5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out of Habit
Humans are funny when it comes to technology. We're eager to adopt new technologies when the difference is trivial, like camping out for days to buy the new iPhone when we still haven't figured out the old one. But at the same time, we also have a way of getting attached to worthless technologies of the past, just because it's too much hassle to change.
It turns out old habits die hard. And sometimes, they don't die at all.
#5.
The QWERTY Keyboard
Quick -- look at the very computer you're reading this on. Depending on your level of geekitude, you probably have a plasma monitor and a system running six terabytes of RAM powered by a flux capacitor. But in order to communicate with this futuristic device you probably call your Tardis, you're still using an archaic system that hasn't been improved since it was introduced 130 years ago. We're talking about your keyboard.
Why It's Inefficient:
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Besides not being able to take a punch.
When you rest your hands on the "home row" like they told you in high school, check out what keys you're touching -- A, S, D, F, J, K, L and semicolon. Besides A and S, you're looking at a conga line of some of the least-used letters in the English language and possibly the least useful punctuation mark of all time. In fact, your right index finger, the dominant finger on most people's dominant hand, is sitting on goddamn J, which is worth 8 points in Scrabble for a reason -- it's the fourth-least-used letter, trumped only by the loser letters X, Q and Z.
How did we wind up with this intuition-defying random configuration? Well, back in 1868, when Christopher Sholes and a couple of other guys had just finished inventing the first typing machine, the keys were arranged in alphabetical order (our current middle row shows vestiges of this, with A, D, F, G, H, J, K and L still in order). But there was a problem: Before long, people were mashing away on these fragile early keyboards, which had a tendency to jam when two keys next to each other were pressed in rapid succession.
Early versions of World of Warcraft were almost impossible to play.
So Sholes consulted a buddy who had studied up on letter-pair frequency, and he moved the keys that were most often typed together away from each other. After a few other minor tweaks, like moving up the R key, allegedly so that salesmen could impress buyers by typing the word "TYPEWRITER" using only the top row, we had our current QWERTY arrangement. Never mind that the most commonly used letters (E, T, A, O, I, N and S, respectively) were randomly scattered all over, and that it took forever every time you wanted to type "ESTONIA." Sholes wasn't trying to make the most ergonomically sound keyboard; in fact, QWERTY is deliberately engineered to slow you down so you don't have to worry about pesky typewriter jams.
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And so you don't have to put "awesome typing skills" on your insurance claim.
Why We're Stuck With It:
The only reason we're still tying our fingers in knots more than a century later is simply because QWERTY got here first.
Since then, several more "scientifically" designed keyboard layouts have been introduced, including Dvorak, Colemak and XPeRT, which no one's ever heard of but which has an extra "E" on the keyboard.
And then there's the E-board. Yes, we just did.
Now, debate rages over how much faster these alternatives are than QWERTY. But the fastest typist in the world used Dvorak to set her record, and it's hard to imagine that a layout with a semicolon in the home row would be as fast as one with an extra freaking E.
Speed aside, countless studies show that Dvorak and others are far more ergonomically efficient, requiring fingers to move approximately a third of the distance that QWERTY requires. Oh, and QWERTY also discriminates against right-handed people. Thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand. Maybe Sholes just wanted to hold his beer while he typed.
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Or maybe he lost it in a game of "Fuck Your Hand."
And yet, QWERTY shows little sign of going anywhere, all because of the "first mover" advantage -- everybody has already grown up knowing only one way to type, and nobody wants to completely relearn how to type for the possibility of slightly increased speed and comfort, at least until they get carpal tunnel.
#4.
Cursive
Virtually everyone reading this was made to learn cursive writing in school. Most of the people reading this are either in college or out of school completely, living in the adult world. So when was the last time you wrote something in cursive, other than your name? Do you even remember what a capital cursive Q looks like? Put your hand down, Quentin.
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And stop making racist comments in class.
Originating from the Latin cursivus, meaning "flowing," cursive developed in ancient languages to be a speedier way of writing by hand. And for many hundreds of years, it was. Also, nobody could read your handwriting.
