When paper beats the screen

https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/15/the-enduring-value-of-an-analogue-technology

by edward • 4 years ago

81 110 4 years ago

john-doe• 4 years ago

Absolutely I don't understand how people use Google calender or even worse the outlook calender for any meaningful scheduling.

danuker3• 4 years ago

The notifications are an advantage. Paper can't scream at you.

Broken_Hippo2• 4 years ago

Plus, I always have my calendar with me and everything is in one place. I can simply look.

Honestly, it is the same with notes - as in, lists and things to remember later. I always have my phone, so I always have the grocery list and can write down ideas that I have while on the bus or walking.

kzrdude2• 4 years ago

I guess the killer application is the shared scheduling, calendars kept in sync between everyone who is in the same meeting or activity.

komali2• 4 years ago

What do you mean? What do you use? I use google calendar for meaningful scheduling.

psychphysic6• 4 years ago

In terms of actually plotting my day and week. Electronic calenders for me don't lead to schedules I'm likely to be able to stick to.

whirlwin• 4 years ago

With wife and 2 kids who have activities now and then I cannot imagine a life without a shared calendar. Not sure how that would work. Perhaps with rigorous phone calls during the day to so sync up, but that's unfeasible for me at least

psychphysic6• 4 years ago

You literally share a calender it sits on your fridge and it has your shared appointments.

If I really want to get work done then I need to make myself a to-do list.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

Which kind of scheduling? My task list is on paper (and in the issue tracker, sometimes at a far less detailed level). But my dentist's appointments and the rare meetings (we do async text comms 99%) are on my phone because it can SCREAM at me when neededd.

jrib• 4 years ago

Doodling on a phone is just not as satisfying.

Not the main point of the article, but that remark stood out to me.

I sometimes still take notes on paper. Doodling to pass the time or let my thoughts wander is relaxing.

I remember doing it all the time as a child. Do children still have this experience?

seafoam• 4 years ago

Do children still have this experience?

Our children do.

Son designed a seal to stamp on paper this week. Learned that it reverses the image, and that ink dries out.

unityByFreedom• 4 years ago

Do children still have this experience?

Haha, yes, we are not that far gone..

ergonaught2• 4 years ago

Some very much are.

e12e2• 4 years ago

When I was using my surface pro 4 - I found it quite good for doodling (and note taking) in meetings. My ReMarkable 2 are in some ways better, some worse in this respect (I find I miss bright colored sketches, on the other hand the rm2 feels quite like pencil/pen and paper).

AstixAndBelix4• 4 years ago

LCD screens are a wonderful technology that has unfortunately been adopted for a whole range of unsuitable applications.

this article talks about writing, but I want to highlight the viewing part.

LCDs were not made to be stared at for hours on end, e-ink displays on the other hand were made exactly for that purpose. they don't tire your eyes more than a piece of paper and they require external light to be visible. this is very much in tune with how every single object has worked in the whole history of humankind until the invention of artificial illumination.

in my opinion working for 8 hours in an office starting at an LCD screen should be considered as damaging as sitting at a computer for 8 hours with an incorrect posture. you end up with a headacke and your eyes burn, and the rest of the day is just painful to continue.

this wouldn't be the case if some technology was invented that had the refresh rate and color palette of standard LCD screens while having the pleasant viewing experience of digital paper. I think many people would drop their books or even their e-book readers if normal tablet or computer monitors weren't painful to look at.

danuker3• 4 years ago

[citation needed]

You make many unsubstantiated claims. I don't get headaches from staring at an LCD even 14h/day.

peoplefromibiza4• 4 years ago

I don't get headaches from staring at an LCD even 14h/day.

You are probably a young person (sorry for assuming)

I didn't get headaches when I was 18 and stared for 14 hours straight at a 1024x768 14 inches CRT monitor at 85Hz interlaced.

p.s.: the term you're looking for is "screen headaches"

p.p.s.: http://oaxis.com/lcd-screens-harmful-effects/

mrob4• 4 years ago

If your LCD is tiring your eyes, it's set too bright. E-ink has the advantage that it automatically shows the correct brightness for the lighting conditions, but there's nothing inherently less tiring about it. I have keybinds set to change my monitor brightness using DDC, so I can easily adjust my LCD's brightness as needed.

AstixAndBelix4• 4 years ago

there's nothing inherently less tiring about it

e-ink doesn't flicker.

I know that past a certain number of Hz our brain just mushes the images together and we magically perceive that the motions on the screen are fluid, just like we believe our electric lights are completely on all of the time. But even though our final perception might be continuous, maybe there are steps in the image processing pipeline in our brain where something gets overloaded by the discrete refreshing of the screen.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

If your LCD is tiring your eyes, it's set too bright.

