Even very fast typists are unable to do stenography without a machine specialized to the task. Speech, in turn, can usually be understood at two or even three times the rate at which it is ordinarily produced. Meanwhile, I can read several times faster than I can understand speech, even at the highest speedup which I find coherent.
Ergo, 10 bits per second just doesn't hold up. It's an interesting coincidence that a reasonably fast typing speed hits that rate, but humans routinely operate on language at multiples of it.
I don’t think a difference of this magnitude meaningfully changes what the paper is talking about. They already have other human behaviors in their table with bit rates up to 5 times higher. Even if you set it at 100bps it wouldn’t change much. They’re addressing a difference of eight orders of magnitude. Making it seven instead of eight isn’t all that important.
Ergo, 10 bits per second just doesn't hold up. It's an interesting coincidence that a reasonably fast typing speed hits that rate, but humans routinely operate on language at multiples of it.