Hard to say, there is no good evidence either way, but I lean toward speed-reading not being a real thing. Based on a quick search, it looks like the empirical research suggests that speed-reading doesn’t work.
The best source I found was a review by Rayner et al. (2016), So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? It looks like there’s not really direct evidence, but there’s research on how reading works, which suggests that speed-reading shouldn’t be possible. Caveat: I only spent about two minutes reading this paper, and given my lack of ability to speed-read, I probably missed a lot.
If anyone claims to be able to speed-read, the test I would propose is: take an SAT practice test (or similar), skip the math section and do the verbal section only. You must complete the test in 1⁄4 of the standard time limit. Then take another practice test but with the full standard time limit. If you can indeed speed-read, then the two scores should be about the same.
(To make it a proper test, you’d want to have two separate groups, and you’d want to blind them to the purpose of the study.)
As far as I know, this sort of test has never been conducted. There are studies that have taken non-speed-readers and tried to train them to speed read, but speed-reading proponents might claim that most people are untrainable (or that the studies’ training wasn’t good enough), so I’d rather test people who claim to already be good at speed-reading. And I’d want to test them against themselves or other speed-readers, because performance may be confounded by general reading comprehension ability. That is, I think that I personally could perform above 50th percentile on an SAT verbal test when given only 1⁄4 time, but that’s not because I can speed-read, it’s just because my baseline reading comprehension is way above average. And I expect the same is true of most LW readers.
Edit: I should add that I was already skeptical before I looked at the psych research just now. My basic reasoning was
Speed reading is “big if true”
It wouldn’t be that hard to empirically demonstrate that it’s real under controlled conditions
If such a demonstration had been done, it would probably be brought up by speed-reading advocates and I would’ve heard of it
But I’ve never heard of any such demonstration
Therefore it probably doesn’t exist
Therefore speed reading probably doesn’t work
Another similar topic is polyphasic sleep—the claim that it’s possible to sleep 3+ times per day for dramatically less time without increasing fatigue. I used to believe it was possible, but I saw someone making the argument above, which convinced me that polyphasic sleep is unlikely to be real.
A positive example is caffeine. If caffeine worked as well as people say, then it wouldn’t be hard to demonstrate under controlled conditions. And indeed, there are dozens of controlled experiments on caffeine, and it does work.
Hard to say, there is no good evidence either way, but I lean toward speed-reading not being a real thing. Based on a quick search, it looks like the empirical research suggests that speed-reading doesn’t work.
The best source I found was a review by Rayner et al. (2016), So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? It looks like there’s not really direct evidence, but there’s research on how reading works, which suggests that speed-reading shouldn’t be possible. Caveat: I only spent about two minutes reading this paper, and given my lack of ability to speed-read, I probably missed a lot.
If anyone claims to be able to speed-read, the test I would propose is: take an SAT practice test (or similar), skip the math section and do the verbal section only. You must complete the test in 1⁄4 of the standard time limit. Then take another practice test but with the full standard time limit. If you can indeed speed-read, then the two scores should be about the same.
(To make it a proper test, you’d want to have two separate groups, and you’d want to blind them to the purpose of the study.)
As far as I know, this sort of test has never been conducted. There are studies that have taken non-speed-readers and tried to train them to speed read, but speed-reading proponents might claim that most people are untrainable (or that the studies’ training wasn’t good enough), so I’d rather test people who claim to already be good at speed-reading. And I’d want to test them against themselves or other speed-readers, because performance may be confounded by general reading comprehension ability. That is, I think that I personally could perform above 50th percentile on an SAT verbal test when given only 1⁄4 time, but that’s not because I can speed-read, it’s just because my baseline reading comprehension is way above average. And I expect the same is true of most LW readers.
Edit: I should add that I was already skeptical before I looked at the psych research just now. My basic reasoning was
Speed reading is “big if true”
It wouldn’t be that hard to empirically demonstrate that it’s real under controlled conditions
If such a demonstration had been done, it would probably be brought up by speed-reading advocates and I would’ve heard of it
But I’ve never heard of any such demonstration
Therefore it probably doesn’t exist
Therefore speed reading probably doesn’t work
Another similar topic is polyphasic sleep—the claim that it’s possible to sleep 3+ times per day for dramatically less time without increasing fatigue. I used to believe it was possible, but I saw someone making the argument above, which convinced me that polyphasic sleep is unlikely to be real.
A positive example is caffeine. If caffeine worked as well as people say, then it wouldn’t be hard to demonstrate under controlled conditions. And indeed, there are dozens of controlled experiments on caffeine, and it does work.