Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

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Not to be the usual skeptic, but "scientifically designed" doesn't really-really mean (at least to me) "designed by scientists" (which this thingy is).

I mean, nice and all, but what about some actual tests/reports of it actually being noticeably better at remembering what you have read?

The concept is very nice and interesting, but besides it:

>The science of Sans Forgetica

>Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.

I would like to have something more than a video by the scientists that designed it.

If it wasn't a UNI backed thing, I would have thought that the video was a sales pitch for Kickstarter or similar.

I had some expectations for the .pdf inside the downloadable .zip but basically all there is in it is:

>Learn more about the science behind Sans Forgetica at sansforgetica.rmit

This reminds a lot of the hype around traffic signs and the font "Clearview" being better for driving. The data collected was the legibility of old signs vs new signs but never accounted for the control of replacing the worn/faded signs with new signs using the old font, or other types of signs.

Turns out it was simply replacement of old signs, and that Clearview actually had reduced legibility in negative-contrast (black on white, instead of white on green).

I'd bet that research would show something that the benefits of this come with cons.

I tried to find a paper or something on it, nothing (don't actually know how to search for papers, no scientist).

I checked the credits on https://mumbrella.com.au/naked-creates-font-for-rmit-which-i... where i see no psychology anything but maybe Behavioural Business Lab. Granted, this was no list of the scientists working on it, but there sure seems to be a lot of marketing and brand management involved.

I can't be sure on this one, but it seems adding science to a claim is just a good marketing practice.

Are there science news sites that add paper references or something to fact check against, to their articles?

It seems plausible, studies have shown that students who handwrite notes retain more information than students that type notes. The reason for this is because handwriting is slower than typing, so your mind spends more time thinking about what you're writing, vs just being a stenographer that writes everything the professor says, giving no thought to whether it's important or not. I can't speak to the validity of Sans Forgetica, but on the surface it at least makes sense.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...

You are speculating without evidence. Handwriting may be more effective for memorization than typing because forming letters by hand is a more memorable act than typing, nothing to do with "choosing what's important to write". Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more.

You can test this yourself by making a fair comparision:

* Copy entire documents by handwriting vs typing, with no regard to choosing "what's important", and test which strategy leads to better recall.

* Take notes from a lecture by handwriting vs typing, setting a goal of say 10% of the total material note-taken, choosing what's important to write down, and giving yourself as much time as needed to write or tye everything

* Similar comparisons, writing all vs writing selections, typing all vs typying selectionsl

"Since handwriting is so laborious, it leaves LESS time for thinking about what to write down, not more."

A bit in undergrad but quite a lot in grad school, I ended up stopping taking notes. I discovered I was better off engaging completely in class, and consulting the textbooks if necessary, than trying to multitask learning and taking notes. YMMV; I can easily believe there are people who had the exact opposite experience, that note taking radically improved their retention. I'm just saying that such experience is definitely not universal.

I was the same way for the most part, I'd skip taking notes unless a teacher was making a very important point that I knew I wouldn't remember or wouldn't be able to look up later. But most of the time if it was important the teacher wouldn't just say it once and never touch on it again!

Sure it seems plausible, but from "plausible" to "scientifically" there is IMHO a huge leap.

It may make sense, and personally I hope/wish that it actually works as intended, but that's far from being OK with the font to be tagged as it is.

Even the paper mentioned in the article you linked to that should be this one (the original link in the article is to SAGE journals and I cannot access it):

https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/Mu...

seems like proposing a theory that makes a lot of sense more than anything else.

> The reason for this is because handwriting is slower than typing, so your mind spends more time thinking about what you're writing

Yeah, but this is about a typeface that's intentionally harder to read, not write.

I agree with the idea that handwriting notes is more beneficial, to a degree. I prefer taking notes by hand, but once I reach a certain threshold (over 3 pages, usually) , I need to organize the notes digitally.

Right, I would want to see a study comparing people's ability to remember things written in this and another font before I believe any claims.

This sounds like the same sort of pseudoscience that gives rise to apps like Lumosity, et al.

There's a video on the page where they talk about a test they run on it and that it performed "better."

No idea how much better, or if the test was terrible. At least they're on the right track.

After reading your comment and learning the immature research backing this article, I wonder why this is trending at number one post.

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