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 programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.
This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.
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 convinced me that your internal assessment of how well you understand something can be wildly off without an objective yardstick. Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as getting rekt in an exam.
A bit off-topic, but I remember a college class in which I was completely lost. I wasn't even clear on the topic of the class. Nothing ever made sense. I got D's on most of the tests. I was enormously frustrated. Then, at the end, I got my final grade: B+.
My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.
I had to learn driving a car this spring, with manual transmission. Knowing these things helped a lot. I made notes of all the traffic regulations document, and made tables of all long and intricate rules (e.g. lists of places where u-turn is forbidden, or backpedal, or what are speed limits for different kinds of vehicles/roads).
This helped avoid learning all those 1000 test questions, what most students did.
And using computer simulator with 3 pedals helped to automate the movements, and think of subtleties. Reportedly, those who had no practice before driving school, under the pressure of the exam, didn't stall the engine, but failed exactly in higher-order matters, like they'd cross continuous lines or not notice speed limit signs.
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 as evaluation of the course itself, because it can penalize courses where people would actually learn - because learning sometimes simply isn't fun.
Yes, it is often a matter of sympathy, atmosphere and ambitions more than actual learning.
Many years ago as a grad student I was a teaching assistant.
One year I was instructing two classes.
One was an ordinary class. It was all very pleasant, cozy and relaxed. Students would often bake cake for the class.
But I had trouble teaching because most of them did not do any homework and did not read the textbooks much. They all liked me. One even said in class that he would try to get me again next semester, meaning that he knew he would fail the exam. Which most of them did.
The other class was a special class for students that had failed the previous exams and because the curriculum had changed this was their last chance. They were a lot more motivated. And they were quite critical about me as an instructor. At one point they even made a complaint about me be because I had tried to prove a theorem on the blackboard and failed because I made a silly mistake. They were absolutely right that I messed up that proof. But we did handle it in that same class and had a good discussion about that theorem and how to prove things. And their critical attitude kept me on my toes.
I worked hard preparing the classes. And the classes were focused and tense.
In the end, except for one that fell sick, everyone passed the exam with good marks.
It takes a huge level of maturity to know when you understand something. You have to take yourself away from how pleasant the interaction was, and ask yourself questions that are on the limit of what you think you can answer. That whole not-too-easy-or-hard balance is really difficult to nail down, especially if you have a grade depending on it. It's also hard when you have nothing but your own satisfaction depending on it, eg after you've graduated and are just reading for interest.
The entertainment aspect is hard to get away from. It's like when you watch a good documentary, you're in awe of whatever field it's about. But have you really learned much? Hard to say.
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).
This lends credence to the educational reform that I always found the most compelling: kids/people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture, so the teacher can actually help students work through problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).
A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.
For each class, a text lesson is assigned. This assignment includes a reading and specific
problems associated with the reading material. Each cadet is expected to "work the
problems." (Note: Prior to 2000 these problems were called "drill problems"; the current
terminology is "suggested problems.")
• "One learns mathematics by doing mathematics." Cadets are encouraged to be active
learners and to "do" mathematics. Group work is encouraged and expected. Special
projects are a major portion of each core mathematics course-work on these projects is
done in teams of two or three.
• Cadets are required to study the concepts of each lesson in such a way as to be ready to
use them in three ways:
1. To express them fluently in words and symbols
2. To use them in proof and analysis
3. To apply them to the solution of original problems
• The instructor's goal during each lesson is to cause the maximum number of cadets to
actively participate in the day's lesson. One of the instructor's roles is to facilitate the
learning activity in the classroom. This may take the form of a question or a remark to
clarify a point.
• Class begins with the instructor's questions on the assigned text lesson. Cadets are asked
if there are questions on the assignment. Example problems are worked and discussed.
Cadets are sent to the boards to work in groups of two or three on specific problems that
are provided (so called "board problems"). These board problems may be similar to the
problems assigned with the text lesson or they may be "original."
• Cadets are selected to recite on the problems they work. Questions are encouraged.
• The instructor spends a few minutes to discuss the next lesson. This practice is commonly
called the "pre-teach."
First, I'm a slow reader, so I always feel penalized when it takes me twice as long to get through a text as classmates.
Second, math/engineering/science lessons typically build upon understanding the first example. If you don't understand or have questions about the earlier parts of the lesson you will have a hard time completing the lesson.
Third, most text books I have encountered are terrible. Grade and High schools typically are trying to get the cheapest books so their dollar stretches further. In college, too many Profs/Departments push certain books because of kickbacks.
Finally, too often enough people don't complete the readings, so you end up covering the material in class anyway. Or worse, not at all. I had several profs who's assigned reading was never to be discussed in class but was prominently featured in tests.
I much prefer the typical lecture that allows for questions and discussions during the class. That way I can quickly address the issues I have with the material when I encounter it instead of having to wait till the next class hoping I don't fall too far behind.
I would go even further and argue that making students read or listen to lectures for any significant length of time without them being actively engaged with the lesson is sub-optimal.
Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between teaching the student something and checking whether they actually learned it to seconds rather than days.
After experiencing such systems for myself I'm blown away that they aren't already the norm.
When I first went back to school for tech stuff (ultimately a master's in EE), my instructor for the entire calculus sequence -- and later on for linear algebra -- struck what I found to be the ideal balance. Something like:
0. Homework is never collected or graded, but don't be fooled into thinking it's not required -- that is, if you don't do the homework, you are extremely unlikely to pass the exams/course. Essentially, this is not knowledge we were learning -- it is skills that require practice. Homework is an opportunity to practice and hone skills.
1. Each lecture introduces a concept and/or technique, and works through a few demonstrative problems to show what it means or how it is done. Homework is assigned from textbook problems that involve the same techniques with progressive difficulty or complexity. The textbook used that pattern where odd-numbered problems included solutions, and assignments usually involved the ones with solutions.
