'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
Other <video> elements can be sped up entering this into the javascript console:
document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2
(There are also browser extensions that can do the same thing.)
(The above comment is 49 words)
For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li... claims that 250wpm is the speed auctioneers speak at and that normal speech is 150-160wpm.
Getting words spoken at you is terribly inefficient compared to reading them.
It's almost like they're pretending it spontaneously came from nature (or always existed absent of humans and we discovered it) and we weren't evolved for it but somehow adapted to it. You could insert eg a bicycle into the same premise: we ride them absurdly well given there's nothing built into the brain for specifically riding a bicycle (except there is: balance, grasping acceleration, etc. - we designed them for our use just as we did text).
I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that even the best of us can only swim about as well as the average dog. So pity us on the day we find a creature actually designed for reading.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for another task. It's called neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...
I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the brain, it's "versatile".
Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
(2) There is a goal: species survival.
(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.
In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field.
For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English:
aC -- TRAP vowel
aCe -- FACE vowel
eC -- DRESS vowel
eCe -- FLEECE vowel
iC -- KIT vowel
iCe -- PRICE vowel
oC -- LOT vowel
oCe -- GOAT vowel
uC -- STRUT vowel
uCe -- GOOSE vowel
The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.
Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.
This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...
English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.
Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!
It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
What do you mean by "learnable"?
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
Snapchat has the best UX for this type of content.
The simple idea of "tapping" to skip is the equivalent to the tab key when you're using excel. Life is better with it, and you miss it when you can't use it in other apps.
That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer.
I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bits re-read hard bits, luxuriate in the really wonderful bits...all of which is hard in video. And in fact because the visual channel is so complex, I find reading more multimedia than video -- it's hard to feel cold when watching someone march through the snow, though a well written book can make me shiver with cold, even on a summer day.