| found the most compelling: kids/people should be reading the
| chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and
| doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture, so
| the teacher can actually help students work through problems
| (rather than parents who don't know the material).
|
| A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that
| practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| This is the Thayer method, iirc
|
| https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=.
| ..
|
| For each class, a text lesson is assigned. This assignment
| includes a reading and specific problems associated with the
| reading material. Each cadet is expected to "work the
| problems." (Note: Prior to 2000 these problems were called
| "drill problems"; the current terminology is "suggested
| problems.")
|
| * "One learns mathematics by doing mathematics." Cadets are
| encouraged to be active learners and to "do" mathematics.
| Group work is encouraged and expected. Special projects are a
| major portion of each core mathematics course-work on these
| projects is done in teams of two or three.
|
| * Cadets are required to study the concepts of each lesson in
| such a way as to be ready to use them in three ways: 1. To
| express them fluently in words and symbols 2. To use them in
| proof and analysis 3. To apply them to the solution of
| original problems
|
| * The instructor's goal during each lesson is to cause the
| maximum number of cadets to actively participate in the day's
| lesson. One of the instructor's roles is to facilitate the
| learning activity in the classroom. This may take the form of
| a question or a remark to clarify a point.
|
| * Class begins with the instructor's questions on the
| assigned text lesson. Cadets are asked if there are questions
| on the assignment. Example problems are worked and discussed.
| Cadets are sent to the boards to work in groups of two or
| three on specific problems that are provided (so called
| "board problems"). These board problems may be similar to the
| problems assigned with the text lesson or they may be
| "original."
|
| * Cadets are selected to recite on the problems they work.
| Questions are encouraged.
|
| * The instructor spends a few minutes to discuss the next
| lesson. This practice is commonly called the "pre-teach."
| ghaff wrote:
| This also has a lot in common with the case study method in
| both law and business although the specifics are obviously
| different for a technical topic.
| ninly wrote:
| When I first went back to school for tech stuff (ultimately a
| master's in EE), my instructor for the entire calculus
| sequence -- and later on for linear algebra -- struck what I
| found to be the ideal balance. Something like:
|
| 0. Homework is never collected or graded, but don't be fooled
| into thinking it's not required -- that is, if you don't do
| the homework, you are extremely unlikely to pass the
| exams/course. Essentially, this is not knowledge we were
| learning -- it is skills that require practice. Homework is
| an opportunity to practice and hone skills.
|
| 1. Each lecture introduces a concept and/or technique, and
| works through a few demonstrative problems to show what it
| means or how it is done. Homework is assigned from textbook
| problems that involve the same techniques with progressive
| difficulty or complexity. The textbook used that pattern
| where odd-numbered problems included solutions, and
| assignments usually involved the ones with solutions.
|
| 2. The last one-quarter to one-third of every class period
| was dedicated to review and questions about the homework
| assigned for the previous class. Because we had the correct
| solutions in the text, we knew what to ask about (i.e. the
| ones we couldn't get to come out right). This particular
| instructor was fantastic at thinking on his feet and working
| problems on the fly, correctly and without preparation, so
| usually he'd just work the problem on the board and we could
| stop him to ask for a more detailed explanation if necessary.
|
| Granted, this model didn't work as well for his linear
| algebra class. Since many of those problems involve long
| slogs through tedious and error-prone matrix operations
| before/while you were really dealing with the concept or
| technique being introduced, he couldn't as easily demo entire
| solutions during the question/review periods. I suppose that
| difficulty would apply to several other higher-math topics,
| as well, but even so, later in my education I often found
| myself wishing this or that professor would follow the
| pattern of my humble calculus teacher.
| rmah wrote:
| Many teachers/professors I had in my youth asked the class to
| read the material before lecture so the lecture could be a
| summary and then most of the time spent asking
| questions/discussing the topic. Few students actually did so.
