Kingreaper comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 05 December 2011 08:38AM

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Comment author: thejash 06 December 2011 02:39:43PM 0 points [-]

It's not that meaningful to assign a single number, true. I gave my speed for "normal" text--comments, blogs, newspaper articles, "light" books (business/best-sellers), fiction (if I have to/feel like reading it quickly). When I read scientific papers, the speed drops considerably until I am used to the terms used in the field.

Thanks a lot for that comment though, I have less incentive to try training it further now... I am pretty surprised that anything could decrease significantly from trying to train it though. I would suspect other effects at work (like now she is reading a different kind of text, or had previously never measured herself, or the training was nonsense, etc). Any idea what caused the decrease?

Comment author: Kingreaper 13 December 2011 04:00:53PM -1 points [-]

One possible explanation is simply awareness.

If you naturally develop a technique, you may not be consciously aware of it at all. But take some training, and all of a sudden your conscious brain is butting in going "this is the way to do it".

And, well, your CPU is going to be less efficient than a well-optimised RPU (Reading Processing Unit)