I mostly agree with the actual point being made here: a thing can be real even if the simplest possible way of operationalizing it turns out not to match reality. But, on the specific matter of reading speed …
I (like a lot of people around here, I suspect) read very fast. But there’s a problem with this. When I was learning to read and forming habits around how I do it, the material I was reading was all pretty easy. These days, I often want to read things like mathematics papers, physics textbooks, and the like, which I cannot absorb effectively if I am zipping through them at high speed—but zipping through them at high speed is what my body and brain naturally try to do. My eyes move across the page at a rate that makes sense if I’m reading a not-too-literary novel just for fun, and if I’m reading something difficult and trying to understand it deeply this is not helpful.
If someone else is about as smart as me but for whatever reason didn’t learn the habit of reading very fast, then they might actually read technical stuff faster than me because they don’t keep finding themselves skimming over its surface and taking very little in.
If someone else is about as smart as me, did learn the habit of reading fast, but is better than me at adapting the physical actions of reading to different material, they too might read technical stuff faster than me.
Call me and these two hypothetical people A,B,C in order. Then when reading easy stuff we’ll have A=C>B, and when reading difficult stuff we’ll have A<B=C. So different people are in different orders depending on what material they’re reading.
(Of course this may happen in more straightforward ways—e.g., everyone will make faster progress on material they understand well, so if I know more about X and less about Y than you do we may have reversed reading speeds on those two topics. But the mechanism above is more interesting :-).)
So perhaps the right way to look at this is: “exists” is too binary. Reading speed is less real than height, but more real than (say) ability to perceive demonic possession (assuming, as I would expect most readers to agree, that demonic possession is not in fact a real thing). In at least some cases (of which reading speed is one) you can get something “more real” by nailing down details, at the cost of missing some of what the concept is meant to be about.
I mostly agree with the actual point being made here: a thing can be real even if the simplest possible way of operationalizing it turns out not to match reality. But, on the specific matter of reading speed …
I (like a lot of people around here, I suspect) read very fast. But there’s a problem with this. When I was learning to read and forming habits around how I do it, the material I was reading was all pretty easy. These days, I often want to read things like mathematics papers, physics textbooks, and the like, which I cannot absorb effectively if I am zipping through them at high speed—but zipping through them at high speed is what my body and brain naturally try to do. My eyes move across the page at a rate that makes sense if I’m reading a not-too-literary novel just for fun, and if I’m reading something difficult and trying to understand it deeply this is not helpful.
If someone else is about as smart as me but for whatever reason didn’t learn the habit of reading very fast, then they might actually read technical stuff faster than me because they don’t keep finding themselves skimming over its surface and taking very little in.
If someone else is about as smart as me, did learn the habit of reading fast, but is better than me at adapting the physical actions of reading to different material, they too might read technical stuff faster than me.
Call me and these two hypothetical people A,B,C in order. Then when reading easy stuff we’ll have A=C>B, and when reading difficult stuff we’ll have A<B=C. So different people are in different orders depending on what material they’re reading.
(Of course this may happen in more straightforward ways—e.g., everyone will make faster progress on material they understand well, so if I know more about X and less about Y than you do we may have reversed reading speeds on those two topics. But the mechanism above is more interesting :-).)
So perhaps the right way to look at this is: “exists” is too binary. Reading speed is less real than height, but more real than (say) ability to perceive demonic possession (assuming, as I would expect most readers to agree, that demonic possession is not in fact a real thing). In at least some cases (of which reading speed is one) you can get something “more real” by nailing down details, at the cost of missing some of what the concept is meant to be about.