Language at the Speed of Sight, by Mark Seidenberg

2018-11-21T01:19:30Z

Subtitled "How We Read, Why So Many Can't, And What Can Be Done About It" this fascinating book provides some great insight into the science of reading. Not linguistics or language, really, but reading.

There's some great observational science about how people actually read, and this goes towards exploding many common myths. Both of the 98% scams of 'speed-reading' and the education wars of how to teach children to read.

Perhaps one of the most interesting little bits is probably quite useless. As you might know, your eye makes little jumps or saccades as you read. Obviously it takes time to move your eyes, so one way to increase reading speed is to remove the saccades. Systems have been devised for this so that a text is presented one word at a time at a fixed location on a screen, and you can power your way into a significant speed increase. But a drawback is that you can't keep up that focus for long. I think the author describes it as trying to win a staring contest with a book.

One of the interesting insights comes through the development of neural network type models. While not necessarily exactly the same as how brains process written language, it's still very interesting and I think does teach us something. A naïve look at reading is just to say that it's language translated into the visual rather than into sound. But what the models find (by training them in different ways) is that there are three or four interacting pieces to the puzzle. The brain is juggling with the orthology (the written characters) the phonology (the sounds of the phonemes and graphemes and morphemes) and the semantics (the meaning of the language), and the best neural networks have connections that run both ways through all three of these subsystems.

And if you cripple a neural network by not training it on the phonology, you get a less able reader. And this leads into the more contentious issues in the latter part of the book. Namely that 'whole language' reading instruction that deemphasizes skills-based learning is, shall we say, not well-supported by the evidence. Worse, its proponents misunderstand the evidence they use to support it.

Seidenberg naturally feels that it would be a useful thing to base a curriculum of "teaching people to teach people how to read" on the science of how people learn to read. Sadly, this is not the case at the moment, and I share his frustration with what education curricula actually do (and don't) teach prospective teachers. The entrenched inertia of ed school is likely preventing us from making evidence-based advances in the teaching of reading.

comments

Educated & Far Cry 5

2018-05-19T00:22:26Z

Educated , by Tara Westover, is another book pick of the NYT/PBS Now Read This book club.

Westover grew up in Idaho in a strict Mormon family that stands out even among Mormon families in Idaho. Her father was not merely religious, but mistrustful of the government, doctors, vaccinations, medicine, education. Tara (after the fact) diagnoses him with bipolar disorder, but it's hard to separate mental illness from the extremes of conspiratorial antigovernment survivalist thinking. At any rate, while some of her older siblings had some schooling, Tara as the youngest grew up during the most extreme era of dad's thinking. She didn't go to school at all, and it would be charitable to call her home life 'unschooling'. Not only that, but she didn't have a birth certificate until she was 9.

Mom makes herbal remedies and gets training as a midwife. Dad makes a living at scrap dealing. Much of her childhood reminiscences are of horrible industrial accidents caused by willful negligence on her father's part, usually with her or her siblings as the victims. One brother somehow studies enough to go to college, and form a role model for her. She studies enough to get a decent ACT score and get admitted to BYU, where she is soon a fish out of water, even moreso than you or I would be at BYU, but for different reasons.

One significant event is a lecture class where she has to ask what the word "Holocaust" means. That's how profound her ignorance was. And although her ignorance was 'honest', being ignorant of the Holocaust was probably too close to Holocaust-denial, so she faced a certain amount of moral censure from the class.

I wish there were more details like this included, that track the change from ignorance to knowledge, or from false knowledge to true knowledge (as when she slowly comes to understand that aspirin and antibiotics are not, in fact, poisons.)

But while her life story is certainly one of gaining degrees at BYU and Cambridge and Harvard, there is not enough insight (to satisfy me) about how her worldview changes. The actual story she's telling is more about the increasing distance between her and her parents (and the shifting alliances among siblings and other relations).

Perfect segue into Far Cry 5, set in the Mountain West, where a religious cult with doomsday prepper attitudes takes over a county. It's not much of a stretch to cast Tara's family as the bad guys. As a rookie law enforcement agent, you get sent in to arrest the head of the cult. Let's just say it doesn't go well, and pretty soon, you're in Far Cry mode. Hiding in the bushes with a bow and arrow, slowly taking out the bad guys and liberating territory for decent folk.

Now coming from a series which has been justly criticized for regressive attitudes, this entry sends some subliminal prosocial attitudes. Sure, it's violent as fuck as you kill bad guys with bigger and larger explody things (although the bow and arrow combat system is still extremely satisfying). But the bad guys are anti-government forces. And you slowly gather allies among the good honest folk. When you take over an outpost, you literally put up an American flag. Now, if this were set in the Middle East or Africa, it would be jingoistic colonialism (and most of the rest of the Far Cry series has been set in remote parts of the world where it's been easy to see it as white dude versus nonwhite dudes.) But here they've twisted it around, and made the treasonous rebel scum the enemy. America, Fuck Yeah!

Lots of good stuff to flesh out the game. Some good creepy music from the cult. A few hilarious characters ("I've been shot!... In the wiener!"). Recreating the stunts of daredevil Clutch Nixon. And the simple joy of slinking around a compound with Peaches the mountain lion, slaughtering cultists.

comments

Journal of No. 118

Language at the Speed of Sight, by Mark Seidenberg

Educated & Far Cry 5