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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

#71

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

It's the opposite for me. I can't listen to things at anything like my comfortable reading speed. The move of so much internet content from text to video has been a disaster for me.

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

#72

Post by lucideer »

hoodwink wrote: post #38
lucideer wrote: post #36

> tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you. After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed. I've seen a lot of viral social media posts about bionic reading recently and this is the very first time I've ever seen anyone mention reading speed. Everything I've seen is selling bionic reading for greater reading comprehensio…

giant hero section on bionic-reading.com: "Did you know that your brain reads faster than your eye?" title of bionic-reading.com: "Faster. Better. More focused. Reading." does "faster" not refer to speed to you or something?

I'd heard of Renato but not the registered trademark (why don't they use the font throughout the website)?

I guess that answers my question: different bubbles

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

#73

Post by gnicholas »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #69
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…

It would also be easy to prompt you to consider rewording if your title has a question mark. There would be some false positives, but I'd think the vast majority would benefit from rewording.

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

#75

Post by sbeckeriv »

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 read once that a headline that ends in a question mark is almost always a no. I think the thought is that positive answers to a question are shared as a statement. Much like you shared. It saves me a few clicks?

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

#76

Post by madrox »

sbeckeriv wrote: post #75
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 read once that a headline that ends in a question mark is almost always a no. I think the thought is that positive answers to a question are shared as a statement. Much like you shared. It saves me a few clicks?

You ended with a question mark, so I must assume it doesn't save you a few clicks.

I'll take my downvotes now.

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

#77

Post by freemint »

noobhacker wrote: post #55
hoodwink wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, this is the follow up post to the experiment posted here on Hacker News a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204 . I'll be hanging out in the replies today if there are any questions I can answer :)

I stalked the post's author (your?) LinkedIn and didn't see any background in statistics. How do you know to design this experiment so nicely?

It is a pretty standard statistical test taught in any bachelor level class covering statistics (or earlier in Germany we did this in 11 the grade) . This setup also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics) another pretty standard method you learn by just looking how others do experiments.

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

#78

Post by drooby »

300bps wrote: post #67
drooby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I follow along with written words and listen at the same time. The apps I use automatically scroll the page and keep the current text in focus.

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

#79

Post by lkbm »

a3w wrote: post #59
WhitneyLand wrote: post #51

What about instead an AI project that rewrites content for fastest consumption and easiest comprehension? Not a summary, but kind of like a lossless re-encoding for maximum human efficiency. You could even allow custom reader profiles that take into account things like vocabulary an subject expertise.

So, the gist bot that some subreddits already use? It has a different name than gist which I cannot recall, but probably an ML algorithm.

AutoTLDR, which uses smmry.com[0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotl...

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

#80

Post by drooby »

painted-now wrote: post #52
drooby wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, listening to audiobooks was a game changer. I guess TTS is even better because you can listen to pretty much everything. Any app/software you can recommend?

I use NaturalReader paid subscription with high quality TTS voices for web browsing and the free iOS version of Voice Dream reader for ebooks and mobile browsing.
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