What if non-specialist teachers taught all mandatory courses?

My high school history teacher passed away recently. I think he was a good teacher, so while trying to think of something to write in his obit's guestbook I was trying to think of why I think he's a good teacher. And what I came up with is he got the material into my head. History was neither my favourite nor my least favourite subject. I don't have any particular passion for it, and I only took the required course. But this teacher easily and painlessly got me to a mindset where, even 15 years later, the material that is relevant to whatever I'm doing or thinking about is there in my head. When we were talking about a coalition government last year, I could name-check King-Byng and modify a well-known historical quote to come up with coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition. I knew enough about the Upper Canada Revolution that I groked and could banter with @RebelMayor. I know what the Boer War was and how Canada got caught up in it. I know why we have Catholic schools, and I know why so many of my co-workers are ex-Catholic. I can name-check all the major characters and plot points from both world wars. I know what a Bennett buggy is and what the On-to-Ottawa Trek was. I don't know everything about everything, but I have a solid grounding and know where I need to do more research. While this teacher must have had a passion for history, it didn't permeate his work - which was a good thing! In his classroom, we could simply learn the material without being expected to pour our whole heart and soul into it, and it stuck.

In comparison, my Grade 12 English teacher had a passion for literature, and that made me detest the subject matter. He loved comparing and analyzing and dissecting, and I simply don't care that much any more once the story is over. Even the few glimmers of interest that arose naturally were promptly extinguished, smothered by his constant demand. I found a Shakespearian sonnet that spoke to me, and got marked down in my analysis of it for not drawing religious parallels. I memorized and understood Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and lost marks for not being able to write it out with the exact same punctuation. I thought Newspeak was kind of cool and was in a headspace where I could have made a rudimentary attempt at drawing parallels with the language choices of current politicians, but we had to have a fricking debate about it in front of the whole class! Overall, we studied about half a dozen major works from generally-accepted Western literary cannon (plus poetry and ISU), learned the whole hubris-hamartia-downfall thing, and I found a few things that piqued my interest. That should have been enough for a required course, but this teacher put me right off with assignments that simply didn't work out unless you had the level of passion for the subject matter that he had and I didn't.

I've had this happen in other subject areas too. Teachers who are passionate about subjects I'm indifferent about smother any sparks of interest I might have developed, whereas teachers who are more blasé make subjects I wouldn't normally care about seem more approachable without hindering any existing interest.

So, to address this, what if all required courses in school were taught by non-specialist teachers? They didn't study the subjects in university, they don't have any particular passion for them, but they learned them in high school just like everyone else and now have to refamiliarize themselves in order to teach them. So they understand what it's like to struggle with the subject matter or to have to figure it out despite a lack of enthusiasm, and can get the basics into everyone's brains. Students who then find the subject particularly interesting can go on to study it in elective courses taught by specialist teachers who also have a passion for the subject matter, while students who don't particularly care can absorb the basics without having the subject ruined by a teacher's enthusiasm for fussy and finicky aspects of the subject matter.

Refining Scott Adams' tax model

Scott Adams proposed a tax model where the rich support the poor. I've thought of a modification whereby businesses support the unemployed and underemployed.

We begin by identifying what I will define as the "corporate tax pool". The corporate tax pool is a dollar amount equal to a fair, reasonable, and comfortable living (for mathematical simplicity, we'll say $50,000) multiplied by the number of people in Canada.

In lieu of whatever the current method for calculating corporate tax is, every company's taxes owing is equal to their share of the corporate tax pool. A company's fair share of the corporate tax pool is determined by calculating their business revenues as a percentage of Canada's total business revenues. If, for example, a large corporation's revenues are equal to 1% of all of the business revenue generated in Canada, then that corporation is responsible for paying 1% of the entire corporate tax pool.

However, from this tax payable is deducted the total salary and benefits the corporation pays to its employees. So if the corporation's payroll is equal to or greater than its share of the corporate tax pool, it doesn't pay any taxes. If its payroll is less than its share of the corporate tax pool, it pays taxes. The taxes collected through the corporate tax pool pay for social assistance for people who are unemployed or underemployed.

