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We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

blog.readwise.io

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Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#111

Post by dr_dshiv »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #94
Barrin92 wrote: post #90

can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years , and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.

Agree. Even beyond enjoyment I’ve heard multiple very accomplished people in a variety of fields (from theology to math) say in interviews “I’m actually a very slow reader.” So sure reading fast would be nice, but I think that’s mostly biological whereas slow quality reading you have full control of and we need to focus on that instead.

Ok, but… I love being able to speed read. Love it. And I can’t speed read many things, like philosophy or “zorba the Greek.” Lol just kidding I totally speed read that shit (but slow down when necessary)

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#112

Post by function_seven »

Terr_ wrote: post #107
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related rant I've had over the years: the redundancy present in human language is not a flaw to be optimized away. Evolution went there because it acts as a form of forward error correction.

Except when the complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. :P

Wow, I've never seen such a good one. I spent a solid minute frozen in this garden!

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#114

Post by refulgentis »

Blackthorn wrote: post #113

The whole thing was a hilariously transparent marketing strategy to begin with for their stupidly expensive (and tracks-everything-you-read) API.

I don't think so, and I have 0 interest in any of these companies -- I did find it notable they were checking a company's claim, on a company blog, but I also found it notable there was 0 mention of how this related to their company

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#115

Post by Blackthorn »

refulgentis wrote: post #114
Blackthorn wrote: post #113

The whole thing was a hilariously transparent marketing strategy to begin with for their stupidly expensive (and tracks-everything-you-read) API.

I don't think so, and I have 0 interest in any of these companies -- I did find it notable they were checking a company's claim, on a company blog, but I also found it notable there was 0 mention of how this related to their company

Sorry, don't think I was clear. I don't mean this study, I mean Bionic Reading and their virality in the first place.

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#116

Post by svnt »

Terr_ wrote: post #93
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!

I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow. Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to…

> People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.

Like so many things with people, it depends on what they practice. Most people practice listening far more than rapid speech. Some people can speak faster than most people can comprehend. Part of learning to do that may involve not listening (to themselves) in the same way.

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#117

Post by smegger001 »

jms wrote: post #100
O__________O wrote: post #23

Here’s what appears to be an independent review of Spritz: https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-pr... One of the issues with tests like these is that the companies sponsor the research and they are one-off vs long exposure studies; that is as with most interfaces with high-throughput, takes time for the mind to adjust. My guess that given human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate…

Blind people who use screen readers usually turn up the speed to something unintelligible to the rest of us. Maybe reading a computer screen is a simpler task than talking person to person, but it's an interesting datapoint!

I am definitely not blind. But i listen at high speed to audio books and podcast all day at work, I average at around 2.5x/2.8x speed (lower for certain narrators and can get up to 3x + speeds if i am not doing something that requires much of the language processing part of my brain or anything mentally taxing) i could drive or play a non-text/plot heavy video game but not talk or problem solve.

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#118

Post by simongr3dal »

Terr_ wrote: post #93
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!

I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow. Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to…

> So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step

If you learned this new more compact language as your native language or to native fluency, I don't imagine you would need to go through a compression step, since all of your thoughts would already have happened in the compacted form.

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#119

Post by O__________O »

Terr_ wrote: post #106
O__________O wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> “People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.” If you have any links to research supporting this, I would be interested.

A Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates [1] focused on finding optimal generated-speech rates for screen-reader software: > The mean Listening Rate was 56.8, which corresponds to 309 WPM. Given that people typically speak at a rate of 120-180 WPM, these results suggest that many people, if not most, can understand speech signifcantly [sic] faster than today’s conversational agents with typical human speaking…

Thanks, reviewed research, unclear though how a synthetic voice reading off a single word per unit of measure is an accurate gauge of average listening rates.

From page 4 of 12 of the PDF you linked to, “Rhyme test: measures word recognition by playing a single recorded word, and asking the participant to identify it from a list of six rhyming options (e.g., went, sent, bent, dent, tent, rent). We used 50 sets of rhyming words (300 words total), taken from the Modifed Rhyme Test [27], a standard test used to evaluate auditory comprehension.” The word list research used is on page 30-31 of 55 of this PDF:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Hecker-3/public...

If true, test appears to not even measuring word recognition, it’s more accurately measuring a single phoneme recognition. If the listener correct picks the correct phoneme from a multi-choice list, researchers assume person would hear and understand 100% of any expressions received at that rate of speed; which in my opinion is clearly flawed.

I would be the first to agree that testing listening comprehension rates is hard to do, hence why I asked to review research, but to me, unless I am misunderstanding something, unclear how this research actually provides any meaningful observations.

Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

#120

Post by woopwoop »

If your reading speed is the limiting reagent for your understanding a piece of writing, you should read something else. It's like if the limiting factor in your programming speed is typing. The thing to fix is probably not your typing speed.
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