matt comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong

47 Post author: lionhearted 07 September 2010 07:01PM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 10 September 2010 08:00:51AM 4 points [-]

Or medium-sized classes where the teacher asks a lot of questions, for the students who do most of the answering. It's not an absolute rule. The point is that if a student asks/answers 0.5 questions per class (a very high average), there's no way the benefit of that outweighs not having to pay the teacher and being able to speed up consumption of information by 1.4

Comment author: matt 12 September 2010 01:24:58PM 0 points [-]

Crank that slider a bit further - QuickTime 7 on OS X does it really well, and I do most of my video watching at 2.5x.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 13 September 2010 04:12:31AM *  2 points [-]

I'm on Ubuntu using VLC and if I recall correctly, it's pretty friggin' hard to make anything out once you get to 2x speed. I don't think that's the barrier for me, anyway.

Comment author: matt 13 September 2010 10:16:13PM 0 points [-]

VLC's algorithms are not very good, and out of the box it only moves in x0.5 increments (there's a setting to change that, but it's hard to find). Quicktime 7 is awesome at it (look for the A/V Controls), but Quicktime 8 can't do it at all.

(A small note (probably for others, rather than JM-IV): it takes time for your brain to get used to very high speed audio - if you can't follow at first, give yourself a few minutes to adapt)

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 14 September 2010 08:03:32AM 1 point [-]

Hm. I might try to get Quicktime working on Linux if you think sped-up lectures are more effective means of learning stuff than reading pdfs and so on.

Comment author: matt 14 September 2010 07:51:08PM 3 points [-]

I think that different modes of presentation of the same content is a great learning hack, and verbal presentation without a speedup takes too long.

Generally though, given a transcript, I'd prefer to read.