I've read the original paper before, and I think people are misusing its title and the number 7. If you read closely, the conclusion of 7 being a magic number i

I've read the original paper before, and I think people are misusing its title and the number 7. If you read closely, the conclusion of 7 being a magic number is a bit of satire. In fact, just think about the title itself, a "magic number" with such a wide range? The paper discusses various studies where the "magic number" (mean) varies between 5 to 12. And at the end Miller sort of throws his hands up and poetically concludes, "And finally, what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week?" So it's pretty clear "7 plus or minus 2" is not meant to be interpreted quantitatively, but rather it's that: depending on the task, there is some limit to our working memory. I think a more accurate title would be "humans seem to use chunking for various short-term memory tasks". And should be tempered by the standards of rigor from the past; compare Miller's paper to the precision in a recent paper like this one: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/151291/1/Thalmann.et.al.Chunking.final.pdf https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/151291/1/Thalmann.et.al.Ch... Cue all the spammy "10 UX design principles that everyone must know" articles that put the number 7 on a pedestal...