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Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

sciencemag.org

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Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#21

Post by dual_basis »

jefftk wrote: post #17
Aperocky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on language, if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is.

> if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is Being "verbose" means that each letter you type communicates fewer bits of information. If the bottleneck is putting ideas together then you would expect someone writing in a more verbose language to type more letters per minute but still take a similar amount of time to communicate the idea. In practice most Java p…

What might be more relevant, however, is the effect of verbosity on comprehension. Syntax highlighting can help, and humans will likely naturally perform input compression (chunking), but this must be learned.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#22

Post by holy_city »

I'm not sure what the review process is for the source, but the paper [1] is pretty interesting. Lots of cool findings/references in there like:

- There is a measurable difference in information density based on the sex of the speaker

- Syllables were chosen as the base unit of measurement because morphemes (words) are too big/linguistically varied and phonemes (sound equivalent of letters) are too small and likely to be dropped in regular speech. I'd like to see the same analysis using phonemes to see how it changes, especially between dialects.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#23

Post by dual_basis »

ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I can watch YouTube content at 3x without issue. I did this without much intentional effort - I simply downloaded an extension which allows me to speed up the video in increments of 0.1x using a keyboard shortcut. Whenever it felt slow I would speed it up, and whenever it felt too fast I would slow it down. Without paying much attention to the actual numbers I had reached over 3x within a month or so.

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#25

Post by airstrike »

Aperocky wrote: post #12
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #8

> instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. “It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.” Glad this paragraph was in the article, clears up their m…

Really depends on language, if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is.

So you're saying you're not a fan of RequestProcessorFactoryFactory.StatelessProcessorFactoryFactory?

http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server...

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#26

Post by emilga »

ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#29

Post by the_af »

jefftk wrote: post #17
Aperocky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on language, if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is.

> if you're writing java, you'll be putting out a lot more than that due to how stupidly verbose it is Being "verbose" means that each letter you type communicates fewer bits of information. If the bottleneck is putting ideas together then you would expect someone writing in a more verbose language to type more letters per minute but still take a similar amount of time to communicate the idea. In practice most Java p…

Like the sibling comment mentioned, it seems verbosity hinders reading comprehension rather than writing. Many IDEs understand this and hide some of the boilerplate.

This raises the question: if the IDE autocompletes the boilerplate for you, and also hides it, why is it needed in the first place?

Re: Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

#30

Post by gonehome »

dual_basis wrote: post #23
ilamont wrote: post #15

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One…

I can watch YouTube content at 3x without issue. I did this without much intentional effort - I simply downloaded an extension which allows me to speed up the video in increments of 0.1x using a keyboard shortcut. Whenever it felt slow I would speed it up, and whenever it felt too fast I would slow it down. Without paying much attention to the actual numbers I had reached over 3x within a month or so.

Is there a trick to get it above 2x (which is the cap in the UI). It'd be nice when watching videos of congress.
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