Charlatans begone. 2x is a fashion statement and Ive been learning at a much faster rate for quite some time.
The real answer to speed learning, is to watch the video at 200x, in a concrete room buried ten meters deep, with your nose pressed pensively to a 50" flatscreen surrounded by a frigid black ocean of PA speakers and amplifiers. Ive found that in five to seven hours, Ive fully comprehended the video as it "repeats twice", ad infinitum.
now, the volume is critical as it is not to concede 110db at any time. this promotes learning at 200x the volume of the original video. At the end of your learning session it is important to remain unclothed, as this promotes the knowledge to absorb into your body fastest whilst the room leaves you in inscrutable darkness, to succor a distant memory of the learning materials interdisciplinary themes and objectives.
Once youve climbed from the pit --and washed the learning jelly from yourself-- then you will have attained full and complete knowledge of how to properly tie a tie, or water a houseplant, or whatever you should need to learn. The pit will remain there for you should you ever dare to utter another question in wonderment.
The top 2 voted comments including yours made me understand for the first time that some people hearing others talk about "2x benefits" perceive it as silly superhuman braggadocio. (Maybe the "2x" does sound like Patrick Bateman's American Psycho morning routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjKNbfA64EE)
Yep, I understand what your humor is trying to do.
As counterpoint, the blind have been using screen readers TTS (text-to-speech) at 2x to 3x (~300 wpm) for a long time but the masses didn't notice. (E.g. A blind programmer using TTS at 450 wpm which is about ~4x normal speaking speed: https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-per-...)
However, when popular websites like Youtube added "2x" speedup function to videos, the general public suddenly noticed how it made many lethargic and dull videos more bearable to watch. (Or it turns 20-minute videos that are too long and stay unwatched into more manageable 10-minute videos that are easier to digest.)
It doesn't take superhuman ability to comprehend many videos at 2x. A lot of us can just do what the blind have been doing with playback technology.
(As for those productivity maximizers who looking beyond 2x and are interested in superhuman 4x+ abilities, there may be evidence from blind people that the brain can be trained to understand extremely fast speech: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-some-blin...)
I'm doing a certification right now and watching the videos at 1.2x. I flagged a little at 1.5x. I'm thinking I'll try 2.x0 again but in 20 minute stints and take more breaks, which could help my overall stamina given I still have hours of video to watch.
The videos themselves aren't really the problem, it's the constant repetition. "Here's what we're going to present, here were are presenting, here's a summary of what we just presented."
If we could convince curriculum developers to put out an express version of their material -- nixing the pleasantries, intros, summaries, and outros -- we'd have plenty of time to consume the entirety of it in a casual 1.0-1.2x speed-up.
I'm watching almost anything between 1.21 and 1.77 (these are the default speed-up steps in mpv - 1.1^x), depending on speaker. I just cannot keep attention to most things when played at 1x. When I miss something, I seek back a few seconds (mpv seeking is not limited to keyframes) and maybe slow down. If it's an important lecture, I watch the most critical parts later once more (maybe a week or a month later). This works better for me than watching at the original speed once. As a bonus, you get video that does not tear your eyes, as most things are still produced at only 25 or 30 FPS nowadays.
I cannot keep at 2x with almost any speakers though, neither in English nor in my native language.
What really matters is the audio resampling algorithm. I consider the default in browsers and YouTube really bad (apart from that, YT offers only 1.5 and 2x, which is too coarse). I actually prefer no "smart" resampling - just play the samples faster (and I guess low-pass them to avoid aliasing?) -- audio-pitch-correction=no in mpv is what I use. I think some adaptive algorithm that compresses spaces between syllables more than the "payload" might be great, but I have not seen any yet (suggestions?). I also have a tiny bit of hearing problems, and maybe this shifts the frequencies to a region where my "brain receiver" works better?
I also downmix all audio to mono (af=lavfi=[pan=1c|c0=0.5c0+0.5c1]), as I have problems (kind of nausea, or trying to follow the sound with my head) when listening to stereo with headphones. (I have tried to use remap-sink PulseAudio module, but it added terrible latency)
Because of this, watching anything in the browser is a terrible pain. I really wish browsers allowed you to specify an external player and pipe the stream to it. (I use youtube-dl, but of course it does not work for everything)
> However, when popular websites like Youtube added "2x" speedup function to videos, the general public suddenly noticed how it made many lethargic and dull videos more bearable to watch.
Perhaps it just means that some (many?) are watching too many videos and/or videos of a particular kind. So many people are imitating 'news voice' or waste energy and our time with production value. Most videos shouldn't even be videos at all.
It's a non problem to me. I just don't watch so many shitty videos.
>Perhaps it just means that some (many?) are watching too many videos and/or videos of a particular kind. It's a non problem to me.
A lot of videos have good visual content (how-to, etc) but the pacing and speech is too slow.
Also because of COVID, a lot of students were forced to watch video lectures and it increased awareness of using 2x as a legitimate tool to quickly process slow professors or selectively slow down to 1x only the sections that were difficult to understand.
There's modern technology now for listeners to bend the media to suit their brain rather than being forced to suffer the slow pacing of the content creator. This is why many people embrace 2x as a tool to enhance learning.
In my last couple years in college they started doing more recorded lectures. Most felt pretty good at 1.5x speed. But there was one professor that I was so glad that 3x was an option.
I’m a bit puzzled by the recurring apparition of articles about learning faster on HN.
