[HN Gopher] We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a posit...
___________________________________________________________________
We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on
reading speed
Author : hoodwink
Score : 142 points
Date : 2022-07-19 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.readwise.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.readwise.io)
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Why they didn't test for comprehension of the text?
|
| This is a huge flaw of this study
| hoodwink wrote:
| https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/#comprehensi...
| gnicholas wrote:
| Perhaps you did not comprehend the writeup, which describes
| this aspect of their analysis in some detail.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as
| well as complete transparency around methods and data.
| hoodwink wrote:
| thanks marc! appreciate the kindness.
|
| ps- philly native here :)
| carapace wrote:
| If you want to read fast write a little tool to do "Rapid Serial
| Visual Presentation".
|
| The basic idea is that you flash words on a screen in the same
| location so that your eyes don't have to pan back and forth, you
| just look straight ahead.
|
| Your eyes and brain can recognize whole words as a _gestalt_
| (without reading each letter.)
|
| That's it.
|
| This method cuts out most of the physical overhead of reading.
|
| When I played with it I got to the point where I could read over
| 500 words/minute. I could read faster than my internal voice
| could speak.
| janandonly wrote:
| 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 our
| innate and built-in "automatic speed reading" capability?
| hoodwink wrote:
| 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.
| darkerside wrote:
| 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.
| doliveira wrote:
| 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
| Mo3 wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Note there is rapid eye movement you're not conscious of
| lucideer wrote:
| > _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 comprehension and focus. Never
| mentions speed.
|
| Granted the article measures reading comprehension too (though
| I'd have some doubts about the methodology of 3 MCQs on a PG
| article - this part of the test didn't seem high on the author's
| priority list).
|
| Did the authors just waste a lot of their time because they
| didn't pay attention to the claims or are we just in very
| different bubbles?
| hoodwink wrote:
| 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?
| lucideer wrote:
| 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
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| ffhhj wrote:
| "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some
| few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be
| read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and
| some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and
| attention."
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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 :)
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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? ...".
| dang wrote:
| Yes. We've changed the title to a representative sentence from
| the first paragraph.
| sbeckeriv wrote:
| 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?
| madrox wrote:
| You ended with a question mark, so I must assume it doesn't
| save you a few clicks.
|
| I'll take my downvotes now.
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| 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)
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| kleer001 wrote:
| I'm not surprised at all.
|
| Maybe I'm just older, have seen more, and have a better tuned BS
| meter.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| This is just the 2022 version of Spritz(2014). Before that...
|
| SQ4R - Survey/question/read/recite/reflect/review
|
| Gummy bear trick - Place candy/gummy bears on the pages and eat
| them as you read them.
|
| SparkNotes - Read someone else's summary of what you need to
| absorb.
| [deleted]
| affgrff2 wrote:
| What I would really like to instead of methods that help me speed
| up my reading is something that has a model of my knowledge and
| can summarize information to the points I don't know yet and are
| relevant to me.
|
| Does someone know if that exists or if there is research on it?
| anjc wrote:
| Can you show the distribution of reading speeds. If this font has
| a multimodal effect then the t-test mightn't be appropriate.
| avivo wrote:
| I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an
| augmented form of reading that is _semantic_. I would love to
| have bold and italics and even section headings and table of
| contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to
| quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content.
|
| I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based
| off a query, or a personalized recommendation system.
|
| I spend much more time skimming than reading, and skimming to
| determine if something is worth reading. Anything that can
| support that is incredibly valuable and would increase my
| functional reading speed for accomplishing tasks.
| [deleted]
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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!
| hoodwink wrote:
| nice to meet you, Nick! shooting you an email now :)
| fsiefken wrote:
| Coincidentally I was wondering a similar thing this morning. To
| get as much text as possible on paper for holiday reading I
| managed to get the text down 30% while by stripping out any
| vowel but the first in a word, replacing 'the' with '#', 'and'
| with '&' and of' with '%'. I also used the smallest Tahoma font
| and multiple columns. This increases reading complexity just as
| Sans Forgetica, but perhaps also increases reading speed
| somewhat- because words get stripped down to their 'essence'
| (perhaps similar to chinese or japanese script) and your eyes
| move less with multiple columns. In that 'word essence'sence
| this technique has similarities to Bionic Reading. Combining
| the two would be tricky, as what letters would be bolded with
| the devowel method and can you get closer to a word essense?
| The combination with Beeline and Bionic Reading or devoweling
| could have more potential. It's nice that Beeline has gray
| scale support.
|
| sed 's/ and / \& /g' -e 's/ of /\ % /g' -e 's/ is / \= /g' -e
| 's/ th / \\# /g' -e 's/\B[aeiouAEIOU]//g' -e 's/\\(.\\)\1/\1/g'
| -e "s/'//g" sacred-world.txt > sw.txt
| Poppys wrote:
| This suggests that it is not that useful
| https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...
