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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

#21

Post by kadoban »

prometheus76 wrote: post #16
_bramses wrote: post #9

Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all source…

We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?

An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of other things already read, and essentially create a course of study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty expensive.

An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be less biased than in human in several ways.

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

#22

Post by avivo »

I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an augmented form of reading that is semantic. I would love to have bold and italics and even section headings and table of contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content.

I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based off a query, or a personalized recommendation system.

I spend much more time skimming than reading, and skimming to determine if something is worth reading. Anything that can support that is incredibly valuable and would increase my functional reading speed for accomplishing tasks.

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

#23

Post by O__________O »

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 of around 39-bits per second, that on average that’s going to be the actual performance target:

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

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

#24

Post by fsiefken »

gnicholas wrote: post #8

> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forg…

Coincidentally I was wondering a similar thing this morning. To get as much text as possible on paper for holiday reading I managed to get the text down 30% while by stripping out any vowel but the first in a word, replacing 'the' with '#', 'and' with '&' and of' with '%'. I also used the smallest Tahoma font and multiple columns. This increases reading complexity just as Sans Forgetica, but perhaps also increases reading speed somewhat- because words get stripped down to their 'essence' (perhaps similar to chinese or japanese script) and your eyes move less with multiple columns. In that 'word essence'sence this technique has similarities to Bionic Reading. Combining the two would be tricky, as what letters would be bolded with the devowel method and can you get closer to a word essense? The combination with Beeline and Bionic Reading or devoweling could have more potential. It's nice that Beeline has gray scale support.

sed 's/ and / \& /g' -e 's/ of /\ % /g' -e 's/ is / \= /g' -e 's/ th / \# /g' -e 's/\B[aeiouAEIOU]//g' -e 's/\(.\)\1/\1/g' -e "s/'//g" sacred-world.txt > sw.txt

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

#25

Post by carapace »

If you want to read fast write a little tool to do "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation".

The basic idea is that you flash words on a screen in the same location so that your eyes don't have to pan back and forth, you just look straight ahead.

Your eyes and brain can recognize whole words as a gestalt (without reading each letter.)

That's it.

This method cuts out most of the physical overhead of reading.

When I played with it I got to the point where I could read over 500 words/minute. I could read faster than my internal voice could speak.

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

#26

Post by [deleted] »

avivo wrote: post #22

I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an augmented form of reading that is semantic . I would love to have bold and italics and even section headings and table of contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content. I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based off a query, or a personalized recommendation system. I spend…

[deleted]

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

#27

Post by jacobsenscott »

No surprise. It's been shown over and over that speed reading, no matter the gimmick, doesn't work. It is just another one of those self help fads that never goes away because it is super easy to re-package and sell. Just read without thinking about how fast you are reading and you'll do fine.

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

#29

Post by natrys »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #27

No surprise. It's been shown over and over that speed reading, no matter the gimmick, doesn't work. It is just another one of those self help fads that never goes away because it is super easy to re-package and sell. Just read without thinking about how fast you are reading and you'll do fine.

Did you speed read this article? They weren't measuring whether speed reading itself works, rather whether bionic reading works for speed reading.

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

#30

Post by layer8 »

_bramses wrote: post #9

Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all source…

Different people will have different opinions on which parts and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don’t expect AI to be able to adequately address that anytime soon.
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