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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

#61

Post by cedilla »

m463 wrote: post #53
bpodgursky wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trivially disprovable; it's easy to think of longcuts, ways to accomplish or learn something inefficiently. There would be no difference between a great teacher and a terrible teacher otherwise. Or a great coach and a terrible coach.

I've always thought research papers were a longcut to comprehension. I don't know if this is because the subject matter is novel, or that the authors are better at math and science than writing. I wonder if there could be a standard for grading a research paper on readability to raise the status quo.

Unfortunately, readability is at odds with other, more important goals of the authors, like shoe-horning in references to all important papers in the field, especially if they're likely to be written by reviewers.

Also, a lot of work must be shown to demonstrate completeness and rigorousness, and that doesn't help comprehension either.

The trick is to read only the segments of the paper that are actually worth reading, which is often only the abstract, conclusion and maybe implementation details.

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

#62

Post by t_mann »

Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out).

So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".

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

#63

Post by darkerside »

janandonly wrote: post #4

So Bionic reading is just a form of speed reading? And it turns out that comprehension is suffering from trying to read faster... I think that most people, when they read, do a sort of automatic "speed reading" in their mind already. What I mean is: I notice that when I read, my eyes will skip parts of words where I don't need to see all the letters to know what word it is. What if all this trickery simply hinders ou…

Having just tried it, I definitely felt like the bionic reading was completely unreadable. I am very much a skimmer, and to be fair, I haven't practiced with Bionic so it might get faster over time. But my initial reaction was honestly disgust.

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

#65

Post by hinkley »

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.

Have we isolated the writing style with these experiments?

I have no trouble believing that speed reading concise, efficient writers represents a loss of information. But some writers just will not get to the fucking point, and those were the books/classes where I was a little jealous of the speed readers. I need to read and retain about 10% of this garbage, but my brain is not cooperating on skimming.

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

#67

Post by 300bps »

drooby wrote: post #49
thenerdhead wrote: post #34

There's no shortcuts to anything in life. Thinking so is a fool's errand. You get better at reading by reading and deliberately practicing it. Speed reading is a completely different skill than comprehension. Comprehension is a completely different skill than entertaining yourself. The fundamentals aren't going anywhere. They'll be here when you realize speedreading, bionic reading, and summaries are just distraction…

I use text to speech… it absolutely is a short cut and without and doubt it improves my reading comprehension, stamina, and speed.. I can even look away from the screen and still follow along. It has changed my life and introduced me to so much more information that I would have otherwise not attained with manual reading. Eye scanning and mental vocalization are really tiring on my brain. Text to speech has solved bo…

My retention from listening to text is a tiny fraction of my retention from seeing written words and numbers.

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

#69

Post by SimonPStevens »

t_mann wrote: post #62

Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out). So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".

I really hope Dang or one of the others in charge here is reading this and is willing to consider it.

The change suggested here would be one of the greatest single improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio on this site, and even news in general.

It would be a policy change rather than a tech change really, and would need some enforcement. Just a reminder on the submission page, and perhaps a banner at the top of the home page highlighting the policy change, and directing people to flag titles in the wrong form.

(Or, failing that, does anyone have any suggestions for good tech news sources where the titles are in this format, this is definitely something I want to see)

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

#70

Post by thorum »

The article’s conclusion doesn’t seem to match the data they collected. They found that most people (52%) do read faster with bionic reading, the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading!

The authors then average results (good and bad) across all users, resulting in a number close to zero, and conclude Bionic Reading doesn’t work for anyone, even calling it a placebo effect at the end.

The problem is, all brains are not the same. It doesn’t have to work equally well for everyone to be valuable.

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