[extropy-chat] Self-Enhncmnt: data acquisition at high speed

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Acy James Stapp wrote:

> I'm a fairly fast reader at ~1000+ wpm with fairly good
> comprehension on fiction and subjects I'm already acquanted
> with, and ~500 wpm on hard nonfiction. I've found that reading
> the same thing over and over until I'm quite bored with it
> produces massive gains in retention although it hardly affects
> comprehension.

But is there anything to significant to comprehend in fiction?
In contrast biology and history are largely retention while
inorganic chemistry and to a greater extent organic chemistry
require some retention and comprehension but to a large
degree practice of a set of rules.  Algebra and Calculus
are to a large extent the practice of a set of rules.

I'd like to see how different people would rate these
and any other subjects between retention/memorization,
comprehension and practice of methods.

> I'm sure that I could double my reading efficiency with some
> aids but simply rereading makes a tremendous difference.
> Taking notes would probably make a big difference as well,
> but I'm not quite that organized.

But as Harvey pointed out normal news content is data sparse
(I wonder if various news agencies realize this and whether
they are shifting summaries accordingly -- i.e. can I get
the news (or key points) from just the summary on Google News
or do I have to go to an article that may be 1 page on
some sources and 4 pages on other sources.  (Its kind
of amazing how many ways reporters/writers can repackage
the same press release.)

This then becomes a question as to whether software tools
have enough knowledge/capabilities/rules to be able to
compress a story from a few dozen to a few hundred sources
into a dozen points about who/what/where/when, etc.?
Then if one reads/listens to the summary at 3x compression
one should be talking something like 10x or better than
normal methods.

Robert