[rottc0dd]

This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text.

In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Feynman lectures are bad for some people. It is very easy to understand, but doing physics require active problem solving.

Consuming audio is the most human way and if it works for you, it works for you.

[TeMPOraL]

> In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding.

That just means exploiting the medium to full potential hasn't been normalized yet. Much like with the books, you can pause video and audio. And, much like with books, you can go through the material once to get the high-level overview, and then play it again to learn more, now that you have better feel for how things fit.

I've noticed that both pausing to think and playing the same work couple times in a short succession, are something people are reluctant to do. Writing this, I've noticed that myself I am reluctant to do it too, for no apparent reason. Might be because people my age and older, we weren't forced to learn from videos or audio during school and university years, so we didn't internalize the same consumption patterns as we did with books.

[aaronbaugher]

I find myself rewinding a lot when listening to podcasts or watching videos. It's definitely more trouble trying to hit the right spot where my mind started wandering, compared to realizing the same thing with a book and flicking my eyes back to wherever the text looks familiar and restarting there, so that may be part of it.

At least for fiction, I like audiobooks for rereading something I've read before, where I can enjoy the story and it doesn't matter whether I miss a few lines that might include an important plot point. With a new book, I'm just rewinding too much unless it's a really engaging book and reader.

[sigbottle]

This is really true. People love to say, "Just don't make the same mistake twice" or whatever, but part of the necessity of ingesting truly novel information is that you're gonna weave back and trip over yourself a ton of times before you get to that clean refined mental model.

For me, note-taking is a godsend - I don't know how I would live without it. Anywhere from hyper specific detailed notes to just unstructured rants. It's the equivalent of storing things in memory - that alone makes algorithms far more powerful.

It doesn't help with real-time tasks like talking though... but I've noticed I have gotten a bit better at talking ever since I started note taking.

I think the "learn instinctually by doing stuff a lot" approach definitely is useful but note-taking is a healthy balance between that and getting perma-stuck in research mode.

[rottc0dd]

I think, it is much more to do with the fact that audio or visual way of consuming information is so natural that you can sometimes go with the flow.

It helps me to be much more aware of the information being consumed, exactly because reading is an unnatural and learned way of consuming information. You can definitely do the same with audio medium, but books make me aware of where I am in the process much more than former.

[Insanity]

Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

Or accept a superficial understanding and fail to see the deeper point. Philosophy might be a good domain to see this happen with - read the words but don’t parse the meaning.

[blenderob]

> Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

What do you disagree with? Nobody said that reading makes you immune to moving on without understanding.

What they said was that while reading it is possible to pause if you don't understand something and move on when you are ready to move on. That's harder to do in videos or lectures. Do you disagree with this?

[Insanity]

Parent said:

“if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step”.

I disagree that you can not move on. You definitely can. So your statement about what “nobody said” contradicts what was actually said.

[rottc0dd]

I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading. And I honestly cannot think of even consuming certain books with audio medium. As I commented elsewhere, "Gravity's rainbow" is one such book, in which for me, even a single page cannot be consumed using audio medium.

[thfuran]

>One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Yes, you can. You can even skim—or entirely skip—whole sections.

[spoiler]

But with reading it's more of an active or deliberate choice. With listening or watching it "just happens" naturally as the medium progresses.

I'm also a slow learner (and reader) so I think reading also suits me better because I allows me to control the pace better.

[thfuran]

You've never gotten distracted while reading and then found that you've scanned over a bunch of text while thinking about something else?

[spoiler]

It happened for sure! But it usually happens for a few words, maybe one or two sentences max.

I think mind wandering briefly is a different thing to what's being discussed here though.

Like, let's say I'm watching a video about a complex subject, in my case it's easier to accidentally gloss over knowledge gaps than it is when when reading about it.

It's also feels more practical to take notes or annotate stuff I'm reading about rather than stuff, and it's easier to "revisit" it once recall fails.

It's also generally more convenient to consume (ie I can consume it while commuting/traveling), etc.

However, as a counter point (since I've been doing lots of technical art recently) watching videos on some subjects can be useful, but I still pair it with reading to get a more in-depth understanding on the subjects involved

[doubled112]

I've never read anything _without_ realizing I had skipped most of the text while thinking of something else.

[rottc0dd]

Edit: Made my points subjective

Harder for me. I thought I can while reading fiction. "Gravity's rainbow" proved that wrong too.

What I mean is, I am more aware of information flow particularly because it is not the natural way of consuming knowledge. Speaking language is in a way part of our evolution. But, written language is a skill you learnt, like driving a bicycle.

This unnatural way, makes me much more aware of my own thinking. While I am reading, even if I understand I stop and muse and breathe in and bask on thoughts it cultivated in me. It has not happened, for me, in other medium.

[rottc0dd]

As mentioned elsewhere, I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading.

[NalNezumi]

I think your personal take is more so that you require "interaction" in the learning process; which is extremely common and universally accepted as best way to learn stuff.

>If I don't understand I cannot move on to next step

Everytime you encounter new hard concept, you really have to actively think/interact with that information to make it yours. This is often lacking in the "lecture" style teaching. One key benefit of reading is that you can do it at your pace.

I think for audio/verbal medium, you would probably have a completely different experience if you were talking to Feynman. He have a lecture for you, and everytime you get stuck, you can interrupt him and ask follow up question or ask further. This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

[TeMPOraL]

> This is probably why Private tuition is so valuable (and very very often used in East Asian nation); whichever fence of preference you fall to, a someone dedicated to teaching you is an extreme advantage.

That's gonna be a money printer for LLMs (even if for a short while - "no moat" & stuffs). Many people are fine with LLM-assisted learning, and able to navigate the hallucination problem. Then there's the (in)famous NotebookLM, that's known for only one of its many features: the ability to blend a bunch of source documents and generate an engaging podcast out of them. And a feature they're testing is letting the listener interrupt the podcast with their own questions. Meanwhile, OpenAI's "advanced voice" has been demonstrating for close to a year now, that a spoken conversation with an LLM can be done and feels... natural.

It's not hard to see the convergence of these ideas into ad-hoc experts: blend some textbooks, replace a podcast with a conversational "advanced voice" model, and suddenly you may experience "talking to Feynman". Not a real one - nowhere near as smart or likely to be correct - but still better than anything else you or me have access to.

(Whether or not you believe LLMs are good enough for this, or are too dumb a markov chain stochastic parrot something - it still begs to be tried, and someone will try it soon.)

[codelieb]

Feynman's introductory physics course also entailed a lot of problem-solving and labs, in addition to the lectures that are the basis for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. If you go to The Feynman Lectures Website (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu) and you take a look at the "Original Course Handouts" you can see the homework sets, quizzes and tests his students took (which are not for the feint of heart - many of the problems are quite difficult), and also the labs they did. For those reading the book now, there is also a supplemental volume (sold separately), "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" which includes most of the problems given to Feynman's students, and many from later years given to students whose textbook was The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

[awongh]

There’s also the meta element of understanding how each medium affects the way you engage with the topic, which I think can be helpful in understanding when you might want to switch and why.

That is, assuming you probably want to have more than one media type in order to round out your understanding.

[bookofjoe]

"When in doubt, read on." — Alfred Korzybski, the father of modern semantics, in his foundational 1933 book, "Science and Sanity."

https://archive.org/stream/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sani...

[Der_Einzige]

Feynman lectures pretend that physics doesn’t require a ton of hard, painful, and not all that rewarding math to get to any of the good stuff.

[codelieb]

Anyone who could write this has apparently no familiarity with The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is chock full of quite difficult mathematics.