Granted, I don't know that there's not something to the idea of some kind of special benefit or effect that only handwriting has. It does feel meaningful and important in some way. But I more strongly suspect that it's a matter of fluency. If someone types fluently enough that the act itself takes no conscious effort or deliberate attention, then maybe they can engage and form associations comparably well as if they were handwriting. Most people, I think, don't -- that is, even if their typing speed is more than adequate for whatever work they do, I'm guessing it remains a bottleneck in this sense. Handwriting is slower, typically, but I don't mean a speed bottleneck, even though speed is part of the point. I mean something more along the lines of whether the conceptual task at hand enjoys dedicated resources, or has to share mental bandwidth, attentional control, working memory, flow, etc. with the mechanical task. I get the same frustration as you, of course: I don't handwrite painstakingly, but I do it slower than I type for sure. Both are low-effort, but handwriting loses out in terms of speed. If my handwriting and typing speeds were the same, but typing were a higher-effort activity for me, it's then that I suspect handwriting would have the advantage. Then, how much faster can the typing get, while remaining high-effort relative to handwriting, before the speed advantage overcomes the cognitive load advantage?
This is the National Court Reporter's Association; participating membership is for, as you say, stenographic court reporters and [stenographic] captioners, CART providers, and the like. Their membership FAQ mentions transcriptionists as eligible for associate membership -- not independently, though, only in a role supporting stenographic professionals (so really more like scopists, I believe).
Note also that the speeds listed are described as beginning level. Contrast this with the speed contest(1) featuring literary (i.e., a speech or some kind of governmental literature or something to that effect) read at 200-220 WPM, jury charge (instructions) read at 200-260 WPM, and Q&A ([witness] testimony) read at 280 WPM.
These are the kind of speeds that have been typical of stenographers pretty much as long as it's been a thing, even when it was done with a pen rather than a steno machine -- well, back into the 19th century at least; I personally can't speak to the performance of the earlier shorthand systems off the top of my head.
Those "beginning" speeds are about at the top of what most of the best longhand typists can do at any serious length (see, for example, hi-games.net typing leaderboard for a 5-minute(2) vs 10-second(3) test).
As to the WPM cutoff to be considered a "typist"? I mean, it's not like it's a professional credential or anything. Anyone can be a typist if they're typing, I suppose, or if they choose to take it seriously enough. Even the de facto standards of job requirements are nothing much to go by: The typing speeds listed as required in the job postings for nearly all customer service, tech support, general office, and other such jobs, quite frankly, range from underwhelming to laughable. Even transcriptionists (longhand, as in not steno, and offline, as in not real-time) don't need to type more than about 80 WPM to find work in the field, if even that much. In my view, 80 WPM is still an awfully tedious sort of speed, but I understand it's more commonly considered a respectable one, and more than adequate for most tasks, so I guess I'd be fine with that number if I had to pick one.
I'll also throw in with jb-wells above and say that anyone who's touch-typing (and preferably making progress into the triple digits, or so far as their own ability will allow) might as well be considered a typist -- or anyone who managed to convince someone to pay them to type things at any speed.
Yeah, I tried Copilot for the first time the other day and it seemed to be able to handle this approach fairly well -- I had to refine the details, but none of it was because of hallucinations or anything like that. I didn't give it a chance to try to handle the high-level objective, but based on past experience, it would have done something pointlessly overwrought at best.
Also, as an aside, re "not a real programmer" salt: If we suppose, as I've been led to believe, that the "true essence" of programming is the ability to granularize instructions and conceptualize data flow like this, and if LLMs remain unsuitable for coding tasks unless the user can do so, this would seem to undermine the idea that someone can only pretend to be a programmer if they use the LLMs.
Anyway, I used Copilot in VSCode to "Fix" this "code" (it advised me that I should "fix" my "code" by . . . implementing it, and then helpfully provided a complete example):
# Take a URL from stdin (prompt)
# If the URL contains "www.reddit.com", replace this substring with "old.reddit.com"
# Curl the URL and extract all links matching /https:\/\/monkeytype\.com\/profile\/[^>]+/ from the html;
# put them in a defaultdict as the first values;
# for each first value, the key is the username that appears in the nearest previous p.tagline > a.author
# For each first value, use Selenium to browse to the monkeytype.com/profile url;
# wait until 'div[class=\'pbsTime\'] div:nth-child(3) div:nth-child(1) div:nth-child(2)' is visible AND contains numbers;
# assign this value as the second value in the defaultdict
# Print the defaultdict as a json object
I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.