| naasking wrote:
| It's not a matter of asking, it's mandatory. Reading is
| your homework, and if you don't read the night before you
| won't be able to do your problems and get help of you need
| it the day of.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| But it's far simpler to check if students did 20 math
| problems then if they read a section of their textbook
| reaperducer wrote:
| _people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead
| of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in
| class instead of a lecture_
|
| While it's been decades since I went to college, I'm
| surprised this is no longer how it's done. That was pretty
| much the routine when I was in school.
|
| At the end of the class, the professor would say, "Next week,
| we'll be doing X, Y, and Z. It's chapters A, B, and C in the
| book." You'd prepare for it over the weekend. The following
| week, we'd have a mixture of lecture, discussion, and
| quizzes.
|
| Is it the other way around now? Lecture first, then the books
| and papers?
| asciimov wrote:
| I've never liked the flipped classroom structure.
|
| First, I'm a slow reader, so I always feel penalized when it
| takes me twice as long to get through a text as classmates.
|
| Second, math/engineering/science lessons typically build upon
| understanding the first example. If you don't understand or
| have questions about the earlier parts of the lesson you will
| have a hard time completing the lesson.
|
| Third, most text books I have encountered are terrible. Grade
| and High schools typically are trying to get the cheapest
| books so their dollar stretches further. In college, too many
| Profs/Departments push certain books because of kickbacks.
|
| Finally, too often enough people don't complete the readings,
| so you end up covering the material in class anyway. Or
| worse, not at all. I had several profs who's assigned reading
| was never to be discussed in class but was prominently
| featured in tests.
|
| I much prefer the typical lecture that allows for questions
| and discussions during the class. That way I can quickly
| address the issues I have with the material when I encounter
| it instead of having to wait till the next class hoping I
| don't fall too far behind.
| smitop wrote:
| This is called a flipped classroom:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > so the teacher can actually help students work through
| problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).
|
| This seems to be the continual heart of opposition to
| restructuring math curricula. Whether it's my parents
| generation recalling how their parents couldn't make heads or
| tails of new math or parents slightly older than me
| struggling to comprehend the Common Core math they're
| supposed to guide their children through, the essence of the
| complaint is the same: "how can I teach my child what I was
| never taught myself?"
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I would go even further and argue that making students read
| or listen to lectures for any significant length of time
| without them being actively engaged with the lesson is sub-
| optimal.
|
| Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant
| do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students
| with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between
| teaching the student something and checking whether they
| actually learned it to seconds rather than days.
|
| After experiencing such systems for myself I'm blown away
| that they aren't already the norm.
| ben_w wrote:
| While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school
| standard of "here's a textbook, here's an audio tape to
| play on loop", it's nowhere near the level of a private
| tutor.
|
| I'm currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly
| gold-starred the German course as they add more content,
| and Duolingo isn't the only app I'm using.
|
| Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don't conjugate
| even close to correctly, my grammar in general sucks, and I
| can only comprehend real-life spoken German if the speaker
| talks very slowly and clearly and uses a sufficiently short
| sentences -- from experience, the sort of conversation
| you'd find in an interview in a general interest magazine
| in the waiting room of a Hausarzt.
|
| I'm also trying to learn Arabic on Duolingo. Over a year
| into that course, I still can't even read the entire Arabic
| alphabet.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Sure, but it's also nowhere near the price of a private
| tutor. Regardless of subject, I don't think giving each
| student their own human private tutor is feasible. I've
| become convinced interactive, adaptive, software based
| learning is the next best thing, at least when done
| right.
|
| For language specifically, the only way you're ever going
| to get anywhere close to the level of a native speaker is
| by actually conversing with native speakers. I'm still
| just starting out with Duolingo, but my plan is to finish
| the course I'm in (or at least get a decent way into it),
| then switch to Tandem or some other service that lets you
| trade lessons with native speakers of another language.
| corpdronejuly wrote:
| That may have to do with Duolingo optimizing for paying
| and returning customers instead of for fluency.
|
| Their app has to be "fun" or in flow rather than in that
| difficult challenging place to actually help you grow.
