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army1987 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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This is a feature, not a bug. Natural language has lots of redundancy, and if we read one letter at a time rather than in word-sized chunks we would read much more slowly.
I think you have causality reversed here. It's the redundancy of our languages that's the "feature" -- or, more precisely, the workaround for the previously existing hardware limitation. If our perceptual systems did less "filling in of blanks," it seems likely that our languages would be less redundant -- at least in certain ways.
I think redundancy was originally there to counteract noise, of which there was likely a lot more in the ancestral environment, and as a result there's more-than-enough of it in such environments as reading text written in a decent typeface one foot away from your face, and the brain can then afford to use it to read much faster. (It's not that hard to read at 600 words per minute with nearly complete understanding in good conditions, but if someone was able to speak that fast in a not-particularly-quiet environment, I doubt I'd be able to understand much.)
Yeah, I agree with that.