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Against 3x Speed

perell.com

211–220 of 353 posts

Re: Against 3x Speed

#211

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…

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…

In most cases you'd care about, it's easy: ask them to apply it.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#212
post #4

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.

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 peo…

> 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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#213

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 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. fictio…

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I find that if I do that, I take twice as long.

Music doesn't get me in my way, though.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#215

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…

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#216
post #192

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…

Are you referring to Noam Chomsky?

I refer to Andrey Zalyznyak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Zaliznyak

Re: Against 3x Speed

#217

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.

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#219
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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#220
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 grad…

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 pa…

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).

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