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jimrandomh comments on What are the best ways of absorbing, and maintaining, knowledge? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm currently working on a piece of speed-reading software. It works as a browser plugin, creating a floating window in which words flash a few at a time, so that you don't have to move your eyes, and to keep pace.
If people have ideas about features it should have, I'd be interested. For example, how valuable would it be to pause after each paragraph (or group of short paragraphs) and show some sort of summary? For example, it might extract all the proper nouns and low-frequency words and make a tag cloud.
Why do you think any of that will improve reading speed? What are your goals for this software? E.g., do you want to help slow readers (150wpm), or are you trying to help fast readers (350wpm) become considerably faster?
My reason for thinking the flashing-words-in-a-window thing will increase reading speed is that there's already software that does it, which has been confirmed to work. Most people don't use them more than briefly, though, because of the inconvenience.
My own experience was that brief usage of a speed-reading tool increased my reading speed while not using that tool, and that using a speed-reading tool increases my reading speed by enough to justify filtering most of the things I read through one.
Software that does it (google-friendly phrase: "rapid serial visual presentation") has been available on all the major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) for at least 15 years. I know from personal experience that on Windows and Linux, the software worked reliably and without any annoying glitches or performance problems. Yet hardly anyone uses it more than briefly. What exactly is this confirmation that you speak of that would move the expected value back to anywhere near where it was before taking into account that hardly anyone in the last 15 years has used it more than briefly?
"Hardly anyone": am I wrong about that? Can you name two people who do not have a large financial or academic-prestige stake in it who have ever used it more than briefly?
It is not enough to show that it has benefits. You also have to show that it does not have major drawbacks that cancel out the benefits. I have a specific drawback in mind that with probability .88 cancels out any benefits for the vast majority of potential users. It is not ignorance on the part of computer users or inconvenience. My experience with using it on Windows 95 and Linux was that although it would be more convenient if softwares like browsers and operating systems were better integrated with it, the inconvenience of using it is not particularly high especially after one takes into account that the user can reserve its use for longish passages while handling short passages the ordinary way. (Do not recall the name of the Windows RSVP software I tried. The Linux software was call sview.)
What drawback did you have in mind? I'm confused why you would allude to this without specifying what it was, and curious as to whether it's one I've already thought of and tried to mitigate, one that I've thought of but can't mitigate, or one that I haven't thought of.
I will explain the drawback I have in mind if you answer my two questions in grandparent to my satisfaction.
My reason for holding back on the explanation of the drawback is that it will require an appeal to one or two highly technical concepts (from the field of neuropsychology roughly speaking), and I know you well enough by now to know that you will probably latch onto the highly technical concepts and refuse to write or think about the only part of this thread of conversation that has any significant interest to me: namely, the fact that, unless I am extremely mistaken about your plan, you already have enough information to know that your plan of creating yet another RSVP software is a waste of time even if I had made no mention of any drawback. I predict that you will persist in not updating on this information you already have.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm implementing naive RSVP with a slightly improved UI. I've made improvements that I haven't told you about, and I'm experimenting with different variations on the concept. I believe that people don't persist with RSVP because the software is bad - in addition to the inconvenience of getting started, they periodically force task loads into timeslices where they don't fit, which derails the reader badly. I wrote my own software because I believe I've found ways to reduce how often that happens, and to reduce the disruption when it does.
If you think you know something about RSVP that I don't, just say it. Don't play games.
Are you going to follow up on this?
I would rather just drop it because grandparent's score is currently at minus 3, and by convention downvotes mean, "I don't want to see more like this".
The downvotes are for the "I will only explain if you answer my questions first" thing. If you have insights about RSVP, I do want to hear them.
(Upvoted back up to 0 because this is an entirely reasonable response! Why on earth would someone be expected to want to continue a conversation in which they were getting downvoted?)
You may not have read the context of that comment. Here's how the conversation went, from my perspective:
rhollerith: Hey, I know something very important about the project you're working on right now.
Me: And what's that?
rhollerith: Not telling. You'd just ignore me anyways. (-2)
Me: Don't play games.
...
Me: Are you going to follow up on this?
rhollerith: I'd like to drop this conversation now because I was downvoted.
Needless to say, I am quite unhappy with how this conversation went. But ending it there would make it much worse, since I don't know whether rhollerith actually noticed something important, or is defecting by accident, or if I offended him somehow and forgot about it.
RSVP (Rapid serial visual presentation) software has been around for a long time. What makes yours better? Color bars changing as you get closer to the end of a sentence/paragraph, and an extra delay at the end of a sentence/paragraph seem to be the most useful extensions.
I can vouch for being able to read much faster, at the cost of comprehension using RSVP tech.
The main problem I've had with speed reading software has been structure, and with regularly using them. I would like for there to be a pause or something at the end of each paragraph, and beyond that ease-of-use is the most important thing.