I don’t think I have suffered from the speed at which material covers a subject since I left school. Finding interesting material, properly structured with a good balance of introductory and in depth coverage and giving solid insight into a topic remains challenging — it already was when I was a student to be fair. Good teaching ressources are the exception rather than the norm. Finding the time to properly conceptualise and deeply think about what I’m trying to learn has been challenging. But the speed at which I can consume teaching material is not something I remember being bothered by this past decade. Thinking about it more often than not I wish I could actually go slower rather than faster.
I’m curious about how the experience of others commenters differ here as it’s obviously a topic of interest to some in this community.
Have you tried watching things at 2x speed? I watch anything educational at 2x stopping to replay (often several times) anything I don't understand, watching at normal speed. I end up powering through the bits I understand and focusing on parts I don't. I also find the fact that I really have to concentrate to decipher what's being said means I don't get distracted.
While some stuff that gets posted here veers into productivity cult status, I personally don't think this deserves to be lumped in with that. In spite of speeding it up, I probably spend the same amount of time watching the lecture as I would at normal speed. I do it because in my experience any concept that's novel or hard in a lecture won't be understood by me on the first viewing. So will require several attempts and usually reading something.
In all seriousness it may actually help. I notice when I swap to lower BPM music I process information differently. Same with novel music and lyrics, they change processing
I agree many presenters on YouTube speak way too slowly and need to be sped up to 1.5x. At 2x I find I miss some of the demonstration though (“white boarding”) and I have to “rewind”.
That was my original assumption, but I looked it up before posting this. As near as I can tell, there's a video length requirement for enabling mid-video ads (11 minutes?), but nothing in general. And almost none of the 11ish minute videos I play have interstitials.
Maybe it changed? I know next to nothing about historical YT revenue rules.
Worth trying, especially with those slow stuttering drones on youtube, and as the strangeattractor says you can always rewind selected parts as needed.
The idea of varied speed viewing has been well known in times past for video as well as audio. There are also the gap compressors that are useful in audio streams that serve the words with variably reduced word gaps. I do wish they also had a stutter, um, ahh stripper for audio that have not used post production editing to eliminate gaps/ums. ahs and stutters etc.
There are a number of training courses that help you in becoming an audio reader that many youtubers should well have a look at.
I use 2-3x speed to get through the recorded videos of my “umm”-ing prokaryotic molecular biology professor (during COVID). However, when I’m watching something for fun, I hate to speed through it, because I enjoy the watching process.
Would never speed up something I was watching for enjoyment. I was slightly puzzled when I saw Netflix enable speeding up video, I suppose someone out there must have wanted it.
It's quite useful for movies that were edited to meet a length but don't actually have the content to match. Some speed can raise the interest density to make it watchable again. Also/similarly for some older movies which have a slower-paced style that doesn't fit today's conventions and expectations. Slower takes more art/skill to do more with less, and it's so refreshing when it works. [Same for wide shots rather than close-up frantically-cut action.] I'd never speed those up, and rather watch them on a day I have the time.
I know a few people who like doing that when they decide they don't like a movie they're watching but still want to finish it. I've watched Man on Fire this way and found it very comedic at 1.75x speed.
I suffer from feeling like I should finish watching things I started even after realizing I don’t like it. I’ve also come to the realization that it is freeing and making progress and good use of my time to force myself to decide to stop watching the show. It might be a kind of sunk cost fallacy that I’m fighting, feeling the need to check if there’s a surprise or if the ending gets better, feeling like I have to make sure I didn’t miss out on something good after all. Never tried speed-ending a video on Netflix, but I have on YouTube. But thinking about it now, I’m going to try harder to double down on consciously turning something off instead of wasting my time more quickly.
A thing I've done a few times with TV shows is go read the Wikipedia summaries of the remaining episodes. Much faster than watching them. (In one case I then decided the rest was worth watching; in several others, I didn't.)
I do this when binge watching TV series, as the quality often fluctuates between the episodes through the season. So when (usually in the middle of the season) things get too slow I just switch to watching it on 1.5x - 2x speed, rather than fast forwarding through the episode. Helps me with managing that fear of missing out something "important" in the plot...
> I probably spend the same amount of time watching the lecture as I would at normal speed.
The article's title does not suggest you should do otherwise, though its body suggests that you could do just as well, with a single 2X pass, as with a single 1X one.
I also use a variable rate, depending on the complexity and novelty (for me) of the material, and also how well it is presented. I also do this for better comprehension, not to get through it faster. I find it useful to have subtitles on, when available.
>I don’t think I have suffered from the speed at which material covers a subject since I left school. [...] Thinking about it more often than not I wish I could actually go slower rather than faster. I’m curious about how the experience of others commenters differ here
For many listeners, they suffer from speakers talking too slowly which causes them to tune out and become disengaged. This handicaps learning instead of enhances it.
A lot of people can read text at ~200 to 300 wpm. Since many speakers talk at ~100 wpm, accelerating videos to 2x or more just gets the audio in the same ~200 wpm range.
> For many listeners, they suffer from speakers talking too slowly which causes them to tune out and become disengaged. This handicaps learning instead of enhances it.
When I was in school last year I really loved online, pre-recorded, lectures for this reason. I could put speed on 1.5x or even 2x speed. If I missed something I'd tap my left arrow to go back a few seconds or write the time stamp down and come back later. Slow speaking videos drive me crazy.
There are semi-mandatory courses we need to take occasionally at work; and both the speed, and ratio of useful content, are dismal. E.g. Oracle University releases these 24 or 40hr courses which probably have, dunno, 6 hrs of content? Maybe?
It is brutal to try to spend a week going through something so atrociously slow and informationally sparse. Ability to speed it up (sometimes 1.25, 1.5 or 2.0 times) brings it into actually manageable.
