I would like more information than the Wired article provides. However, it doesn’t seem to me to support your hypothesis especially well;
If people can find more detailed articles that discuss the science better, I’d appreciate that (I did some minimal digging, didn’t find anything particularly helpful). I know it’s not the most rigorous of articles and am open to the possibility that I’m worrying too much. But it did specifically state that reading comprehension and memorization drops when reading articles with a lot of hyperlinks. That’s not just different, that’s pretty explicitly “worse” assuming you value reading comprehension. I don’t think I made any claim that wasn’t also made in the article.
I do think hyperlinks accomplish good things. But I think there should be a way to accomplish similar things without the distraction. Using them sparingly to highlight important information may be a net-benefit. But when every other word in a paragraph is a link (as was practically the case in the Scientific Self Help post), and most of those links are not really important, I think you’re breaking even at best and probably at a net-loss. I don’t have enough data to know if/where a measurable point is at which reading comprehension loss outweighs extra knowledge. I would definitely like to see a more detailed study on that.
Less Wrong is particularly bad because the links take you to new, huge posts with no way to know what’s actually important to the original topic. Even if overall use of hyperlinks on the web wasn’t a problem, I’d say it’s a problem here. Because often the original topic was pretty complex on its own, and fully digesting it requires more attention than the average wikipedia page.
I think an ideal compromise might be to break long posts into (relatively) short pages, and include necessary links at the bottom of each page. That way people can read individual sections without interruption, but still have the bonus info while relevant topic is fresh in their mind. (In fact, this is how footnotes actually worked in old-print-media. You didn’t have to wait till the end of a 10 page article to find out what that little number meant, you’d find out by the end of one page.)
One last point: I’ve seen multiple studies that demonstrated that people get information more quickly and more completely from bullet-style lists than from paragraphs.
I completely agree with this. In fact, I tried to find ways to break this post down into bullet-lists, but I had already spent a few hours working on it and was getting tired and just wanted to post it and be done. I also don’t think it necessarily translated well into bullet-lists at all. But yeah, it’s a lot easier to learn that way for me and I try to do that where possible. However:
That style of emphasized and chunked information reminds me a bit of hyperlinks; the similarity might be entirely my imagination, but it seems relevant.
I think it’s your imagination. They look similar, but whereas a bullet list actually breaks stuff down into easy-to-digest chunks, a hyperlink brings you to an article that is NOT an easy to digest chunk, which then interrupts your digestion of an already-not-easy-to-digest chunk.
I think it’s your imagination. They look similar, but whereas a bullet list actually breaks stuff down into easy-to-digest chunks, a hyperlink brings you to an article that is NOT an easy to digest chunk, which then interrupts your digestion of an already-not-easy-to-digest chunk.
The similarity that appears to me is that the existence of a hyperlink (the visual cue) condenses text around it into a chunked thought. Too many hyperlinks, or hyperlinks placed or named badly fail to do this, and in that regard I agree with you. I sometimes read hyperlinks after the content, and sometimes I interrupt the content, but in either case the hyperlinked word usually serves as a mental tag that allows me to correlate the sentence it was in with the linked content, and helps me remember the sentence as a whole.
I think the “tagging” concept is why I can comfortably have fifty Wikipedia pages open at once, but I get lost only a few links deep when a link called “Carnot” takes me to a page that fails to use the same word and just uses “efficiency”. As long as the terms are consistent, I can usually get to the page even hours later and usually integrate it into the hole I had prepared for it while reading the original text.
I think the “tagging” concept is why I can comfortably have fifty Wikipedia pages open at once, but I get lost only a few links deep when a link called “Carnot” takes me to a page that fails to use the same word and just uses “efficiency”. As long as the terms are consistent, I can usually get to the page even hours later and usually integrate it into the hole I had prepared for it while reading the original text.
On Wikipedia, go to preferences, click on “Gadgets” at the far right and tick Navigation Popups. It pops up a preview of whatever article is at the other end of a wikilink. The cure for mystery meat navigation, at least internally.
Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried playing with it, and will continue to for a little while, but right now I don’t think that it will help me.
1) It’s too slow. I normally read around 350 wpm (90% comprehension 1 day later), and read quickly at around 900 wpm (70% comprehension 1 day later). I usually read Wikipedia at my faster speed (they are discrete modes for me, rather than a continuum). On my connection, it takes about a second for a popup to appear, but even moving the mouse is an interruption. In my test just now, that reduced my reading speed by about half.
