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669 points georgemandis | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.261s | source
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heeton ◴[] No.44378250[source]
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.

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pluc ◴[] No.44378391[source]
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.

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hooverd ◴[] No.44378472[source]
If you're not listening to summaries of different audiobooks at 2x speed in each ear you're not contentmaxing.
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lovestory ◴[] No.44382161[source]
Or just use notebookLM to convert your books into an hour long podcasts /s
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1. 0cf8612b2e1e ◴[] No.44382862[source]
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.