> Finding the time to properly conceptualise and deeply think about what I’m trying to learn has been challenging
This reminds me of something that happened to me 20 years ago, and cemented my view that teaching should be bottom-up: waiting for our computer architecture lecturer to arrive for the day's lecture -- Interrupts -- I quipped to a friend "I hope he doesn't just walk in and say 'There's something called interrupts'". In a comedic bit of prophecy, the lecturer just then walks in, walks over to the board and says, "There's something called interrupts".
Today, if I were him, I would never start by defining the solution. I wouldn't even name it at first. I would first state the problem: we know that a traditional CPU can process only one instruction at a time. And last time we learned that it looks at the program counter at the end of each instruction to see what instruction needs to be executed next. Now if the CPU keeps breathlessly executing the instructions from memory, it's never going to have time to check if I/O devices have any data. How do we solve this problem?
A good student will start by suggesting that we have the program poll the I/O devices regularly. Then someone will likely mention the overhead of repeated polling, especially when when there are no inputs most of the time. This should eventually lead to the idea that the CPU itself (rather than the program) should check some sort of input signal between the execution of every instruction. An I/O device would set this input to an active state when it has input for the CPU, and the CPU will catch it immediately after the current instruction. Now at that point, there is no way to tell the CPU which set of instructions to run in response. Instead, we'll have to store those instructions in some specific location that is known to the CPU. Now what do you call this scheme? Interrupts.
This is excellently put and explained. I wish most educators took this approach as well. It seems a large part of education is handing out solutions to barely-defined problems, and the idea is to memorize the solutions.
A lot of IT is centered around staying current, which occupies a substantial portion of your time. Being able to do that quicker is an immediate boost for your productivity. This isn't all at the level of learning physics or rocket science, it can simply be a tutorial about a new framework (every 6 months or so) or a library, a new development tool or orchestration method. Personally I prefer to read but with the easy way that video can be monetized a lot of things that in the past would be blog posts and long form articles or web based tutorials are now posted on youtube. And sometimes there aren't any alternatives so you're forced to use video even if you'd rather use some other medium.
I'm not convinced that being "more current more quickly" is going to boost your productivity but it will probably boost your paycheck if you're willing to job-hop.
Compared to most other fields IT moves relatively fast, learning is a part of being active in this field if not you'll never be able to make a career out of it even if you stay in the same place. Very rarely do you find companies where the tech doesn't meaningfully change over the period of a lifetime's employment, and that by itself is very rare if only due to the speed with which companies come into being, merge, split or get acquired and do wholesale technology changes.
I couldn't agree more. But learning twice as many new frameworks twice as fast is, in my opinion, unlikely to give you a net gain in productivity. Unless your job is to use twice as many frameworks as the other guy, in which case congratulations on your employment at Google. /s
Every professional should be learning new things as they go along. But you're not going to learn everything, and being good at This Thing Here also takes a lot of concentration, so I suggest that picking your skill-acquisition battles and diving deeper into some of the new things will make you more productive than having a larger set of latest-greatest notches on your belt.
Ah I see, ok, but that's not what I meant. I meant: if you are going to spend 300 hours of learning time versus 200 to learn the same content then you can spend the other 100 hours on something that is billable. People tend to not want to pay for time spent learning so that's an investment on the part of the learner, and a smaller investment with a higher pay-off translates into a better ROI.
It's mostly about efficiency. If you want to watch a 4 minute video and the first 2 minutes were ads, wouldn't you skip it? Same principle: people talk slower than necessary in many of these videos, or make unnecessary edits that slow it down content-wise.
I think this search for faster learning is fueled by the realization that we only have so many lines of text, or minutes of video or audio content, that we can consume in life. I don't want to waste that on ads or someone's idea of a fancy video transition. It's the reason why I don't like podcasts or radio programs: too much of it is spent on introductions or random subjects. I have other shit to do, so if I can maximize the retention in a shorter timespan, that's much better.
There's an ever-present desire to learn more, and the more you learn the more new topics you find out about. Personally I am a bit bothered. I bought a bunch of books over the years and recently I've realized maybe I won't be able to go through all of them at my current speed. So I'm trying to learn how to read faster (with retention) and be more methodical about it.
For things you need to go in depth the learning is necessarily slow: a college course, a textbook, years of experience. But if I want to learn something small that has less relevance to my life, I don't want to waste that time.
When I studied Physics as an undergraduate, I would regularly spend 3 hours just to really understand the content of the notes I had taken in a 1.5 hour lecture.
The speed of consuming the content was never the limiting factor.
When I listen to an interesting podcast, I often pause the track to think about implications of what was just said or to formulate a rebuttal in my head.
I guess there are different kinds of learning and different levels of understanding something.
With three or four two-hour lectures every day, multiplying the studying time by 3 would leave at most six hours for eating, sleeping, and maintenance such as buying food and bathing. Never mind working. I doubt that many university students could do that.
You probably remember the ones that did take 3 hours to understand but you’ve forgotten all those that were simple enough that you already left the lecture hall with an understanding of the material.
For me, I think I understand attention is the most important factor in learning, followed by practice.
The material is the base, sometimes a bad quality material can even reinforce practice and attention.
I remember how I learned serious programming at 14: a badly translated manual in French and a casio scientific calculator, no internet. I had to try each command, see what it did, guesstimate what it meant. I plowed through variables, goto/labels, printing, conditionals, had lots of problems conceptualising loops but figured it out talking with friends at school who struggled too, and ended up doing decent things with the calculator.
When I started C at uni, nothing was new (except pointers, I admit lol): the very good material didnt help my fellow students much, in fact I remember helping them a lot gain a more intuitive understanding on what programs were and to love programming for the sake of it, me who learned from sheer frustration and trial and error with basically rope and wood.