Ultimately, all businesses collectively have to pay for all people collectively. They can do so by hiring people, paying them salary, and getting productive and/or revenue-generating work out of them, or by paying taxes that are used to fund social assistance. I know that in my current job, the revenue I generate for my employer is between two and three times my salary, so if it's a choice between paying taxes to support me or hiring me as a worker, hiring me wins by far.

Things I haven't figured out yet: Might this somehow create an incentive for employers to pay employees no more than $50,000? Conversely, if there's high unemployment but very high salaries for the jobs that do exist, could that leave the unemployed high and dry? Is it fairer to use revenue or profit to calculate each company's fair share of the corporate tax pool? (I chose revenue because my understanding is that a company can use accounting tricks to appear to have very low profit on paper, but it's possible I'm missing something.)

Edited to add: Another thing I haven't figured out is the impact of public sector, not-for-profit, and other employers that wouldn't pay taxes. I know that there are an awful lot of public sector jobs (the number half a million comes to mind but I'm not sure if that's right), but they'd be operating outside this whole system. I'm not sure how this would affect it. The easiest workaround I can think of at this precise moment is to subtract the number of employees of non-tax-paying employers from the calculation of the corporate tax pool, but there would still be other impacts I can't see.

Cars and yelling

This post is further to this braindump.

I've noticed a correlation between driving and yelly/angry behaviour.

A friend of mine once worked for the City of Toronto in a number of different offices, and she said that by far the most anger she ever faced was in the parking office. People get way more disproportionately angry about parking tickets or not being allowed to park where they want or not being able to find a parking spot than anything else. That is consistent with my own observations of life in general.

For the purposes of constructing a sensible sentence, I'm going to deem the set of all the people who have ever been the driver of a car in which I was a passenger "my drivers". I'd say a good 80% of the anger I have witnessed from my drivers has occurred while they were driving, even though the vast majority of the time I have spent with these people has been outside of the car.

My yelly fast-food customers were nearly all drivers, and actually most of the yelly behaviour came through the drive-thru.

Rob Ford's angry demographic skews towards drivers. And again, I'm supporting and they're opposing policies that would make driving less necessary.

Is driving scary? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving stressful? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving disempowering? No. Driving increases empowerment and agency and resilience.

So why does it correlate with an increase in anger and yelling?

Hate speech braindump (part 1 of ???)

I support hate speech laws, and I'm the only person I know who does. Unfortunately, I've never been able to articulate usefully why exactly I do support hate speech laws. However, the more I think and learn about it, and the more I'm exposed to the efforts of everyone I know to convince me otherwise, the more I become convinced that hate speech laws are a good idea. But I still can't articulate why. So I'm going to braindump around the concept and see what I can come up with. You can try to debate me if you want, but you're totally going to win right now because my thoughts aren't words yet.

1. There's a parenting technique whereby siblings are to be left to sort out their interpersonal problems among themselves I've blogged about my experience with it here. The problem for me is that what I wanted was to be left alone. It didn't hurt anyone, it didn't demand anything of anyone. But what my sister wanted was apparently to bother me, to stop me from having privacy, to make sure that I didn't get what I wanted. The same thing with my bullies. Leave me alone, either work civilly with me or ignore me in class, let me read my book. But what they wanted apparently was to bother me. What I wanted had no impact on anyone else; what they wanted was specifically to bother me. But this technique of letting kids sort out their own interpersonal problems treated them both as equally valid. It didn't give any credit to the fact that I wasn't hurting anyone, I wasn't bothering anyone. Because they did want to hurt and bother, they were good at it; because I didn't want to hurt and bother, I was bad at it. Therefore, they always won, and the net result was that someone was hurt and bothered. Which is, objectively, a negative outcome, whereas if I had been left alone the outcome would have been neutral or perhaps even positive.

