“But where shall wisdom be found? / And where is the place of understanding? / Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living…for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”
As before, here is material I’ve worked on in the 477 days since my last update which LWers may find interesting. In roughly chronological & topical order, here are the major additions to gwern.net:
I interviewed translator Michael House about his work in Japan as a translator
finished data collection for my hafu anime statistics page and begun analysis. (I’ve achieved good coverage of characters, found an astonishingly consistent absence of Korean characters, and confirmed the blond-haired/blue-eyed stereotype; but my original thesis doesn’t seem to work and the data is too unevenly distributed to identify time trends.)
judged the 2011 & 2012 results for the Haskell Summer of Codes and the accuracy of my predictions
did a meta-analysis on whether dual n-back increases IQ, and examining possible biases and various claims about what makes the training work or not work
There’s also been a lot of backend changes: switching to Amazon S3+Cloudflare, adding error pages, metadata like tags, A/B testing, but no need to go into detail.
Is it useful to increase reading speed, even if it takes a minimal amount of time (to go from basic level to some rudimentary form of training)? I've always been under the impression that speed increases in reading are paid for with a comprehension decrease - which is what we actually care about. Or is this only true for the upper speed levels?
In the form of speed-reading in which I was trained, you write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph as you're reading, and after you read a chapter or section, you review each of your one-sentence summaries. In theory this allows you to "process" things like textbooks into knowledge stored in your brain very quickly. In practice, speed reading only works for me if the material doesn't contain any concepts that I don't already understand.
I find it very useful when I need to get the gist of a paper to decide whether I want to actually read it in detail.
I think it is. As I mention in my footnote, it's been a long time since I was reading up on the topic and I don't have any notes, but I recall the gist being that it's at the upper levels that you forfeit comprehension and that for lower speeds like <400wpm on nontechnical material you may even get better comprehension.
“But where shall wisdom be found? / And where is the place of understanding? / Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living…for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”
As before, here is material I’ve worked on in the 477 days since my last update which LWers may find interesting. In roughly chronological & topical order, here are the major additions to
gwern.net:modafinil:
Comment anchoring experiment (LW discussion)
Transcribed or translated:
More technical:
gwern.netusing GitStatsPersonal: