Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)

[Ilikepurple]

47. I think it would be interesting to hear your wives anecdotes, but you only mentioned analog clocks in your prior post.

I do applaud your wife for choice of field and obvious dedication to the betterment of others. Only you can decide the form of justification you use to base your beliefs, but in a public forum when you share your belief as if it was knowledge, you may be asked what that justification is. Do you really think many of us are not reasonably educated older parents with real world experience related to the generational cognitive development? I’m not saying you’re not justified based on your personal anecdotal evidence, but you shouldn’t expect wholesale agreement on that basis.

Every time lamenting about the demise of cursive comes up here and in the media, it starts with talking about cursive and ends with comparing studies where writing is compared to typing or simply degenerates into a discussion of all the skills we learned that the current generation is missing.
The argument, as generally presented out of order, seems to be as follows:
1. Studies show that Writing has beneficial effects on motor skills and information retention
2. Cursive is a writing
3. Therefore, learning cursive in addition to manuscript has beneficial effects on motor skills and information retention
This argument is invalid as it’s missing a premise. The missing premise is that “manuscript writing is not a writing.” This is false , so the argument fails as it is unsound. This does not mean the conclusion is false, but that the argument provided fails.

It always gives me pause when I’m presented with a fallacious argument, especially in conclusions about studies. Sometimes it’s just the writer’s failure to state their argument clearly, but often the reason a stronger argument is not given is because the studies don’t actually support the desired conclusion. This seems to be the case the many times I’ve seen this argument. Often, our advocacy for a position our experience and intuition gives rise to takes precedence over the search for the truth.

It was not clear that your statement was based on your wife’s anecdotal knowledge but rather it implied that the cognitive impact of the use of cursive over manuscript was established by science. If it was, it would be easy to find studies that unambiguously say so. The studies I’ve seen actually show that it is writing, cursive or manuscript, that has beneficial cognitive effects over typing. That doesn’t mean your wife isn’t more of an expert on the issue than I, but expertise alone often doesn’t settle the truth of claims. People like your wife are wellsprings of information on these kinds of matters, so I’m as wary of discounting her anecdotal experiences as I am taking those experiences as definitive. You and your wife might be right, but I’m suspending judgment for now as I think the issues highlighted by Ancianita in #17 are more pressing. This isn’t the last we’ll hear of the issue and I think that is good as I don’t think it has been settled.