undefined | Better HN

0 pointsTerr_3y ago0 comments

I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow.

Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to be governed by the sending-side. People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.

So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step, which isn't actually necessary when your mouth already supports talking faster.

Technology analogy: Two computers are collaboratively solving a problem with back-and-forth messages. The network connection is actually very good, however the bottleneck is the CPU in each computer. Will the problem be solved faster if you change the transmission style from plaintext to gzipped?

0 comments

bradrn3y ago

The other problem with this idea is that natural languages contain quite a bit of redundancy, which is why speech and writing can be decoded even over very noisy channels. It’s hard to make language more compact without removing some redundancy.

That being said, this has been attempted before: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedtalk and https://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#howmany, and especially https://web.archive.org/web/20000503004430/http://fatmac.ee.... for a detailed attempt.

jasonwatkinspdx3y ago

A related rant I've had over the years: the redundancy present in human language is not a flaw to be optimized away. Evolution went there because it acts as a form of forward error correction.

Terr_OP3y ago

Except when the complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. :P

function_seven3y ago

Wow, I've never seen such a good one. I spent a solid minute frozen in this garden!

dalmo33y ago

That's not redundancy, that's multiplexing!

svnt3y ago

> People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.

Like so many things with people, it depends on what they practice. Most people practice listening far more than rapid speech. Some people can speak faster than most people can comprehend. Part of learning to do that may involve not listening (to themselves) in the same way.

simongr3dal3y ago

> So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step

If you learned this new more compact language as your native language or to native fluency, I don't imagine you would need to go through a compression step, since all of your thoughts would already have happened in the compacted form.

Terr_OP3y ago

That raises the question of why it seemingly hasn't happened already.

One option is that what you're describing just isn't possible, that humans are already butting up against some kind of limit which is not avoidable simply by being raised with a different language.

Another option is that one can be raised to think in "pre-compressed" structures, but nobody does because it's a bad tradeoff, dropping "general thinking" performance with a worse impact than any "faster speaking" benefits. (Such as being simply slower, or more error-prone, or more demanding on attentional resources, etc.)

O__________O3y ago

>> “People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.”

If you have any links to research supporting this, I would be interested.

Terr_OP3y ago

A Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates [1] focused on finding optimal generated-speech rates for screen-reader software:

> The mean Listening Rate was 56.8, which corresponds to 309 WPM. Given that people typically speak at a rate of 120-180 WPM, these results suggest that many people, if not most, can understand speech signifcantly [sic] faster than today’s conversational agents with typical human speaking rates.

While there was some difference between the visually-impaired and normal-vision respondents, I don't think it's enough to matter to the thesis of my post:

> [...] The mean Listening Rate for visually impaired participants was 60.6 (334 WPM) while for sighted participants it was 55.1 (297 WPM).

1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3173574.3174018

O__________O3y ago

Thanks, reviewed research, unclear though how a synthetic voice reading off a single word per unit of measure is an accurate gauge of average listening rates.

From page 4 of 12 of the PDF you linked to, “Rhyme test: measures word recognition by playing a single recorded word, and asking the participant to identify it from a list of six rhyming options (e.g., went, sent, bent, dent, tent, rent). We used 50 sets of rhyming words (300 words total), taken from the Modifed Rhyme Test [27], a standard test used to evaluate auditory comprehension.” The word list research used is on page 30-31 of 55 of this PDF:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Hecker-3/public...

If true, test appears to not even measuring word recognition, it’s more accurately measuring a single phoneme recognition. If the listener correct picks the correct phoneme from a multi-choice list, researchers assume person would hear and understand 100% of any expressions received at that rate of speed; which in my opinion is clearly flawed.

I would be the first to agree that testing listening comprehension rates is hard to do, hence why I asked to review research, but to me, unless I am misunderstanding something, unclear how this research actually provides any meaningful observations.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

bradrn3y ago

jasonwatkinspdx3y ago

A related rant I've had over the years: the redundancy present in human language is not a flaw to be optimized away. Evolution went there because it acts as a form of forward error correction.

Terr_OP3y ago

Except when the complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. :P

function_seven3y ago

Wow, I've never seen such a good one. I spent a solid minute frozen in this garden!

dalmo33y ago

That's not redundancy, that's multiplexing!

svnt3y ago

> People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.

simongr3dal3y ago

> So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step

Terr_OP3y ago

That raises the question of why it seemingly hasn't happened already.

One option is that what you're describing just isn't possible, that humans are already butting up against some kind of limit which is not avoidable simply by being raised with a different language.

O__________O3y ago

>> “People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them.”

If you have any links to research supporting this, I would be interested.

Terr_OP3y ago

A Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates [1] focused on finding optimal generated-speech rates for screen-reader software:

While there was some difference between the visually-impaired and normal-vision respondents, I don't think it's enough to matter to the thesis of my post:

> [...] The mean Listening Rate for visually impaired participants was 60.6 (334 WPM) while for sighted participants it was 55.1 (297 WPM).

1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3173574.3174018

O__________O3y ago

Thanks, reviewed research, unclear though how a synthetic voice reading off a single word per unit of measure is an accurate gauge of average listening rates.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Hecker-3/public...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse