Crackpot Theory of Speed Typer Sean Wrona

Crackpot Theories of Speed Typer Sean Wrona

Sean Wrona is one of the fastest typist in 2010s. Then, he started to sell his crackpot theory about typing, in this video

In that video, first of all, he titles it “how to type”, as the first part of the title, not “how to type fast”. But the latter is his actual content.

What is the difference?

Touchtype, is a valuable skill for computer-using professionals. Speed-type, is basically a useless kill, good only for speed typing competitions and showbiz.

Then, the second part of his title is “keyboard geometry”. Here, he envisions that he is getting onto the mathematics of quantum space.

In his video, he diss the standard touch-typing pratice of putting fingers on the home-row. He also, dismiss efficient ergonomic layouts such as the dvorak layout, colemak, etc. Entirely ignoring massive statistics and research by the layout nerds in past 20 years. Sean Wrona, pushes the idea that qwerty with his idiosyncratic techniques is superior.

There is little interest in society for speed typing. If speed typing become a million-dollar prize championship like gaming, then I predict, most of the competitors would be using dvorak, colmak, workman, etc.

• crackpot theory on typing, Sean Wrona
• https://youtu.be/LzN78rqtjzc?t=1381
• Xah Talk Show 2024-04-26 Ep548 Speed Typing, Sean Wrona's Crackpot Theory, Best Emacs Lisp Book

Sean Wrona on Retiring from Competitive Speed Typing, 2024-01

The following is written by Sean Wrona, on one of his YouTube comment. (source below.) this is the most informative, on the landscape of the speed typer community. Also, he seems to be feeling down for going-ons in his life.

• The main thing I guess is that I never enjoyed typing as much as most of my fans did.
• Early millennials in the United States like me grew up in a time when nobody cared about typing contests.
• The last people in the United States to get any kind of niche fame from typing prior to Jelani Nelson and me were Cortez Peters, Jr., Ron Mingo, and Barbara Blackburn.
• Blackburn withdrew to private life almost immediately after her David Letterman appearance in 1985 because she was offended by Letterman picking on her (she even tried to sue him).
• Mingo had a car accident in 1993 that ended his typing career and Peters died that same year.
• That was when I was eight.
• Guinness removed all its typing records from the books in the late '90s in my early teen years.
• Even as the dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium led to interest in computers being at an all-time high, that era was probably simultaneously the nadir for the interest in competitive typing until it blew up again with my Ultimate Typing Championship videos, which is weird to say.

• So when I was a kid, there was no one who dreamt of being the fastest typist in the world because as far as any of us new, typing records weren't a thing because literally no one talked about them.
• I just sort of accidentally stumbled into it because I had played that old DOS typing game (well, it wasn't really a game) called CPT Personal Touch Typing as early in the '80s and trained myself to type 100 wpm on it before I turned ten.
• Shortly after that, I had my first computer with Windows 95 on it and I quickly stopped using most of the old DOS apps and I had basically stopped practicing for over a decade but still naturally improved just via regular computer use, and this was at a time when most parents were still discouraging their kids from using computers and genuinely trying to limit screen time before everybody eventually gave up.
• Even most nerds were still forced to socialize in real life by their parents more than they wanted to so few people had the kind of unlimited computer time as I did to develop skills like that, and because of that and the fact that nobody knew anything about typing records, I ended up dominating for a much longer period of time than I expected.
• But it was never really fun for me as only for a handful of years did I ever consider it my biggest hobby.

• No, my biggest hobbies were usually Scrabble, auto racing, and collecting/analyzing data.
• At age eight, I was the youngest member of the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail Special Interest Group in 1994 (my parents were both Mensa members and my mom was well-known in the group; I never had any interest in joining but non-Mensans were allowed to join the group).
• In high school, I was the group's statistician and I was later also its ratings compiler (the group folded in the last decade).
• I later also became an expert-rated tournament Scrabble player.
• Later in 1994, I also got into auto racing and I made a bunch of Geocities sites (my longest-lasting one was a NASCAR site called Frontrow Racenet.
• Here, you can see it from 22 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20020220064552/http://www.geocities.com/frontrowracenet/.
• I then built my more serious follow-up sites race-database.com (where the original version of TypeRacerData was hosted) in 2007 and racermetrics.com in 2015.
• Most of the time, if you asked me what I really enjoyed doing most, it was this stuff.
• race-database was arguably my biggest claim to fame before the typing thing started as for a while, I had one of only three websites with a complete archive of every Formula One and major-league NASCAR race (and yes, my typing speed paid great dividends here; I once entered 34 NASCAR races in a single day).