So I dunno... maybe I could have optimized my time but I still believe the sheer will to learn how machines ticked is what mattered, more than anything and that s always how I teach someone new to it: love the result and the process, independently of the details of implementation and you ll be able to program anything or at least know you CAN program anything eventually given enough courage and commitment.
And at work, I m the multi hat guy who code on all the systems, on all the languages, always coming in as a humble idiot but slowly gnawing at the problems until I become expert and people at it for years start asking me questions, because I just never give up and never think it's too hard.
When I read this I immediately thought "typing faster makes me a less annoyed programmer, and better would be a happy accident", then realised it was the same for speeding up or pausing audio. Having control over the speed at which ideas are launched at me is more about not getting distracted or frustrated than learning faster.
Patience is as much a skill as any other though. I don't quite understand this hyperoptimization. I'll speed up things I find a little dull or advertisements, but increasing the pace of everyone's speech for your sake seems....odd?
What an interesting comment. I also find that there is a lot of not great learning materials available. Perhaps it is not surprising, but the really quite good is uncommon. And, I expect that poor materials lead to poor learning, missed things, misunderstood things, etc.
But another point is that the presentation is not the main place where people learn, at least in math, which is the field I teach in. The main place people learn is in doing the exercises. I will pull a number out of my posterior and say it is 80% exercises (a matter of opinion, I concede, but what else can you do with opinions besides spread them around?). Obviously twiddling with video speeds doesn't apply at all to that.
> Good teaching ressources are the exception rather than the norm
I have to disagree here. There has never been a time in history where it has been easier to access high quality educational materials. See, for instance, MIT OpenCourseWare. Many other great universities have similar programs (Stanford, Berkeley). That, combined with the countless people putting out educational content on platforms like YouTube and Coursera, means that it’s basically possible for anyone with an internet connection to learn from some of the world’s best teachers.
My experience at a university comparable to Stanford and Berkeley is that lectures perfectly conform to what I said: good ones are the exception rather than the norm. Most lectures are mostly useless as a form of teaching material outside of offering you the ability to ask the question you have to a specialist and the syllabus hopefully pointing you towards good books while telling you which chapters you can skip if you just want a sound but basic overview of a subject. I would much rather read than listen or watch something.
I think the problem remains the same nowadays that it was before when people in large cities had access to good learning material through their public libraries: knowing which are the good resources amongst all that is available.
For me, when speaker talks slowly, I tend to loose attention. I get bored, start to think about something else or just daydream. Then I have no idea what was told and have to rewind back. Speeding it up helps a lot, I stay engaged.
Imo, speakers in educational videos tend talk very slowly. They do not talk in normal talking speed, they are slowed and speeding it up is basically moving them to normal speed.
I certainly wish I was able to learn more quickly, and I'm sure that would be true no matter how quickly I was able to learn. The availability of quality material is an orthogonal issue to me, the worse the material the longer it takes to digest. I would also of course enjoy being able to take my time more, but there's so much I'm interested in that I wish I was able to get through more of it.
After some level of learning the eloquence of the author (barring some minimum standards) is probably not as material, it’s more about the content itself. Talking about graduate level courses, presumably ones not too math heavy, I can see this working. Or for lectures and seminars on research by professors (though one rarely is trying to remember every detail).
1.) N is in the hundreds of students, all with similar backgrounds - likely a highly specific population. It may not generalize well.
2.) The videos were pretty short: 3-15 minutes long.
3.) The overall effect size is pretty miniscule - it would make little practical difference.
4.) The video topics were roman history and real estate appraisals.
It will be interesting to see if this generalizes (to longer durations, more technical topics, more diverse population, etc.), but given the above I wouldn't change any personal habits based on this study.
My problem is that they're studying retention, not mastery. Like how would this work for math or science lecture at the senior or graduate level?
In a more radical way I almost think playing a video in any nonlinear, noncontinuous fashion would have learning advantages because what matters isn't what you passively remember from the lecture but the amount of work you spend actively thinking about the material.
5) Retention is vastly different than comprehension and integration with other knowledge.
I often am thinking about the applications of knowledge during a lecture. I am currently listening to an economic history course and the last lecture I compared the foolish inefficiencies of 16th century mercantilism tarrifs to the new modern ones of the last few years.
I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my own speed.
Is there a service yet which turns a video from YouTube or whatever into a ppt? In a smart way ofcourse (based on amount of change of the particular frames). Would pay for that.
Now that you mention it, basic implementation is rather trivial: isolate keyframes (which is in the video data¹), aggregate the transcripts chunks (e.g. .vtt should be available) within those keyframes according to the timestamps.
Issues: first of all, transcript quality: those of TED (Chris Anderson's "Technology Entertainment Design" conferences) are curated, those of YT are oftentimes not. Then, discriminating significant and less significant keyframes, but if one only needs "decent" instead of "perfect", good compromises for heuristic algorithms (more "parametrized procedures" or "recipes") can surely be found.
You are tempting me... In an evening one should get something already usable. Better than a presentation, I see the transcript text with aside thumbnails linking to the full-sized images. As someone who sometimes studies material from video, when I am listening or watching I am not in the strict need for text analysis, and when I am working on the text itself I do not need the video. On the other hand, if I think of the MIT OpenCourseware material and similar (Yale etc.), the "blackboard" shots can be precious to have alongside the text.
I feel like one of those Reddit or Twitter bots, but:
the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute.
I remember reading this my first day in a public speaking class in college. Just one of those factoids that’s stuck with me, and why I’ve always preferred reading articles versus seeking videos.
Of course, speed of comprehension is just one consideration. I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.
