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by scbrg 1084 days ago
> As for "almost the whole article" -- it is short! It took about 90sec to read the whole page, top to bottom.

Cool. The article has 2348 words, so that's around 26 words per second, or ~1560 words per minute.

According to some speed reading pages I randomly found via Google the consensus seems to be that 1000+ words per minute is quite exceptional. https://irisreading.com/what-is-the-average-reading-speed/ puts average adult reading speed at around 300 WPM, which you casually exceed by 400%.

Far be it from me to suggest that your estimate is inaccurate, but at least know that not everybody reads at that speed :-)
1 comments
lproven 1084 days ago
Yeah, I am a speedreader, and I did used to be able to do circa 3000wpm at a push. Good to know that even as a myopic 55YO I can still do half that without trying.

Points of comparison: I originally read Hal Clement's classic Mission of Gravity in about 25min, and Joseph Conrad's Victory in about 3 hours.

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karlshea 1084 days ago
Did you forget you’re a speed reader when asserting how long it should take to read the whole article?
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lproven 1083 days ago
No. I expect people to be able to skim.

If the can't skim, for example if they are a foreign language speaker of low-intermediate ability (as I am in 5 or 6 languages, and I am also a professional language teacher among other things), then I expect them to know that they can't skim, and make appropriate allowances.

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scbrg 1084 days ago
Right, so your 90 seconds is actually closer to 10 minutes for most people. That's a lot of time to communicate "AI tends to render one banana as two bananas", which was OP's point.

Yes, there were pictures that communicated the same thing, but people naively thought that those 2348 words may actually hold some additional information, as otherwise ca 2300 of them would be completely superfluous. But they were wrong; again, OP's point. Not sure what's so mystifying by this.

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lproven 1084 days ago
I don't think that the time difference is that big. I'm fast, but I don't think I'm that much faster than an average skim reader.

As I said, the title of the article and a couple of image captions are enough to get the gist, and as such, I find it baffling that so many people seem to have totally failed to understand it.

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