We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
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Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#2Hey 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 :)
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#3stopped reading at 'and the results might surprise you'
if you want 'hackers' to read something, best not start with the same line as every ultra-low-quality invasive clickbait ad
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#4So 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 our innate and built-in "automatic speed reading" capability?
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#5So 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…
My best interpretation of the test results is that Bionic Reading is just an exotic text styling that has no impact -- positive or negative -- on reading speed or reading comprehension.
If it were a form of speed reading, we would have observed faster speeds when using Bionic Reading (and probably lower comprehension as a trade-off). This is NOT what we observed.
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#6So 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…
I thought so too, but I've noticed in some "pair-programming-like" experiences that some people waste so much time reading posts and SO comments/threads that are obvious dead ends, and take too long to jump to the relevant section in logs or docs... So I think most people don't do speed reading at all
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#7stopped reading at 'and the results might surprise you' if you want 'hackers' to read something, best not start with the same line as every ultra-low-quality invasive clickbait ad
should have continued reading. they follow with "not so surprising".
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#8> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica.
BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques.
We've wondered about Sans Forgetica in the past, which may increase reading comprehension (at the expense of speed). It might be interesting to try a BeeLine/Forgetica test, to try to get the best of both worlds!
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#9Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print.
Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all sources at once? - has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#10For me, it was a little surprising that there was no effect at all. For whatever reason it felt like it ought to have an impact.
However, if I think about it, reading has been done for thousands of years and by now something like that would have prevailed if it was effective.
Anyway, we need more experiments like this. I bet there are a ton of things out there that we think make out lives better, but in reality don't do a thing.