can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years, and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.

Here’s what appears to be an independent review of Spritz:

https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-pr...

One of the issues with tests like these is that the companies sponsor the research and they are one-off vs long exposure studies; that is as with most interfaces with high-throughput, takes time for the mind to adjust.

My guess that given human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second, that on average that’s going to be the actual performance target:

https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

The article’s conclusion doesn’t seem to match the data they collected. They found that most people (52%) do read faster with bionic reading, the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading!

The authors then average results (good and bad) across all users, resulting in a number close to zero, and conclude Bionic Reading doesn’t work for anyone, even calling it a placebo effect at the end.

The problem is, all brains are not the same. It doesn’t have to work equally well for everyone to be valuable.

> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica.

BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques.

We've wondered about Sans Forgetica in the past, which may increase reading comprehension (at the expense of speed). It might be interesting to try a BeeLine/Forgetica test, to try to get the best of both worlds!

Hey everyone, this is the follow up post to the experiment posted here on Hacker News a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204.

I'll be hanging out in the replies today if there are any questions I can answer :)

So Bionic reading is just a form of speed reading?

And it turns out that comprehension is suffering from trying to read faster... I think that most people, when they read, do a sort of automatic "speed reading" in their mind already.

What I mean is: I notice that when I read, my eyes will skip parts of words where I don't need to see all the letters to know what word it is. What if all this trickery simply hinders our innate and built-in "automatic speed reading" capability?

What about instead an AI project that rewrites content for fastest consumption and easiest comprehension?

Not a summary, but kind of like a lossless re-encoding for maximum human efficiency.

You could even allow custom reader profiles that take into account things like vocabulary an subject expertise.

Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print.

Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all sources at once? - has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?

There's no shortcuts to anything in life. Thinking so is a fool's errand.

You get better at reading by reading and deliberately practicing it. Speed reading is a completely different skill than comprehension. Comprehension is a completely different skill than entertaining yourself. The fundamentals aren't going anywhere. They'll be here when you realize speedreading, bionic reading, and summaries are just distractions.

No surprise. It's been shown over and over that speed reading, no matter the gimmick, doesn't work. It is just another one of those self help fads that never goes away because it is super easy to re-package and sell. Just read without thinking about how fast you are reading and you'll do fine.

For me, it was a little surprising that there was no effect at all. For whatever reason it felt like it ought to have an impact.

However, if I think about it, reading has been done for thousands of years and by now something like that would have prevailed if it was effective.

Anyway, we need more experiments like this. I bet there are a ton of things out there that we think make out lives better, but in reality don't do a thing.

I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an augmented form of reading that is semantic. I would love to have bold and italics and even section headings and table of contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content.

I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based off a query, or a personalized recommendation system.

I spend much more time skimming than reading, and skimming to determine if something is worth reading. Anything that can support that is incredibly valuable and would increase my functional reading speed for accomplishing tasks.

> there's no universal best font […] different fonts increase reading speed for different individuals

My takeaway is that system fonts, reader mode fonts, etc., should always be configurable.

If you want to read fast write a little tool to do "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation".

The basic idea is that you flash words on a screen in the same location so that your eyes don't have to pan back and forth, you just look straight ahead.

Your eyes and brain can recognize whole words as a gestalt (without reading each letter.)

That's it.

This method cuts out most of the physical overhead of reading.

When I played with it I got to the point where I could read over 500 words/minute. I could read faster than my internal voice could speak.

The whole thing was a hilariously transparent marketing strategy to begin with for their stupidly expensive (and tracks-everything-you-read) API.

Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as well as complete transparency around methods and data.

I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be curious about a more targeted audience of people with known reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have comprehension problems with written communication?

This fits with my experience so I believe it!

That said, I did feel like the bionic rendering made me more likely to read every word as opposed to skimming sentences. It also made reading feel more "percussive" which can be fun. Definitely an interesting line of inquiry even if it's over-hyped.

What I would really like to instead of methods that help me speed up my reading is something that has a model of my knowledge and can summarize information to the points I don't know yet and are relevant to me.

Does someone know if that exists or if there is research on it?

If your reading speed is the limiting reagent for your understanding a piece of writing, you should read something else. It's like if the limiting factor in your programming speed is typing. The thing to fix is probably not your typing speed.

I'm not surprised at all.

Maybe I'm just older, have seen more, and have a better tuned BS meter.

What if the fixation points are not on every word but create a narrower space by being a couple inches in from either side of each line to use the classic speedreading trick of using peripheral vision? Has it been tried?

Completely unsurprising. The bottleneck in reading is not visual recognition of words or eye movements. Source: decades of actual research on this topic.

I find it increadibly hard to read, so I really hope it doesn't become a common thing. So I am kinda happy about these results.

Can you show the distribution of reading speeds. If this font has a multimodal effect then the t-test mightn't be appropriate.

my reading bottleneck is understanding and contemplation, not eye motion. for that bionic reading seems useless

> tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you. After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed.

I've seen a lot of viral social media posts about bionic reading recently and this is the very first time I've ever seen anyone mention reading speed. Everything I've seen is selling bionic reading for greater reading comprehension and focus. Never mentions speed.

Granted the article measures reading comprehension too (though I'd have some doubts about the methodology of 3 MCQs on a PG article - this part of the test didn't seem high on the author's priority list).

Did the authors just waste a lot of their time because they didn't pay attention to the claims or are we just in very different bubbles?

Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out).

So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".

Why they didn't test for comprehension of the text?

This is a huge flaw of this study

stopped reading at 'and the results might surprise you'

if you want 'hackers' to read something, best not start with the same line as every ultra-low-quality invasive clickbait ad