But this is why I love HN. It’s almost always a link to a written article, and I can pop open comments (which I often do first) for more written text on the subject.
I can only speed read for a couple hours at best, as staring so close at something and carefully moving my eyes so quickly is extremely exhausting. I can read at slow speeds for a lot longer, but I am pretty sure it is still horrible for my eyes :(. Either way, it is mentally taxing, as I have to convince my brain to not start talking to itself and begin ignoring the visual input.
In contrast, I can spend an entire day listening to people; and, while I am listening, I can be looking into the distance, the way human eyes are supposed to mostly be used. I can walk around, cook and eat food, or even shower, all while listening to people talk. I would argue listening to other people is a much more "human" activity than staring at symbols (despite how much I do this for my passion: software development).
I also have no clue where you got those numbers from: the iPad software I have finally found to read PDFs to me has me configure it in words per minute, and I find it reasonable to understand 400 words per minute for long stretches. I bet I could go faster (this software supports 500), but it would likely be mentally taxing.
To put in context how preposterous 150 words per minute is, the average person supposedly speaks at 100-130 words per minute according to some random source I just found (which feels right as I took years of linguistics and was going to guess 110-120), and we know people routinely listen to videos at 2x (and so are hitting 200-260).
(I think it is also worth noting that actual speed reading is a skill most people do not have. I actually think it quite likely that your average person can read only as fast as they can speak, as I bet that people who are not really really good at reading are subvocalizing. I feel like a lot of people don't consider this when saying everyone should read all the time.)
What is the name of the ipad reading software you use? I tried using the basic text to speech but can’t figure out how to tell it how to start reading at a point and keep going. Being able to tap to rewind 10 seconds would also be useful
Voice Dream Reader. Given the issues you cite this will be perfect. I really appreciated that it models your progress through the document as "time" as it knows how long it would take to read the whole thing. The only thing I am disliking is that the act of highlight text for something like bookmarking is extremely slow and fidgety (it has word issue like trying to highlight the last character on a line is extremely difficult as the hit test only verifies you are on the right edge of a character, but if you go past the character there is no hit box so it doesn't recognize anything, causing you to have to wiggle your finger on the last character trying to intersect that narrow hit box; it mostly seems to rely on you touching through the character after the character you want to highlight, but there isn't one at the end of a line... they need to like, scan left and see if there is a character to the left of your finger to make this easier).
To me the big advantage of reading is that I can easily re-read a section without having to hunt-and-peck 30 times to find the beginning of the section that I want to repeat. Especially with difficult material I tend to go over it many times before I really grok it and doing this with video is absolutely infuriating to the point that I'll usually transcribe the video and then read the transcription, that's still faster and during the transcription process I usually learn quite a bit as well.
This might be different per person? When people talk, I lose concentration after a few minutes, when I read I hold concentration for hours. For me videos and podcasts are the worst for information transfer. Sure I can probably process more, but it stops after minutes for me.
Like someone else said; it depends on the subject of course: fixing an issue with a washing machine (not operation, but with the internal electrics or something), a video is faster but otherwise...
Agreed. That’s why I thought I’d give a shout out to the fact that these are all generalizations:
“I’m mindful that there are some contexts where a visual is necessary or particularly helpful, and that some folks resonate with visual/spoken word more than written.“
Strangely, I was never a reader as a child, but took to it as an adult.
> the general rule is that you can read about twice as fast as you
> can understand spoken word - 300 vs 150 words per minute.
In my experience the limiting factor is the speed at which one speaks, not the speed at which one listens. I can listen to a 1.5x Youtube video from any speaker comfortable, and 2x for really good speakers such as Marcus House, Scott Manley, or Destin.
With the exception of terse definitions, my comprehension speed of fast spoken word is MUCH better then reading. But I'm probably an outlier in this regard.
>I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more,
But sometimes the more efficient reading text instead of listening to a video is negated by not being able to multitask. E.g. The "dead" time of driving, walking a treadmill, raking leaves in the yard, etc can be filled by listening to text. Can't do that with a book.
That's why productivity can be helped with both complementary technologies:
- audio-to-text: auto-generated transcripts from video for max speed and random seeking
- text-to-audio: auto-generated TTS (text-to-speech) from text to multitask while performing a mindless physical activity. This helps get through backlog of books and articles without having to block out dedicated reading time while nothing else is getting done.
Agreed, but when I really want to learn something (which is always, for me, math, physics andor CS), then I want to read as it focuses me far better. But I agree; if it is not something I want to practice but just learn about, it does work.
For some subjects it's not possible to read everything. For example: woodworking safety for a particular machine, or adjusting the carburetor by ear on a vintage motorcycle.
>Even a searchable transcript [...] Bonus points if clicking on a sentence seeks the video to that timestamp
The Youtube auto-generated transcripts work that way. On most videos, you click on the "..." (3 dots) to access it. Then click on the text fragment and it instantly seeks to that part of the video.
Since it uses AI algorithms, there will be misspelled names or technical terms but it's still useful.
> I would rather just read instead of wasting time watching a video. I take in far more, can reread stuff without messing around with sliders. I can read at my own speed.
Have you watched many educational YouTube videos lately?
I used to also prefer reading for most things, but YouTube and advances in technology have just made educational/edutainment videos so much better than they used to be. There are some incredible videos out there.
Of course this depends on the subject, if I want to deep-dive on e.g. maths, of course only a Textbook will suffice.
There's another benefit of watching something at 2x too which wasn't mentioned which is it can put you into a more receptive mental state.
I don't know if anyone else is like this but inefficiencies tend to bug me. This is purely personal preference but folks who talk slow or use a lot of filler words can ruin a video for me to the point where I'm focusing on that instead of the material.
