Comment by wrs

The key word here (and this is something I fight personally) is consuming. You don’t learn anything by consuming it; you only learn by doing it. So being able to watch the lecture at 2X is only helping if it makes more time to do the exercises.

But doing the exercises is hard (much like physical exercise, that pain is in fact the signal that you’re making progress). And the more time we spend just consuming, the less natural it feels to work.

It’s so easy to blast through a lecture or speed read a text and feel like you accomplished “learning”. That illusion is destroyed as soon as you have to actually do something (in school, that’s usually write an essay or pass a test).

In other words, the bottleneck has never been how fast you can consume the text. It’s how fast you can do the work to internalize the knowledge.