| gnicholas wrote:
| Thanks for the info -- I'd been hopeful about Forgetica based
| on some general research about disfluent fonts and memory.
| But I guess things don't look so rosy for this particular
| one, at least based on this one study. Thanks for sharing!
| _bramses wrote:
| Hopefully 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?
| geysersam wrote:
| Sounds like a book review.
| layer8 wrote:
| Different people will have different opinions on which parts
| and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were
| worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me
| today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don't expect AI to be
| able to adequately address that anytime soon.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-
| generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is
| "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that?
| In other words, why would you trust AI more than human
| curators/reviewers?
| kadoban wrote:
| An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of
| other things already read, and essentially create a course of
| study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty
| expensive.
|
| An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more
| consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be
| less biased than in human in several ways.
| hoodwink wrote:
| hey there! thanks for the kind words :)
|
| on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting
| article by OpenAI on the topic:
| https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/
|
| *any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights
| in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased)
| that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's
| what you're asking)
|
| *is there a random quote API that references all sources at
| once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets
|
| *has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?*
| not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text
| search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x
| better than they were before
| rasulkireev wrote:
| For 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.
| hoodwink wrote:
| thanks rasul!
|
| on an individual basis, there is some evidence that reading
| with your "best" font may have a meaningful impact on reading
| speed with no loss of comprehension. but you could probably
| unlock these gains by simply switching from, say, arial to
| garamond (i made that up for illustrative purposes), rather
| than implementing this complex font style.
| selfhifive wrote:
| What if the fixation points are not on every word but create a
| narrower space by being a couple inches in from either side of
| each line to use the classic speedreading trick of using
| peripheral vision? Has it been tried?
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Completely unsurprising. The bottleneck in reading is not visual
| recognition of words or eye movements. Source: decades of actual
| research on this topic.
| hinkley wrote:
| We'll figure something out though. It was big news about ten
| years back in sports medicine that cooling off the lower arms
| was unreasonably effective for recovery, even, IIRC, better
| than a full body ice bath.
|
| I don't know if they still do it, but at the time they were
| showing off these weird baggies you put over your arms like
| oversized mittens and ran coolant through.
|
| We know sleeping helps with memory retention. We know that
| NSAIDs influence experiences of emotional pain. What other folk
| remedies and completely random things also work on memory? I
| forget, is caffeine now established wisdom or do they keep
| going back and forth on that?
| pluc wrote:
| Headline: Does Bionic Reading actually work? We timed over
| 2,000 readers and the results might surprise you
|
| First line: tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not
| surprise you
|
| fuck this
| aeturnum wrote:
| This fits with my experience so I believe it!
|
| That said, I did feel like the bionic rendering made me more
| likely to read every word as opposed to skimming sentences. It
| also made reading feel more "percussive" which can be fun.
| Definitely an interesting line of inquiry even if it's over-
| hyped.
| O__________O wrote:
| 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 of around 39-bits per second, that on average
| that's going to be the actual performance target:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > 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!
| carlob wrote:
| I know you're probably joking, but for those out of the loop,
| the result your parent was referring to is that more verbose
| languages have faster speakers and the two effects compensate
| one another pretty well.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
| danudey wrote:
| We need to start in schools, teaching our children to speak
| in zstd. It could more than triple their throughput!
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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?
| O__________O wrote:
| >> "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.
| bradrn wrote:
| The other problem with this idea is that natural languages
| contain quite a bit of redundancy, which is why speech and
| writing can be decoded even over very noisy channels. It's
| hard to make language more compact without removing some
| redundancy.
|
| That being said, this has been attempted before: see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedtalk and
| https://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#howmany, and
| especially https://web.archive.org/web/20000503004430/http:
| //fatmac.ee.... for a detailed attempt.
| atulvi wrote:
| Not a language, but a font: https://dotsies.org/
|
| Discussed in HN multiple times
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805
| jms wrote:
| 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!
| thenerdhead wrote:
| 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 distractions.
| croes wrote:
| Pretty much all human inventions are short cuts.
|
| Wheels, cars, computer etc.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| drooby wrote:
| 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 both of these problems.
|
| I think there's something about adding a new dimension
| (auditory) that also helps with memorizing and comprehension.
| It adds more data points for my Bayesian brain to use and
| associate with.
| painted-now wrote:
| 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?
| drooby wrote:
| 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.
| 300bps wrote:
| My retention from listening to text is a tiny fraction of my
| retention from seeing written words and numbers.
| drooby wrote:
| 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.
| Oblitzitate wrote:
| What apps are you using?
| selfhifive wrote:
| Depends on your style of synthesis I think. I need to think
| and establish axioms in my head after every two paragraphs so
| I pause a lot. Going over something again on TTS puts me to
| sleep.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| 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.
| runevault wrote:
| The entire software industry is based on creating new
| efficiencies... On top of all the stuff you said I just...
| don't see how anyone could believe that.
