Against 3x Speed

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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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.