I find that the type of thing greatly affects how I want to engage with it. I’ll just illustrate with a few extremal points:
Philosophy: I’m almost entirely here to think, not to hear their thoughts. I’ll skip whole paragraphs or pages if they’re doing throat clearing. Or I’ll reread 1 paragraph several times, slowly, with 10 minute pace+think in between each time.
History: Unless I’m especially trusting of the analysis, or the analysis is exceptionally conceptually rich, I’m mainly here for the facts + narrative that makes the facts fit into a story I can imagine. Best is audiobook + high focus, maybe 1.3x -- 2.something x, depending on how dense / how familiar I already am. I find that IF I’m going linearly, there’s a small gain to having the words turned into spoken language for me, and to keep going without effort. This benefit is swamped by the cost of not being able to pause, skip back, skip around, if that’s what I want to do.
Math / science: Similar to philosophy, though with much more variation in how much I’m trying to think vs get info.
Investigating a topic, reading papers: I skip around very aggressively—usually there’s just a couple sentences that I need to see, somewhere in the paper, in order to decide whether the paper is relevant at all, or to decide which citation to follow. Here I have to consciously firmly hold the intention to investigate the thing I’m investigating, or else I’ll get distracted trying to read the paper (incorrect!), and probably then get bored.
I find that the type of thing greatly affects how I want to engage with it. I’ll just illustrate with a few extremal points:
Philosophy: I’m almost entirely here to think, not to hear their thoughts. I’ll skip whole paragraphs or pages if they’re doing throat clearing. Or I’ll reread 1 paragraph several times, slowly, with 10 minute pace+think in between each time.
History: Unless I’m especially trusting of the analysis, or the analysis is exceptionally conceptually rich, I’m mainly here for the facts + narrative that makes the facts fit into a story I can imagine. Best is audiobook + high focus, maybe 1.3x -- 2.something x, depending on how dense / how familiar I already am. I find that IF I’m going linearly, there’s a small gain to having the words turned into spoken language for me, and to keep going without effort. This benefit is swamped by the cost of not being able to pause, skip back, skip around, if that’s what I want to do.
Math / science: Similar to philosophy, though with much more variation in how much I’m trying to think vs get info.
Investigating a topic, reading papers: I skip around very aggressively—usually there’s just a couple sentences that I need to see, somewhere in the paper, in order to decide whether the paper is relevant at all, or to decide which citation to follow. Here I have to consciously firmly hold the intention to investigate the thing I’m investigating, or else I’ll get distracted trying to read the paper (incorrect!), and probably then get bored.