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Ask HN: How many developers think they detect 11 mln bits of info per second?
As Steven Kotler mentioned in a "Flow Research Collective" newsletter, from which I've unsubscribed after reading that "Our senses gather 11 million bits of information every second", becasue such conclusion seems fundamentally flawed. Elswhere he mentioned that this information was mentioned in the book "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders, which I haven't read.
So I am curious how many actual developers really think that they gather 11 million bits of information every second, or at least if they really could calculate how many bits of information they handle every second during a programming session (and what quality of programming is produced during then).
- dexwiz 4y agoVideo alone from your eyes could be that much. However our senses are most definitely analog, so measuring bits is a bit disingenuous.
- amts 4y agoThanks for the opinion, but the topic implies the conjunction of several sets: 1) actual developers & able to calculate that they really collect 11 mln bits of information per second OR 2) actual developers & able to calculate how many bits per second they handle during programming & able to correlate the latter with the quality of code
- Someone 4y agoI’m not sure I fully understand your question, but I think you’re incorrectly assuming that we can use the full input bandwidth for whatever we want to use it for, while, in reality, most of it is unconscious, and independent of our attention (whatever that is. AFAIK, there still are arguments over how to define that, and on whether you can attend to two things at the same time). You can’t, for example, close your ears and use its information processing capacity for doing programming. https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physiology https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...: “Many researchers (being human) expected that the human brain would show a tremendous information processing capability. Interestingly enough, when researchers sought to measure information processing capabilities during “intelligent” or “conscious” activities, such as reading or piano playing, they came up with a maximum capability of less than 50 bits per second. For example, a typical reading rate of 300 words per minute works out to about 5 words per second. Assuming an average of 5 characters per word and roughly 2 bits per character yields the aforementioned rate of 50 bits per second. Clearly, the exact number depends on various assumptions and could vary depending on the individual and the task being performed. It is known, however, that the senses gather some 11 million bits per second from the environment.” I couldn’t find where that “it is known, however” comes from. I’m sure there’s a lot of uncertainty in those numbers, but this claims the unconscious brain processes many orders of magnitude more information than the conscious part. They also have a split over the senses that shows how vision dominates our information processing capacity: sensory system bits per second eyes 10,000,000 skin 1,000,000 ears 100,000 smell 100,000 taste 1,000
- amts 4y agoYeah, I expected such bs explanation. Naval Ravikant at nav.al also mentions in a related podcast that counting bits per second for human cognition is just bs. But nevermind. You just do the following: you are an actual developer, go code while simultaneously counting every second and how many bits per second you handle, afterwards provide estimates of quality of this code. In this option there is no assuming that we can use the full input bandwidth. I'd add the following to the 1) of the formulation: how many actual developers would just believe (unable to actually calculate by themselves) the above mentioned 11 mln bits per second AND what code quality/contribution to CS do they produce.