201–210 of 353 posts
Ironically, jumping past so much filler is one of the main reasons for faster speeds.
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 no…
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.
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 programmin…
> 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...
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.
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…
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
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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).
In German-speaking countries, there has been a name for it since 1647: Nuernberger Trichter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel
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 programmin…
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.
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".