2. The last one-quarter to one-third of every class period was dedicated to review and questions about the homework assigned for the previous class. Because we had the correct solutions in the text, we knew what to ask about (i.e. the ones we couldn't get to come out right). This particular instructor was fantastic at thinking on his feet and working problems on the fly, correctly and without preparation, so usually he'd just work the problem on the board and we could stop him to ask for a more detailed explanation if necessary.
Granted, this model didn't work as well for his linear algebra class. Since many of those problems involve long slogs through tedious and error-prone matrix operations before/while you were really dealing with the concept or technique being introduced, he couldn't as easily demo entire solutions during the question/review periods. I suppose that difficulty would apply to several other higher-math topics, as well, but even so, later in my education I often found myself wishing this or that professor would follow the pattern of my humble calculus teacher.
Many teachers/professors I had in my youth asked the class to read the material before lecture so the lecture could be a summary and then most of the time spent asking questions/discussing the topic. Few students actually did so.
people should be reading the chapters for the lecture ahead of time as their homework, and doing the practice problems in class instead of a lecture
While it's been decades since I went to college, I'm surprised this is no longer how it's done. That was pretty much the routine when I was in school.
At the end of the class, the professor would say, "Next week, we'll be doing X, Y, and Z. It's chapters A, B, and C in the book." You'd prepare for it over the weekend. The following week, we'd have a mixture of lecture, discussion, and quizzes.
Is it the other way around now? Lecture first, then the books and papers?
> so the teacher can actually help students work through problems (rather than parents who don't know the material).
This seems to be the continual heart of opposition to restructuring math curricula. Whether it's my parents generation recalling how their parents couldn't make heads or tails of new math or parents slightly older than me struggling to comprehend the Common Core math they're supposed to guide their children through, the essence of the complaint is the same: "how can I teach my child what I was never taught myself?"
> if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress
If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".
I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same proportions.
If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to make people feel smarter with the sample lessons. That being said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the important stuff. So I think it's important to find a balance. You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.
I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment? The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel good after learning stuff.
> 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 grades.
So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?
Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are two parties to that bargain.
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 pay attention as the lecturer slowly speaks the material you already know. And then any questions you may have require too much detail to actually answer in the lecture. It's really quite miserable. Why would you do that to yourself?
Hum, if people are engaging, it's not a lecture. Discussions are much more effective than lectures.
What I've never seen is a comparison between a pure lecture (like it would be on video) and reading a book. Those two fit the same stage on an effective "get pointed to the content, get the raw content, refine it with people and the real world" learning process.
This is what I do when learning math and it works really well.
Lectures alone don't give you a deep understanding and a solid theoretical grasp of the concepts and their manipulations, books alone are very dense and often lack the intuition and human explanations of the concepts.
But if you go book then lecture you get a double whammy of thick theory followed by an exposition of the intuition behind it and suddenly everything clicks together.
I imagine it's obvious to many, but I only realized it recently.
I think for some subjects and some teachers, swapping homework time and lecture time can work. For example, if you are learning calculus, it may be more efficient for the teacher to assign reading a section of a textbook as homework and then in the classroom work through a bunch of problems and proofs using the homework material.
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.
Also, confirming what you wrote: students who excelled at my courses, usually took some courses, like online, before that. Those who were great at maths in the university, said their parents were mathematicians, and they were exposed to advanced maths, like quadratic or trigonometric equations already at the age of 7-9.
I always thought lectures aren't for teaching, they are basically just some more detail on the syllabus. Basically it's the prof saying "you need to know this proof, I'll skim over it fast and you can figure it out in your own time".
I also taught at commercial courses and in a university, trying to apply active learning, but it didn't go well, so I haven't an answer to this problem either.
> “When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at a rate of four thousand words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”
> 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]
Yea, this is why my IT program had such poor students in the higher grade levels. I would spend 8 hours on Saturday on labs and other students would breeze through them in a couple hours.
I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.
I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.
In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.
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. 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.
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.
I believe the research supports fast reading as being better, because you get more of an overview, but presumably this peaks at some point, same as audio.
If 2x speed lets you listen twice then by all means it is probably better than only listening once. However, the people who think they can get away with listening once at 2x speed without pausing are just passing the time, they aren't learning.
It is very clear to me that listening at 3x works after some training. (Not surprising, since almost everyone already reads way faster than normal speech)
The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.
I have listened, and it's amazing, but I'm not sure they are understanding more than I would if I were scanning the page for the navigation options. (I haven't heard someone listening to a long-form text for understanding.)
> A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress
There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion about whether video learning was useful or worked better for some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative correlation).
This makes me feel better about myself. I don't like reading or listening a ton before diving it. Just give me a spoonful and then I'll do what I can with that, and come back for the next spoonful when I'm ready.
The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.
> Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills.
Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating your current ability", and more broadly being good at "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current ability", is a skill in itself.
Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the next step being the realization that you probably are incapable.
At conferences, people will say they liked and learned from talks that were complicated and largely incomprehensible, and that they found trivial and boring the talks that managed to explain the thing well enough that it was actually understood.
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 people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
>, misunderstood the point (aka he's talking about people who are cramming information,
The author is making multiple points and it's fair to consider each claim in isolation.
One of the points is that that active learning is better passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the information multiple times is better than reading it fast once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
- 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so slowly than listeners tune out at 1x
- 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1 perspective in 1x time.
- 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
- 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in their head" when reading written text
The author should have titled his essay "Against Passive Learning" because that's the stronger point rather than highlight "3x".
I don't agree at all. The author doesn't mention filler content. He seems to implicitly assume that Mike's podcasts have no filler content. And he assumes Mike's motive to be trying to learn faster - rather than skipping filler - without presenting any evidence that Mike believes this.
I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman, that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis - Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the content a little boring.
I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
To be fair, the article is quite long so I for example gave up reading after a while. Which from my brief skimming seems like what the author advocates for -- reading less things but more deeply.
I use the same youtube plugin mentioned in the article, and watch many videos at 2.5x-3.0x speed, for the exact reason that you state. There is a lot of "filler" content that I either a) already know or b) is not relevant to what I'm trying to learn. I'm really just trying to get through that content quickly. When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the speed down to 1x to learn it.
