Comment by teiferer
4 hours ago
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
I'd love to see studies about this.
When I’m understimulated by a teacher, my mind wanders. I’ll start thinking about something else entirely. When my mind comes back, I’ll have missed a couple minutes of content. I can overcome this with willpower, but doing so is exhausting.
Playing videos at 1.5-2x fixes the problem entirely. My attention is held without any effort.
If a concept is new or difficult enough, I just slow the video back down or pause it whenever I need to think things through.
I don't think you can make blanket statements. Consider:
1. Teacher 1 speaks at 100 words per minute.
2. Teacher 2 speaks at 50 words per minute, for the exact same content as Teacher 1.
You're not really losing anything by playing Teacher 1 at normal speed vs Teacher 2 at 2x speed. For every learner, there will be an optimal teaching speed for a given topic. This may mean listening to some audio at normal speed, some at higher speeds, and some even at slower speeds. I always customise my playback speed to the specific content I'm trying to learn.
It's not about the rate of speaking but rather about what is actually being spoken. I am currently going through the Neetcode DSA course and it's just obnoxious. His video on Union Find, a 15 LoC algorithm, is 20 minutes.