| ▲ | reaperducer 7 hours ago |
| Sneaky age filter? You must be young enough to remember your SAT scores. I can remember mine just fine. If you're really looking for smart people, use "Answer this word problem in two or more paragraphs. Write your answer on the sheet of paper provided. In cursive." |
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| ▲ | consensus1 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The signal being that the smart people will refuse to jump through this hoop in your inane process because they have a lot of other opportunities to choose from. |
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| ▲ | margalabargala 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are people who were forced to learn cursive smarter? They're just older. Doing this may well expose you to age discrimination lawsuits, since it's just sneaky indirect age filtering. Another example would be if you required a minimum SAT score of 1601. Sure, someone could have gone off and taken the SAT as an adult or a young child but in reality it is mainly an age filter. |
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| ▲ | apparent 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Are people who were forced to learn cursive smarter? They're just older. My kids are learning cursive in elementary school right now, FWIW. | | | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are people who were forced to learn cursive smarter? By definition, people who know more things are smarter than people who know fewer things. That's just how it works. For centuries, people have striven to improve themselves through the acquisition of knowledge and skills. It is a quirk of recent generations that so many members take pride in their lack of knowledge. I'm repeatedly bewildered by my Millennial colleagues who proudly say "I don't know what that means," or boast "I don't know what that is" with no sense of shame. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I may be able to help with that bewilderment. Imagine, you have two people. Person A knows cursive, person B does not. Person B knows the ins and outs of Newtonian physics, person A does not. Which person is smarter? Which person would the cursive test say is smarter? What you seem to have mistook for people not knowing things without shame, is people valuing knowledge not by the preponderance of its quantity but by its total when multiplied by its utility. Otherwise I do not envy the shame you must feel at lacking the knowledge of which plants are edible, how to.clean a carcass, how to fashion a needle from bone and an axe from stone, the mixture of clays to use to make your bricks, and all manner of other once-necessary tidbits whose usefulness has lapsed for the general population. | | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The person who knows cursive can go on to learn Newtonian physics. Now he knows two things. While your supposed hero still only knows one. | | |
| ▲ | igregoryca 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to learn cursive handwriting. Except this version of me was already in his 20s, would be out of school in a matter of months, and quickly realized the skill would be of such marginal utility in the future that it wasn't worth the hours spent tracing out giant letters like a kindergartener every day. One could learn this skill in their 20s or beyond, but there's an opportunity cost – why not something else that would actually improve work performance, or that you enjoy doing? I still wish I'd been taught in elementary school, though, because it would've been really useful as a student. Some of our teachers discreetly handed out practice booklets to students who'd "expressed interest" (their parents taught them the basics and teacher noticed); most of us were not so lucky. | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The person who knows physics can go on to learn cursive, should they choose. "Knowing cursive" is not specially indicative of one's intelligence. |
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| ▲ | xboxnolifes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure the definition of smart is so clear cut. If anything, that falls closer under the definition of knowledgeable. |
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| ▲ | khuey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Having to write the "I did not cheat" pledge in cursive was the most difficult part of the SAT for me. |
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| ▲ | crooked-v 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| "In cursive" is just filtering for people old enough to have been taught cursive. |
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| ▲ | spullara 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | sadly my kids were just recently taught cursive in elementary school for some unknown reason | | |
| ▲ | wavemode 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Learning it is mostly useful for being capable of reading it, esp. when encountering historical documents (or when encountering old people) | | |
| ▲ | boring_twenties an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I can tell you that while women appreciate romantic electronic messages, they appreciate handwritten ones 10-100x more | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or encountering California license plates. Or finding Walgreens. Not wanting to learn cursive is like not wanting to know lower case just because caps lock exists. |
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| ▲ | inerte 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I learned in Brazil. Here in the California I asked my son's kindergarten teacher if she would teach cursive, and she said they don't teach calligraphy and I've never seen it described this way, but she's right. |
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