> When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the speed down to 1x to learn it.
An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature too.
Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially useful when you want to know more about a subject you already know about (say a programming language you've used but never formally learnt).
If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the information rate of a video is typically quite low.
In addition to what you're saying, it can also be _harder_ to watch something at 1x speed. I've found that at 1.25x-1.5x my mind is more engaged. If it's too slow, I start thinking about other things and end up getting less from the video.
Honestly, maybe I'm just some old, out-of-touch luddite, but I think that using videos to pass information is sub-optimal all around.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Nothing to do with your age, it's always been either a difference between users of the media, convenience for the producer, that it's easier to monetize video, or the ability for instant feedback when it's in-person or live.
Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text to pass information is just making your memory weak.
different people prefer different methods of learning
they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn new information is becoming harder and harder for me personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and social media use
I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to me
videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed
..so I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and hear someone explain something at length
They key advantage to video (and the reason why YouTube seems to keep expanding to encompass more and more subcultures) is that video formatting is also inclusive to text, audio, and still image formatting. You can only upload text to a blog, and you can only upload audio to SoundCloud, but you can upload everything to YouTube.
Long before audio books were a public thing I received a special tape player for listening to audio recordings of my school textbooks because I have low vision. I was ecstatic to learn that I could adjust the speed and could still understand the book at something around 2-2.5x speed. I don’t know to what extent other bling or impaired persons use the speed controls but I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly and this isn’t a bad thing per se. I also agree that the information glut is not a good habit but listening to something at a faster speed is not in abs of itself information glut. Sometimes the bottleneck in presentation speed is the speaker not the listener.
> I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly
Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.
I think it's not really about the speed of the information, as long as you are able to process it, but the sheer amount of information. If you use time savings of 50 minutes to just consume more information, not much will settle in your long term memory. But if you process and repeat the information in those "saved" minutes, you'll get away with much more in the end. I think this is more the point of the author's view.
This ignores the point (that Perell makes in the essay) that learning via lecture is a horrible way to learn much of anything to begin with.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
Off-tangent: modern lectures are still a better way to learn something than original lectiones were ― the lecturer would read the book by some prominent author, and students would listen to it and take notes... and that's it. That's what lectio literally means: "[an act of] reading". And before the invention and spread of the printing press, it absolutely made sense ― books were rare and expensive.
Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully considered to be the worst: a student too can read the textbook himself just fine!
I think that tutors like Khan of Khan Academy kind of revolutionized the shortening down of lectures. The videos are split up into smaller chunks, they're much more direct, and go straight to the point.
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
I'll often seek out both the written and lectures on material I'm particularly interested in.
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
It's not just density, many books are pure nonsense. So 200 books of pure nonsense a year won't teach you much. They'll just introduce you to a ton of terrible ideas.
Hey, that's how AI's learn as well. Reading up all the nonsense indiscriminately and making no effort to make the ideas consistent. But it's better than not reading because you get exposed to a larger variety of text so you can draw upon them when it's time to get creative.
You describe a symptom of a high data/low effect situation that is pretty common these days.
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
From learning point of view? Unanimously do something with it. Or at least see some examples of someone doing something with it to make you care about what you just learned. It's very high to remember a fact, as in commit to long-term memory, if there was no feeling attached.
I'm very slow with books. I'll read a couple paragraphs and then ponder for a minute. And then maybe look up some tangential, maybe even radial stuff. Even audio books at 1X move too fast for me.
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
If only this wasn't necessary - a lot of online stuff has had a single 'take' done and minimal editing out of such time-wasting utterances or silences. And once you start to notice such characteristics in some poor speakers it can be a complete deal-breaker in terms of actually learning something.
I have quite literally gone through long lectures and edited out such filler words (Audacity is good for this), where the material is sufficiently compelling (an extreme rarity).
It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI" school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything that features this.
For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
Not sure how well it removes "ehm"s, but I use unsilence[1] a lot for lectures. It removes the silent bits from a video file. It isn't a browser plugin however. You have to download the lecture before converting.
Using rate of speed up is probably a bad metric due to varying densities, but even if one were to account for that and use some kind of smart speed up app that maintains constant information throughput, the issue is with not taking pauses to ruminate.
It's more of an information retention problem rather than an information loss one. IE not committing to long term memory as the author states.
Yeah, I've noticed that with text I'm going to make more pauses thinking about what I just read (especially printed text for some reason). Video is the worst, while audio only in the middle. Maybe because of clunky controls ?
I really hate how everyone has shifted to video and podcasts over the last ten years or so.
Personally, I'm an "in one ear, out the other" type as far as auditory memory goes. So I can read something written out, or even just transcribed, in a fraction of the time and actually remember it.
I suspect someone with better understanding of psychology can tell me if I'm way off on this or not.
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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.
My experience is that speeding up low-quality content makes it more tolerable, whereas speeding up high quality content makes it less enjoyable.
So now I just don’t speed up. If the quality is low, I don’t listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time to think about what the speaker is saying, while they’re saying it.
And that's why reading a book or an article is 10x better than listening or watching a lecture.
There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.
Listening to a lecture at a faster speed doesn't change the information density. You're just compressing everything; you're not editing out the useless bits.
Yes, it does: the useless bits remain as time to help you digest the information. It's just that you don't need as much time to do so, so making everything faster is just fine.
The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me.
Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed because there's really nothing there.
It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily gained.
If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.
> The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me
Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found the ones to keep my interest yet.
"The History of Rome" and "Philosophize This". I finished them both in a superficial way, while driving on my daily commute. Now I listen to them in my spare time and try to really dig deep, take notes and read the original material on topics that resonate to me. After I finish them again this way I will search for something of similar quality. "Revolutions" seems to be it.
Psychology in Seattle has some excellent well researched content. It has very concretely changed or modified my perspectives on relationships, parenthood and mental illness.