Why It's Inefficient:
There's a reason nobody can read your goddamn signature -- cursive is hard to read. Many colleges forbid students from turning in exams written in cursive and present lectures via PowerPoint, not pretty P's and looping L's. Some say writing in cursive can help brain development, but so can printing. Also, kids can type far faster than they can write in cursive, and they can work on their grammar, syntax, spelling and idea flow much more efficiently on a computer than they can with a quill pen and parchment.
The drawback, of course, being that you can't stab someone with a computer.
But the main argument against cursive comes down simply to an allocation of classroom resources. If you somehow already know cursive, fine, but in these days of stretched school budgets and limited teaching time, some wonder whether we should really be devoting school resources to the world's stupidest way of putting words on paper.
Yet 90 percent of schools are still spending the recommended 60 weekly minutes teaching their second- and third-graders cursive. If that hour is going in, what are we sacrificing? Math? Cultural diversity? Phys ed? Our fat, racist, counting-on-their-fingers kids don't need to know how to make flowery Z's. Or at least, they need to know a lot of other things more.
Why We're Stuck With It:
There are some signs that cursive is on the way out. Ten percent of schools have stopped teaching it, which actually makes cursive even more inefficient, as 10 percent of kids now won't be able to read what everybody else is scribbling about.
But most schools are, for now, clinging to their curling C's, thanks to slow-to-change educational standards. Cursive was actually reinstated in Florida's school standards in 2006, amidst fears of students becoming too reliant on technology. Perhaps we should also reinstate hunting and gathering, over fears of becoming too reliant on grocery stores.
#3.
Summer Vacation
The standard "take three months off every summer" schedule that our schools use came about through a combination of fiscal limitations, hundred-year-old developmental theories and antiquated medical concerns that kids somehow couldn't hold up under year-round teaching.
You may have also heard that it's a vestige of farming days, when families needed the kids back on the farm. That's not really true -- that would have meant time off during spring and fall, for planting and harvesting. Either way, it's old-fashioned. And it's hurting our kids. Especially the poor ones.
Why It's Inefficient:
Three things happen when you take kids out of school for three months.
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Not to the teachers -- to the kids.
A. They get dumber. The human brain forgets things it doesn't use, and not many kids are doing fractions and reading Shakespeare during the summer. A recent Time article found that, on average, students lose around a month of math skills each summer. Kids who are poor and don't have access to summer enrichment programs do even worse: Low-income students lose as many as three months of reading comprehension. Other studies suggest that ninth-grade summer learning loss can be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups.
B. They need to be re-taught what they've forgotten, so kids wind up spending up to a month in the fall reviewing what they learned the previous year, when they could be moving ahead. Most countries that boast higher test scores have shorter summer breaks, and there could be a connection. Sure, some kids are going to be idiots and need to be re-taught things no matter what, but why exacerbate matters with 90 days with no math beyond counting how many levels are left before their Night Elf can get a Flying Mount?
Now what?
C. They get fatter. Brains aren't the only things that degrade when kids are left to three months of Halo 3 and nut-kick videos -- they also eat worse. Kids gain body mass twice as fast during the summer as during the school year. Most parents can't afford to take three months off work and babysit, or pay for day care, so without adults policing their intake, many kids are left to their own waddlesome devices.
Why We're Stuck With It:
And yet, more than two-thirds of people oppose the idea of year-round schooling. Summer vacation hasn't changed much in the last 100 years, and though a few schools are trying year-round classes, it's hard to imagine it catching on countrywide. Simply put, Americans just love their summers. They've been romanticized through adult memories and storybooks of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn spending their long summer days committing grifts and helping slaves escape. What could be more American than that?
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Maybe the Statue of Liberty giving the finger to winter.
Now, nobody's suggesting getting rid of vacations entirely -- after all, kids need to recharge, especially those who don't particularly like school. We also don't have the money to pay teachers and keep buildings open year-round, or to clean up after the riots that would inevitably ensue if such a thing were ever actually instituted.
But maybe we could spread the vacations around, like many of the countries that are kicking our ass do. Take the hottest month of summer off to save AC costs, and take the coldest month of winter off to save on heating. A one- or two- month summer is long enough to take family trips, take up a crappy summer job and prevent teachers from spiraling into a three-month abyss of dread and alcoholism.