My child-self didn't have these negative skills of hurt and bothering, but she did have the positive skills of amusing herself quietly without hurting or bothering. In a society, these are excellent, helpful, even productive skills to have, and if our child society had been mediated by adults, my child-self would have been left alone to be productive and our little corner of society would have been better for it. But when kids are left to their unmediated anarchy, these positive skills are worthless and the negative outcomes prevail, to the detriment of all but the lowest common denominator.

There needs to be…something, some way of mediating discourse to prevent the people with the best bullying skills from winning just because they have the best bullying skills. There needs to be some way of giving more credit or weight to positions that are productive as opposed to positions that are harmful. There needs to be some way of creating a public environment in which people can't bully their way to credibility. Without this, we may as well be back on the playground.

2. Go read Death or Cake and them come back here (this is an archive.org page and the formatting is messed, so you have to scroll down about halfway before the content starts). In this particular article they're talking about US political parties, but let's take it as broader interpretation: the contingent calling for Cake is being opposed by a contingent calling for Death. This reminded me of something I wrote during the last municipal strike. It uses up a lot of time and energy and bandwidth and column space and airtime to have to constantly counter shouts of "Death! Death!" It's draining, and it's preventing us from being productive. Maybe Cake isn't the optimal solution, but all the energy we're putting into countering calls for Death is preventing us from being able to to build a better cake, or maybe a pie instead.

We need…something, some way of taking Death off the table, so we can examine Cake objectively. How do we make it work for vegans and diabetics? I have a great recipe for gluten-free cookies! What if there was a nice salad? We can't do this when we're frantically trying to negotiate down to a maiming.

3. A while back, I read this article by a US columnist on Canadian hate speech laws, and I got the impression that he isn't seeing something that's apparent to me. I'm still not able to fully articulate my reaction (although I can point to the exact part of my brain where it occurs), but I think at least part of it is that the concept of hate speech is far more closely circumscribed than this columnist - or, I think, people who are opposed to hate speech in general - realize. You can't just point at someone saying something you don't like and scream "Hate speech!" and get them in trouble. And any idea with some actual non-hate substance to it can totally be expressed in a way that doesn't constitute hate speech.

I don't have on hand any real examples of hate speech with substance beneath, so I'll try to explain this using the Death or Cake example. Suppose that, rather than simply shouting "Death! Death!", the Death contingent was saying "You know, we have a bit of an overpopulation problem here…" We could work with that. We could start talking about improving access to family planning or introducing voluntary euthanasia options. It would not only save a whole lot of time and energy and yelling, but also keep anyone from being maimed in the name of "reasonable" compromise.

That is part (not all) of the nuance of what constitutes hate speech. "Death! Death! Death to Those People!" is hate speech. "We have an overpopulation problem. " is not. That's part of why the more I think about it, the more I support the existence of hate speech laws. It's a little step in the general direction of giving a bit more weight to productive positions. It's a little step towards taking Death off the table so we can focus on the real issue of controlling overpopulation while keeping the existing population from starving. It stops people from being able to go around doing harm just because they're bigger and louder like the bullies. And maybe if my bullies had been forced to say what it was they wanted from me, why exactly they wouldn't just leave me alone and what exactly they hoped to accomplish, maybe we could have had a situation where everyone was happier and no one was bothered.

4. When I say that any idea with non-hate substance can be expressed in a way that doesn't constitute hate speech, some of you are probably thinking "But not everyone is as good with words as you are! How can you say - and this in a blog post full of 'I can't quite articulate' - that people should get in trouble just because they can't express the precise connotation they need?" But that's how the rest of the world works. If I want to compliment a subordinate on her outfit, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that cannot be interpreted as sexual harassment. If I joke to the woman waiting in front of me in line that we should shoplift our purchases and then it turns out she's a police officer, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that makes it clear I'm not actually planning to shoplift. If I want to tease you about something, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that isn't cruel. So why should the people making the most hateful statements in our collective discourse get a bye?

