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casebash comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Is there convincing evidence either way on Speed Reading? Some people swear by it, others claim that it doesn't actually provide an improvement over skimming.
This is only an anecdote, but I've always been an extremely slow reader, but worked hard to fully comprehend everything on the first read-through (at least for subjects that weren't extremely subtle and required lots of time to chew over). An example of this is that when I took AP U.S. History, I could just read the textbook once and ace the tests. This isn't just about having a photographic memory (which I don't have), this is also about synthesizing facts into patterns and ideas as I read. I find this very helpful and do the same thing while following whiteboard talks (except I'm apparently a much faster verbal learner, or at least I don't have trouble following talks in real time at all).
I'm not sure what direction this anecdote points in, but at the very least I'd personally be afraid to do speed-reading because it would mess up a pretty good system I already have in place.
I've experienced the same when reading philosophy literature for a class. With my slow reading I was also able to remember individual quotes and their locations well enough to retrieve them pretty well, and both write essays and answer multiple choice tests. I attribute this to taking as much time as I needed on a readthrough to "digest" the text and even pause and mull it over.
There seems to be a moderately hard speed-comprehension tradeoff curve. A few techniques might shift the curve outward, letting you have more speed and more comprehension, but mostly they give you more flexibility to choose where you want to be on the curve.
This matches my experience. Speed reading software like Textcelerator is nice when I want to go through a fluff story at 1200 WPM, but anything remotely technical requires me to be at 400-600 at most, and speedreading does not fundamentally affect this limit.
Reading technical material at 600 WPM would still be much faster than the average person.
True. I've always read things around that speed by default, though, so it's not related to speedreading techniques, and I don't know how to improve the average person's default speed.
"default" is a deceptive word. You probably didn't read at that speed when you where 10 years old. Somewhere along the lines you learned it. Given that you learned it and don't know how you learned it, there also no good reason to assume that you are at the maximum that's possible.
Here are two in-browser speed reading apps for anyone who wants them for testing hypotheses. My sense is that it is useful for quickly skimming simple news, re-reading books you've already read or other things of little depth that you want to get out of the way quickly, but that you wouldn't to use it on something that requires actual thinking. I have not tested this.
http://spreeder.com/
https://www.squirt.io/install.html
A thought, the people swearing by it vs the no improvement folks reminds me rather a lot of the people from generalising from one example.
It's been a few years since I investigated the issue the last time in depth but at the time the situation was that there was no convincing evidence either way.