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Maybe the default settings are too high

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Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#281

Post by UltraSane »

teiferer wrote: post #271
UltraSane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audible and most audiobook player apps let you control the speed. I usually listen at 1.25 to 1.5

That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.

Reading books as slow as the article says is rather silly.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#282

Post by teiferer »

UltraSane wrote: post #281
teiferer wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.

Reading books as slow as the article says is rather silly.

You are free to have that opinion and I personally also find it a little too extreme, but the author's main point is a good one.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#283

Post by yawz »

gste wrote: post #175

By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago. I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens. You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and…

I love Woody Allen's speed reading joke:

> "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#284

Post by augustk »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #136
nabbed wrote: post #50

This can work with the way you think as well. Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it…

I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving. If I recall correctly the question was something like: You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of th…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#285

Post by teaearlgraycold »

bart__ wrote: post #144
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving. If I recall correctly the question was something like: You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of th…

Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?

What other situations are you concerned with that your solution doesn’t handle?

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#286

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

harshreality wrote: post #240
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim…

One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes. I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, Lo…

One would like to point out that the set {Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse} is not a subset of {fantasy books I have come across}. I would not dare to claim that LoTR is the end all of all fantasy writing. Perhaps the word ”complex” was a bad choice here, since I’m sure there is books with more complex structure (which is not necessarily a good thing…)

I think what I tried to say is that the language Tolkien uses is as much or more part of the middle earth as are the characters, maps and whatnot. The obvious point is that he created whole new languages and writing systems for the book, basing the two Elvish languages on Finnish and Welsh etc. Other is that he changes his vocabulary depending on what he is describing. I am not a linguistic scholar, but I’m fairly vertain that at least in Two Towers the parts describing nature, forrests and whatnot use solely words that are celtic in origin, ie. no Latin influence and very old. There’s also structural techniques of interwoven plots that I can’t even start to unwind.

Point being, you can very much read the book on surface level as Frodo and the Ring and Swords and lah-di-daa and that is all fine. That’s how I read it when I was 12-13. But there is so much more, mastery of English language comparable only to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce… Here Tolkien is very much a singular writer, escaping the limits of genre he very much was essential in creating.

So no wonder it is perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#287

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ghaff wrote: post #238
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time doing anything when in a nice resort. If it’s too nice, you just want to hangout at your pool villa all day and enjoy the view.

And if you're presumably paying a premium for a nice resort, why wouldn't you spend a lot of your time taking advantage of it?

Yes, if you want to get out and do things, better to go for low or mid range. You don’t want your room to feel like a huge sunk cost.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#288

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fluoridation wrote: post #161
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #21

One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are. This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly. You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Fo…

My experience has been the exact opposite. Yes, there's literally a lot of information, but so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much. I've seen multiple paragraphs of Tolkien, for example, that narratively boil down to "they walk across the field". To be clear, I don't see that as a flaw. The fluff serves to set the mood. But that's different from saying that the text…

> so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much

Are you sure? Or is that just superfluous for the way you’re reading it?

In some cases, it’s overly verbose. But if you’re taking this away from acclaimed authors, consider picking up some literary criticism (fancy words for fan theories). Chances are, there is meaning embedded in what you’re dismissing as fluff.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#289

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fluoridation wrote: post #256
watwut wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "mood" is the information too.

That's not really "information" in the information-theoretic sense that the other person was using, when it can be rewritten in all manner of different ways while conveying the same overall mood. The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that. All the other words one would write around that core idea would not provide any more specifici…

> The densest way to communicate "Sam and Frodo walk across the plain towards Mt. Doom. They're both really tired" is exactly that

Uh, yes. This is press-release speak, optimised for a fourth grader’s reading comprehension.

If, on the other hand, you want to develop the motif of the Unseen—central to Tolkien’s work—the type of tired the characters are and how they’re detecting and addressing it is incredibly germane, interesting and totally lost in your summary.

You’re also describing the first scenes we see through familiar eyes of Mordor. The landscape is an extension of Sauron’s will. The contrast with the developed, organised, albeit crowded cities of men; the arrogance implied in the desolation; et cetera pack information lost in your summary.

Re: Maybe the default settings are too high

#290

Post by bart__ »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #285
bart__ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?

What other situations are you concerned with that your solution doesn’t handle?

The best solution I could think of on the spot was this: First write down every license place until it fills up. Then for each time a car drives by, give it a 1/2 chance to write it down. Moving down the list regardless of the outcome. Then once the bottom is reached, do it again but with 1/3 a chance. Over and over again, decreasing the chance each time.

I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.

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