The race for brightness considered harmful :)

The problem that LCDs have and CRTs didn't is that you lose color reproduction/contrast if you turn down the brightness to healthy levels.

Hopefull OLED fixes that and becomes affordable. But I'm afraid manufacturers will still race for brightness even on a technology that doesn't need it.

E-ink has the advantage that it automatically shows the correct brightness for the lighting conditions

Tbh I find eink very readable in bright sunlight and it's all downhill from there, to the point that i prefer reading on a tablet with brightness way down and the lights off to eink with a lamp on. But that may be a consequence of staring into LCDs most of my life.

lloeki• 4 years ago

E-ink has the advantage that it automatically shows the correct brightness

It doesn't because e-ink is a non-light-emitting technology so has no concept of brightness. Ambient light is what lights it up usually (unless one turns an entirely optional backlight on to read in the dark). So you don't need to adjusts as there's nothing to adjust, it's literally ambient light bouncing back, so is the same brightness by virtue of being the same light source.

Conversely, typical displays (TN, IPS, OLED, CRT even...) being a light emitting technology, one needs to turn backlight up as ambient light increases as both compete. (That is, unless it's a transflective LCD, but even then it's quite dim in ambient light).

there's nothing inherently less tiring about it

e-ink really is more like paper, while typical displays are like turning a flashlight straight towards your eyes.

alin232• 4 years ago

There's even software that can adapt that DDC brightness automatically using the ambient light around you. I develop Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) that can do that for macOS.

For me, the screens I use are always at the brightness where white regions are as comfortable as a piece of paper. Sure, colors aren't reproduced "as the artist/developer wanted" at those values, but neither do I need that, nor do we have e-ink screens that can reproduce color more accurately.

I just want to create software, research stuff on the internet, arrange my music etc. and if I feel like doing that for 10 hours straight, I only want the screen to tire my eyes as little as possible.

I also read a lot of books and research material, both on Kindle and paper. My eyes get tired after hours of doing that as well. Light is not the only factor.

So although it's good to try to be optimal about the light that gets in your eyes over large periods of time, it's best to also try periodic rest and moving some activities to non-screen mediums instead of fretting endlessly over the last 5% of screen light optimization.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

If you lower the brightness on an LCD screen, it's going to have terrible contrast even if you use the lowest possible black because the "black" on that kind of screen is achieved by filtering out polarized light. Additionally on some screen models, low brightness is obtained by flickering the backlight which only adds to the discomfort.

BlueTemplar• 4 years ago

Even basic colour support (like 3 colours in addition to black, no grayscale) with a 1Hz refresh rate might be enough for me...

And I would have expected us to have them by now, considering how colour e-paper has passed the prototype stage and is now widely used in supermarkets for labels ??

makeitdouble4• 4 years ago

Working for 8 hours in an office is already considered damaging, staring at LCD or a pile of paper.

kzrdude2• 4 years ago

I use a paper notebook every day in my job. Pen and paper is a help for the mind, part of thinking out loud maybe. Far too long was I content with staring into a screen and trying to "think harder".

As it has been said elsewhere, what I jot down are not finished thoughts but steps on the way there.

pitaj• 4 years ago

I've tried using various digital Todo lists but nothing compares to the sticky notes on my monitor.

Superbowl5889• 4 years ago

Thanks anon for kindness l

dang2• 4 years ago

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34026745.

dang2• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with saying thank you! but just to save space at the top of the thread, I detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34026745.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

Anyone have notations specifically intended for pseudocode sketching on paper?

(eg the "offside rule" was originally conceived to be easy to interpret even for handwriting)

beagle3• 4 years ago

Ken Iverson.

It’s called APL, it is incredibly effective, it won many awards, there’s a book about it called “Notation as a tool of thought” which is a bit dated but still highly recommended.

But it is not really compatible with modern programming languages and styles.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

I use set theory/formal logic notation sometimes.

makach• 4 years ago

My remarkable 2 seems to work for me. I am always struggeling with note taking. Some times, it makes sense to write directly at the PC, but on occasion pen and paper is the way to go. Problem with paper is that I tend to, either lose it or crumple it and it becomes useless.

With my remarkable I seem to be able to doodle notes better.

For doing homework with the kids, and especially maths, the remarkable is remarkable

we can burn through pages and pages of notes explaining and solving problems.