5. Hate speech laws are to free speech as libel/slander laws are to freedom of the press.

6. As I've written about before somewhere, I do well in a society, but wouldn't do well in anarchy or a survivalist situation. I've found something I'm good at, and someone pays me money to do that, and then I can trade that money for things I need. In exchange for contributing what I can and keeping out of everyone else's way the rest of the time, I have enough food and shelter that keeps the bugs away and time and space to learn and think and grow. And a lot of the reason why this works is because of laws. Because we have laws, my employer pays me what's due to me, my landlord doesn't kick me out or raise my rent every month, the grocery store sells me food at the posted price and the food isn't poisonous, etc. This allows people like me who aren't good at fighting for their very survival to participate and even thrive, and it also allows our society as a whole to ascend Maslow's pyramid. I think hate speech laws do the same thing for discourse. It takes death off the table so we can work on building a better cake while also solving the overpopulation problem, all without anyone getting maimed along the way.

That's all the words I have at the moment, and it feels like somewhere around 20-30% of what's in my brain. More later.

Powerlessness and yelling and rudeness and job security and Toronto politics: messiest braindump ever

Last August, I read this Miss Conduct post about how rudeness comes from a lack of power.

My first thought was "This is HUGE! I must blog about it!" And I've had writer's block ever since. I know what I want to say but I can't make it into a blog post, so I'm just brute force braindumping. Each of these points should be developed into a couple hundred words, but I'll just spew now and maybe clean it up later. There's something in here, and I'm not going to get at it unless I braindump.

1. My first thought was about childhood. When you're a kid - or at least when I was a kid and based on my experience with other kids - you yell more. That's because you're powerless. You're completely at the mercy of the grownups and their rules. I've blogged about this many times before. As I became a proper grownup and especially because I started living alone, I found myself yelling much less. It's not that I became more polite, it's that I became better able to be polite. I had the [insert word that's halfway between "empowerment" and "agency"] to be polite, because I had the option of walking away.

2. This became even more pronounced when I got my first proper grownup Good Job. It was easier to be polite, and it was easier not to yell, because I was suddenly in a position that is, by general social standards, respectable. On one hand the world treated me with more respect, and on the other hand I had the security and the confidence, and, frankly, the trump card of paying my own way. More "power" (insofar as this can be considered power - it's more privilege but emotionally it fits the originally analogy) meant fewer people were aggravating me, fewer stresses were aggravating me, and it was way hella easier to be polite and not yell.

3. My second thought was about working in fast food when I was a teen. The restaurant was located in a poshish suburb, where people had big houses and fancy cars. And they yelled. Looking at it with adult retrospect, I can't see where they were coming from. Why would you yell at a fast food cashier? So you have to wait two minutes for fries, or you have to pull around away from the pay window, or someone accidentally drops your change. Why is that even on your radar? As an adult with a proper grownup job - albeit one that's nowhere near posh enough to buy big houses and cars - I can't even imagine caring. So why didn't money/power/privilege buy them the calm that it bought me?

4. At this point, I realized that I'd drifted away from rudeness vs. power and into yelling and anger vs. privilege and respect. But I know in my gut it's the same thing or closely related. So that's why this blog post got paralyzed way back in August.

5. And then Rob Ford got elected mayor of Toronto.

6. Rob Ford yells. People who are inclined to vote for Rob Ford think he's down-to-earth. In my corner of adulthood, down-to-earth people don't yell - that's what makes them down-to-earth. What are these people's lives like that their definition of down-to-earth includes yelling?

7. Rob Ford's target audience is skewed towards houses and cars, which, in Toronto, are hella expensive. They must, necessarily, have several times more money than I ever will. But they're angry. Why are they angry?

8. The non-selfish aspect of my personal politics is focused on Good Jobs. (The selfish aspect doesn't contradict this, it's just focused on very specific things that affect me personally.) I know, from my personal experience and those of my family and friends and everyone I know who's ever had a Good Job, that a Good Job is transformative. And, in my own experience, it's what makes the angry go away. And this might even be multi-generational. If I have a Good Job, and I'm not angry, then my kid not only has a secure environment to grow up in, but doesn't have to face generalized anger at the dinner table every evening, thus making them feel even more secure and less prone to anger themselves.

