

Typing Errors: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A... Dvorak not so great either - nickb
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html

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Hexstream
What bullshit. There's a common pattern in Dvorak VS Qwerty: Dvorak advocates
sometimes rely on history and sometimes on purely technical grounds to prove
their claims, while Qwerty advocates always only rely on history because
there's simply absolutely no way to prove Qwerty approaches Dvorak when it
comes to logic.

Here are some facts about Dvorak that are easy to verify and the utility of
which is obvious:

\- Dvorak has the most used keys on the home row. Compare: AOEUIDHTNS VS
ASDFGHJKL;

\- Dvorak optimizes for alternating hands, which obviously helps speed. Ever
tried typing "street" or "states" in Qwerty, two common words with common
letters that you have to type all with the left hand? On the Dvorak side the
worst word is "joke" I think.

\- Dvorak optimizes for typing a bit more with the right hand instead of the
left hand, which makes sense because the right hand is usually the strongest.

\- Dvorak optimizes for typing from the outside to the inside (try tapping
your fingers in rapid succession on the desk from outside to inside, then
inside to outside, and you'll see immediately which one is easier and faster).

\- Dvorak optimizes for typing more with stronger fingers (index and friends)
than weaker ones (pinkies and friends).

\- Dvorak has all the vowels on the left hand on the home row (except Y which
is conveniently on top of I), one beside another, which is great for learning.
It also makes sense because you use consonants more than vowels, (see right
hand argument) and since the most used consonants are on the right home row,
it optimizes alternating hands.

No need to mention Qwerty makes no such optimisations and the result is
correspondly atrocious.

See? No need to bullshit with biased reports about history.

~~~
lliiffee
You weaken an otherwise useful post by using words like "bullshit". The
problem with "bullshit" isn't that you are cursing. It is a way to dismiss an
article with out actually engaging in any of the arguments made by the
article. At the end you do hint that you believe the article gives a biased
report of history, but you give no specifics, and it comes many paragraphs
after "what bullshit".

~~~
cchooper
I see nothing wrong with beginning the post "What bullshit". It's a concise
statement of what he believes. And what's wrong with stating your belief up-
front and then providing the argument afterwards?

~~~
lliiffee
My objection is that he does not provide the evidence! He gives a bunch of
sensible reasons that Dvorak might be better, but never once addresses
anything the article says. You don't get the right to call something
"bullshit" with out giving your reasons. If you _do_ give your reasons, saying
"bullshit" is unnecessary.

~~~
cchooper
So if you give an argument for a conclusion then you shouldn't state what the
conclusion is? Judge that point with reference to your own comments.

~~~
lliiffee
You are mischaracterizing what I said. Of course, stating the conclusion is
fine. My point is that he _never gave an argument_ for the conclusion that the
article is bullshit. There is not a single statement in the article whose
truth has been called into question.

------
ellyagg
Based on the distance your fingers have to move to type average words on
qwerty and dvorak, it's really impossible that Dvorak wouldn't be loads
better.It's sort of like claiming that someone wouldn't be faster at running
50 meters than 100 meters. Of course, where this analogy falls down is that
you have to learn a new skill, which means there's an upfront cost and thus
makes the whole issue interesting economically.

The article claims that the cost of learning the new skill could never be
amortized and uses this evidence:

> In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained
> on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day
> training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare
> this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to
> their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly
> trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists
> (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve
> their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less
> quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on
> QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be
> able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government
> provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.

I really can't express how stupid this is. The logical implication the article
would have you draw from this study is that qwerty actually may be MORE
efficient. To believe this, you'd have to believe that the top end
hypothetical speed of qwerty is higher than dvorak. This is literally
physically impossible, as I've already pointed out. Moreover, the fastest
typist ever used Dvorak. While that's not conclusive, it's suggestive. Folks
trying to optimize a skill to the highest level are very good at cutting out
all inefficiencies.

To understand the results of the study cited there, we need only look to
exercise science. First of all, what most lay people don't realize is that a
great deal of exercise results for activities like weight training is
explained by the exercise's affect on your nervous system, not your muscles.
Properly managing your nervous system response is at the heart of continued
gains, and not managing it properly leads to overtraining and plateaus. All
top flight Olympic athletic coaches spend much of their time thinking about
this.

As a matter of fact, it is a well known and well documented phenomenon in the
literature that if you train at close to maximal capacity on the same training
regimen for longer than 3 to 4 weeks, you will stop making gains. You'll see
big increases the first 3 weeks, and after that, nothing. This is a nervous
system effect.

Armed with that knowledge, it becomes clear why the study's results look the
way they do: The dvorak trainee were already in a state of CNS fatigue,
whereas the qwerty trainees were starting out fresh.

Dvorak is clearly better than qwerty. Colemak is even more better. However, I
don't think this situation is much of an indictment of the free market. I
don't think the bottleneck in most people's productivity now (or ever) was top
end typing speed and it would take quite a long time to recover the cost of
the switch. Considering that this is THE MOST concrete example ever cited
where you might be able to say that government meddling could induce a
positive effect, I'm not inclined to agree that it's in general a good idea to
have our economic lives centrally manipulated. There are far more examples of
net economic losses from government interference.