• Although I discovered competitive typing through a bunch of short-lived Facebook apps in 2008 and 2009, I didn't really get into it until after I quit my job with an extremely corrupt statistical consulting firm that was being investigated for fraud.
• I heard about the Ultimate Typing Championship and entered, wanting to win just so I could raise enough money to declare bankruptcy while I was unemployed (perhaps it was stupid quitting when unemployment was peaking at the end of the Great Recession, but I'd do it again; those people were dicks).
• I won, I got it, but I've had many second thoughts especially after it went viral.
• I am convinced my slovenliness and social ineptitude in those videos have cost me many jobs for the remainder of my life, and after so many people in the comments sections of those videos were calling me pedophile, virgin, school shooter, that really drained my interest in typing.
• But since I was unemployed for the most part throughout 2010-2012 (except for a gig job with Sports Reference, the owners of the famous baseball-reference.com site), I did push hard and got really into it those years until I thought I had maxed out my potential at that point.
• At the end of 2009/start of 2010, Jelani Nelson and I were dead even and I was very, very lucky in my opinion that Jelani dropped out of competition because he did not want Das Keyboard using his image because I totally could have lost to him (he was off doing better things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jelani_Nelson - I can't believe his typing doesn't even count as a footnote yet!) By the end of 2012, I had no competition and most of my other early-millennial peers had basically quit for the same reason: none of us were driven to do this from childhood in the way zoomers and alphas were (in an era when people genuinely were dreaming of becoming the world's fastest typist in a way I never was except maybe a bit in 2010-11 when I had nothing else going for me).
• Now bored and with no real competition (except people like Zevus who turned out to have been cheating), I quit again for almost the entirety of 2013-16 and instead got back into Scrabble and started playing in Scrabble tournaments (https://www.cross-tables.com/results.php?p=21019&tsel=c) but I got tired of that eventually too.
• I was still doing all the race-database stuff on the side, and to be honest, I think it really was my various massive statistical projects where I entered hundreds or thousands of rows of data numerous times dating back to my teen years that really made me a dominant typist, but I also think it hurt me as a programmer because the real brainiacs/programmers find more efficient ways to do repetitive tasks while I was such a fast typist I just brute-forced all my data entry and that's really killing me now that everything I'm good at is being automated.
• I do have some programming skills but far fewer than I should have had, and to be honest that's not where my interest is; I have grown increasingly anti-tech in recent years pretty much in the same span of time I was wrting my book.
• These days, I primarily want to do nonprofit work as a job.
• I'm just not exactly sure what except that I want to do something to help disabled adults who are isolated, particularly those who are considered insufficiently disabled to receive disability from the government.

• I got back into typing in 2017 largely due to the emergence of Michael DeRoche, Izzy, and Kathy Chiang.
• Once those three arrived, I finally had competition who could beat me with some frequency and they became very close friends: we all had some long-winded philosophical conversations on the very early days of the TypeRacer Discord before Boolean Value deleted it all whatever year that was.
• I really got back into it then (replacing Scrabble as I was pretty much quitting that for good) and that is when I decided to write my book and cement my legacy.
• But Michael eventually got offline entirely because he thought his gaming addiction was ruining his life (and indeed, I would agree it was and he seems to be doing better now that he is offline) and Kathy was unable to type anymore because of , so that scene didn't really last long and quickly those guys were replaced by the zoomer generation starting with Chak [Anthony E] and Josh [joshua728] who came up in an entirely different environment where gaming was considered normal and universal (rather than just being considered for freaks as it was in my day).
• They did grow up grinding and training hour after hour and day after day for years on end to become the world's fastest typist and they did so.
• It's not surprising that they and several others have blown me out of the water because it was something they had been training for years while I hardly used any sort of typing apps at all from 1995-2008.
• I also increasingly didn't relate to a lot of the extremely online people in younger generations at a time when I was starting to loathe the Internet more and more, although still addicted to it to this day.
• Now that I was the elder statesman of typing, most of my peers around my age who genuinely have stuff going on in their life like families or jobs or whatever were long gone and I couldn't really connect with a lot of gamers who had shorter attention spans who just say things like "poggers" and "based" when I still have an interest in more long-winded conversations (this post is a case in point).
• And it also really wasn't making me happy because I was craving the real world relationships I have lacked since high school (and still lack to this day) and setting gaming records does not heal those wounds.
• So I decided that my book was going to be my swan song and that after I finished my book, I was going to quit.
• It happened that was the exact time period that Chak was overtaking me, so that cemented it.
• I knew like my hero Bill Watterson I didn't want to keep competing in my old age while I was "washed up".
• Always leave people wanting more rather than have people witnessing your decline.

from his youtube comment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSftAHT_2uA&lc=UgzScp3tj2BL8UKJqeB4AaABAg.9s2v1DDC9dr9zrsEcmD-Sg