From the supplementary material of their 2022 study "Poor writing, not specialized concepts,
drives processing difficulty in legal language"¹ (in this example, embedded clauses, the best example of which, in my opinion, can be found in the final sentence of the paragraph hereinunder, are indicated by italics):
⏞
It is understood by Lessees, standing liable for violating obligations inter se, hereinbefore set forth in Clause 3 of this real estate agreement, that Lessors shall be exempt from liability for any damages, to the maximum extent not prohibited by law, unless Lessors knew of the possibility of such damage and acted with scienter. Lessee's aggregate liability inter se for all claims, including those based on tort or statutory liability, is limited to $1000 by this agreement. Personal injury damages, limitations of liability of which, excepting those for emotional distress, this jurisdiction prohibits, are not affected by the foregoing provisions.
⏟
"So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of United
States federal laws over time"² clarifies what these researchers count as center-embedding:
⏞
Center-embedded clauses.
Plain-language guidelines discourage the use of "convoluted" sentences, particularly those that are "loaded with dependent clauses" and which separate the "essential parts" of a sentence from each other (i.e. the subject, verb and object). The most notorious examples of such sentences contain center-embedded structures, in which a sentence or clause is embedded within the center of another sentence or clause ("all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the 'Total Payments'"). Center-embedded structures cause processing difficulty for readers (Gibson, 1998) and have been shown to inhibit recall of legal content relative to clauses that have been un-embedded into separate sentences (Martinez, Mollica, & Gibson, 2021). Here we calculated the percentage of sentences in each corpus containing a center-embedded clause. We coded a sentence as containing a center-embedded clause if a predicate dependent clause as parsed by Stanza (i.e. clausal subjects, clausal complements, open clausal complements, adjectival clauses, and adverbial clauses) was followed by a word as opposed to an end-of-sentence punctuation mark.
⏟
Most examples I've found seem to focus more strictly on constructions along the lines of:
The ice cream{that the boy [that the girl liked] bought} melted.³
As opposed to this one, which is not center-embedded:
The girl{that likes the boy [that bought the ice cream] } sang.
I'm not sure exactly how strict the definition of a center-embedded clause is meant to be. If it does mean only a phrase embedded within another phrase of the same type as described in the Wikipedia article, then aren't Martinez, et al. taking some liberties with it? Or is it really a broader concept than that?
Going back to the second paragraph of this comment, "including those based on tort or statutory liability" seems especially out of place. Does a mere parenthetical phrase -- and not a particularly disorienting one at that -- really count? It isn't a recursive relative clause of the kind I see people use to illustrate center-embedding.
The supporting information for "Even Laypeople Use Legalese"⁴ has what I assume are more examples of center-embedding according to these researchers (in the statutes linked):
⏞
Any person who trafficks in marihuana by knowingly or intentionally manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or cultivating or possessing with intent to manufacture, distribute, dispense, or cultivate, or by bringing into the commonwealth a net weight of fifty pounds or more of marihuana or a net weight of fifty pounds or more of any mixture containing marihuana shall, if the net weight of marihuana or any mixture thereof is [ . . . ] [f]ifty pounds or more, but less than one hundred pounds, be punished by a term of imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two and one-half nor more than fifteen years or by imprisonment in a jail or house of correction for not less than one nor more than two and one-half years.
More, now from books, defining or illustrating center-embedding. I'm not convinced that the constructions addressed by Martinez, et al. qualify, nor that legal writing has a particular problem with actual center-embedding, strictly speaking.
A well-known construction is center embedding, where several (of the same type of) structures nested inside one another make sentences increasingly difficult to process. . . .
(7) a. The intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered the administrator [who lost the medical reports].
b. The administrator [who the intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered] lost the medical reports.
Sentence (7b) has been shown to be considerably more difficult to process . . .
'The typical center-embedded clause is a relative clause' (p. 374). One firm constraint is 'Double relativization of objects (The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt) does not occur (p. 365). An example of a centre-embedded clause (underlined here) at depth 2 (C^2) in Karlsson's notation) is "She thought that he who had been so kind would understand." This is centre-embedded because there is material from its superordinate clause before it (he) and after it (would understand). . . .