Using a pen and a medium you can write on is extremely useful, and until you can PAVE the walls with screen and make them as endurable as paper - I will continune to prefer pen + paper.

musingsole• 4 years ago

The reMarkable tablet is the best innovation on pen and paper since the ballpoint pen. It's become a thinking tool more so than any other electronic device I have, and it has me daydreaming about a tablet and stylus based computing environment.

shanebellone6• 4 years ago

Are these really worth it? I'm interested in the concept but worry it's not as practical as it looks.

kaba0• 4 years ago

Is that really that much better than an ipad air/pro? I don’t particularly care, but some people buy a paper-like screen protector as well.

nonoesp2• 4 years ago

"Burning through pages" is a great way to put it. No need to worry about sheets of paper lying around or scanning and document what you do. It's all there. I especially like that, with the "fineliner," strokes are vector polylines (as opposed to shapes in other brushes) that can be used later to simplify, redraw, and animate documents.

maegul• 4 years ago

A bit wishy-washy, but the general point holds.

Since the 90s, I’ve been somewhat surprised to see the PC technology fail to really learn from how well humans have leveraged printed information that is embedded in our environment.

I figure screens and projectors are simply harder and more expensive than what would be required for the digital to get paper like. But still, it’s disappointing.

Incidentally, just watched a recent Bret Victor talk about his latest application of his RealTalk/Dynamicland system:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXiVOmaVSo

brainzap• 4 years ago

holy shit that duck animation is so good, it also teaches a bit on data collection and matching, love it

makeitdouble4• 4 years ago

The right balance is probably a mix of digital and analogue, so yes leveraging printed information where it’s more cost effective or practical is a good call.

Now, I think there really are better interfaces than paper in most of our everyday use cases, and it’s more on what people are used to or what they’re comfortable with (the Chinese student example in the article is basically that). It’s totally valid, and everyone has preferences, it should just be explicited that it’s really about individual taste.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

For those confused, the Bret Victor bit comes later in the video. Yes, the beginning is Shawn Douglas talking about protein visualisation.

BV starts at about 14 minutes.

taink• 4 years ago

Here's the ordered list of publications mentioned in this article.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2021.1347

[2] https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1297

[3] https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211059540

[4] https://hbr.org/2022/07/how-paper-catalogs-remain-relevant-i...

hilbert424• 4 years ago

"In a series of 10 studies, we find that people are more likely to make virtuous decisions on paper than on a digital device because they perceive choices on paper as more real..."

Right, that's not only my experience but also those with whom I've worked (see my earlier post of refusing instructions by email, when on paper they were real and held much more weight).

fedeb953• 4 years ago

In one part of their study, the researchers approached strangers and asked them to take a made-up survey. Half the respondents were given a pen and paper to fill out the form; the other half were handed an iPad. At the end of the exercise, respondents were asked if they wanted to give their email address to receive information on how to donate to a charity. Those who used paper were much likelier to provide their email addresses.

Forgive my ignorance, but what should this mean?

baq• 4 years ago

If you want someone to give you their email, give them a piece of paper and a pen and ask politely

filoleg• 4 years ago

Once I thought about it, I realized that on some lizard-brain level with no logical reasoning present, I am indeed more likely to agree to give someone an email if they asked me to write it down on paper vs. type it in somewhere.

I can think of many different reasons for why, but they are all just guesses at best. One that comes to mind is that writing it on paper feels more "personal", as in "i am giving you this piece of my info", and I instinctively know that a human will have to look at it, read it, or do something else with it. Regardless, a human will have to take a look at it before something else happens to it.

While typing it on the person's device feels much more impersonal and more of a "I am entering my email into this digital form, with no expectations of any real human to ever look at it, with my email probably being sent into some database for some automated processing or spamming me or whatever else".

The latter isn't a real objective concern of mine, both typing and writing it out could easily lead to the exact same outcomes (both good and bad). But just instinctively, I feel that this is one of the main reasons for why it feels different for me on a subjective level in the back of my head.

mach1ne• 4 years ago

Likely that the experience of the electrical survey was more aggravating than the pen-and-paper one.

fedeb953• 4 years ago

I don't think that that can be concluded with certainty, or anything else beyond that the people in that survey with pen and paper were more likely to give their email address for charity.

elliekelly• 4 years ago

Typing out an email address, especially on a device that isn’t yours, does seem to feel particularly tedious.

nonoesp2• 4 years ago

The digital medium often strips human expression when capturing input.

Devices such as the Apple Pencil are getting better at capturing pressure and highly-detailed paths, which inturn are encoded as vectors and can gather information that is lost in physical mediums, such as coordinates, drawing order, and temporality, even capturing things not present on paper such as hover gestures and pressure.

