Against 3x Speed • Hacker News Board

Re: Against 3x Speed

#241

Post by rfrey » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #174

culebron21 wrote: post #142

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#242

Post by PragmaticPulp » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#243

Post by anotheryou » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#244

Post by tombert » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

saivan wrote: 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 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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#245

Post by amonroe0805 » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

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.”

Re: Against 3x Speed

#246

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

culebron21 wrote: post #142

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…

You can think of lectures as showing the extremely conservative education industry not being able to reform itself since before the printing press.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#247

Post by colanderman » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #79

colanderman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, ge…

>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 ov…

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#248

Post by allknowingfrog » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #8

> 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…

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.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#249

Post by dqpb » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #239

culebron21 wrote: post #142

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…

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 co…

For me, the act of programming has taught me epistemic humility much more forcefully and consistently than exams.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#250

Post by ghaff » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #121

> 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.

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.