At 3x, sure. But I regularly listen to podcasts at about 1.3-1.4x, depending on how quickly the hosts talk. When you actually are paying attention, 1x can just be really slow sometimes. I think of it more like bringing it to a comfortable speed where I don't feel like I have to wait for them to get on with it, than trying to speed through it as quickly as possible. I, too, will sometimes pause to think (or talk) about what I've just heard though, so perhaps by your metric I'm at less than 1x on average too...
This is my issue also. I'm guilty of being a 2x'er, not because I believe I'll absorb more information faster, but because I find most narrators/podcast hosts tend to slow down their speech significantly when recording something for consumption. Be it because their reading speed is worse than their talking speed, or that they think they need to for effect like some 1940's Trans-Atlantic radio host, I find it painful to listen to most of the time.
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.
I'm with you here. The money line of the whole article was almost a throw-away at the end:
He should think more strategically about what he wants to learn and why.
The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education, with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of interactions between students.
In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge of C++.
Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python. "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked through the existing library of code they did, asked questions of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship I was writing programs that were performing vital business tasks.
I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind, and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time, from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that develop over repeated encounters.
> It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone.
Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player.
However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing.
But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.
I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it offers anything substantial.
It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...?
Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations with real native speakers.
This article is perhaps interesting, but it is not well-written, nor, I would argue, particularly well reasoned. The author makes gratituous assumptions about Mike's reasoning, assumptions that appear unlikely to many readers, and fails to provide any justification for them. Read it again - how much of Mike's reasoning comes from Mike, and how much from the author? Did the author even ask Mike?
It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's ironic that so many folks in this comment section are questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that you didn't deep read the article, including spending time considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously criticizing other people for not doing the same.
Learning happens in the space in between words. Without time for reflection, people inevitably just mirror information instead of integrating new ideas into what they know.
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.
I disagree, if you are just doing you won’t be learning new things. I work at a place where there a lot of of long-timers are there and at that time there were only people that can from different fields. Those people work since 10, 20 years without even mastering what they do.
If they have to do something new they either give up or just try to come up with something on their own. Most of the time people have done things like that before and you can just read about them or look at their code.
You're right! I'd say doing is important for actually understanding and retaining information while reading is important for understanding the triumphs and failures of others and "stealing" ideas.
Interspersing the two is perhaps the best way of learning. For example you don't want to learn to swim by watching 12, hour-long videos on swimming techniques, costumes and its history. You do wanna watch a 15 minute instructions video on how to get your feet wet and then go ahead and actually get your feet wet and then come back and watch the next 15 minutes of video on how to step into the pool.
Strongly agree. I would always fall asleep in class in college.
Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed at learning specific new things.
If I sat through talks or presentations I would just information dump into a text file which I would data mine later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but organizing it according to my own thought process helped make it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same thing.
I'm inclined to agree. There's a profound difference between how I remember something I've heard and how I remember something I've done - even if it's something I've heard through spaced repetition.
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.
If you mean time spent, then yes, about 95% of time spent learning is doing. But you're talking about the cost, not the benefit. Learning by doing is very inefficient. You gain much deeper knowledge, but it can only possibly be in a very narrow area. If you spend only 5% of your time reading/listening/watching stuff, this more than pays for itself. You don't need to have experience programming a network stack before knowledge of it becomes useful. For almost everyone out there, knowledge is enough.
I’m not a fan of this dichotomy - you assume the two are mutually exclusive. There's analysis paralysis (no “doing”) on one extreme and blind ambition on the other (no book knowledge). I doubt many people advocate either.
Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?
I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic.
I was a good but not great student in college. The computer science classes bored me to death.
Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn’t stay focused until … I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few min at 1x.
My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine. If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.
10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x. It’s a sweet spot for me.
When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I Built This w Guy Raz) I’ll often pause to write down notes, but I’m almost never feeling like it’s too fast to ingest.
Sometimes I’m self conscious that I talk too fast around other people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and mouth don’t have a 1/2x button. Ha!
"I haven’t read the whole article but I’m deeply opinionated about this topic."
Sometimes I truly feel like this should be the unofficial motto of HN ;)
> 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x
The sweet spot for me is between 1.5x and 1.7x (Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x but apps that do earn extra brownie points from me eg. VLC). It's always weird having to explain this to friends who tend to think that I'm always listening to is a rap documentary :-D
I am so happy you said this. I always felt like the majority of lectures and content overall is ceremony and that most of the actual substance comprises maybe 15-20% of the overall content. There are times when I can appreciate ceremony, especially if it's being given by a good performer, a great writer or a passionate lecturer. Unfortunately most teachers are not passionate or good lecturers, most educational videos are not that engaging, and many authors are not good writers, and so in most cases I could strip out 80% of the content and spare myself the boredom.
I'm in a similar boat. 1.75x is probably the best speed for me for most speakers, but until I was able to speed up audio/video I also had a really hard time paying attention in lectures / watching informative content.
I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too much time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think it's a blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up being an excuse to not complete things. There's always something else that you "need to know" that blocks you.
Nowadays, I realize that it feels good to learn new things, but if it's not in service of an actual "deliverable" of some sort, I don't end up using it.
More recently I've gone the other way and just try to do and make things, even if I don't have an exact plan on how I'm going to do it. It ends up focusing my learning as well. Plus I'm actually more productive since I'm always focused on producing something as opposed to focusing on planning to produce something.
> I think I've spent too much time on learning and also too much time in planning earlier in my career and life. I think it's a blind spot if you're an analytical type. It ends up being an excuse to not complete things. There's always something else that you "need to know" that blocks you.
I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and striving for perfection, often upfront.
I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find it"?
To me, a big part of my mental shift was just realizing how much code or process I follow doesn't actually deliver customer value. I want to make things that affect people or improve lives and the longer I spend polishing what I'm making, the less I'm getting feedback.