|
| In learning both German and Old Norse the most helpful
| thing for me was to translate texts, read them aloud to a
| fluent speaker and get feedback. Which is hard to scale.
| stumpbeard wrote:
| Do you have any more detail to your approach? Do you use
| graded readers, or do you find that a dictionary and
| basic grasp on grammar is enough to struggle through
| pretty much anything?
|
| ... Do Old Norse graded readers exist?
| bildung wrote:
| This is a core problem in education, BTW: people, regardless of
| age, are essentially unable to properly evaluate whether they
| actually learned something from e.g. a course they just
| completed, and what helped with these learning effects. Those
| after-course feedbacks mostly just reflect whether they liked
| the presenter and/or the group. This of course has problematic
| consequences if that after-course feedback is used as
| evaluation of the course itself, because it can penalize
| courses where people would actually learn - because learning
| sometimes simply isn't fun.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It takes a huge level of maturity to know when you understand
| something. You have to take yourself away from how pleasant
| the interaction was, and ask yourself questions that are on
| the limit of what you think you can answer. That whole not-
| too-easy-or-hard balance is really difficult to nail down,
| especially if you have a grade depending on it. It's also
| hard when you have nothing but your own satisfaction
| depending on it, eg after you've graduated and are just
| reading for interest.
|
| The entertainment aspect is hard to get away from. It's like
| when you watch a good documentary, you're in awe of whatever
| field it's about. But have you really learned much? Hard to
| say.
| underdeserver wrote:
| In most cases you'd care about, it's easy: ask them to apply
| it.
| parenthesis wrote:
| Kind of a super power of mine is that I am very good at
| knowing whether or not I actually know or understand
| something.
|
| This made university pretty stressful: it was always on my
| mind how little I had yet retained and understood from my
| current courses; i'd only be happy when grinding material
| through my brain on my own (i.e. actually learning).
| hansbo wrote:
| I'd like to think I am good at it as well, but I doubt it.
| The number of times I've felt I've understood something,
| but then realized I could not answer follow-up questions or
| explain it properly to a third party, is uncountable.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I have the same thing! I've always found it deeply
| perplexing to see people that don't understand something
| but think that they do. Particularly, because when you
| actually understand something, it's so obvious.
|
| When I'm learning something, I have kind of a map in my
| head. I can just accurately keep track of the parts that
| are still fuzzy. In any subject, unknown unknowns are what
| will really trip you up. I think a big part of it is that I
| can use tiny context clues to predict and calibrate my
| understanding. Often, just knowing the NAME of a concept is
| enough for me to figure out what it's going to look like.
| (I did that with feynman path integrals for example.) SO I
| absorb those context clues and use them to try to keep some
| idea of what I DON'T know yet in that map.
|
| In fact, I think it's closely tied with prediction in
| general. I remember in math, I'd take what we knew, or had
| been learning, and just take it to the absolute limits of
| my knowledge, or find it's absolutely limits until the idea
| breaks. I did that constantly. In doing so, I could often
| predict the next section of study. I think that habit gives
| you lots of practice in self-assessment of what you really
| know.
|
| Conversely... when it comes to complicated subjects of
| complex systems like history/economics/geopolitics, where
| there is relatively poor feedback on "correctness" of
| ideas, I feel like ALL of my opinions are completely
| unfounded bullshit. People still seem to value them, but
| they have such a tenuous grip on reality.
| fouric wrote:
| > A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it
| usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice
| actually does make you progress
|
| There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion
| about whether video learning was useful or worked better for
| some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people
| claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from
| them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply
| learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative
| correlation).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think every serialized media is presented at a set speed, but
| that speed is rarely a carefully determined value. It's just an
| artifact of the creator's speaking or editing characteristics.
|
| Which leads me to personally conclude: there is probably no
| single correct speed and the author likely hasn't picked an ideal
| speed either.
|
| Speed up or slow down based on your personal needs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-20 23:02 UTC)