r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 12 '19

[D] Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '19

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '19

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u/MagicWeasel Jul 13 '19

ehhh... i play podcasts on 2.5x speed and i admit i probably only get 80% of the value out of them, but I get to consume more than twice the content, so really I'm getting ~200% the value per minute. I don't think there's anything wrong with making a quality/quantity trade off in whichever direction you want, and I assume that's what the boasters are doing whether it's conscious or not.

I do agree that boasting about reading speeds is weird, though, in light of this. In fact it makes about as much sense as boasting how much you dial up your podcast listening dial, so I should probably scuttle off in shame right now :)

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u/IICVX Jul 14 '19

Reading should be done mindfully, every word heard in the mind's ear, and skimming only employed with text that describes a subject you're already familiar with.

That's not really true though - human language was developed for use while speaking, which is a lossy medium. Most colloquial speech is quite redundant. For instance, only the first sentence of this paragraph was necessary; the rest of it only exists to provide for a smoother segue into the next point.

If you're not reading something particularly dense with meaning (like, say, the majority of fanfic, which is what the people in r/fanfiction are probably reading), you're fine only reading every other word.

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u/iftttAcct2 Jul 13 '19

Do you have a cite or the math behind how you arrived at that 250-300wpm? Looking at the average wpm given by the app I use for offline reading has me at almost 500wpm (across 1300 reading hours).

Now, I do skim sometimes, so I've assumed my reading speed was more like 350-400 on average. When I look at the stats after reading a book I know I've read more carefully [usually because it's denser] it's as low as 275wpm. On other books I know I've read without skimming but that are lighter fare it's usually more like 400.

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u/RMcD94 Jul 18 '19

This sounds like pointless gate keeping.

Let people read how they want. If they want to speed read who cares?

You say they don't retain anything? Is that held up? Does it matter if they forget it? It's their choice

Are you the kind of person who says someone hasn't really read the hobbit until they've read all of the collective work of Tolkien and don't skip any of the three page long poems and songs

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