I used to work in a large company on a team that essentially developed frameworks for other teams to use. I would often think through designs from several different angles and try to create an API that could work in any scenario. After shipping our frameworks, I often found that the "customer" (i.e. the other team) would use what I made in a different way from what I had expected. That meant a lot of the thinking I poured into the project was unnecessary. I really just had to look at that one particular use case and design for that.
After a while I started working backwards and went directly in the customer team's codebase to start integrating potential API designs to ensure it would work for their use case. That saved a ton of guesswork and eliminated a lot of code waste.
So I guess my advice is to question everything you work on and ask if there's a simpler/cheaper way to build just what you need. I usually aim for creating a proof of concept now to ensure that I only build what I need. It often means hacking things to make it work, and then afterwards clean up the hacks, but to be honest, a lot of hacks are good enough, if they are isolated. Also, try to develop a mindset of always aiming to deliver an output to ensure you don't get bogged down with analysis paralysis.
I will take a stab at this since I am transitioning away from this mindset myself.
Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on each task, one at a time.
If it’s not critical, let go of control and be okay failure, both from yourself and others.
Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well, what didn’t go well, what could have improved) and use those to come up with action items.
Or, if that’s too much, my original advice for you was “just do it.”
Until the management starts asking what are the pros and cons of new tools to be introduced into the stack and nobody can answer them, they will hire new experts to join the company and who knows who else is going to be obsolete anyway
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 not really engaging with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio shows for since radio shows were invented.
That's not to say podcasts can't also be useful in the instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you've got a good memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.
Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your own story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it. Believe it or not, that's allowed too.
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.
Readit News
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 programming code to a farmer: incomprehensible stream of linguistic terms. My complacency was shattered in 1 minute.
There's some scientific evidence as well:
1. Lectures are proved to be a bad way to learn things. https://www.science.org/content/article/lectures-arent-just-...
2. A nice experiment showing that if you enjoy a lesson, it usually means you make no progress, meanwhile hard practice actually does make you progress: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/39/19251
I suppose, those who insist they learn something, do make progress at memorizing trivia, but not at practical skills or any systematic understanding.
This kind of knowledge feels firm only until it's tested by practical task or by serious questioning.
Seeing the answers afterwards, they usually involved facts i knew applied in a way i could not. That experience convinced me that your internal assessment of how well you understand something can be wildly off without an objective yardstick. Like nothing teaches epistemic humility quite as forcefully as getting rekt in an exam.
My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.
This helped avoid learning all those 1000 test questions, what most students did.
And using computer simulator with 3 pedals helped to automate the movements, and think of subtleties. Reportedly, those who had no practice before driving school, under the pressure of the exam, didn't stall the engine, but failed exactly in higher-order matters, like they'd cross continuous lines or not notice speed limit signs.
Many years ago as a grad student I was a teaching assistant.
One year I was instructing two classes.
One was an ordinary class. It was all very pleasant, cozy and relaxed. Students would often bake cake for the class. But I had trouble teaching because most of them did not do any homework and did not read the textbooks much. They all liked me. One even said in class that he would try to get me again next semester, meaning that he knew he would fail the exam. Which most of them did.
The other class was a special class for students that had failed the previous exams and because the curriculum had changed this was their last chance. They were a lot more motivated. And they were quite critical about me as an instructor. At one point they even made a complaint about me be because I had tried to prove a theorem on the blackboard and failed because I made a silly mistake. They were absolutely right that I messed up that proof. But we did handle it in that same class and had a good discussion about that theorem and how to prove things. And their critical attitude kept me on my toes. I worked hard preparing the classes. And the classes were focused and tense. In the end, except for one that fell sick, everyone passed the exam with good marks.
The entertainment aspect is hard to get away from. It's like when you watch a good documentary, you're in awe of whatever field it's about. But have you really learned much? Hard to say.
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).
A brief review/lecture at the end to tie together all of that practice intoa coherent story then wraps it all up.
https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
For each class, a text lesson is assigned. This assignment includes a reading and specific problems associated with the reading material. Each cadet is expected to "work the problems." (Note: Prior to 2000 these problems were called "drill problems"; the current terminology is "suggested problems.")
• "One learns mathematics by doing mathematics." Cadets are encouraged to be active learners and to "do" mathematics. Group work is encouraged and expected. Special projects are a major portion of each core mathematics course-work on these projects is done in teams of two or three.
• Cadets are required to study the concepts of each lesson in such a way as to be ready to use them in three ways: 1. To express them fluently in words and symbols 2. To use them in proof and analysis 3. To apply them to the solution of original problems
• The instructor's goal during each lesson is to cause the maximum number of cadets to actively participate in the day's lesson. One of the instructor's roles is to facilitate the learning activity in the classroom. This may take the form of a question or a remark to clarify a point.
• Class begins with the instructor's questions on the assigned text lesson. Cadets are asked if there are questions on the assignment. Example problems are worked and discussed. Cadets are sent to the boards to work in groups of two or three on specific problems that are provided (so called "board problems"). These board problems may be similar to the problems assigned with the text lesson or they may be "original."
• Cadets are selected to recite on the problems they work. Questions are encouraged.
• The instructor spends a few minutes to discuss the next lesson. This practice is commonly called the "pre-teach."
First, I'm a slow reader, so I always feel penalized when it takes me twice as long to get through a text as classmates.
Second, math/engineering/science lessons typically build upon understanding the first example. If you don't understand or have questions about the earlier parts of the lesson you will have a hard time completing the lesson.
Third, most text books I have encountered are terrible. Grade and High schools typically are trying to get the cheapest books so their dollar stretches further. In college, too many Profs/Departments push certain books because of kickbacks.
Finally, too often enough people don't complete the readings, so you end up covering the material in class anyway. Or worse, not at all. I had several profs who's assigned reading was never to be discussed in class but was prominently featured in tests.
I much prefer the typical lecture that allows for questions and discussions during the class. That way I can quickly address the issues I have with the material when I encounter it instead of having to wait till the next class hoping I don't fall too far behind.
Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between teaching the student something and checking whether they actually learned it to seconds rather than days.