Yet it's common practice to reduce gestures and clicks to points, lines, or curves - two clicks from thousands of users in a CAD environment may output the exact same line from point A to point B - which often forget about the expressiveness of pencil strokes on a sheet of paper, features which could be used by machine learning algorithms to discern intent in the input of different users.

the-printer2• 4 years ago

Can anyone recommend a good quality pencil that doesn’t smear? I like pens. I do. I’ve never owned a good fountain pen, but I think I’d prefer a good quality pencil (for short-term notes at least). There’s something about the feeling of the pencil making its mark across paper that is satisfying.

blueridge• 4 years ago

I use Blackwing pencils while reading and for day-to-day note taking. Their long-point sharpener is also excellent.

https://blackwing602.com/collections/pencils

https://blackwing602.com/products/blackwing-one-step-long-po...

the-printer2• 4 years ago

Oh yeah...this is along the lines of what I'm after. Thanks.

abakker• 4 years ago

I love my Pentel Graphgear 1000. If note taking, I really think the way to go is .7 or .9 leads, but .5 is nice if you need fine lines.

I use the .5 for woodworking, but a .7 along with a Rhodia dot paper notepad for my desk.

hunter-gatherer• 4 years ago

Was given a nice mechanical pencil as a gift years ago and dug it up not too long ago and started using it. It is a .7 mm lead, which I believe is a minimum size for good notetaking for me. All through college I used regular wood pencils and loved writing with them. I believe the thicker leads are more forgiving for writting letters.

hilbert424• 4 years ago

I recall when as an IT department head I had a difficult CEO who often changed his mind (he seemed to always hold the view of the last person who spoke to him).

My response was to refuse email from him (as emails can be ephemeral). Second, I requested all his future instructions to me be in words written physically in the form of black atoms adhered to sheets of white atoms and signed by his own hand in blue atoms at the end.

It dismayed him and everyone including my staff some of whom I'd instructed to block my emails—yes, I'm likely one of the few heads of an IT department in history who refused to have an email address.

Yes, it worked and he complied and ultimately I had the last laugh but that was only after the feud had become newspaper headlines.

hcurtiss• 4 years ago

Respectfully, I would have fired you immediately.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

Maybe not in context, who knows. If the CEO knew they were causing problems, then they'd be more open to playing ball.

hilbert424• 4 years ago

If I had read in isolation a comment such as mine written by someone else then my reaction might have been the same—and I suspect many others would have reacted similarly. The trouble with my comment (of which I was aware when I wrote it) is that I provided little about the actual circumstance and nothing about the background of the matter, which, for obvious reasons, I still cannot do.

In choosing to reply to this story I had a choice of making my point about the often fragile and ephemeral nature of electronic data and I chose an actual real-world example that involved myself in preference to some hypothetical case which would have been less interesting. The fact was at the time email in this organization was both insecure and often ephemeral by nature in that there was no guarantee that copies of it would be kept indefinitely let alone able to be authenticated at some later date (unfortunately the reasons are too involved to explain here, you'll just have to my word for it).

That and the fact that decisions made by the CEO often turned out to be bad or made inappropriately and that he regularly changed his mind about matters that had already been signed off after being influenced by external voices and did so without consultation with his departmental heads caused serious disruption within the organization to the extent that it became almost dysfunctional—not to mention staff morale being reduced to an all-time low was the reason why I demanded he provide me with written instructions under his signature. That I was not fired both vindicated my stance and showed the true gravity of the situation. (I eventually left the organization of my own volition well after the event. Without doubt it was the worst working environment I've personally experienced).

Incidentally, my staff were always loyal to me, in fact I protected them from much of the turmoil. What I was surprised learned from that and other related incidents was who one's real friends were and or those who held strong ethics and who were prepared to stand up for them. I received support from the most unexpected of people—staff, managers etc. from very different departments to IT, many of whom I hardly knew.

I note you chose to focus on my insubordination rather than the matter of reliability, authentication, paper documents, etc. This is not a criticism given the abrupt way I presented my comment, in hindsight I could have worded it more tactfully but in hurried HN posts that doesn't always happen, as here (that said, I'm usually reasonably restrained and careful about what I post online). It was interesting to note that some voters almost immediately voted the comment down after posting but surprisingly the votes fluctuated either way and are now split evenly—in fact to the exact number.

That work incident wasn't supposed to hog the comment, it was only meant to be a stand-in for cases where it's turned out that physical evidence was either much harder to tamper with and or easier/cheaper to authenticate than electronic counterparts.