9. But the Rob Ford people, the people who are angry, are working against this politically. Why? Do they not know that Good Jobs make the angry go away? Do they already have Good Jobs (since they have all houses and cars and expensive things like that) that didn't make the angry go away? Do they not have Good Jobs but have somehow managed to acquire houses and cars that they now have to pay for and they're scared? But, if so, why are they trying to get rid of what few Good Jobs exist?

10. Then I read an article in the Globe and Mail on stress as a serious social-medical problem, and was struck by this quote:

Combatting these feelings is not easy and begins with resilience. Just knowing you have a Plan B for any problem can often reduce the brain’s physical response to stress.

That's what a Good Job does - resilience. It creates opportunities for a Plan B. If my glasses break, I can drop everything and get them fixed without running out of money or losing my job. If I get cancer, all I have to worry about is nausea and hair loss - I'm not going to lose my home or my job. It's less scary, less stressful, and ultimately means that there's less yelling in your life. And, politically, I want that for everyone. I've had a glimpse of it, and I want to share it. But my city seems to be run by people who are angry and yelly and stressed and scared, and yet want the opposite of this situation that creates resilience. I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense.

11. I realize I have no right, authority, or credibility to go swooping in and saying "You voted wrong! I know better than you!" But what I'm saying here is my truth as I have lived and experienced it, as I have observed in those around me and those I admire from afar. Rudeness and anger and fear and yelling decrease as empowerment and agency and respect and social credibility and resilience increase, and all these things increase with good employment conditions.

12. Growing up, I'd probably yell at someone every other day. Now, I can't even think of the last time I yelled at anyone. I like this, and I want everyone else to have it too. But the people who look to me like they need it the most don't want anyone to have it.

I don't know what to do with this.

Half-formed idea: algorithmic approach to TTC expansion

This post arises from a combination of ideas.

1. A number of very loud political candidates want to wreck Transit City because they want subways. They seem to think LRTs now preclude subways later.

2. There is a sysadmin approach whereby hardware upgrades are algorithmic. They make a rule (presumably based on some calculations or intelligence or standard procedure) that if the system reaches X% capacity Y% of the time, they upgrade capacity.

3. It is possible to do vast 20-year economic projections of population growth, service use, and revenue generation, and to project how all of these will be affected by certain factors. They can then use these things to work out random crazy things like "If mortgage rates jump sharply today, how will that affect passenger loads at Pearson a year from now? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?"

So we combine all three of these things, and we get an algorithmic approach to TTC expansion. They determine that if a bus hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into an LRT, and if an LRT hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into a subway.

We know that better transit service will eventually lead to intensification, which will lead to a broader tax base and more transit users. This is the sort of thing economic forecasting can quantify, which can be used to cost out the upgrades, determine which will be most profitable most quickly, and ultimately work out an algorithm for prioritizing them.

So they get a bunch of smart people to figure all this out in specific terms and make a massive plan specifying conditions under which transit lines are upgraded and a method for determining which lines will be upgraded first. They make a plan to grow using internally generated revenue, and another plan for outside funding from other levels of government, so transit improvement isn't paralyzed by withdrawl of outside funding. Maybe internal funding is used to target the areas most in need, and external funding is used to target areas with most revenue-generation potential, so it can be presented more as an investment on funding applications. The plan could of course be tweakable as new factors come into play, but in general it should come down to "Once a route reaches X capacity, it gets upgraded."

Then this approach, and the algorithms and economic forecasting used to work it out, are all made publicly available, so people can see what exactly is driving specific expansion decisions, and can see that, yes, they will get a subway eventually. Hopefully this will protect our transit system from politicos who want to dismantle existing plans and remake it in their own image every election cycle (or at least make their plans look foolish) and encourage more long-term thinking.