After experiencing such systems for myself I'm blown away that they aren't already the norm.
0. Homework is never collected or graded, but don't be fooled into thinking it's not required -- that is, if you don't do the homework, you are extremely unlikely to pass the exams/course. Essentially, this is not knowledge we were learning -- it is skills that require practice. Homework is an opportunity to practice and hone skills.
1. Each lecture introduces a concept and/or technique, and works through a few demonstrative problems to show what it means or how it is done. Homework is assigned from textbook problems that involve the same techniques with progressive difficulty or complexity. The textbook used that pattern where odd-numbered problems included solutions, and assignments usually involved the ones with solutions.
2. The last one-quarter to one-third of every class period was dedicated to review and questions about the homework assigned for the previous class. Because we had the correct solutions in the text, we knew what to ask about (i.e. the ones we couldn't get to come out right). This particular instructor was fantastic at thinking on his feet and working problems on the fly, correctly and without preparation, so usually he'd just work the problem on the board and we could stop him to ask for a more detailed explanation if necessary.
Granted, this model didn't work as well for his linear algebra class. Since many of those problems involve long slogs through tedious and error-prone matrix operations before/while you were really dealing with the concept or technique being introduced, he couldn't as easily demo entire solutions during the question/review periods. I suppose that difficulty would apply to several other higher-math topics, as well, but even so, later in my education I often found myself wishing this or that professor would follow the pattern of my humble calculus teacher.
While it's been decades since I went to college, I'm surprised this is no longer how it's done. That was pretty much the routine when I was in school.
At the end of the class, the professor would say, "Next week, we'll be doing X, Y, and Z. It's chapters A, B, and C in the book." You'd prepare for it over the weekend. The following week, we'd have a mixture of lecture, discussion, and quizzes.
Is it the other way around now? Lecture first, then the books and papers?
This seems to be the continual heart of opposition to restructuring math curricula. Whether it's my parents generation recalling how their parents couldn't make heads or tails of new math or parents slightly older than me struggling to comprehend the Common Core math they're supposed to guide their children through, the essence of the complaint is the same: "how can I teach my child what I was never taught myself?"
If you learned something at all, then you should feel a tad bit dumber than before you started. A lot of people though actively avoid ever feeling dumb, so they want "edutainment".
I think both are useful, but obviously not in the same proportions.
If I were to make a language course, I would definitely try to make people feel smarter with the sample lessons. That being said, so much content is basically 95% this and 5% the important stuff. So I think it's important to find a balance. You need to sell to your audience, you do that by making them feel better after sampling the content, but there's actually negative value if the content never dips into the "you're going to feel dumber for a little while but it's ok" territory.
I've never taken Masterclass, but is it all just edutainment? The people I know who take them seem to really prefer to feel good after learning stuff.
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 grades.
So, what should I, as a college lecturer, do about this?
Everybody claims they want "active learning", but there are two parties to that bargain.
Very few college classes meet these requirements. When they did, they were amazing. But otherwise, reviewing just makes it nearly impossible to pay attention as the lecturer slowly speaks the material you already know. And then any questions you may have require too much detail to actually answer in the lecture. It's really quite miserable. Why would you do that to yourself?
What I've never seen is a comparison between a pure lecture (like it would be on video) and reading a book. Those two fit the same stage on an effective "get pointed to the content, get the raw content, refine it with people and the real world" learning process.
Now, about your question, I have no idea :)
Lectures alone don't give you a deep understanding and a solid theoretical grasp of the concepts and their manipulations, books alone are very dense and often lack the intuition and human explanations of the concepts. But if you go book then lecture you get a double whammy of thick theory followed by an exposition of the intuition behind it and suddenly everything clicks together.
I imagine it's obvious to many, but I only realized it recently.
> 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...
I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.
I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.
In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.
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.
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.
The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.
There was a post a few weeks ago whose comments had discussion about whether video learning was useful or worked better for some people than textual learning. I saw a lot of people claiming that they enjoyed videos more and learned more from them...but, as the linked study shows, enjoyment doesn't imply learning effectiveness (if anything, there's a negative correlation).
The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.
Perception is a strong force, and being good at "evaluating your current ability", and more broadly being good at "evaluating how good you are at evaluating your current ability", is a skill in itself.
Awareness that you may currently be incapable of measuring these things in an unbiased way is a big step on this path, the next step being the realization that you probably are incapable.
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 people instead of reading the article, took the title of the article and your comment as what the article meant, thus fulfilling the entire thing his article mentioned. Speeding through information. Kinda hilarious.
The author is making multiple points and it's fair to consider each claim in isolation.
One of the points is that that active learning is better passive learning. And another point is that reviewing the information multiple times is better than reading it fast once. No disagreement about those. However, the other claim that the speed of 3x is always less retention than 1x isn't true for every listener, every speaker, and every topic.
- 3x can be better for focus because some speakers talk so slowly than listeners tune out at 1x
- 3x lets you listen to 3 different presentations of a topic for reinforced learning rather than only getting 1 perspective in 1x time.
- 3x lets you get past "easy sentences" and selectively slow down to 1x for the "hard dense sentences".
- 3x increases the wpm (words-per-minute) into the normal/natural speed of the reader's "imaginary voice in their head" when reading written text
The author should have titled his essay "Against Passive Learning" because that's the stronger point rather than highlight "3x".
> 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.
I'd say the author constructs what is probably a strawman, that Mike is consuming so fast because he desires to learn as fast as possible, rather than the other obvious hypothesis - Mike is probably consuming so fast because he finds the content a little boring.
I don't think saivan is misunderstanding the author by pointing out the authors (mis)assumption - I think the author is misunderstanding Mike and you are axiomizing the author's misunderstanding to criticize other commenters.
An alternative that often works is to open the transcript and simply read it. If you find something unclear you can click to jump to that point. Coursera classes have this feature too.
Obviously doesn't work for everything, but it's especially useful when you want to know more about a subject you already know about (say a programming language you've used but never formally learnt).