I tend to listen to everything at 2x (instructional videos, podcasts, etc.) and I don't really see any downsides even if it's only watched once. If it's something deep or you're following along with code then you'll be pausing the video no matter what speed you listen to it to apply what you're watching. When you factor all of that together you can IMO absorb things just as well as 1x.
Exactly! It's possible you and I have ADHD, but it's worth giving out this tip. Watching at a sped up rate lets you filter out the crap and find the "real" content.
In a simple world you'd just slow it back down to 1x when you get to this point, and you wouldn't need 2x, you could just skip forwards 10 seconds at a time like most people until you find it.
Unfortunately there tends to be fillers throughout the video, even inside of the sentences people speak. The real lifehack is to keep the high speed and then pause when the video said something important, so you can digest what you just heard, and resume - rinse and repeat.
A variant solution I prefer is to always be regulating the speed according to the load on your attention span. Videos change so much in info density from one minute to the next, it's nothing short of strange to watch at one set speed throughout. I think the fact it's so common to "give up" and "accept" a given video speed is an artifact of the fact that people have never had the experience of letting their subconscious finely control the speed with muscle-memory. Doing it keeps your attention at 100% usage all the time. Low info density, high speed. High info density, low speed. Use a browser addon that gives you hotkey control over the speed, or use ff2mpv to exploit mpv's native speed controls.
I have basically the same approach. I don't absorb information that well from video because of the fixed pacing. I would much rather read which lets me speed up and slow down automatically. When I need to absorb a video, I find speed controls to be incredibly useful. For low density information, I set the speed as high as I can and still understand the speaker. This is like skimming a text. If the speaker gets to something high density, I will slow down or even listen to the section multiple times. This is like reading slowly for maximum understanding.
I am honestly a bit frustrated with how much information is getting locked up in videos as I find them a pretty poor format in comparison to text annotated with diagrams.
Ditto for me. when people speak, they tend to speak slow add a lot of unnecessary/repetitive information especially lectures. On the learner side, I tend to be much more focussed when watching at 2x speed, otherwise, i get distracted and think of something else during those slow paces. That was a big problem for me in classroom lectures, moments of important information gets overshadowed by low density information. WOnder how well I would have performed in college if it were through a video lecture!
Was waiting for this comment, as all the top ones were mostly dismissive of the findings. As someone with ADHD, this is exactly how it feels to me. Increasing the playback speed is like going into a mode where the content of what the speaker is saying becomes the only thing my brain cares about, as opposed to the secondary characteristics like their pauses between words, accent, speaking style, etc.
I don't know if I have ADHD but my brain will very much filter out what it perceives as inefficient waste and replace it with whatever thoughts are important at the time, such as would you get shocked if you put uncooked spaghetti into a live outlet.
Another variation on 2x is to listen to 2 different people at 2x on the same topic can convey concepts better than listening to only 1 at 1x. Different speakers use different vocabulary, different analogies, etc.
As for listening to the same presentation twice at 2x, one reason it works better is that most narratives or lectures do not provide a "mental map" or "scaffolding" to hang all the sentences on. So the 1st pass feels like it's a bit random and incoherent but it lets listeners mentally build an outline structure in their head, and then the 2nd pass makes it easier to link the sentences to that structure and it feels more coherent.
If speakers did a better job of explicitly providing that outline structure and constantly referring back to it during the narration so listeners don't get lost, the 2nd pass wouldn't be as necessary.
> The timing mattered, though: only those who’d watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.
More like cramming before the exam in this case. Though, one can use rewatching as a spaced repetition session. The key would be to actively try to remember the narrative of the lecture. Otherwise, passive rewatching wouldn't help as much.
Given this huge caveat, the title of the article is at best extremely deceiving. It's bonkers to me that this was the comparison they chose (watched at 1x speed -> 1 week delay -> test) vs (watched at 2x speed -> 1 week delay -> watched 2x speed -> test). Full description of this is found on page 7 at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356194270_Learning_...
>We also compared learning outcomes after watching videos once at 1x or twice at 2x speed. There was not an advantage to watching twice at 2x speed but if participants watched the video again at 2x speed immediately before the test, compared with watching once at 1x a week before the test, comprehension improved.
For those who didn't read the full article, a couple tidbits not covered in the headline:
> The timing mattered, though: only those who’d watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.
Also, if subjects watched only once, there was no downside vis a vis 1x watching, until reaching 2.5x:
> the 1.5x and 2x groups did just as well on the tests as those who’d watched the videos at normal speed, both immediately afterwards and one week on. Only at 2.5x was learning impaired.
> Watching lecture videos is now a major part of many students’ university experience.
This sentence is the most important, describing a failure in education. Once I learned to teach through project-based learning, I'm never going back, largely because of student feedback, that they learn more and are more engaged.
I'm not saying we don't learn from lecture at all, but a lot less relative to other ways. Maybe some subjects or professors work with lecturing, but not subjects that I studied in college.
It's epistemically toxic to promote video as a learning tool. Videos are great for entertainment, entertainment can boraden your horizons, but it isn't a good tool for learning anything except when learning a skill that requires mimicking body movements.
Well, there are people who would refuse to learn if not for the videos. What then? Are we going to sit in an increasingly sparsely-populated ivory tower and complain how nobody wants to learn, or are we going to try capturing the attention of such people in any way that works?
To be honest, I agree with you. I like to read. I learn better when I read. Text is much more convenient in so many ways that I honestly don't understand why would anyone opt for a video instead. But the reality is that the average attention span and the kinds of concentration people are capable of changes with time, and recently started changing a lot in relatively short amounts of time (1 generation). That's reality, and we have to learn to cope with it - even if it's painful - or we won't be able to teach anyone anything!