2) It requires concentration. This might change once I get used to it, but the way I pre-allocate an expectation for new information, and tag what I expect to go in there is subconscious, and happens easily at any reading pace. It seems to revolve around the association of a single word or word phrase. Just now, I had to focus on the popup and mentally note “Butte du Lion = Lion’s Mound” (and that’s an easy one!).
3) It’s only helpful for the corner cases, but I can’t predict those ahead of time. Wikipedia is pretty good about labeling links with the title of the page they link to. It seems that (a lot?) less than 10% of links violate this rule, and I can’t easily predict which ones; it’s only useful for me to see the popup when the page it links to is a redirect.
Ah ha! I just realized I could write some javascript to replace all links on a given site with the title of the page they link or are eventually redirected to. I wonder if that would be helpful? I would have to write different scripts for Wikipedia and LessWrong and TvTropes (maybe), but I don’t use that many link-heavy sites. On the other hand, it would ruin jokes and make some text nonsensical. Hmm.
Good question. By hand, and I don’t know how my results match up against more “official” methods, but here’s how I did it (a few months ago, so I remember it well):
1) I time myself reading 100 pages, and randomly sample from those 100 pages until I have a tight confidence interval for the word count of those 100 pages. This gives me my wpm.
2) The following day, I generate 100 random numbers between 1 and the number of lines per page in that book. For each page, I check 3 lines starting at that number (may bleed onto the next page). I count it correct if I remember the content of those three lines, and incorrect if I don’t. It’s subjective, but I’m strict. If the lines are
how childrens minds work. One of the Nickelodeon / producers, Todd Kessler, had actually worked on Sesame / Street and left the show dissatisfied. He didn’t like the
I count that as the facts:
1) Todd Kessler was a Nickelodeon producer
2) He worked on Sesame Street
3) but left dissatisfied
If I get any wrong (including failing to remember Todd Kessler’s name), that counts as a strike against the whole phrase, not just 1⁄3 of it.
Thus, my 90% comprehension rate means out of 100 samples, I got 7-13 wrong (most of those were in fact forgetting a person’s name, location, or organization).
3) Repeat for at least two more books to see how different writing styles affect my reading rate.
On the other hand, it would ruin jokes and make some text nonsensical.
You could append the title of the page they link to- i.e. joke(Aha! Jokes: Clean Humor and Funny Pictures!)- and that would just make the jokes faster and the text interrupted. My concern would be that many titles are overlong. Do you want every Less Wrong link to have the phrase “—Less Wrong” in it?
The similarity that appears to me is that the existence of a hyperlink (the visual cue) condenses text around it into a chunked thought.
Ah, I can see that. And I agree, if used responsibly, it probably accomplishes that to some degree. Again, what Less Wrong is lacking here is good summaries that allow the single word to actually encapsulate a relevant idea. (Or, as I noted in another comment, a glossary, so people can quickly learn new terms without reading entire articles)
If people can find more detailed articles that discuss the science better, I’d appreciate that (I did some minimal digging, didn’t find anything particularly helpful). I know it’s not the most rigorous of articles and am open to the possibility that I’m worrying too much. But it did specifically state that reading comprehension and memorization drops when reading articles with a lot of hyperlinks. That’s not just different, that’s pretty explicitly “worse” assuming you value reading comprehension. I don’t think I made any claim that wasn’t also made in the article.
I do think hyperlinks accomplish good things. But I think there should be a way to accomplish similar things without the distraction. Using them sparingly to highlight important information may be a net-benefit. But when every other word in a paragraph is a link (as was practically the case in the Scientific Self Help post), and most of those links are not really important, I think you’re breaking even at best and probably at a net-loss. I don’t have enough data to know if/where a measurable point is at which reading comprehension loss outweighs extra knowledge. I would definitely like to see a more detailed study on that.
Less Wrong is particularly bad because the links take you to new, huge posts with no way to know what’s actually important to the original topic. Even if overall use of hyperlinks on the web wasn’t a problem, I’d say it’s a problem here. Because often the original topic was pretty complex on its own, and fully digesting it requires more attention than the average wikipedia page.
I think an ideal compromise might be to break long posts into (relatively) short pages, and include necessary links at the bottom of each page. That way people can read individual sections without interruption, but still have the bonus info while relevant topic is fresh in their mind. (In fact, this is how footnotes actually worked in old-print-media. You didn’t have to wait till the end of a 10 page article to find out what that little number meant, you’d find out by the end of one page.)
