The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

Yes, but in order to measure its bitrate accurately you need to tell us whether that compression is gzip, zlib, zip or 7zip. They don't all produce the same results.

If we are going to be utterly ridiculous about this conversation, let's at least be complete.

"It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'."

The paper uses this number and acknowledges that it is not the only possible measure, and explains why they use this number and how it was derived. It is just the start of the paper, not "all this paper does." The paper primarily focuses on counterarguments to this number to then address the primary question of the relationship between the inner and outer brain.

A few questions it poses: does the superior colliculus contribute to a bottom-up "saliency map" to ultimately direct the attentional bottleneck in cognition? Why does the brain use the same neural circuitry for both rapid/parallel sensory processing and slow/serial cognition? This is not even how other parts of the body work (e.g., type I and II muscle fibers). Perhaps the associated routing machinery between input and output accounts for the billions of neurons? Maybe, like the visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex has a fine-grained organization of thousands of small modules each dedicated to a specific microtask?

We do ourselves the most favors by reading research with some skepticism, and asking questions. We do ourselves no favors by writing comments after only reading an abstract (please, tell me if I'm wrong). I only point out that discounting research so blithely does nothing for improving research. This was a perspective paper - an author asking questions to better understand a possible issue and guide research. And maybe the commenter is right, maybe this is the wrong focus, but I do not believe it was truly considered.

That’s kind of a cop out - at what point do very quick conscious decisions become “automatic.”

(20 Questions, from the intro) Trying to think of a thing for the game is not a search over a set of known things. Just saying the possibility set has size 2^N doesn't mean that choosing something in the set consists of processing the set. But even if that were the case, and if you do consider each of 2^N options, the consideration process itself is not trivial and probably varies wildly.

(English typing) Touch typists do not (only) simply convert an existing/known string to a sequence of hand actions by mapping character to action. There are whole words and sequences that become units/tokens from the standpoint of muscle memory and processing (this will be relevant to the rubik's cube topic as well). When i type, there's a sort of planning and queueing of actions, but also there's monitoring of actions that allows fast error correction with pressing delete a number of times or holding it and costly determining when the error has been reached, and resuming afterward. Of course the process likely varies from person to person, but there's such a host of other things going on that should count as part of the information processed in this simple behavior that the example and numbers used in the paper for it are utterly useless even as estimates.

(Rubik's cube blind speed solving) Again we see reference to the entire possibility space (from the perspective of possible configurations of the puzzle). But solvers do not identify the configuration they encounter with reference to the space, nor do they search the space for it. They look for patterns and ignore what they cannot use for the strategy they have practiced. The cuber often does not commit to memory the whole configuration, but will often convert it to a custom and bespoke mnemonic. It's just utter nonsense to refer to the number of possible configurations, it has nothing directly to do with what the human is doing.

If I memorize a 30 word passage, i have not "processed the set of possible 30 word passages".