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| cedilla wrote:
| 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.
| dinkblam wrote:
| stopped 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
| rasulkireev wrote:
| should have continued reading. they follow with "not so
| surprising".
| codingdave wrote:
| I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be
| curious about a more targeted audience of people with known
| reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even
| regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have
| comprehension problems with written communication?
| hoodwink wrote:
| i got that feedback a lot after initially posting the
| experiment:
|
| > 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.
|
| there _might_ be some specialized effect on folks with known
| reading problems, but bionic reading makes no claims to
| specifically work for those people but rather the whole
| population so that 's what we decided to test.
| gnicholas wrote:
| It would be interesting to ask people after the test:
|
| Have you been diagnosed with, or do you believe you have,
| dyslexia, ADHD, visual impairment, or other reading
| challenges?
|
| It would also be interesting to ask people if they felt it
| was easier to read with the new tech or the old way. Speed is
| one metric, but subjective impressions of reading ease are
| also relevant.
| thorum wrote:
| > Let's look at how many participants read faster with each
| font and their average speed gains.
|
| "Average speed gains" doesn't seem like the best metric here.
| A graph showing the distribution of users across different
| WPM differences would be much more informative. Sure, the
| average user doesn't see outsized results, but are you saying
| that _zero_ participants in your test read substantially
| faster with BR?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| 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.
| natrys wrote:
| Did you speed read this article? They weren't measuring whether
| speed reading itself works, rather whether bionic reading works
| _for speed reading_.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| thorum wrote:
| 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.
| tristanho wrote:
| 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.
| thorum wrote:
| 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.
| tristanho wrote:
| 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.
| thorum wrote:
| 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.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I think the idea here isn't that we're treating all brains the
| same, but that the deviations represent statistical
| noise/outliers rather than an actual effect fron the bionic
| intervention.
|
| I agree though, it would have been an interesting follow-up if
| they asked only people who felt they benefit from it, and then
| conducted their analysis again on that sample!
| gnicholas wrote:
| Reminds me of The End of Average, [1] a book about human
| variation. It talks about how the Air Force tried to design a
| cockpit by averaging various measurements, only to find that
| their pilots weren't actually average.
|
| Your point is especially apt here, where there is a possibility
| that the technology could be helpful for a subpopulation, and
| act somewhat like an assistive technology. It is very tricky to
| assess the utility of assistive technologies (I work in this
| field and have asked many experts how they do it) because the
| _average_ impact isn 't the most important thing. It doesn't
| matter if high-contrast mode is bad for 90% of people, if for
| the 10% who would actually use it, it's helpful.
|
| One way that the study could have been optimized is if
| participants had been asked (after taking the test, to avoid
| priming) if they have any specific reading challenges. That
| would have helped identify whether there appear to be any
| subgroups that disproportionately benefit from the approach.
|
| 1: https://www.amazon.com/End-Average-Succeed-Values-
| Sameness/d...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the effect is generally quite small, but large for some
| minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with
| Bionic Reading!
|
| Well, that's not really something you'd want to admit in your
| paper, much less advance as an argument. The obvious conclusion
| is that there's a mistake in your data, not that some users
| will see an increase in reading speed of 4.9 words per second.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| > there's no universal best font [...] different fonts increase
| reading speed for different individuals
|
| My takeaway is that system fonts, reader mode fonts, etc., should
| always be configurable.
| TT-392 wrote:
| I find it increadibly hard to read, so I really hope it doesn't
| become a common thing. So I am kinda happy about these results.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| 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.
| a3w wrote:
| 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.
| lkbm wrote:
| AutoTLDR, which uses smmry.com[0]
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_aut
| otl...
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| my reading bottleneck is understanding and contemplation, not eye
| motion. for that bionic reading seems useless
| hoodwink wrote:
| 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 :)
| noobhacker wrote:
| Excellent experimental design and analysis!
|
| Is there a way for me to buy you a coffee (or some cash
| equivalent)? I'd love to incentivize such rigor in online
| discourse.
|
| An obvious way is to try out readwise ;) but I mostly read
| online articles and (pirated) books, so I'm not sure I'm a good
| use case.
| hoodwink wrote:
| these might be the kindest words i've ever gotten in a hacker
| news thread so thank you! :D
|
| we've actually built an app for reading articles and ebooks
| (and RSS and PDFs and email newsletters and Twitter threads):
| https://readwise.io/read
|
| still in private beta but we'll be entering public beta
| before summer is over!
| noobhacker wrote:
| 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?
| freemint wrote:
| 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.
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