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7speedreading provides speed-reading software that claims:

You Will Read 3.471 Times Faster, With Full Comprehension. Or We'll Not Only Refund Your Investment… We'll PAY You $50. All you need to do is use our award-winning speed reading software for only seven minutes a day—for two weeks. That’s it.

[...]

When you learn to speed read with 7 Speed Reading, you’ll not only maintain your reading comprehension level – it will actually improve.

Is there evidence that the software upholds it's promise?

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    "3.471 Times Faster" Not 3.472 times faster? Quoting something like this to that precision makes me think they are BSing. – JasonR Mar 07 '16 at 19:58
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    @JasonR I could imagine that they did a study/test or had someone external do it, and the number that came out said 3.741. And instead of saying "on average X" or "up to Y", marketing decided to call it "exactly X.YZ". I'm not saying that the claim or offer sounds sensible to me, but they may have at least *some* kind of data to back up that exact number. – tim Mar 07 '16 at 21:40
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    @tim An actual *measurement* will always have the form of *two* numbers (average measurement and standard deviation or some other statistically equivalent pair). A single number like that is at least misrepresenting the facts, but more likely it is made up. – Sklivvz Mar 08 '16 at 00:29
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    @Mustang : The promise is faster & higher comprehension. I'm not seeing that you get that by reading Amazon reviews or otherwise trying to skip supposed repetition. – Christian Mar 08 '16 at 14:53
  • You have to consider quality as well as quantity. The vast majority of modern writing is endless repetition and dawdling, so you could easily read 100x faster just by looking at the books wikipedia page. – D J Sims Mar 09 '16 at 02:11
  • The number with such precision is senseless of course. I would also avoid calling it 'faster' reading because the question is where this particular software is used and tested. But if consider the reading "workload", _big_ improvement is not so unrealistic, if compare to some really bad layout, bad fonts and also try to predict the effect for long term usage. Very good layout versus average browser page can be actually _much_ easier to read and this problematic imho is underestimated. – Mikhail V May 07 '16 at 17:10
  • In other words, if I give my patients recommendations about fixing problems with text source, line length, lighting then calculate this together, then improvement can be seen. But if they claim about improvement _in general reading bility_ for the person who reads already good, this is pure BS. – Mikhail V May 07 '16 at 17:20

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