How about the Kanji alphabet in the Japanese writing system?
ReplyFor those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's a explanation: the Japanese writing system has a basic alphabet called Hiragana which has 48 characters. And there's the Kanji alphabet, which has over 20,000 characters (I'm not making this up). But here's the funny thing: ALL possible meanings, spellings and pronunciations are covered by Hiragana. Kanji doesn't add anything new; it just reuses meanings used by Hiragana. This means that it's possible to say anything you want to say by using just the basic alphabet Hiragana, and Kanji is 100% redundant and pointless. Unfortunately, writing in just Hiragana is frowned upon in Japan, as apparently they're more interested in making their writings look diverse and fanciful than in conveying a message. As a result, everyone is forced to memorize thousands of Kanji characters, which takes a long time to do (school students must study how to write for plenty of years). And even then, you still won't have memorized all possible Kanji characters; there isn't a single person who knows them all. Because of this, it's extremely common even for educated adults to find Kanji characters they never saw and thus can't read when reading a newspaper or a book.
Another problem with this is that there are multiple ways of writing names due to the thousands of characters with repeated meanings, so it's impossible to know how a name you heard is supposed to be written. You must ask someone to write it so that you tell which characters are supposed to be used.
All of these unecessary problems and headaches would be adverted if they dropped the pointless Kanji alphabet and used mainly the basic alphabet, Hiragana. Plus, Japanese school students people would be able to learn how to write in less than a year, and schools would be able to use the other years to teach more stuff.
Yeah, but that's Japan. Nobody expects it to make any sense.
We've all been taught the metric system, but thinking metric is probably not going to happen here. Even though they officially use the metric system, a lot of people in England STILL use miles and pounds (not the currency) in conversation. Since in our country we have a third of a billion people whose brains are calibrated to comprehend the imperial system, that type of thinking will be too pervasive to go away any time soon if we ever officially convert.
ReplyI could deal with the end of summer breaks. I have a young child, and trying to find a daycare to take her for just a few months is a pain in the ass. You leave a daycare, you lose your spot. Daycare is less expensive than hiring a bored teenager, and our parents have jobs. My mother-in-law is self-employed and has a flexible schedule, but she lives forty-five minutes away in BFE - where there aren't jobs for us, and commuting is terrible in the winter. And she has a job. I have no idea what I'm going to do with my kid when she starts school.
ReplyI use cursive to take notes in class. It's faster than printing. I tend to not remember what I type, so handwriting works for me. I can't say I'm utterly attached to the idea or anything, but it's easy enough to learn from a book or the Internet. Kids probably don't actually need someone to teach them if they already know how to print. It's more or less the same concept.
I could give a f**k less about my keyboard. I type 80 wpm. But hey, if people want the option, why not have it available?
Oh, and part of the reason people are gung-ho on wine corks - mostly cheap wines use synthetic corks. If more expensive wines did it, people would start to get used to it.
the issue with summer vacation in Florida is that it's so f*****g hot you can't do anything outside without sweating till you shrivil from dehydration, even though you really want to go do something.
ReplyAnd you may be saying, "why not go to the pool?"
I don't find the idea of swimming in piss very appealing.
Great article!
ReplyAs for #1 also consider, what a pain in the ass it is for the whole world, that nearly all relevant websites are American, which means, that everytime, someone mentions his c**k lenght, we have to google for a cm-inch converter.
I wouldn'y mind ordering a Royale with Cheese instead of a Quarterpounder (thank you Vince Vega).
ReplyOkay, I rarely take the time to just bash an article. There are few things that annoy me as much as people just shitting all over someone's work because of personal preference, so I'll try to be respectful and keep in mind that these are just my own opinions and not facts.
ReplyI disagree with nearly everything in this article, for the simple reason that it seems to completely ignore personal preference for cold, simple facts. I understand where you're coming from, but logic has to be tempered with common sense. If we made all of our choices based on efficiency and numbers, none of us would waste our time watching TV, playing videogames, or reading funny articles on websites.
The thing that irked me the most was the writing off of summer vacation because it's been "romanticized" by "adult memories". I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that pleasant memories of childhood are something I treasure, and I don't see that as some kind of handicap. When I look back over my young life, I have exponentially more good memories of summer vacation than I do of the days spent sitting in a classroom.
