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> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it.

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.




I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script.

'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.


Television is always slow paced, because it has to be comprehensible to people with a wide variety of language skills. Youtube, and most other video player software, has a speed setting with pitch correction. I watch everything at 1.5x speed which brings standard TV slow pacing up to natural fast-paced conversation speed. The majority of people here should have no problems understanding 1.5x speed. I don't watch live TV because 1x speed is too annoyingly slow.


I use 2x speed for YouTube videos. It takes some practice, but you can generally pick up almost all of what was said.

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.)


Yeah I did a few "<subject> in 60 seconds" videos and the two lessons I learned from that? (1) They take hours and hours and hours of work to make. (2) Your script for the video must not contain more than 50 words, so you can say very little.

(The above comment is 49 words)


I read the above comment in less than ten seconds.


Not surprising: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Assessment reading for comprehension normally falls in the 200-400wpm range. 10 seconds to read 49 words is 294wpm, which is smack in the middle of that range.

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 a very strange statement indeed to claim that there's nothing built-in for it. We built it around / within our capabilities. It works so well precisely because we built it for ourselves, for what we are capable of.

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).


Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech.

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.


There's an excellent book [1] that explores the neurological aspects of language. TLDR: language evolved to be efficient for our existing brain structures—our brains did not evolve to be good at language.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...


> structures meant for

"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.


I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much the same function, just in a different place.

As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.


you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue

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".


There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.


>The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes.

Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.


You know exactly what he meant. You are using the word design in a different way than him.

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.


(1) Evolution is not random. Mutation may be random, but feature selection is based on a rule.

(2) There is a goal: species survival.

(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).


Species survival? Gene reproduction you mean. The organism is simply a way for the gene to propagate itself.

Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.


I disagree with Dawkins. If genes were the unit for evolution, we wouldn't exists. We would all just be bacteria spewing out copies of genes, with the planet buried in a pile of tiny protein chains. Genes are the servants of the species. They are a tool used by species to pass on traits, or even to acquire traits from other species. Genes are inert absent a species using them.


that suggests that once born, an individual could have all of their genes removed, and be perfectly fine, other than not being able to pass on traits to a new individual.


Yes. Genes and DNA are not the same thing. DNA is a means of recording and passing along genes. And alien organism that doesn't use our system of DNA/RNA could still possess genes. So it is theoretically possible to remove all manifestations of genes and have the organism continue to function.

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.


meaning is a nice convention to signify that something works well for some use case.

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.


> I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read.

Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?


Newborns can't swim in the sense that they stay afloat. A baby will drown if dropped in water.

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.


>> ... will hold their breath and work their feet.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scFiRRTU5jg


> Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing.

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.


>> 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.



Charitably, reading was not "widespread in the population" at that time. sandworm101's comment shows a pretty appalling understanding of evolution -- the selective pressure for reading ability exists as soon as anyone can benefit from learning to read, not when everyone is required to try -- but a somewhat better understanding of history.

Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.


In my case I think I avoid HN video links because I know in advance that they will ask me to commit an exact amount of time to it without knowing whether it will be worth it in the end. With text on the other hand, I can easily start to read an article and begin to skim it once I see that it isn't as interesting as I thought it'd be.


My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features.

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.


> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition

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


> 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.


> 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
Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").


So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language.

The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.


> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish.

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.


English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste.

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.


Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciation is a feature of spelling systems that either (1) are new, or (2) have just undergone reform.

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.


Good points, but I disagree. Decoding and encoding becomes a lot harder, if vowels change depending on consonants coming after them, or something else even further down the line. (I'm not a linguist.)

It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.


So there are no dialects in Finnish? I remember my Norwegian teacher telling me the same ludicrous thing 30 years ago when I moved to Norway.


There are, like in most other places. What's usually written is the so called "general language". You can also speak that in a formal setting.

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...


Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi. Or even German where spelling is changed to keep up with changes in pronunciation.

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!


> Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi.

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.


> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned

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.


"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.


Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.

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.


My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.


They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones.

What do you mean by "learnable"?


Agree with this second part, it's structured like a tree, where a video is linear unless the scrubber has more detail. With text you can gather the shape and skim the start of topic sentences very quickly.

As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.


This comment is a personal anecdote. People respond to text in different ways. But they respond to visual motion more predictably. That has been my observation over the course of a year while experimenting with writing an electronic book. The book began as an Android app; and when shown to an audience the general response was one of disinterest. They'd read a few lines and stop, then comment on the photos. Maybe this was because the book was bad, but to me it seemed people did not want to read a lot of text. Perhaps the content was boring? I don't know. In an attempt to promote the work, I generated an auto-scrolling screencast of the book --- which resulted in (slightly) more interest. Consequently I've shifted to converting the book from an Android app to an autoscrolling mp4. It's a work in progress, and I'm prone to unrealistic optimism, but maybe this is a step toward a format for future written works [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXzziwURRU


Surprisingly, one app that is changing this paradigm for video is snapchat. Publishing content in a short series of clips that are skip-able with one tap is an enjoyable user experience.


Please, god, no. What are we maximizing across, clickability or contribution to civil political discourse?


Neither. Optimizing for user experience. Like it or not there's a new category of video content, short, casual videos. From the cooking shorts that are taking over facebook feeds to the the jealousy inducing short clips from my friends BBQ last night, this content category is growing.

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.




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