Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke <grant@wisdomandwonder.com>]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 8:33 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> >> I just wanted to point out that I don't understand why you'd find it
> >> desirable for the software to remove the vowels that you did type.
> > That is my fault: I didn't share why.
> >
> > When I am typing, most of the time I can keep up and more or less
> > apply the simple rules I am trying to follow.  The problem is when
> > I get distracted (or tired, or the speaker goes to fast and I can't
> > keep up) and I just start typing word-for-word.
>
> Hmm... so you go faster when you type "word for word" (i.e. when you
> type more)?  What's the benefit of only typing the consonants, then?

When I type, I have my eyes closed, and touch-type, so the typing
speed is always
the same, it is fast (way faster than when I first learned to type a
long, long time ago).
It doesn't seem to be a limiting factor for me because I've been doing
it for a long time.

The issue I'm trying to manage here my mental stamina. I call that
my mental budget. For example if I'm going to dictate a 2h lecture
then I have a budget of
100 Euros

When I type word-for-word it is very accurate. In my mind I hear the
words, and see them,
and type them out as correctly as possible. It makes for dictation
that is very close to perfect.
It has a high cost though per word to get that accuracy. Say that it
in total costs me 87 Euros.

That doesn't leave much room for issues. I don't have any room in the
budget for noise or light distractions, or losing
attention to the speaker, or having a difficult time understanding
what the speaker just said
(either the pronunciation or the word or idea itself). Everything has
to go nearly perfectly. Those remaining
13 Euros handle some error but not much. When I type word-for-word in
this scenario I'll
spend nearly 100 Euros. Even if I spend less, it leaves my bank
account pretty low. That makes
corrections difficult, I'm out of mental budget by the end of the
lecture. Even lectures in the next
session or day become more difficult for me. This is my experience not
theory. My goal is to minimize
spending of my mental budget.

To answer your question, when I only type consonants, I "see less
letters" in my mind, and also,
I don't have to be so worried about getting them written down
perfectly. When I transcribe with that
approach, and see words in my mind such as "the, like, every" it
probably doesn't need such
attention to details because "t, lk, evy" are just as easy to
recognize when you are reading the entire
sentence. It uses less of my mental budget to do this. I don't have
"think so hard".
So, why am I even talking about typing word-for-word in the first place?

When I get fatigued or don't catch a word or get distracted or just
don't know how I want to or
am going to simplify something and have to really think about it then
it is more mentally taxing for me.
The easiest thing to do in that case is to just type it word-for-word.
For example an important word
like "equanimity" pops up. The word is to "different" for me, it is
interesting, not boring or simple, it
makes me think. It takes too much mental budget to think about it for
one or two seconds to find a
simplification that is good enough. My immediate reaction is that I
don't have a simplification for it, so I will just
type it. That is the only way that I can keep up (later on I would see
that "eqnmty" would be fine).

The problem is that the surprises start to push the budget down and it
is not a linear drop. As I get more
fatigued my performance gets worse and the slow downs start to
snowball. Of course there will always
be interesting, not common or trivial words, and that is where I would
want a mode to modify them
at that moment. These aren't surprising cases, just normal ones. I
want the mode to make
it easier every place that it can.

> > In those cases, I don't want to have to go back over the document to
> > clean it up.  That is why I was thinking about the mode "looking back
> > at the last two words or so" to do the right thing to them.
>
> You can also do that as a separate processing step, rather than doing it
> "on the fly", right?

Yes absolutely.

If I could automate it though I want that correction step performed
immediately for two reasons. #1 "it will look how it should look" at
that
moment because inevitably I will have a moment here and there to
review what I wrote down and it would be easier for me to
see it in its final form. #2 my mental budget runs out very very
quickly so if I don't have to do a separate step it will save funds
for the
next lecture or day.

I feel like it is important to share a /little/ bit of the context
here... I'm not pursuing this "just for the fun of it" or
for words-per-minute bragging rights or just making note taking sort
of easier (each of which I endorse 100% in their own right!).
But rather it is to implement a compensation strategy for a cognitive
processing deficit that a lot of people unexpectedly come to face
today.
That is why I keep talking about the budget and sort of saving every
Euro wherever I can. It isn't a hyper-optimization for sake of
optimization.
It is trying to manage a reduced mental budget in a way that lets you
participate in the life activities that you were able to before.
Every single penny matters here. After doing a week of learning it
will take another week just to recover from that even if it
goes "perfectly".

Based on my research, that list of stuff is the best potential
approach out there: there just wasn't anything else out there.
That is why I am relying so much on my experience and imagination
here. There is probably a lot more to it.
For example, I just realized that I never considered how to handle
proper nouns uugghh!

My motivation is huge. When you are in this situation switching to
Colemak or learning stenography just isn't an option.
A lot of people can benefit from something here, millions.
Specifically in the situation where you can perform at
this level if you heavily budget. It probably doesn't sound like a big
deal, but if it could be done then it would
help out so much. Just need to figure out what that something looks
like first! :)