As a psychometrician, I would think the case here is more complicated than that. Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on reading speed, so I might be wrong about some things here.
I agree with you that there are probably strong correlations between the speed at which different people can read different texts, to the point where it seems like it would make sense to rank people by reading speed in a fairly unidimensional way. However, I would also agree with him that the speed at which people read things depends on other factors, such as the kind of material one is reading, or the way one is reading it.
This becomes a problem when one has to quantify the reading speed. You can’t exactly quantify reading speed as e.g. “words per minute”, because the number will depend on other factors. And I bet there’s no known natural unit to use for reading speed.
In psychometrics, you usually solve this by just working with relative rankings of people, rather than independently meaningful numbers. So for instance if there was two people whose reading speed you both know very precisely, where one of them is a very quick reader and one of them is a very slow reader, you could use proximity in reading speed to those two people to discuss it numerically. However, I think it is quite rare for people to have clear baselines like this? Idk.
As a psychometrician, I would think the case here is more complicated than that. Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on reading speed, so I might be wrong about some things here.
I agree with you that there are probably strong correlations between the speed at which different people can read different texts, to the point where it seems like it would make sense to rank people by reading speed in a fairly unidimensional way. However, I would also agree with him that the speed at which people read things depends on other factors, such as the kind of material one is reading, or the way one is reading it.
This becomes a problem when one has to quantify the reading speed. You can’t exactly quantify reading speed as e.g. “words per minute”, because the number will depend on other factors. And I bet there’s no known natural unit to use for reading speed.
In psychometrics, you usually solve this by just working with relative rankings of people, rather than independently meaningful numbers. So for instance if there was two people whose reading speed you both know very precisely, where one of them is a very quick reader and one of them is a very slow reader, you could use proximity in reading speed to those two people to discuss it numerically. However, I think it is quite rare for people to have clear baselines like this? Idk.