🔢The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

There is a ceiling on how much a person can take in at once and hand straight back, and it is low: about seven, give or take two, whether the task is telling tones apart on one scale or repeating a list after one hearing. The way round it is not a larger memory. It is recoding: grouping what comes in into bigger units, so that the same handful of slots carries more. He suspects the two sevens are a coincidence, and says so.

What I can lean on it for. That attention is a small, fixed budget and the product has to spend it for the dispatcher. Not that seven is the right length for anything. The unit is the chunk and not the item: 💡 Miller's seven counted chunks, not items.

• Read, despite the thin layout. Seventeen pages on Saturday 2 August, after an hour on the estuary wall with Edith's binoculars failing to tell a curlew from a whimbrel. Finished on Sunday.
• I went looking for a citation, not an education. The merged roadmap was due on the 8th, and I wanted one respectable sentence for why the default exception list should be short. The argument goes back to the pilot and to 📂 Exceptions Inbox general availability: 214 open exceptions per dispatcher before nine on a Tuesday.
• It is a lecture written down, and a funny one. He opens by complaining that a number has been following him around.
• What I expected: people can hold seven things. What it says: two different limits that both happen to land near seven, and a method, recoding into chunks, that gets round one of them. The summary everyone repeats is the least interesting sentence in it.
• Three stars. A good paper, used by me as a blunt instrument.
• Notes in 📖 Miller on the limits of working memory. The correction I owe the internet is 💡 Miller's seven counted chunks, not items.