I agree, it can be a great hook, but we can have nouance, not everything has to be so dumb, right? We can teach people that look sure you can have this feeling of learning, but it can be very misleading people are watching edutainment and think they are learning which is probably even worse than if they were against learning in the first place. Edutainment is great fun for me at least, but I see so many people think they know something because they have been exposed by content on youtube and live in this self-deception that it's just sad.
Unfortunately that only works for a time - namely, until the "uneducated masses" decide to topple the tower down. Historically, they succeeded almost every single time. I might be getting carried away with the metaphor, but honestly, I'm afraid. Who's to guarantee to me that in 20 years I won't be the one that the majority of his colleagues "can't get along with"?
I won't retire fast enough to ignore the issue completely. As such, I think I'll try (in self-defense, basically) doing what people in my position have been doing since the dawn of time to stay relevant - that is, to try and become a mentor for the younger folks. But "the kids these days", they don't want to read my blog posts, they want to hear me (and I absolutely hate hearing myself recorded!) and they want to look at my face (what for, for f... sake?! am I a model?) while I explain (and sing, and dance, for better effect?) things to them with a nice screencast.
On top of that I don't even have a luxury of saying it's simply technically not possible, like people 30 (or even 20) could. Unfortunately for my poor heart, the authoring of videos is becoming easier (than it ever should, dammit!) and easier way faster than my retirement approaching.
I'm sure situations like this played out many, many times in history. Last time I tried looking into this I learned the term "defenestration". That's how optimistic it feels at the moment :)
Is your comment satire, sarcasm or something like that?
Wouldn't "epistemically toxic" be characterized by false, unsubstantiated or misleading content?
A documentary is video, as are recorded lectures, or random experts explaining anything.
A video allows us to learn and share knowledge without needing to be in the same room - the overhead of which detracts from the volume of material possible to teach or learn. The 1.5x is helpful when the speaker talks slowly, and makes sense that it's more effective, since your attention is more focused to keep up.
Can you in good faith tell me what sounded sarcastics there?
I am completely serious, just ask a lecturer how do zoom lectures compare to live sessions. It isn't just about content, form and medium are very important, not just for greater memorization but also for deeper understanding. If all you do is watch videos you are watching someone else understand something instead of you and then think you have understood it yourself.
It's removing critical thought from the world, bit by bit. People are (self)decieved that they are learning while they are merely having a very weak/superficial exposure to a domain of knowledge and they stick with that because it gets them the great feeling of knowledge without knowledge itself.
I can vouch for this technique. Most native speakers can listen much faster than they can talk. Blind users often turn their screen reader speed up to 11.
When you listen to a video at a fast speed, it allows you to fit more information into your working memory than you would have been able to .. if .. the .. speaker .. um ... was ... talking .. er ... like ... ... sorry what were we talking about? Oh yes listening at a fast wpm aids understanding of the content. Listen at a speed that is on the border of intelligibility and when you notice that something doesn't make sense, pause the video and go back and listen to it again immediately. This active engagement with the content is key instead of passively sitting back and watching a video.
It doesn't work for all content. Some people just speak really fast and accurately. But for the average online lecture it works super well.
I forgot I turned up my Netflix speed to 1.25x and ended up watching many shows at that speed when I realized it it was very foreign to go back to normal speed and they sounded very slow and annoying. But 11x speed sounds difficult, though I believe what you say so probably just difficult for me.
Completely off topic: i was watching an interview with Ozzy Osborne on youtube, and one of the comment said "if you watch it at 2x speed it sounds like a normal conversation", and it did!
I watch most of my videos at 2x. Well, 1.75x as 2x sometimes makes it too difficult to understand someone, particularly if that person has a strong accent. I find this allows me to digest more content in less time, especially if the person is a slow speaker.
If I miss something or can't grok something well enough, I'll rewind or, well, slow it down a bit for that piece.
What do I not watch at 2x? Movie trailers. I want to appreciate the theatrical efforts.
Funny, this is exactly what I've been doing lately and it did help a lot actually. I felt kind of guilty or stupid for not having figured it out earlier.
Yes, the only reason I had it 2x was because the guy talked so slowly. I've started using that feature a lot for other lecturers though. It's easy to slow it down if you get to a sticky part.
"The more actively you try to learn the better you learn" category conclusion.
Any tools/frontends for ultimate youtube-based learning? Some things I miss:
- highlight code screencasts (so I can copy and paste)
- 3x (not all have 2x in youtube)
- transcript extract and keyword search and jump to that location in the video => there must be someone doing this
PS: Not trying to promote any project by asking this, genuinely curious.
I think a wrinkle often got lost in the discussion is that the outcome of the learning is less affected by the playback speed but the effort and attention you devote to the learning process. Speedify for the purpose of speedifying may result in a net negative efficiency, but can be used to enable other learning methods, e.g., the "play at 2x so as to study twice" method in the study.
When I was studying for the bar exam, we had handouts and lecture videos in which the lecturer basically read the content out of the handouts ad verbatim. Therefore, technically I won't get anything more by playing the lecture than just reading the handouts. But the handouts are too dry and dull for me to keep focussed in a session, so I played the video at 2x in parallel with my reading. AFAICT the "dual input" did make me learn and remember better. But had I just zoom through the video without the additional efforts of reading, I don't think the result would have been as good.
For technical subjects (the "most important subjects" with respect to the future career I was planning), I never came out of lectures feeling like I understood the material. Only after reading the textbook, doing exercises, and re-reading the textbook (or looking up a concept online for an alternate explanation if the textbook's writing was ambiguous) did I feel any sort of confidence or perform well on exams.
