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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

#91

Post by tristanho »

thorum wrote: post #89
tristanho wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results are what you would expect if you measured two identical fonts, ie random. You can make the _claim_ in your comment, but there isn't statistical evidence that this effect is more than random, or if the same people were tested again their results wouldn't be opposite. Put another way, it doesn't pass the null hypothesis.

I think the best approach would be a graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences, and if possible a second experiment with two non-BR fonts (to see how much random variation is expected). The positive results might all be noise, but I don’t think that should be the default assumption.

FWIW, the article does include some data on the distribution, as well as address your exact objection:

> Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faster with Bionic Reading than for those who read faster without Bionic Reading. Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains.

Table 3: Summary speed differences per faster font Count Percent Delta (WPM) Bionic 998 52% 35 Non-Bionic 918 48% 43

> The number of people who read faster with Bionic Reading was slightly greater (52%) than the number of people who read faster without Bionic Reading (48%). That said, those who read faster with Bionic Reading only picked up 35 words per minute on average. In contrast, those who read faster without Bionic Reading picked up 43 words per minute. It does not appear that when Bionic Reading works, it really works.

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

#92

Post by Barrin92 »

croes wrote: post #42
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…

Pretty much all human inventions are short cuts. Wheels, cars, computer etc.

the point of reading is to expand your mind, have new experiences, and have new thoughts. Shortcutting that is probably not what you want to do. In fact that applies also to computers and cars. James P. Carse:

"Morever, machinery is veiling. It is a way of hiding our inaction from ourselves under what appear to be actions of great effectiveness. We persuade ourselves that, comfortably seated behind the wheels of our autos, shielded from every unpleasant change of weather, and raising or lowering our foot an inch or two, we have actually traveled somewhere.[...] Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect us—as though they belong to us, and not we to them. We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling. Such movement is but a change of scenes. If effective, the machinery will see to it that we remain untouched by the elements, by other travelers, by those whose towns or lives we are traveling through. We can see without being seen, move without being touched."

the platonic ideal of speedreading: spend 1 minute on each book, read 10k books per year. The shallower the better, complications might negatively impact reading speed.

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

#93

Post by Terr_ »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #43
O__________O wrote: post #23

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…

> human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!

I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow.

Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to be governed by the sending-side. People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.

So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step, which isn't actually necessary when your mouth already supports talking faster.

Technology analogy: Two computers are collaboratively solving a problem with back-and-forth messages. The network connection is actually very good, however the bottleneck is the CPU in each computer. Will the problem be solved faster if you change the transmission style from plaintext to gzipped?

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

#94

Post by therealdrag0 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #90

can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years , and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.

Agree. Even beyond enjoyment I’ve heard multiple very accomplished people in a variety of fields (from theology to math) say in interviews “I’m actually a very slow reader.”

So sure reading fast would be nice, but I think that’s mostly biological whereas slow quality reading you have full control of and we need to focus on that instead.

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

#95

Post by thorum »

tristanho wrote: post #91
thorum wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best approach would be a graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences, and if possible a second experiment with two non-BR fonts (to see how much random variation is expected). The positive results might all be noise, but I don’t think that should be the default assumption.

FWIW, the article does include some data on the distribution, as well as address your exact objection: > Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faste…

Yes, but they’re still averaging the results in the “it worked” category. Hypothetically, if it worked very well for 5 users and only a little for 95 users, an average score over all 100 will make it appear to not work for anyone. I’m not going to argue this is definitely the case - just that this analysis doesn’t account for the possibility, and it wouldn’t be unexpected in the area of reading ability, where one would expect individual differences to be important.

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

#96

Post by spoonjim »

Barrin92 wrote: post #90

can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years , and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.

Well there is some stuff you want to enjoy and there's other stuff you want to process as fast as possible so you get more time to read the stuff you enjoy :)

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

#97

Post by Mo3 »

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…

More or less, but the creator is much more interested in patents and trademarks and selling API access for mind-boggling cost. It's obvious it's just snake oil.

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

#98

Post by Oblitzitate »

drooby wrote: post #78
300bps wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What apps are you using?

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

#99

Post by O__________O »

Terr_ wrote: post #93
ASalazarMX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!

I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow. Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to…

>> “People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.”

If you have any links to research supporting this, I would be interested.

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

#100

Post by jms »

O__________O wrote: post #23

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…

Blind people who use screen readers usually turn up the speed to something unintelligible to the rest of us.

Maybe reading a computer screen is a simpler task than talking person to person, but it's an interesting datapoint!

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