Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Maybe the default settings are too high

raptitude.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 332 posts

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#211

Post by qmr »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #180
gste wrote: post #175

By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago. I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens. You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and…

Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim…

I don't know. I enjoyed it in tweens and high school, couldn't get into it again in later life.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#212

Post by [deleted] »

toyg wrote: post #191
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?

Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.

[deleted]

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#213

Post by qmr »

awesome_dude wrote: post #186
ghaff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that). ADD…

I have an upcoming trip planned in asia - never been before. My firm rule is - have a loose plan, aim for one activity per day, an emergency option, or two, if the weather plays up, and that's it. It's the type of plan that has worked for every holiday that I have taken that involves a different city to the one I live in.

This is typically what I aim for.

One or two core activities for the day.

If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary.

I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#214

Post by rozab »

In one of his essays, Philip Pullman suggested reading Paradise Lost out loud which was a revelation for me. I never considered reading anything out loud for myself but it changes the nature of the experience entirely.

Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#215

Post by WhyNotHugo »

crazygringo wrote: post #38
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?

The article literally says: > limiting myself to mouth-speed Audiobooks are mouth-speed. The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author. Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.

Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#216

Post by criddell »

qmr wrote: post #213
awesome_dude wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an upcoming trip planned in asia - never been before. My firm rule is - have a loose plan, aim for one activity per day, an emergency option, or two, if the weather plays up, and that's it. It's the type of plan that has worked for every holiday that I have taken that involves a different city to the one I live in.

This is typically what I aim for. One or two core activities for the day. If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary. I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.

My family went to Hawaii a couple of years ago and in the exact middle of the trip we took a day doing absolutely nothing and it was kind of great.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#217

Post by photios »

gste wrote: post #175

By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago. I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens. You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and…

I could see value in slowing down or re-reading crafted writing like Tolkien's. I've been doing that with St. Paul's epistles.

There is no value in doing it for modern clickbait or AI slop though.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#218

Post by matsemann »

fluoridation wrote: post #154
delichon wrote: post #6

My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around. About an hour into that,…

[flagged]

What did you get out of this comment? What do you think a reader gets? Maybe follow the spirit of the article: slow down and pounder, be curious, maybe you would have gotten the right take away instead of being antagonizing towards someone's fond memory.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#219

Post by Wowfunhappy »

chihuahua wrote: post #56
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

I can't control the speed that I read. In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books. Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's…

Audiobooks are great, while driving or walking or riding a bike. But for complex topics, I miss the ability to read a sentence or a paragraph again.

This is definitely a disadvantage of audiobooks, although I’ve found having access to a `skip backwards 15 seconds` button can help a lot.

(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#220

Post by criddell »

copirate wrote: post #193

> When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food. That's not always the case. With certain types of food, it's much more enjoyable to have your mouth full than to eat a small amount, for example. It's a trade-off. It's the same with a story. Taking too long can make it boring, for example. That doesn't mean we always choose…

LoTR isn’t for me, so reading it slowly wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience. There are other books for me where I found myself reading and re-reading, moving through the book slowly, marveling at text wondering how the author managed to pick perfect word after perfect word.

For some books, faster is better. Neuromancer, for example, has a lot of sentences and paragraphs that if I go slowly, I can’t figure out what it is that Gibson is talking about. But if I go fast, I pick up the vibe and things start to make sense.

Post reply on HN