4 ms·
Listen to a podcast at double speed. Assuming a normal talking speed of 150 words per minute, 300 words per minute of written word is not 10 bits per second.
by xattt 2y ago
Listen to a podcast at double speed. Assuming a normal talking speed of 150 words per minute, 300 words per minute of written word is not 10 bits per second.
- sigmoid10 2y agoConsider normal text compression and you're left with a few bits at best for most of those "fast talkers/listeners." And the human brain is very good at compression.
- xattt 2y agoI feel like this is splitting hairs and moving goalposts. The pro side will always have some sort of explanation why it’s 10 bps or less without a way of actually proving it. This is a frustrating article.
- sigmoid10 2y ago>I feel like this is splitting hairs and moving goalposts. How? The argument remains exactly the same and we're just discussed counterexamples to the statements of people who obviously don't get it.
- grumple 2y agoI can type at a rate faster than 10 bits/ second (about 2 characters / 16 bits! what a slow rate! I'm well above that, at least 24 bits/second!) and you aren't compressing that to less. And that's while also moving my hands in extremely complex ways to perform the task, looking around my office, listening for threats / wife, observing the breeze from my fan, twiddling my toes on the balance board I don't use... It's clickbait/ragebait. Well done to the title writer.
- ghurtado 2y ago> And the human brain is very good at compression Yes, but in order to measure its bitrate accurately you need to tell us whether that compression is gzip, zlib, zip or 7zip. They don't all produce the same results. If we are going to be utterly ridiculous about this conversation, let's at least be complete.
- nottorp 2y agoAnd were those measurements made with vsync on by any chance?
- sigmoid10 2y agoHow would that be relevant? The only relevant aspect for this discussion is that language is tightly compressible, which noone here has challenged yet. But I've seen noone come up with a true example where you'd be actively processing high entropy data at a rate that disagrees fundamentally with the paper.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago(Shannon estimates 11.82 bits per word, so 300 WPM is 59.1 bits per second)
- sigmoid10 2y agoThe Hutter prize submissions can get compression factors >9 on english wiki text. And if you're listening to podcasts the entropy is probably even lower. The human brain is obviously a much better language model than anything we have today, so you can assume that the latent layer in your brain deals with much less than 60 bits per second.
- axus 2y agoEach second of listening we're perceiving the speaker's identity, what accent they are using, how fast they are talking, and what emotions they are showing. Those should count for the bit rate dealt with by the conscious brain.
- sigmoid10 2y agoAgain: perception is not what we're talking about and the paper acknowledges that perceptive input is orders of magnitude larger. I challenge you to listen comprehensively to someone talking about a topic you don't know while identifying someone in a police lineup.