Pastafarianist comments on Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books - Less Wrong

27 Post author: patrissimo 27 March 2011 07:54PM

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Comment author: djcb 28 March 2011 11:08:27AM *  5 points [-]

I've mentioned it in earlier posts, but I like to emphasize once more the use of audio books; as they allow you to fill a lot of your otherwise-idle time (say, commuting, running, shopping etc.), you can effectively get a lot more 'reading' done.

Obviously, audio books are not very good (unfortunately) for really technical expositions, but one can use them to read a lot of fiction, popular science, history, that kind of thing. I've been doing that for a few years and I got more 'reading' done than I ever thought possible.

Another little 'trick' for reading more is to read PDFs and the like with 'autoscroll' turned on (at least Evince and Acrobat support this). Using autoscroll forces me to really concentrate and also allows we to sit back and 'experience' the book. Again, this does not work well for highly technical books, but quite well for more 'prosaic' material.

Comment author: Pastafarianist 10 September 2014 05:23:11PM 0 points [-]

My experience with audiobooks is completely different. I found myself unable to get into the flow of listening, constantly getting distracted and losing track of what's going on. Besides, given that I already put myself under much cognitive load (reading, MOOCs, university), I decided to dedicate the time when I cannot read to reassessing and recalling everything in diffuse mode of thinking. So far, seems like there is no better option.