Here's a fun and quirky one, courtesy of Mr. Scoresby (#1547124)
Typing is unnecessary, voice dictation amazing
Back in the day, the same, awesome Oxford lecturer who always yapped about industrial revolution wages and work practices (#1463052) was pretty dyslexic and relied extensively on voice dictation... hence her emails and text messages were a complete mess (though, quite possibly an improvement over what they otherwise would have been?!).
Fast-forward a decade, slap AI on the whole thing, and speaking into a device might be an underappreciated productivity tool.
Here's Rory Sutherland for The Spectator plugging(?) his investment in a software/AI thing called "Wispr Flow" (hashtag, did not try it out.)... but dressing it up in a pretty interesting take on technological complications turning into negative productivity:
Youngsters see the keyboard as traditional office furniture. It isn’t. Yes, Qwerty is 150 years old, but the practice of everyone typing their own words in a professional setting dates only to about 1983, when spreadsheets began putting computers on managers’ desks, along with a keyboard and a screen. Before that, typing was strictly secretarial.
The spreadsheet required people to see immediately on screen the effects of every input. This low latency, the ability to see changes immediately and to edit on the go, led people to spurn the typing pool. Professional typists achieving 90 words per minute were replaced by highly paid executives typing at 20 – the division of labor in reverse.
His overarching idea is that executives used to just tell typists things, and then they'd write it up; now executives write their emails and whatever without a typist (= too expensive) and it takes forever, because old men suck at writing (sorry, typing*... fuck the boomers).
"Decisions once made around a table in minutes are now eked out over weeks by two-finger typists. The loss in productivity is disastrous but invisible."
So instead, we should all just have cheap, mechanical typists!
Online rudeness a matter of slow, not-so-deliberate, typing...?
one of my first discoveries is that it’s far easier to be polite speaking at 150 words a minute than when typing at 40. Some part of the nastiness of the internet comes from the fact that rudeness and brevity go together.
I dunno, man. I find that I'm much more eloquent in text than spoken, my spur-of-the-moment in IRL not as witty, clever, or insightful as when I'm typing at 40 words a minute or whatever.
A few years back I used to challenge friends and colleagues in speed typing, hitting around 100-120 wpm, but I find that what's scarce (#1488323, https://stacker.news/items/1486740) is in pre-typing: my ideas, mentally preparing the sentence structure, casting my mind and consciousness for the name of a person or specific word or recalling a phenomenon or insight...
Content isn't a speed race, it's a deliberate conveyor of meaningful insight
The difference between 120 and 40 wpm (200% productivity increase!!) isn't that big of a value increase. Speed is not of the essence. And you're editing and deliberating on your word choice or sentence structures etc, as you're going over it.
Tl;dr: typing fast is nice and beneficial... but not that beneficial. Typing slower, but with better ideas, is superior.
archive: https://archive.md/3QA4u
I do this for research: I speak into a text field that triggers a script that turns it into boilerplate instruction that tells an LLM to fill out another boilerplate instruction that I can then with a click pass into an LLM that writes me a repo full of analyses, links, remaining issues and so on, and prepares follow-ups for me to press "OK" on.
eeeeh... does that
for you?
Yes, otherwise I wouldn't do it.
It works because:
It feels like a useful working process because:
It makes me sad that our current age doesn't seem to produce admen of the Sutherland type (himself a continuation in the line of Koenig and Bernays) -- but I guess we have Mr Beast and Elon, so that's something.
I enjoy the regal contrarian take on topics seemingly quotidian, Trojan horsing philosophical ruminations which was the lingual franca of these advertiser types -- it's not a cigarette, it's women's rights!
In this case, Sutherland fixes the proverbial slow speed of trains, not by selling us WiFi, but by dressing up the humble (yet significantly sexed up by nostalgia) dictation taking secretary.
Emails and text messages, while convenient, are about as enjoyable as two dollar burrito from Taco Bell -- a pure diet of thus sort of communication will lead to similar dire gastronomical results. And for many of us, Taco Bell comms is our daily bread. It's bad for the modern mental digestion.
What you need, anon, is someone to talk to. Not that you can afford nylons, much less the legs that go in them, but at least you don't have to type.
It's 500 words or something and he manages to cast the thing we spend all our time doing ticky tappy tip tap as uncivilized -- barbaric even.
Despite Sutherland's allure, I'm still doubtful. I hate talking to devices in public. Typing seems to me goated as a private way of communicating in public. But I am an admirer of the Sutherland method, even though it seems half hearted here.
My typing speed is pretty slow but it’s way faster than my thinking + dictation + professional typist + rereading + revision speed.
For writing, I find typing to be more conducive to thinking.
For math, though, I still find penciling it out to be better.
also, that!