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Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

davidbieber.com

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Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#111
post #24

What's the point of listening to 3 books per day? You need time to digest the ideas in a book. Sometimes I listen to one chapter in a book and I need a whole day to digest it: I get into a state where I don't want to listen to _any_ music, etc.

> What's the point of listening to 3 books per day? You need time to digest the ideas in a book.

Agreed, but sometimes there's value in having broad exposure ASAP.

e.g. learning what tools/techniques are available in a given discipline

e.g. learning enough jargon to Google for deeper exposure

This can be helpful in cross-disciplinary contexts. Perhaps you don't need to truly understand Statistics, for instance, but you're working on a problem in which you've binned a matrix of values into deck-of-card-like suits and you want to evaluate how "good" each choice was within its local context. It would help to know terms like "categorical variables" and "goodness of fit".

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#114

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

One thing you learn from reading many books, even at 2x, is that many people prefer lots of things differently, and that that works well for them. If listening at 2x is not your thing, I suggest you find another way to learn that lesson. Based on your comment, you still have to learn that.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#115

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

I have found that listening to audiobooks at 1.35X speed is the "best value" speed. It shortens the amount of time wasted on silence and is still comprehensible. Going any faster than that leads to some incomprehension and strange audio distortions.

I find that reading rather than listening to an audiobook is the superior form of consumption for knowledge retention however.

I assume this will be different for each individual.

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#117
I stopped listening to audiobooks and podcasts at faster speeds because I found myself rushing when speaking.

It's like it recalibrated my set communicating speed, in a bad way.

I've switched back to 1x, which felt painfully slow at first, but it's helped me slow down and think more.

YMMV

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#118

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

I love listening to audiobooks at 0.5x speed to really comprehend what I'm listening to. The people who listen at 1x speed are just there for the experience of listening to something and not to get anything from the book. /s

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#119

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others a…

Now now, you're forgetting the crucial part where you post everywhere about how you've listened to and that it was a life changing experience. You couldn't quote a single line from it and it's most likely some vapid bullshit in that book anyways, but that makes you _better_ than those non readers.

sitting around online making up guys and getting mad at them

Re: Fastbook: Listen to audiobooks faster (2020)

#120
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading something. Meaning that ticking the box "achievement unlocked, read another book" becomes more important than what you really get out of the book. Did you now retain as much information as possible? You're expressing a common skepticism of 2x+ speedup but it misunderstands why people do it. It actually improves the presentation to 200+ wpm s…

> The slower ~100 wpm (i.e. 1x speed) acted as a barrier to learning. Unless there is a lot of good evidence, I am skeptical of this claim Human children are exposed verbally to 1x human speech. Do we really think that making teachers talk faster will improve learning and retention? Also, according to linguistics, I believe pretty much human languages transmit close to the same bit rate (some languages have longer mo…

It maybe doesn't come naturally to most people to be able to take in information from speech at high speeds, but it is definitely possible to learn. I am blind, and use a screen reader. My screen reader's voice is many times faster than normal human speech. (I don't know exactly how much faster, but most people can't understand a word of it.) I also listen to non-fiction podcasts and books at 1.5-2x speed, although I almost always listen to fiction at normal speed unless the reader is painfully slow.
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