> And as far as speed goes, "1x" is the normal conversational speed we've been interacting at for many millennia, and regardless how fast you tune the podcast app, your brain likely hasn't evolved to follow a lecture at sonic speed.
In normal conversation, people speak in far too slowly for me, myself included at times. They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the first word, gesture, or even length of pause.
Just because it's the optimal speech production rate for many people, doesn't mean it's the optimal speech consumption rate for all people.
>They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the first word
It might actually be worth considering if that's the result of people truly adding nothing, or if it's the result of not being attentive enough to how others communicate, and what they communicate. People pause for good reasons and they repeat themselves for good reasons that aren't always obvious. It takes time to mull over speech, and there is detail in speech that is not going to become apparent when someone thinks of a lecture or a book as just a means to 'consume information'.
In a sense true understanding always requires reproduction. People will think the lectures they attend are slow, yet they retain not even 20%. Because they do not know what they miss until they themselves reproduce it. It's even very questionable to think that something can be 'consumed' faster than it can be produced if the goal is genuine learning. You could read a book like SICP quickly and think you 'got all the information', but to actually learn everything that Sussman and Abelson put into it you probably need to work on it as long as it took them to write it.
If I can predict exactly which words someone is about to say, the words add no information for me. Maybe they are there due to the confines of grammar, or maybe they are useful to other listeners, but they are not useful to me, and I can afford to speed through them. I will pause and replay if I was wrong.
In normal conversation, people speak in far too slowly for me, myself included at times. They will spend an entire sentence adding no content to what they conveyed with the first word, gesture, or even length of pause.
Just because it's the optimal speech production rate for many people, doesn't mean it's the optimal speech consumption rate for all people.