I completely agree with this. In fact, I tried to find ways to break this post down into bullet-lists, but I had already spent a few hours working on it and was getting tired and just wanted to post it and be done. I also don’t think it necessarily translated well into bullet-lists at all. But yeah, it’s a lot easier to learn that way for me and I try to do that where possible. However:
I think it’s your imagination. They look similar, but whereas a bullet list actually breaks stuff down into easy-to-digest chunks, a hyperlink brings you to an article that is NOT an easy to digest chunk, which then interrupts your digestion of an already-not-easy-to-digest chunk.
The similarity that appears to me is that the existence of a hyperlink (the visual cue) condenses text around it into a chunked thought. Too many hyperlinks, or hyperlinks placed or named badly fail to do this, and in that regard I agree with you. I sometimes read hyperlinks after the content, and sometimes I interrupt the content, but in either case the hyperlinked word usually serves as a mental tag that allows me to correlate the sentence it was in with the linked content, and helps me remember the sentence as a whole.
I think the “tagging” concept is why I can comfortably have fifty Wikipedia pages open at once, but I get lost only a few links deep when a link called “Carnot” takes me to a page that fails to use the same word and just uses “efficiency”. As long as the terms are consistent, I can usually get to the page even hours later and usually integrate it into the hole I had prepared for it while reading the original text.
On Wikipedia, go to preferences, click on “Gadgets” at the far right and tick Navigation Popups. It pops up a preview of whatever article is at the other end of a wikilink. The cure for mystery meat navigation, at least internally.
Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried playing with it, and will continue to for a little while, but right now I don’t think that it will help me.
1) It’s too slow. I normally read around 350 wpm (90% comprehension 1 day later), and read quickly at around 900 wpm (70% comprehension 1 day later). I usually read Wikipedia at my faster speed (they are discrete modes for me, rather than a continuum). On my connection, it takes about a second for a popup to appear, but even moving the mouse is an interruption. In my test just now, that reduced my reading speed by about half.
2) It requires concentration. This might change once I get used to it, but the way I pre-allocate an expectation for new information, and tag what I expect to go in there is subconscious, and happens easily at any reading pace. It seems to revolve around the association of a single word or word phrase. Just now, I had to focus on the popup and mentally note “Butte du Lion = Lion’s Mound” (and that’s an easy one!).
3) It’s only helpful for the corner cases, but I can’t predict those ahead of time. Wikipedia is pretty good about labeling links with the title of the page they link to. It seems that (a lot?) less than 10% of links violate this rule, and I can’t easily predict which ones; it’s only useful for me to see the popup when the page it links to is a redirect.
Ah ha! I just realized I could write some javascript to replace all links on a given site with the title of the page they link or are eventually redirected to. I wonder if that would be helpful? I would have to write different scripts for Wikipedia and LessWrong and TvTropes (maybe), but I don’t use that many link-heavy sites. On the other hand, it would ruin jokes and make some text nonsensical. Hmm.
Where/what do you do to check your reading comprehension like that?
Good question. By hand, and I don’t know how my results match up against more “official” methods, but here’s how I did it (a few months ago, so I remember it well):
1) I time myself reading 100 pages, and randomly sample from those 100 pages until I have a tight confidence interval for the word count of those 100 pages. This gives me my wpm.
2) The following day, I generate 100 random numbers between 1 and the number of lines per page in that book. For each page, I check 3 lines starting at that number (may bleed onto the next page). I count it correct if I remember the content of those three lines, and incorrect if I don’t. It’s subjective, but I’m strict. If the lines are
I count that as the facts: 1) Todd Kessler was a Nickelodeon producer 2) He worked on Sesame Street 3) but left dissatisfied
If I get any wrong (including failing to remember Todd Kessler’s name), that counts as a strike against the whole phrase, not just 1⁄3 of it.
Thus, my 90% comprehension rate means out of 100 samples, I got 7-13 wrong (most of those were in fact forgetting a person’s name, location, or organization).
3) Repeat for at least two more books to see how different writing styles affect my reading rate.
You could append the title of the page they link to- i.e. joke(Aha! Jokes: Clean Humor and Funny Pictures!)- and that would just make the jokes faster and the text interrupted. My concern would be that many titles are overlong. Do you want every Less Wrong link to have the phrase “—Less Wrong” in it?
Ah, I can see that. And I agree, if used responsibly, it probably accomplishes that to some degree. Again, what Less Wrong is lacking here is good summaries that allow the single word to actually encapsulate a relevant idea. (Or, as I noted in another comment, a glossary, so people can quickly learn new terms without reading entire articles)