OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

A point on skimming vs taking the time to read something properly.

I read a transcript + summary of that exact talk. I thought it was fine, but uninteresting, I moved on.

Later I saw it had been put on youtube and I was on the train, so I watched the whole thing at normal speed. I had a huge number of different ideas, thoughts and decisions, sparked by watching the whole thing.

This happens to me in other areas too. Watching a conference talk in person is far more useful to me than watching it online with other distractions. Watching it online is more useful again than reading a summary.

Going for a walk to think about something deeply beats a 10 minute session to "solve" the problem and forget it.

Slower is usually better for thinking.

Seriously this is bonkers to me. I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives.

Reading is a pleasure. Watching a lecture or a talk and feeling the pieces fall into place is great. Having your brain work out the meaning of things is surely something that defines us as a species. We're willingly heading for such stupidity, I don't get it. I don't get how we can all be so blind at what this is going to create.

If you're not listening to summaries of different audiobooks at 2x speed in each ear you're not contentmaxing.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you, for all the reasons you're saying. With talks in particular I think it's seldom about the raw content and ideas presented and more about the ancillary ideas they provoke and inspire, like you're describing.

There is just so much content out there. And context is everything. If the person sharing it had led with some specific ideas or thoughts I might have taken the time to watch and looked for those ideas. But in the context it was received—a quick link with no additional context—I really just wanted the "gist" to know what I was even potentially responding to.

In this case, for me, it was worth it. I can go back and decide if I want to watch it. Your comment has intrigued me so I very well might!

++ to "Slower is usually better for thinking"

Not to discount slower speeds for thinking but I wonder if there is also value in dipping into a talk or a subject and then revisiting (re-watching) with the time to ponder on the thoughts a little more deeply.

Was it the speed or the additional information vended by the audio and video? If someone is a compelling speaker, the same message will be way more effective in an audiovisual format. The audio has emphasis on certain parts of the content, for example, which is missing from the transcript or summary entirely. Video has gestural and facial cues, also often utilized to make a point.

This is similar to strategies in “how to read a book” (Adler).

By understanding the outline and themes of a book (or lecture, I suppose), it makes it easier to piece together thoughts as you delve deeper into the full content.

> We're willingly heading for such stupidity, I don't get it. I don't get how we can all be so blind at what this is going to create.

Your doomerism and superiority doesn't follow from your initial "I like many hackers don't like one size fits all".

This is literally offering you MANY sizes and you have the freedom to choose. Somehow you're pretending pushed down uniformity.

Consume it however you want and come up with actual criticisms next time?

You'd love where I work. Everything is needlessly long bloviating power point meetings that could easily be ingested in a 5 minute email.

University didn't agree with me mostly because I can't pay attention to the average lecturer. Getting bored in between words or while waiting for them to write means I absorbed very little and had to teach myself nearly everything.

Audiobooks before speed tools were the worst (are they trying to speak extra slow?) But when I can speed things up comprehension is just fine.

> I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you

"This specific knowledge format doesnt work for me, so I'm asking OpenAI to convert this knowledge into a format that is easier for me to digest" is exactly what this is about.

I'm not quite sure what you're upset about? Unless you're referring to "one size fits all knowledge" as simplified topics, so you can tackle things at a surface level? I love having surface level knowledge about a LOT of things. I certainly don't have time to have go deep on every topic out there. But if this is a topic I find I am interested in, the full talk is still available.

Breadth and depth are both important, and well summarized talks are important for breadth, but not helpful at all for depth, and that's ok.

>Slower is usually better for thinking.

Yeah, I see people talking about listening to podcasts or audiobooks on 2x or 3x.

Sometimes I set mine to 0.8x. I find you get time to absorb and think. Am I an outlier?

Or just use notebookLM to convert your books into an hour long podcasts /s

I am genuinely curious how well this would go. There are so many books I “should” read, but will never get around to doing it. A one hour podcast would be more engaging than reading a Wikipedia summary.

On the gripping hand, there are probably already excellent 10/30/60 minute book summaries on YouTube or wherever which are not going to hallucinate plot points.

Read the title and go.

Depends on what you're listening to. If it's a recap of something and you're just looking for the answer to "what happened?", that can be fine for 2x. If you're getting into the "why?" maybe slower is better. Or if there are a lot of players involved.

I'm trying to imagine listening to War and Peace faster. On the one hand, there are a lot of threads and people to keep track of (I had a notepad of who is who). On the other hand, having the stories compressed in time might help remember what was going on with a character when finally returning to them.

Listening to something like Dune quickly, someone might come out only thinking of the main political thrusts, and the action, without building that same world in their mind they would if read slower.

The worst part about talks/lectures is that once you lose the thread, the rest is meaningless. If my mind wanders a bit 5 minutes in to an hour long talk, the rest of that hour is a lost cause

> I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives.

But now we get to browse the knowledge rather than having it thrown at us. That's more important than the quality or formatting of the content.

> I don't get how we can all be so blind at what this is going to create.

There is too much information. people are trying to optimize breadth over depth, but obviously there are costs to this.