If I can't do this I usually just close the tab -- the information rate of a video is typically quite low.
This lets you skip filler content automatically for many popular videos.
Unless we're actually showing audio-visual phenomena, a page of text is almost always more useful to me. I can absorb it at my speed. I can go back and forth within it easily. I can search it. I can copy bits out if I need to. It's just better.
Socrates to Plato perhaps: maybe I'm just old but using text to pass information is just making your memory weak.
different people prefer different methods of learning
they may or may not be more effective -- just that they are more preferred -- even if for no other reason than ease
sitting down with a page of text and focusing on it to learn new information is becoming harder and harder for me personally ...with the bad habits of constant smartphone and social media use
I fall back to have someone do the reading and explain it to me
videos let us pause / rewind / skip / slowdown as needed ..so I am noticing that I am depending on his control also and sometimes zoning out of videos too ...
...which sometimes bites me when I am watching a live stream that has no rewind or worse ..attending a real meeting and hear someone explain something at length
Visual content is a bonus, to remain more engaged and maybe impart information via a third medium
Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.
Now I could see a counter point where you speed up a lecture, find the new information that interests you, and then use that as a jumping off point for repetition. For example, dive deeper into other sources, take notes, use flash cards, try applying what you've learned, and so on.
But just consuming 10 mins of new info from a full lecture at 2.5x speed and then moving on probably isn't doing much long-term learning.
Today, of course, lectures during which the lecturer simply reads the textbook and does nothing more, are rightfully considered to be the worst: a student too can read the textbook himself just fine!
Andrew Ng is a bit similar. Much shorter, more dense videos.
Otherwise I’d almost fall asleep.
It’s better to occasionally rewind a couple of unclear sentences than wasting 2x the time.
I can read far, far faster than I can listen (and at what seems to be 4-5x the projected reading time in most article guides ... I'd really prefer a simple word count).
But ...
... listening to the spoken lecture can result in a very different understanding of material, hearing the lecturer's intonation, emphasis, humour, and more. This applies both where the reader is the original author and, at least in cases, where not, if the reader knows the material and its author well.
This of course depends on the material and ones level of interest in it. Multiple exposures for high-quality and complex material, or particularly compelling dramatisations, are worth this in my view.
The real question is what to do with the 50 minutes left after distilling the information down to 10 minutes. Just absorb more data or do something with it?
I read maybe 4 or 5 books a year. I don't understand how people do 100.
It really depends on the quality of the speaker and the content.
It's really a telling level of contempt for an audience to allow unedited material containing excessive fillers to be released. I'm not at all a fan of the "one take, FI/SI" school of podcasts, and will bail out of virtually anything that features this.
For vapid voiceovers, I'll often just watch the video with sound off. My response is similar to how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Android hearing people count.
It works quite well in my experience.
[1] https://github.com/lagmoellertim/unsilence
It's more of an information retention problem rather than an information loss one. IE not committing to long term memory as the author states.
Not very unlike consuming food without chewing.
Personally, I'm an "in one ear, out the other" type as far as auditory memory goes. So I can read something written out, or even just transcribed, in a fraction of the time and actually remember it.
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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.
So now I just don’t speed up. If the quality is low, I don’t listen to it. If the quality is high, I enjoy having the time to think about what the speaker is saying, while they’re saying it.
There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.
Most podcasts though I listen to at infinite speed, meaning I don't listen to them at all. You can go through them 2-3x speed because there's really nothing there.
It's like code: if it's boilerplate you can just skim it but if it's really doing something you have to read it slowly multiple times. And just like the saying: nothing of value is easily gained.
If you find yourself speeding though things - in general, not just podcasts - I would ask myself if they're worth doing at all.
Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found the ones to keep my interest yet.
I like finding and listening to lectures on Apple podcasts too, like Zizek.
The "deep dives" are definitely the best.
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.
He should think more strategically about what he wants to learn and why.
The article seems to jump around between self learning, a la podcasts and audio books, and the pitfalls of formal education, with its emphasis on assembly line lectures and dismissal of interactions between students.
In high school, I wanted to make video games, so I did some research and asked my parents for a C++ book. I took the book to school with me and read it between classes or whenever there was downtime. I never made any notes or did any exercises. I never got close to learning anything like functional knowledge of C++.
Later in college, I had an internship where I was asked to program in python, even though I had no knowledge of python. "You'll pick it up quickly", I was told. And I did! I never opened a single book, nor even used Google. I just poked through the existing library of code they did, asked questions of the other programmers when I could, and within a week I was contributing code to that codebase. By the end of my internship I was writing programs that were performing vital business tasks.
I'll finish this comment by adding that journaling has been a huge help to me for retaining knowledge and unpacking deeper lessons from familiar material. The book I read most often is the Bible, but you'll never see my Bible without a journal next to it. The journal allows me to develop the ideas in my mind, and so I can track how my understanding has expanded over time, from the literal meaning of what I'm reading, expanding to the metaphorical and psychological and spiritual lessons that develop over repeated encounters.
Where this has been incredibly clear to me personally is with any sort of activity that has an easily measurable skill level. For example, at various points in the past couple of years I have dabbled with chess. There is an amazing wealth of chess knowledge available on youtube, and I find that after watching a lot of videos it's easy to trick yourself into thinking that you understand what's going on and that you could keep up in a high level game. When the teacher says something like "here the best move is bishop to b2 to put pressure on the long diagonal" I think "of course, that's exactly what I would have played". But then I go to play an actual game and immediately hang my queen and lose to a 1000-level player.
However, I would push back a bit on the author's framing of the problem. What he describes is only a problem if your ultimate goal is do something with the knowledge. Like he talks about people who want to do something like start a unicorn company, and they're thinking they need to learn everything first before getting started. That does seem like a mistake, you'll learn more by doing.