You also seem to give quite a lot of credit to technology. Yes, people write faster on keyboards than on paper for the most part. Does that mean we should throw out handwriting completely? By that logic, the loss of math knowledge during the summer months doesn't matter because we can just use calulators for everything.
Again, I recognize that this is just my own opinion, and I appreciate the fact that you took the time to write an entertaining article for us all to read for free, but I have to respectfully disagree with some of your points.
"When I look back over my young life, I have exponentially more good memories of summer vacation than I do of the days spent sitting in a classroom"
...
And that's exactly what "romanticized by adult memories" means, you know?
"I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that pleasant memories of childhood are something I treasure"
So, a lot of people agree that pleasant memories of childhood are something that you treasure? You must be very popular! :P
The problem with loosing for example 1 month of math, is that it takes 1 month to learn again, time in which you displace 1 month of the more advanced stuff. So in that case instead of 1 month, you actually waste 3.
The idea isn't to get rid of vacation, but to spread it out in chunks. Socializing with other kids is as important as math... if someone can't function in society, they have to be REALLY good at math, and learn to take s**t all the time.
"If we made all of our choices based on efficiency and numbers, none of us would waste our time watching TV, playing videogames, or reading funny articles on websites."
I wouldn't be worried about that, most of the things being worked on is make boring stuff last less. Not that I use DVORAK, but typing everything in 2/3 the time means I'd have more freedom to do other things after I finish quicker.
It's enough to teach kids to read cursive, but being tough to type efficiently is going to help them out a lot more in the future. Not many places specifically ask you to write in cursive... just consider that cursive was mostly popular to avoid ink blots while writing with a quill, and I've never used a quill in my life.
As for loss of knowledge not mattering because we have calculators, even though it was said sarcastically I still feel the need to underline the importance of actually understanding the base operations going on when people press the buttons. This is usually the biggest problem with math-challenged college students when they start having to do complicated math of physics.
In South Africa, we study in school from January to December, with significantly more random days off and a two week break in between the school year.
Replythat sounds horrible...
There are some things that America uses metric on. Carats, the measurement of diamonds for example, are .2 grams. Not SI, but metric. Wine, even if it's made in the USA, is almost always in liter measurements, as is soda that's not in the store refrigerators. American coins are weird in that they do both. Nickels (roll weighs 200g) and (post 1982) pennies (2.5g each) are gram weights, while dimes and quarters are imperial weights (both weigh $20 a pound, as most grocery store cashiers can tell you\show you).
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOn the other hand, many countries I've been to use imperial for some things. Some countries still use calories instead of joules, most televisions are sold in inches, and many countries make their bullion in troy ounces.
Weirdest of all is when they try to combine the two. That's how you got this Russian system where an inch equaled exactly 2.5 cm, or Canadian football field of 110 yards, because a meter is about 1.1 yards.
An Inch IS 2.5 cm, it's not a Russian system, dipshit, it's a worldwide system. Yanks are the only people who use the "inches" clusterfuck as opposed to good ol' centimeters.
you are completely OFF YOUR ROCKER if you think that's why Canadian football fields are longer. Wow.
@Evil-Picachu
When it comes to dick lenth, you will see, that the difference between 2,5 and 2,54 IS important.
The United Kingdom uses a mix of Imperial (since they created it ) and Metric. Plus, F***k a metric system. The Metric system doesn't have any friends.
Replyyour gang don't really need anymore friends when the only ones not on your side is the smelly fat kid from over the river and the weird snobby conservative douche from your neighbourhood
cursive? just writing legibly is hard....
ReplySo if summer vacation is so terrible, how come j*pan is doing so well?
ReplyBesides, that's what summer homework is for. At least my schools had summer homework. I don't know what they do in schools in the midwest and the boonies. We had to read 5 books, write 2 book reports (mine was on "The Hobbit") and do something like 20 pages of math problems. Some schools even have you write a report on what you did for summer break. And it's graded heavily.
Then again, being on vacation for a week (or was it 2 weeks) can make your IQ drop by as much as 20 points. So with that logic, we should never have breaks at all!
