I haven’t heard this problem mentioned on here yet: http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/04/puzzle-of-self-torturer.html
What do you think of the puzzle? Do you think the analysis here is correct?
Jabberslythe
Karma: 221
Learning with Audiobooks
If you spend enough time looking you can find some higher level stuff. But, yeah, unfortunately I mostly end up listening to intro stuff of various disciplines.
Things seem to be getting worse for internet piracy, but if you use stuff to hide your IP and go to private torrent sites things will probably still be great.
I zone out occasionally, but that happens when I read as well. One way to get around that would be to listen to books continuity isn’t especially important so that losing your place will not be as costly.
Hmm, that’s interesting. This isn’t the case for me. Perhaps that tendency is why there are fewer higher level or more audiobooks availible.
I’m willing to help. I’ve got some brief familiarity with recording through audacity and I’m listened to many podcasts.
Also, it seems like a great idea. Depending on how it turns out, you can affiliate it more or less strongly with LessWrong.
Do you have a Voice to recommend for this? Neospeech Bridget and Paul seem like the best to me. I usually find that I can’t understand the text if I speed it up even a little bit with Voices worse than these.
I can’t understand any words at that speed even when I am careful about how I speed it up. Any tips about how to listen at that speed?
I currently listen at *2 speed. Trying to train myself to x2.5 now. It seems like the best thing I could do with my time given how much time I spend listening.
I have another question. When I have tried to convert ebooks to audiobooks with programs similar to textaloud I had a problem with extra text that was in the book or the article (like foot notes, dedications and other such things). Do you just go through the text and delete these things or have you found a better way?
Do any LWers have any familiarity with speed reading and have any recommendations or cautions about it?
Does anyone have experience with speed dating? Specifically did they find that it improved social skills? It seems like it would be very effective.
I’m also interested in this. I want to know what specific social situations I can put myself in to build social skills. Raw exposure doesn’t seem to work well for and in any case isn’t time effective.
Other people seem to be able to sit down and assimilate themselves into a group conversation, when I do this I rarely end up saying anything.
Yeah, I think that feeling unconfident is largely the cause, so it’s something that I should try to avoid even though it is an especially poor internal signal. I should try to make myself update on some more reliable signals like those.
Yeah, I should try that more. My main issues with mimicing successful people is that I have trouble mustering the emotion to do it effectively.
I’ve stopped trying to start conversations with strangers. When I considered it a ‘live option’ I didn’t think that I was getting enough conversations out the effort I was allocating. I imagine it would be a better option for people who were not as shy to begin with.
The reason that speed dating is attractive to me is that I don’t think that I could get many more conversations started in a speed dating environment because it would be expected that I would once I was in it. Yeah, that’s good to keep in mind. I would expect that a lot of it wouldn’t transfer, but even if a small amount did it seems like it would be worth the investment for me.
Can anyone recommend any books on signalling or on feminism that might appeal to a LWer?
I posted earlier on the advantages of incorporating audiobooks into your study methods. One of the main problems I desribed was that there was poor selection with regards to audiobooks and particularly with regard to higher level subjects. I’ve recently found a way around this that makes using audiobooks even more of an obvious decision for me. I’ve started using text to speech conversion to make audiobooks from ebooks. The inspiration was from wedrifid.
Here is a sample of the best TTS voice I have been able to find. This method produces suprisingly high quality audiobooks with suprisingly little effort.
I can get through around 2 − 5 books a day by listening to audiobooks.
Audiobooks for learning languages and for appreciating music benefit immensely from the audio format when they are designed for it.
I don’t have a much problem listening to to scholarly stuff what problems did you have with it? Most of the books I listen to recently probably count as scholarly. I don’t think that my comprehension is lower than when I read conventionally, actually, I need to test it, though.
What method do you use for converting blogs? Have you found a way of converting a whole blog at once or do you convert articles individually?
What do people here think about using audiobooks for study? I have a job that let’s me listen to them all day so I take advantage of that. It is possible to download video lectures as audio and listen to them as well. I also have an Ipod touch which lets me listen to them at x1.5 speed. The biggest problem with them is that it is hard to find good hard academic stuff.