Now, it's quite possible that the TTC already does this. I'd be very surprised if they didn't already have an economic forecast. If so, they should publicize this information - post it on their website and make people aware of its existence, to give more credibility to their plans and make "NO! Kill it and build a subway to my house!" politically unviable.

Why are people absolving the black bloc of basic personal responsibility?

This post builds on ideas from my G20 braindump and occurred to me while reading this post from James Bow, but can be read without prerequisites.

A lot of people have been asking lately "Why didn't the legitimate demonstrators do anything to stop the black bloc?" (And, indeed, that has been used as justification for Queen & Spadina.) Some have asked in return why the police didn't do anything to stop the black bloc. Some have pointed out that that people did try (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Some have pointed out that the black bloc people were taking a different route than the main march, so the leaders among the legitimate demonstrators wouldn't have been in the areas. Some have pointed out that the black bloc were simply vandalizing property, not putting anyone's life and safety at risk, and if you call 911 to report a property crime in progress the operator will tell you to stay out of the way and keep yourself safe.

My first thought, as I mentioned in #9 of my braindump, was that not everyone can make people listen to them. People tend not to listen to me, so I normally couldn't stop them no matter how hard I tried.

But then, while reading James Bow, it occurred to me that in real life, in the regular adult world, there is no "Why didn't you stop him?" We are held responsible for our own actions; the people next to us aren't held responsible (directly or indirectly) for our actions. I can best explain with a couple of real-life examples.

Example 1: when we met Eddie Izzard, I went babbly stupid and made a complete ass of myself. Everyone else in our group was cool, but my idiocy reflected poorly on our entire group, thus depriving everyone of whatever awesomeness happens when a celebrity thinks you're cool. If Poodle's cool friends weren't far too polite to say anything, they might have said to me "WTF are you being such an idiot for?" However, they wouldn't have said to, say, TravelMaus (who was adjacent to but unaffiliated with our group) "WTF are you letting her be such an idiot for?" They wouldn't even have said that to Poodle, who was the one who brought me to the stage door in the first place. They might have asked him in a private moment "So what's her deal? Is she completely socially inept?" But it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to hold someone else responsible for not stopping me from being an idiot. My idiocy is on me, even when it ruins things for everyone.

Example 2: once one of my co-workers tried to bring his new dog into the office to show it off. The building security guards stopped him and told him dogs aren't allowed in the building. I repeat: they stopped him, the man with the dog. They didn't stop the people walking into the building next to him and tell them not to let him bring the dog in. So then he hung out with the dog outside the building, and some of us came outside to meet the dog. We walked right out the front door and then petted and played with the dog in full view of the security guards. We were quite clearly pro-dog and anyone with half a brain could see that we had probably encouraged the dog infiltration. But they didn't do anything because playing with a dog outside the building is totally allowed. They didn't scold us for wanting the dog in the building, they scolded the person who actually brought the dog into the building. Because that's how the world works. If you do something that's not allowed, you aren't absolved of your responsibility just because there are people doing nothing to stop you, and perhaps even watching with interest.

So why should the bad guys get a bye?

Conspiracy theory of the moment

Bicycles are considered equal to cars (or any other motor vehicle). They should be on the road, not the sidewalk. They are entitled to take up an entire lane on the street.

On the surface, that sounds good and positive and validating towards cyclists. But what if it's really a conspiracy to keep cycling from being a viable and commonly-used mode of transportation?

Biking in the road is difficult and scary for the cyclist, and is also kind of scary for the driver. If you hit another car, you hurt the car. If you hit a cyclist, you probably kill a whole human being. There's huge outcry about how cyclists should be on the road so they don't interfere with pedestrians, but I personally feel safer walking among cyclists than driving among cyclists, and I feel better able to dodge pedestrians while biking than to dodge cyclists while driving. (I freely concede this might be because I'm a bad driver, and good drivers might feel differently.)

