4 ms·

It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your own standard of literacy is something many

It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your own standard of literacy is something many people truly struggle to obtain, it helps make a lot of things make sense. For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it. What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them... is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a paragraph and come away with an understanding within seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case? There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization that it is likely that a large part of the population simply does not experience the ability to talk to themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if they can read silently without having to mouth the words; perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since psychometrics are not in vogue right now).

Nasrudith 6y ago
Speaking of lack of internal dialog I noticed a quieting of it as a side effect of a medication I was on - normally volume didn't exactly apply but it was difficult to head myself think - not like it getting drowned out but that the thoughts themselves were harder to hear. Speaking of mouthing the words when reading - subvocalization occurs when reading with most people in their larynx. Most people who don't mouth the words silently say them instead as a "good enough" measure. Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > harder to hear. Interesting. Would you really qualify that as being like "quieter volume", or was it more like it was harder to "recognize" words out of the dialogue? > Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course. I wonder what reading is actually like for these folks, since letters symbolize sounds; they _must_ recognize word-at-a-time with no sub-vocalizing, right? I hope we get lucky and a random person with experience in the field stops by ;)
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Like a quieter volume - even though normally the concept of a volume to thought words didn't even apply.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it. Not that I don't agree with your overall message but petty one-upsmanship at things one should never strive to one-up someone else on is kind of a staple of Reddit and that's probably what you were reading.
- core-questions 6y ago
  I guess so. I'm not making up my 14-second number, nor would I pretend that I read at an extremely high speed compared to the average HN poster. It's not a boast. I wasn't speed-reading, I've seen speed readers and they can get up to 1000 WPM apparently - I think I'm in the ~400-500 range based on a few online tests I did.
  - timknauf 6y ago
    I think the “Reddit one-upsmanship” that the parent was referring to was actually in the other direction; i.e., people “one-upping” how long it took them to read it.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Exactly. You post about how you broke your something playing sports in hihh school and it's never been quite the same. Someone else posts about how they hurt themselves worse. Seven nested comments later you've got someone trying to score virtue points by claiming they had a wood chipper accident now they're a head floating in a jar like in Futurama. It's bizarre.

Nasrudith 6y ago

Speaking of lack of internal dialog I noticed a quieting of it as a side effect of a medication I was on - normally volume didn't exactly apply but it was difficult to head myself think - not like it getting drowned out but that the thoughts themselves were harder to hear. Speaking of mouthing the words when reading - subvocalization occurs when reading with most people in their larynx. Most people who don't mouth the words silently say them instead as a "good enough" measure. Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course.

core-questions 6y ago
> harder to hear. Interesting. Would you really qualify that as being like "quieter volume", or was it more like it was harder to "recognize" words out of the dialogue? > Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course. I wonder what reading is actually like for these folks, since letters symbolize sounds; they _must_ recognize word-at-a-time with no sub-vocalizing, right? I hope we get lucky and a random person with experience in the field stops by ;)
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Like a quieter volume - even though normally the concept of a volume to thought words didn't even apply.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it. Not that I don't agree with your overall message but petty one-upsmanship at things one should never strive to one-up someone else on is kind of a staple of Reddit and that's probably what you were reading.

core-questions 6y ago
I guess so. I'm not making up my 14-second number, nor would I pretend that I read at an extremely high speed compared to the average HN poster. It's not a boast. I wasn't speed-reading, I've seen speed readers and they can get up to 1000 WPM apparently - I think I'm in the ~400-500 range based on a few online tests I did.
- timknauf 6y ago
  I think the “Reddit one-upsmanship” that the parent was referring to was actually in the other direction; i.e., people “one-upping” how long it took them to read it.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Exactly. You post about how you broke your something playing sports in hihh school and it's never been quite the same. Someone else posts about how they hurt themselves worse. Seven nested comments later you've got someone trying to score virtue points by claiming they had a wood chipper accident now they're a head floating in a jar like in Futurama. It's bizarre.