I think that's just laziness. If you need to memorize a number it just takes a few minutes of work, and then some reinforcement later.
Actually it's been well documented that human capacity in working memory is 7±2[1]. This is why phone numbers were initially 7 digits.
It certainly is possible to memorize long strings with sustained repitition, but this is usually meaured in weeks or months even if practiced every day.
It's not "lazy" to be unable to perform at the far right of the bell curve in terms of recall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
It's certainly to memorize something short term (eg repeat your QQ number over and over for a period of time) but there needs to be spaced repetition over longer periods to make that memorization permanent.
Feel free to provide specific citations, as I did in my parent comment, if you would like to disagree further.
Interesting tactic, feel free to provide something other than your own opinion that it is "irrelevant"
I'd encourage you to actually read the study you're attempting to "cite" by linking to a poorly written Wikipedia summary. Here's the actual link: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/
If you read it, you'll find that it makes absolutely no claim about the long-term memorization of numbers outside of the range "7 plus or minus 2" -- instead, it's discussing what it terms "immediate memory", your ability to perform tasks such as mapping specific tones to numbers on the fly, or repeat a series of number you've just been told for the first time, and how your conscious working "scratchpad memory" quickly becomes overwhelmed.
Indeed, the very paper you're "citing" disagrees with you entirely. He notes that subjects can very quickly memorize much larger numbers, but that this does not invalidate his claim re: working memory because this is simply accomplished by chunking the number to be memorized into segments compatible with the conscious mind's small working set.
Again: you have completely misunderstood the paper in question, and are incorrectly conflating "working memory" and "memorization capacity", which are very very different things.
Current theories about long term memory (or "memorization capacity") consider it infinite in capacity.
I cannot find anything to substantiate this claim. Is your statement applicable only to a single country?
In the US, it seems like phone numbers started with a few digits only and progressively got longer over time; I can’t find any reference to starting purposefully with 7 digits for memorizability reasons.
This quora post summarizes nicely - Bell standardized on 7 for local (10 counting area code) based on the research I cited earlier:
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Bell-Labs-create-phone-numbers...
By "initially" I meant "when telephones began to become mainstream and part of everyday life" - sorry for the confusion.
It gets progressively harder with length, and takes time. (As I mentioned, spaced over days and weeks).
If you want to memorize something in the short term, 7±2 chunks is often the limit. This is why passphrases are pushed - you can easily recall 7 easily memorable "chunks" that when translated into bits contain much more than seven bits of information.
e: no seriously though. With area code, phone numbers already are 10 digits. Are you baiting?
Though I think your implication is right that bell studies showed the average limit was 7 numbers for many people.
Credit card numbers are a good example of this.
Well, people who don't learn a different language from their own are certainly "lazy" but this laziness includes the majority of humanity. Moreover, this laziness has been the motor of nationalist feelings that world over.
"“Not everyone in China has perfect grasp of pinyin. If websites have pinyin names, it might actually be difficult for some people to figure out which letters to write,” she said. A string of numbers is easier to commit to memory than words in a foreign language."
IE, a read of the article shows how laziness actually generates a lot of the use of numbers in the contemporary Chinese Internet.
On a mass scale, the path of least resistance is a powerful shaper of society. Sure, you may personally put in the effort to learn digits and that extra language and so-forth. Just don't expect that to be what conditions the form of daily life.
Certainly most people in Europe know more than one language, most people in Africa(poor people) and most people in Asia, most people in South America. Most people from Canada.
It is just people of the USA, because they just can get by with just one language.
But this is like using Imperial Units. The (North)Americans even forced the rest of the world not to use metric, like in aviation(French and Germans of course used meters for it in WWII).