~~~
Rabidmonkey1
Hmm... Colemak looks interesting. I've always had a hard time learning to use
Dvorak, especially since everywhere else you work it's going to be Qwerty by
default. Colemak is also public domain, according to Wikipedia. I might have
to give it a try.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colemak#Colemak>

~~~
cninja
I actually installed Colemak on my computer yesterday. I played with it for a
couple hours before uninstalling it. Most of what I type is programing code,
not prose. It dawned on my that most my typing delays come from all of the
parens and brackets and other programming symbols. Since all these fancy
keyboard layouts have been computationally optimized for prose language, they
don't address the primary cause issue. I decided that if I'm going to take the
time to learn a new keyboard layout, then it will need to be one that has been
optimized for programming.

~~~
Shamiq
Fix this, please. It's making this thread just about unreadable.

~~~
cninja
My apologies. I didn't notice until the edit link disappeared. And I have no
clue why the site decided to add <code> brackets to my comment.

~~~
pg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

I fixed it.

------
elviejo
For "real science" on keyboards go to:

<http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/>

From the site: "The carpalx project attempts to find the best keyboard layout
to minimize typing effort for a given set of input documents. These documents
may be English text, programming code, or whatever you find yourself typing
for hours"

Take a look at the studies from those results.

~~~
silentbicycle
Thanks for posting this! I was in the midst of writing something very similar.

------
elviejo
If we were designing a keyboard from scratch: What shall we do? How about we
find the most popular letters and put those under the strongest fingers. then
we favor hand to hand switch, since that is faster. etc. etc.

Seems to me that the logical conclusion of such a study, would be a Designed
Keyboard (DK). Said GK has to be better than any alternative that came from a)
Random arrangement b) being able to type 'typewriter' at sales demonstrations
or c) designed to to avoid jams of moving parts. We would call this Not
Designed Keyboard (NDK)

So we have DK and NDK. Almost by definition DK has to be better than NDK.

Now we all know that in order to do a good job we need to use the right tool
for the job. If the job is typing which it is for 100,000 of people then the
only logical conclusion is that we need to use the better keyboard in this
case Designed Keyboard. (DK)

Next what if you had an organization with 1,000 secretaries that their whole
work was to type documents day in and day out for the next 20 years and you
could improve their typing in just 1% using a better keyboard. Would it be
economically worth doing? Of course.

In conclusion switching to a DK is the smart choice, is the cheaper choice.

And the only thing absent from this article in "reason" magazine is precisely
that; reasoning.

~~~
s_tec
Our wonderful universe acts in surprising ways. Human intuition is often
wrong, and the only way to know something for sure is to test it. The Dvorak
keyboard's logical organization seems intuitively faster, but we don't know
how the human brain is wired, so we don't really know the limiting factors on
typing speed. Anything is possible, and the only way to know the truth is by
experiment. That's the scientific method. According to this article, the valid
experiments support QWERTY over Dvorak, or at least show little difference. I
don't know if the article true without examining the experiments myself, but I
wouldn't call the article "unreasonable" for valuing science over fallible
human reason.

~~~
elviejo
Agree on all accounts except on:

"I wouldn't call the article 'unreasonable' for valuing science over fallible
human reason. "

Because I don't think this article values science. If it did, then it would
simply state: "Here we have 2 keyboards which one is better?"

Defining better as either: a) Fastest to type in for a user with IDK a 2 year
experience in it. b) Easiest to learn, from scratch. c) Easiest to retrain for
a person that already dominates the other keyboard. d) Healthiest over a
period of 10 years (RSI anyone).

Instead of doing an experiment or honestly revising the studies mentioned.
This article spends most of its time, attacking the Dvorak history or "hoax"
as the author calls it in the end.

So this study is neither truly scientific nor truly logical. Is simply the
author trying to support his preconceived notions: "Dvorak is a hoax". And
using "ad hominem" attacks or self selecting studies to support his
conclusions.

as I mentioned before for real science on keyboards check:
<http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/>

And thank very much for your comment, it is nice to see succinct well thought
argument on the internet.

------
tlb
The Dvorak keyboard might have some slight advantage for English text, but
it's noticeably worse for programming where you need ;=+-,./{}[]() and the
numbers quite often.

There might be a advantage for a programmer's keyboard, basically QWERTY with
common punctuation on a fifth row above the numbers. But my few brief
experiments with unorthodox layouts caused no end of hassle when trying to use
other people's machines, so I gave up.

------
pragmatic
This is not just about keyboard layouts. It's about the concept the poor
products (VHS, Windows) win over superior products (Beta, Mac) because of a
winner take all economy.

As you can guess the author shows this to be bunk science.

~~~
davidw
What they are afraid of is the idea of the free market not always and in every
case producing the best possible result, so they need to aggressively attempt
to demonstrate that 1) either market failure just doesn't exist, as they
attempt to show here, or 2) that in no case, ever, will government
intervention improve the situation, which is the topic of other libertarian
writing.

In other words, this is just another episode of "Libertarians vs Socialists":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503>

For a serious treatment of the economics of digital goods and networked
economies, I think Varian and Shapiro are a better read:

[http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-
rules-a...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a-
strategic-guide-to-the-network-economy)

(Edit: to be fair, it turns out the authors have a more scholarly treatment of
the subject matter, which is a better read:

<http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html>

Still though, I think it's pretty clear that they're coming from a point of
view, and "backfilling" to try and get there)

