I beg you, please read the paper before commenting. It's very interesting and it answers a lot of questions that might arise from just skimming the title.
Asking people to read the article before commenting? A commonsense suggestion that needs to be made makes me smirk inside, not the least because I am guilty of this, too, around here. (But not this time, thank you, kind Sir.)
As to being in a "gray area", have you read the posting guidelines? ;-)
I'm pretty sure it says we shouldn't say things like "read the article" or "you haven't read the article, have you?" in our comments.
Anyway, I'm laughing at this community (myself included) and the fact that your innocent and well-intentioned comment needs to be said here. And it did and does, my friend!
I am very very annoyed by many of the shallow "it's obviously wrong" comments on this story. And thank you to those rebutting more politely than I feel inclined to.
It's a fascinating paper and something that I have been interested in since before [0] and ties in to a strand of work in my PhD research. Also see for example [1].
[0] Stevens, M. Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution, OUP Oxford, 2013, ISBN 9780199601783, LCCN 2012554461
[1] Coupé, Christophe and Oh, Yoon Mi and Dediu, Dan and Pellegrino, François Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2019-09, Science Advances, volume 5, report/number 9, ISSN 2375-2548, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
The article is not even wrong imo, it is non-sense. Eg when we speak we convey much more information than just with the words we say. We communicate "information" using intonation, changing the rate of the speech, body language etc. Statements like "10 bits per seconds" are ridiculous clickbaits, and cognitive scientists should study cognition in more ecologically valid settings if they want to make any sense.
You appreciate that the contrast that is being highlighted in the paper is the missing 8 orders of magnitude? A little bit more than the OOM baseline claim of 10bps highlighted is neither here nor there.
Put a bunch of people in an empty, lacking as much as possible any details, room. Try to minimise an environmental stimulation. Have the people dress as plainly, boring as possible. Think of diddy's white parties, all white. Have people sing and dance and do stuff. Have a person just watch them. Do you think the person will find that this context is understimulating? Do you think that the "perception bandwidth" of them there is gonna fall down, or that people will have the same feeling as looking at an empty wall or some painting for several minutes? I don't think so, and if not then we have to think about where the information is coming from, who produces the processes that encode this information and how they produce them.
Only 10 beatings per second? This is a just universe, Sir!
On a serious note, enlightenment only cures us of our selfish curiosity, i.e. any action which causes harm to others. The Way requires us to harmonize with universal compassion, so there is take and give (especially with regard to our required sustenance), but we definitely lose our propensity to experiment with our power at the expense of others. No, we are to increase our curiosity in how we can better help others, help being the cornerstone of compassion.
I don't need to read the paper. The problem is that mechanical systems have inertia and are limited in their ability to change direction and thereby their ability to signal discrete information.