But a lot of people just enjoy learning things just for the sake of it, and in that case I don't think there's anything wrong with one approach or another. If someone is really into watching sports and following all the analysis, you don't expect them to be training to become a professional coach. Similarly if you just enjoy listening to audio books at 3x speed as a hobby instead of watching TV, is there really any problem with that? Just because everybody now has the access to enough information to become an expert in a field if they study and practice it the right way, doesn't mean that you need to be training towards that goal.
It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...?
Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "consume at 3x" advocates. Both are looking for short-cuts to learning. Plus spaced-repetition only really applies to superficial, trivia-related knowledge. I was one of those people using Anki for learning a new language and it was absolutely no substitute for having actual conversations with real native speakers.
It seems that, you and a few other commenters are predisposed to make the same assumptions as the author. You think it's ironic that so many folks in this comment section are questioning the headline - a headline which dovetails directly into the authors assumptions. I think it's pretty ironic that you didn't deep read the article, including spending time considering the author's assumptions, as you're simultaneously criticizing other people for not doing the same.
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.
If they have to do something new they either give up or just try to come up with something on their own. Most of the time people have done things like that before and you can just read about them or look at their code.
Interspersing the two is perhaps the best way of learning. For example you don't want to learn to swim by watching 12, hour-long videos on swimming techniques, costumes and its history. You do wanna watch a 15 minute instructions video on how to get your feet wet and then go ahead and actually get your feet wet and then come back and watch the next 15 minutes of video on how to step into the pool.
Once I got into the workforce I would avoid this learning gap by creating side projects or taking extra work which was aimed at learning specific new things.
If I sat through talks or presentations I would just information dump into a text file which I would data mine later. The taking of the notes helped some with retention, but organizing it according to my own thought process helped make it more navigable later when I was stuck on something.
Works pretty well for me in my career. YMMV if you try the same thing.
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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.
Just listening to something is completely different than being able to do something with what you just listened to.
Learning involves more than just recalling things from memory.
Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?
But then applying that insight and playing with it in various dimensions is what built an intuition.
I was a good but not great student in college. The computer science classes bored me to death.
Years later, post college, I wanted to learn iOS mobile app development. I used the Stanford lecture series but couldn’t stay focused until … I tried 2x speed. All of a sudden it started making sense. When I got lost I hit pause, rewound, watched a few min at 1x.
My feeling is that teaching and learning are gears in a machine. If they are mismatched in speed the student either gets lost, or purposefully gets themselves lost by daydreaming.
10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x. It’s a sweet spot for me.
When listening to a very interesting podcast (shout out to How I Built This w Guy Raz) I’ll often pause to write down notes, but I’m almost never feeling like it’s too fast to ingest.
Sometimes I’m self conscious that I talk too fast around other people - giving them information overload. Too bad my brain and mouth don’t have a 1/2x button. Ha!
Sometimes I truly feel like this should be the unofficial motto of HN ;)
> 10 years later I still listen to podcasts and watch most of YouTube at 2x
The sweet spot for me is between 1.5x and 1.7x (Usually speed controls aren't fine-grained enough to allow 1.7x but apps that do earn extra brownie points from me eg. VLC). It's always weird having to explain this to friends who tend to think that I'm always listening to is a rap documentary :-D
On most sites, you can set an arbitrary speed by executing a line of JavaScript in the debug console:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3027707/how-to-change-th...Nowadays, I realize that it feels good to learn new things, but if it's not in service of an actual "deliverable" of some sort, I don't end up using it.
More recently I've gone the other way and just try to do and make things, even if I don't have an exact plan on how I'm going to do it. It ends up focusing my learning as well. Plus I'm actually more productive since I'm always focused on producing something as opposed to focusing on planning to produce something.
I'm in this text and I don't like it. Jokes aside, I want to do and experiment more but I struggle with analysis paralysis and striving for perfection, often upfront.
I need to move in the direction you did. How did you break out of this pattern? How do you deal with thoughts like "there's a better, cleaner way to do this and if I just analyze I can find it"?
I used to work in a large company on a team that essentially developed frameworks for other teams to use. I would often think through designs from several different angles and try to create an API that could work in any scenario. After shipping our frameworks, I often found that the "customer" (i.e. the other team) would use what I made in a different way from what I had expected. That meant a lot of the thinking I poured into the project was unnecessary. I really just had to look at that one particular use case and design for that.
After a while I started working backwards and went directly in the customer team's codebase to start integrating potential API designs to ensure it would work for their use case. That saved a ton of guesswork and eliminated a lot of code waste.
So I guess my advice is to question everything you work on and ask if there's a simpler/cheaper way to build just what you need. I usually aim for creating a proof of concept now to ensure that I only build what I need. It often means hacking things to make it work, and then afterwards clean up the hacks, but to be honest, a lot of hacks are good enough, if they are isolated. Also, try to develop a mindset of always aiming to deliver an output to ensure you don't get bogged down with analysis paralysis.
Find your highest priority item, break it down, and work on each task, one at a time.
If it’s not critical, let go of control and be okay failure, both from yourself and others.
Since you are also the type who wishes to analyze, dedicate some time once a week for a retrospective (what went well, what didn’t go well, what could have improved) and use those to come up with action items.
Or, if that’s too much, my original advice for you was “just do it.”
Until the management starts asking what are the pros and cons of new tools to be introduced into the stack and nobody can answer them, they will hire new experts to join the company and who knows who else is going to be obsolete anyway
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 not really engaging with the material, which in any case can only go so deep because it's a radio show and you're using it for what we've used radio shows for since radio shows were invented.
That's not to say podcasts can't also be useful in the instrumental way that 3x-ers seem to seek. If you've got a good memory or are in a position to take notes, they can provide fruitful directions for further investigation. But that's not the kind of raw data upload that 3x pretends to optimize. That's just finding places where it might be worth putting in real work, of the sort that listening to podcasts isn't.
Turn off the speed boost and give up on the idea that you can "level up" without doing the work - hell, even in the video games from which that metaphor is drawn, you have to grind for XP or at least progress the story. So get to work! Progress your own story. And listen to podcasts, if you want to, for the fun of it. Believe it or not, that's allowed too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning