I listen to podcasts while doing chores or at the gym, and often feel like I'm learning something but then can't really remember anything afterwards. So for the past ~month I've been doing an experiment where I write brief summaries of them afterwards, usually same-day but sometimes a bit later. Generally I avoid all forms of fact checking, both "what did the episode say" and "what is actually true", though I don't stop myself if I feel like doing it.

I've been posting them to my shortform on LessWrong. Mostly in reply to a single comment for tidiness, but two of them I accidentally posted to the top of the thread and one as a reply to another. Initially that was just because I wanted to be able to write them from both my work and personal laptops. (This blog is published through git. I don't have the repo on my work laptop, and probably shouldn't do.) But I kind of like it. A downside is it's slightly less convenient to include episode numbers or air dates or even titles unless I remember them. So I might be less consistent about that, though it feels good to have a fairly straightforward way to look up the episode given my summary.

I've skipped all the fiction podcasts I listen to, because that's not why I listen to fiction. Also most interviews, those seem generally hard to summarize, though it would probably be reasonable to extract a few individual points. And one Planet Money episode seemed like it would be irresponsible to summarize carelessly, and I didn't feel like trying to be careful about it. But I've summarized every episode of 99% Invisible and History of English, and all but that one episode of Planet Money, that I've listened to in this time. Also one episode of Rationally Speaking and one of Corecursive.

I'm not really sure what this experiment was trying to test. I was curious, so I did it. Some things I've maybe vaguely learned: first, I think I can generally do a decent summary. I frequently get distracted for a few seconds at a time, but there's a difference between that and being actually distracted, and I think it shows. (I listened to 99% Invisible, "Tanz Tanz Revolution", while looking at parking restrictions in my area and anticipating my evening plans. There's significant parts of that episode that just rolled right past me.) I don't think you could reliably pick out the episodes I didn't do same-day, I mostly don't even remember myse...

philh's Shortform

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philh's Shortform

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