Comment by mshekow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mshekow | Hacker News Reader

Another post of these "I read N times faster than the rest and still remember >= 90% of it" high-achievers ;) (no hard feelings).

There's ample evidence that such kinds of speeds are not generally possible with every kind of book. See e.g. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-re...

I did take speed reading courses myself. Sure, it helps you speed-read, skimming over sections that seem unfamiliar, and detect when you need to slow down, because the subject matter becomes too unfamiliar/new. I've also had the impression that retention improves a bit after the couple of training days - at least that's what the workshop instructor makes you believe (it's their job to sell success and good feelings so that you recommend the course to your peers).

In the end, I highly doubt that anyone who claims to have such high speeds is sincere. The simple fact is that marking text with a highlighter, making notes (with a pen) and thinking about the content (do you?) takes time. If you accounted for that and took the average, you'd get lower numbers. And that is fine.

I do think people who read a lot can read faster simply because sentences and subjects look similar to things they've read before. I mean if you read three Steve Jobs biographies in a row you can skim read some segments that look familiar, just scan for things that are new / told differently.

I can't read books fast because I don't read enough. Not books anyway, comments on the internet on the other hand, far too many. But I skim / skip / don't retain most of them.

It’s even more nonsense when you look at recall over longer periods of time. If you look at forgetting curves (like Ebbinghaus) no matter how well you read a book there’s no way after a month you’ll remember more than say 10%. I don’t think that’s so bad if you take care to take the most valuable abstract concepts and rules from books.

Oh absolutely agree with reading speeds being different for different books (I actually had that line earlier, I shortened the post to just mention the principles though).

This post was not meant at all as a silly braggy post about speed reading, not that speed reading is anything to brag about in the first place. Why I say these things changed my life is because, it doesn't matter whether I read 100 books or half a book. What matters is if I learnt just one single principle from it which I actually use. Some of the things mentioned in the post such as taking notes and writing a summary at the end truly helped with that.

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