First I'll mention a personal case, some years ago I had a contractor with a nice important-sounding name do some work on a property where I was not living at the time, it was substandard and he never provided a proper itemized invoice (and after I forced him to provide paperwork it was obvious that many of the newly listed items were only padding). I disputed the bill and the matter went to court and I lost—in the end a bill of around $2,000 ended up costing me over $10,000. He claimed he sent me email which I never received and stated to the court that his computer later failed so he could never prove it. The judge took his word and not mine, so I lost. Had he said he faxed me the info then the situation would have been very different—the printed log sheet of my fax would have shown that he had not done so and it would have been verifiable as fax logs are notoriously difficult to forge well. (I know, in a much bigger case telco comms records etc. could be subpoenaed, but that's well outside the scope of a petty sessions case like mine where the Beak expects to get through a half dozen cases before lunch).

When working in surveillance and remote monitoring (this time with a decent, professional organization) we switched from film cameras to digital ones and then read them remotely (which we couldn't do with film and inconveniently it had to be collected by hand). To switch over we had to go to inordinate lengths to ensure the data link was tamper proof and the data was properly encrypted and authenticated. On the other hand, the physical film was almost impossible to tamper with without it being clearly evident (but again we didn't have the luxury of remote monitoring).

I've many more such instances but not the time to cite them here. Sure, digital data is taking over the world but physical data is extraordinarily difficult to forge well if subject to proper scrutiny/forensics. On the other hand, digital forensics can be both very expensive and often very difficult to detect and or difficult to detect and apprehend the culprits; if were not fact and it were easy to do then we wouldn't be saddled with the many billions of dollars internet fraud that we see every year.

uvdn7• 4 years ago

I think it boils down to cost. Digital content is extremely cheap to replicate and distribute; hence the quality of the content is assumed to be lower (and it’s usually the case). One doesn’t have to put in too much effort in producing digital content.

Now with ChatGPT, it’s even more so than ever. It’s practically free to produce digital content.

On the other hand, even by just printing out a doc increases the cost of replication and distribution significantly (compared to pure digital replication); hence the quality of the content is assumed to be higher.

coffeefirst• 4 years ago

Yes, and I think that's driven a novelty factor. If you spend all day on screens, it's the last thing you want to do more of. The paper book or vinyl record is special because it's disconnected and tactile.

I'm also gradually hearing friends come to realize that their ebooks and streaming movies may vanish at the whims of corporate licensing agreements, but their libraries of physical books and DVDs are durable.

Give it two more years and we might see letter-writing clubs emerge.

kstrauser3• 4 years ago

For me, it never does: https://honeypot.net/post/digital-notes-are-better-than-pape...

Paper is worse for my workflow in almost every way. I keep trying paper-based systems because of articles like this and I keep coming back to digital. I bring this up to say that it’s OK not to like using a pen and paper. Find a system that works for you and not the mode person.

isthisthingon993• 4 years ago

Try a writing tablet like the Remarkable.

kstrauser3• 4 years ago

Trust me, I see the appeal. The back of my mind shouts that, if I were to get one, my organizational issues would go away and I’d be hyperproductive.

I’m used to things calling out to me like that.

As a halfway step, I’ve tried using a Rocketbook and scanning things in, with workflows to file text away appropriately.

simonblack• 4 years ago

The thing about a screen is that it's a tiny window into a wide world. To find anything at all, you must drill down into that myriad of screens to find the one that is relevant.

Now, stick a postit on your fridge or on your work screen. Do you need to interact specifically with that note? No. Every time you scan the room, your eyes will connect with that image of that postit and despatch it to your retina and brain. You don't even need to be able to read that postit from where you are. The mere fact that your brain registers its presence, also connects within your brain to know the content of that note, legible at that moment or not.

At home we use a paper calendar in the kitchen. That works far better than Google calendar or the iPhone calendar. We see stuff everyday that may be two or three weeks in the future, thus reinforcing the memory of that item such that it never suddenly gets sprung on us that 'Today is the day for X'.

fuzzfactor• 4 years ago

Try flipping through the pages of a bound book, skimming for familiar visual clues such as distinctive tables & graphs, or pictures fuzzily remembered. Physically going only about 5 pages per second, but at least each page is fully rendered faster than you can flip to the next one.

Now try it without printing the PDF first.

euroderf• 4 years ago

I've seen web pages where people talk about putting a great big GANTT chart (or timeline or whatever) up on a wall. Like, a couple of meters/yards. Hit it with annotations and sticky notes. It's public, it's editable, it's grokkable-at-a-glance, it's available to other teams for examination.

When paper beats the screen

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