Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Podcast

Eneasz

Have you ever thought “I’d love to read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I just don’t have the spare time. I wish it was available in audio format.” Fret no more! I present to you the HPMoR Podcast! First chapter out now, and another one added every Wednesday.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-potter-methods-rationality/id431784580

I find most spoken audio very comfortable at double speed. Whether this matches reading speed depends on your reading speed. I also find spoken audio less fatiguing than reading for most fiction and most popular nonfiction. I am less prone to being derailed from the book. This is where I read for a bit and then find something else more compelling, such as a blog or a rationalist forum, or where I pick up the book and then put it back down having resolved to continue tomorrow. Even if reading-time is shorter when I read, calendar time is often very long.

Anything I could comprehend at double speed would probably not be worth listening to.

Audio may take longer, but perhaps that enables me to remember it better. Any studies on that?

1katydee15y

Interesting and informative post, thanks! I'll have to try the double-speed method. I suspect that this would still not match my reading speed (which is very fast indeed), but would still make audiobooks and the like more efficient in the cases where they are convenient.

1wnoise15y

For those who want a program that does this well, I find that "mplayer" is decent at speeding up the things it plays. '[' and ']' alter the speed, and the intial speed can be set with eg. "-speed 2.0" on the command line, though I find that too fast. One generally wants to correct for pitch changes with the "scaletempo" audio filter. This can be enabled with "af=scaletempo" in a config file, or "-af scaletempo" on the command line. (One can also use the "mencoder" version of this to create sped-up files for use on other devices).

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