We learn cursive because if we didn't kids would forget how to hand write at all. Trust me, my handwriting is terrible and very slow.
I don't relly know about America, but in Britain we seem to have a pretty good compromise on metric/imperial. We use metric for general measurements, but everyone accepts that there are certain things it's just nicer to measure in imperial, like people and drinks and distances long enough to be measure in miles. Officially everything's sold in metric units but most stuff comes in 473ml and everyone knows it's a pint. Just like we grow up knowing that 2.5cm=1" and 5miles=8km. It seems to work.
ReplyAnd qwerty discriminates against right-handed people? Get over it! Virtually everything else discriminates against lefties.
It's the same way in Canada, from what I hear. But since most Canadian big cities are near America, they really only use metric for official stuff. Like, they know how much a km is, but they'll use miles when talking to each other.
The great thing is that a metric tonne is the same as an imperial ton!
I you don't get tired of "metric s**tload", just replace your "gallon" of ice cream with it, why not?
ReplyAnd no, you don't need to use imperial system to know that someone who's 7' will be taller than someone who's 6'...
Oh please, america uses the metric system all the time! why, just today, I told my dealer I needed 2 GRAMS. See? metric!
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesPick up a ruler. "INCHES".
I don't think porcupineweirdo got it....
Not only did he not get it, he's apparently never flipped over a ruler.
I will say that I will miss cursive when it finally goes. Not for me. I hate writing in it because it takes me so long, but that's probably because I only learned it in about 6 months during second grade and applied it for the next four years or so. My grandmother took class after class specifically on handwriting. She has the most beautiful scripted hand I've ever seen and she's fast, too. Even though she's 87 and has practically lost her mind. There's something wonderful about how much that stays with her.
ReplyWe use cursive because "it looks pretty"? Are you f**king kidding me? I'm an adult with dignity and self-respect and I don't give a damn about how "pretty" my handwriting looks.
ReplyHow about this: we'll adopt metric if the rest of the world gets behind Fahrenheit. I can't really support any system in which the difference between Norway and North Africa is 15 or 20.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesYeah, because basing a temperature scale on a 100 unit gradation between where water changes primary states makes SO much less sense than... what, exactly, was Fahrenheit based on again? No googling. But never mind, as your argument seemed to be based on the numbers weren't big enough.
How is Fahrenheit better than Celsius? In the Celsius scale 0 is frozen water and 100 is boiling water.
Just about everybody in the world knows what water is. Just about everybody in the world knows how hot/cold boiling water/solid ice is. So just about everybody can pick up the Celsius scale with ease.
On the Fahrenheit scale 0 is below freezing and 100 is nowhere near boiling, and that is really confusing as hell.
How about we ditch Celcius as well and just go all-out on Kelvin?
Big numbers usually serve for compensating purposes, ya know?
I'm with you Abu. Celsius is ugly anyways. But I ain't dropping the Imperial System either.
I know it's based on sludgy water and what the body is supposed to be, but it does offer a unique benefit. If you are over 100 degrees, you have a fever. That's pretty convenient. The world over knows water, but the world over also knows illness. At the very least, the benefit of better precision in temperature is useful. Every American can tell you that every ten degrees means something else. Nineties means swimming, eighties means short sleeves, seventies is the most pleasant weather, sixties means a light jacket, etc. It's all fairly systematic.
i write in cursive because i can and think it's pretty. i get compliments on how nice it looks but bulls**t aside, no one can read it. it really is a waste of time even if it looks kind of cool.
Replyalso i've gone to school in germany and america and can say summer break is really making us americans fall behind. in germany, they get spread out breaks and it works great. being that i am american though, i am stuck to the tradition of loving my summer break. kind of sucks to have that nostalgia, the whole system of big seasonal breaks instead of one huge break is a lot smarter and seems more beneficial to releaving stress. also i would get really bored come mid-july before i had a car.
The home row method is an insanely s**tty way to type. I feel bad for all the people who learned to do it that way, because it sucks.
ReplySee...I never really payed attention in "typing" class....or whatever the hell it was called...I don't use the homerow, I just use muscle memory to remember where the keys are in comparison to each other...
Do I make mistakes? Yes. Am I fast typer? Could be faster. Do I really give a damn? Not really.