Watching the lecture helped cement the material after already having a degree of knowledge, but they served best as optional, supplementary material. Since it served mainly to connect concepts together, I can see how watching it at 2x speed would serve the same purpose, but faster.
Most people in university would spend the bare minimum amount of time on both reading, exercises, and lecture in order to get a good grade, where good was defined as "the grade required in order to land a high-paying job". Since I was a non-conformist, I specifically made a point to read all the material assigned (and probably achieved ~80 - 90%), and one of my favorite activities when I was (rarely) ahead of schedule was to spend an hour reading a couple pages or a chapter of literature from an elective course. Every word, phrase, and sentence I would ponder about the meaning the author conveyed through multiple lenses (e.g. how did it affect the characters, the theme, the scenery, the world of the author, the culture he/she wrote them in, as well as the relation/history of the words used throughout the novel -- was this a motif? Did the phrase relate to any motifs?).
My professor mentioned "these books were meant to be enjoyed over many afternoons, to be read at leisure and to relate it to life with all its silly impossible circumstances and happenings". What was the end result of all this slow reading?
In one narrow sense, it led to me getting worse grades than perhaps I would have if I allocated all my time towards getting the best career possible. It also led to depression -- self-inflicted -- and existentialist contemplation as my outcomes were incredibly poor relatively speaking.
What were some of the positives? Sometimes I can look at the brick walkway beneath me and make some quirky, half-sensical remark like "ah, the herringbone
structure. The same one Brunelleschi used in the Duomo in Florence", to which any unfortunate souls try their best to follow socially as if that remark makes any sense in our conversation. Who knows, maybe Sartre would approve.
If they are investigating retention then yes, but studying is more than that, right? You may recall a bunch of facts but have no understanding of what is happening.
"The researchers do also add a few caveats. While 2x viewing was fine for learning about the material in their studies — real estate appraisals and the Roman Empire — perhaps it might not work for more complex subject matter; again, only more research will tell."
Quite a statement because there could be many factors at play. Type of content, density/complexity, the individual's abilities and mental state.
It's certainly true for many popular tube channels, that's for sure. Then again, I sometimes try to follow physics lectures and those make my head spin beyond the intro. Same with biology, even computers. I am not able to absorb great amounts of new info at once. Could be my age, though
I find a lot of lecture videos have a cadence that is intentionally slowed down and nearly unwatchable at 1X speed. I've been watching at 2x for a decade or so. When I'm really adjusted to 2x because I'm watching an hour or two of lectures daily sometimes I can crank it to 3x and still take it in.
But I think this is more a function of the cadence of the speaker than anything else.
Not necessarily. Watching a second time will usually give you less new information than the first time (obviously if you already know more than 50%, there is less to learn)
But revisiting content is good and helps learning. So what I meant was that as long as you're not purely re-watching to catch what you missed the first time due to speed, any overlap is beneficial.
I'll buy that, if you mean 'more than 50% of the information, that can be gleaned when watching at 1x speed, can be gleaned when watching at 2x speed'.
I listen at 2.5x and fast forward a lot with the arrow keys
Downsides: Videos with background music for something instructional is bad. Stick to just talking. Even the intros that many people make are unnecessary. People that actually talk at a good faster speed and still have a long video are now the worst.
I would wager 'yes' to both of those answers, but I would also somewhat attribute this to the Cult of Productivity, where people want to 'learn' more while spending less time on it. Which, depending on the subject (and I'd wager for most of them), isn't really how you learn at all, and you need to put thought and go slow in things.
It's basically another symptom of our culture's ever-increasing rush for things going faster/easier.
I never looked into this Cult of Productivity but I wholeheartedly agree with your take on learning in general. Deep understanding of complex topics can't be rushed.
I noticed it as well. With real focus I’m learning the same way. And if the speaker is speaking slowly it’s even better. If the speaker has a foreign accent hard to understand speeding up can be harder if not listening in my main language.
Reading is a great deal faster than watching videos.
Presumably doubling the speed must also make the presenters sound like chipmunks or voles or something. Perhaps just fiddling with the sound frequency also works.
I come from an English-speaking region where everyone speaks very fast. I watch most instructional videos at 1.5x to 2x just so I don't lose focus from enduring slow-talking "mainlanders". ;)
At one time there was an incitation to make 10 minutes long videos but I don't think it is the case anymore. And while some videos are padded out as an attempt to increase watch time, most of the successful channels don't do it. For example, Lock Picking Lawyer is particularly successful for the niche topic it covers, and the author credit its short and to the point videos as a contributing factor.
Speaking slowly is the norm in education in general. My parents are both teachers, I am not but I received basic training in education too, and "speak slowly" is always among the top advice. Maybe we need to review the rules for video you can control at will.
The real answer to speed learning, is to watch the video at 200x, in a concrete room buried ten meters deep, with your nose pressed pensively to a 50" flatscreen surrounded by a frigid black ocean of PA speakers and amplifiers. Ive found that in five to seven hours, Ive fully comprehended the video as it "repeats twice", ad infinitum.
now, the volume is critical as it is not to concede 110db at any time. this promotes learning at 200x the volume of the original video. At the end of your learning session it is important to remain unclothed, as this promotes the knowledge to absorb into your body fastest whilst the room leaves you in inscrutable darkness, to succor a distant memory of the learning materials interdisciplinary themes and objectives.
Once youve climbed from the pit --and washed the learning jelly from yourself-- then you will have attained full and complete knowledge of how to properly tie a tie, or water a houseplant, or whatever you should need to learn. The pit will remain there for you should you ever dare to utter another question in wonderment.