Spot on. What's the point of reading 800 WPM if you don't remember a single thing you just read?
I was so annoyed by thoes tools that only track speed. I built a free alternative (https://testmyreading.com/) that actually tests your comprehension afterwards. Like you said, the real bottleneck is the brain, not the eyes. Keep up the good work!
Absolutely Tom. You mention redundancy in your comment, and that’s part of why the really good paper takes so much longer to read: none of it is redundant.
The other point is the purpose of reading the specific text. An airport page turner doesn’t need you to read every word carefully, and the gist is enough.
[Hello by the way. We met and chatted at the BPS Cog Sec conference a few years back. 🙂]
It is thank you. I’ve recently got into blogging on Substack, though I was subscribing to Reasonable People some years before I discovered Substack at all!
Great post, Tom. The subtext that I inferred from your post is about the information content versus the number of words. When the information content is high, you need to read slowly regardless of the number of words.
I have found in the past few years that when I suspect that text is AI written, I read it much faster because the LLMs tend to say little with many words and repeat themselves with different phrasing, so two paragraphs might only contain one "unit" of information.
yes, exactly. And I think one trick the viral posts use is to put low information / redundant information in the text they ask people to read using RSVP, then you feel like you are reading at that speed, but you're only successfully extracting 1/3rd of the information.
After this post a bunch of people have contacted me to say what they took from the RSVP version of the article - all have missed the material in the second half (what does work), so I also think there may be an effect that RSVP makes you overestimate your comprehension (because you can't dwell on what you miss/misunderstand)
Spot on. What's the point of reading 800 WPM if you don't remember a single thing you just read?
I was so annoyed by thoes tools that only track speed. I built a free alternative (https://testmyreading.com/) that actually tests your comprehension afterwards. Like you said, the real bottleneck is the brain, not the eyes. Keep up the good work!
Absolutely Tom. You mention redundancy in your comment, and that’s part of why the really good paper takes so much longer to read: none of it is redundant.
The other point is the purpose of reading the specific text. An airport page turner doesn’t need you to read every word carefully, and the gist is enough.
[Hello by the way. We met and chatted at the BPS Cog Sec conference a few years back. 🙂]
Hi Philip - yes, I remember meeting. Hope all is well with you
It is thank you. I’ve recently got into blogging on Substack, though I was subscribing to Reasonable People some years before I discovered Substack at all!
Great post, Tom. The subtext that I inferred from your post is about the information content versus the number of words. When the information content is high, you need to read slowly regardless of the number of words.
I have found in the past few years that when I suspect that text is AI written, I read it much faster because the LLMs tend to say little with many words and repeat themselves with different phrasing, so two paragraphs might only contain one "unit" of information.
yes, exactly. And I think one trick the viral posts use is to put low information / redundant information in the text they ask people to read using RSVP, then you feel like you are reading at that speed, but you're only successfully extracting 1/3rd of the information.
After this post a bunch of people have contacted me to say what they took from the RSVP version of the article - all have missed the material in the second half (what does work), so I also think there may be an effect that RSVP makes you overestimate your comprehension (because you can't dwell on what you miss/misunderstand)