People who aren't hardcore and brave simply aren't going to bike as a primary mode of transportation if it means they have to share a busy street with cars. I'd say the majority of people simply don't want that kind of risk with their morning commute.

Has anyone ever looked into the origin of the law that puts cyclists on the road? Why is it there in the first place? Who thought it was a good idea, and why?

What if TTC workers stopped enforcing fare collection?

I've only had two outright negative TTC experiences, and in both cases it was getting very loudly and publicly yelled at by a TTC worker trying to enforce fare collection when I had just made an honest mistake. In one case, I boarded a bus on the first day of the month, confidently waving my previous month's Metropass (i.e. the same one I used just the day before) at the driver. I did have the right one in my purse, I just grabbed the wrong one of the two. In the other case, just a few days after moving to Toronto and my first time ever in Eglinton station, I misunderstood how the choreography of how the (now defunct) bus bays worked and walked somewhere I wasn't supposed to. In both cases, the bus drivers yelled at me, in public, in front of people, without even taking a moment to calmly explain to me what I had done wrong, so I had literally no idea why I was being yelled at. In both cases, it made me cry (in public, to the extent that I couldn't see well enough to walk around) and broke me for the day.

In my time working customer service, every time I provided suboptimal customer service, it was because I was trying to meet corporate goals. For example, when I worked fast food, we had a timer measuring how long cars were in our drive-thru window. The average time at the window was supposed to be under a minute. The problem was that many customers didn't want to be out of there in under one minute. They wanted to find exact change to pay me with. They wanted to get themselves settled, put a straw in their drink and ketchup on their fries. This generally took over a minute, and then I'd get in trouble for not meeting service time goals. I once even snapped at a customer who had a habit of order food that needed to be cooked to order and then waiting at the window for it to be done (instead of pulling forward to the waiting space). His refusal to pull forward when I asked him to had him at the window for three minutes, which made it absolutely impossible for us to meet or even approach our service time goals for the rest of the day, and got me in trouble. I wasn't even able to start thinking of it in terms of his convenience, because I was going to get in trouble for the number on the clock. The things I got yelled at and nagged about and evaluated on by management were service time goals and upselling, with no thought to customer experience unless a customer complained. When I started that job I didn't upsell because as a customer I didn't appreciate it, but my manager marked me down for it in my performance review, specifically telling me to do it even though I didn't think it was good customer service, because it was corporate policy. How can you provide good customer service in that context?

Another bad TTC experience happened when boarding a Spadina streetcar at Spadina station. The driver started telling people over the PA to get off the stairs so he could close the doors, getting more and more frustrated that people were on the stairs. When he finally pulled out of the station, he said all snarky "Thanks for making me late!" But you know why the people were on the stairs? Because they were in the process of boarding the streetcar! More and more people kept coming from the subway to the streetcar and boarding the streetcar (standing on the stairs in the process) because that's what happens at Spadina station.

Obviously the Spadina streetcar driver had been handed down word from on high that he'd damn well better stay on schedule. And obviously the drivers who yelled at me for accidentally showing the wrong metropass and for entering the bus bay wrong had been instructed to prioritize fare enforcement. And obviously they were getting static from management when these things didn't work out, even when it wasn't entirely the driver's fault. But the result is bad customer service. People get yelled at by a streetcar driver for boarding a streetcar. A passenger gets treated like a criminal for grabbing the previous day's pass out of her purse. A newly-arrived teenage girl just learning to navigate the city gets publicly humiliated for not being fluent in the choreography of a subway station she's at for the first time in her life.

In my food service days, my performance was measured almost entirely quantitatively, by service times and by average price per order on my receipts. Despite all the pretty words in our policies about customer service, actual customer service only came into play if there was a complaint. Otherwise, it was all about the numbers.

With the TTC's new focus on customer service, they need to make sure they aren't creating a similar situation. Don't manage things in a way that gives drivers more motivation to prioritize things other than customer service. Tell them "Your primary mission is to get people where they need to go, and help people who need help. You are empowered to do that." Yes, your route should be on time, but not at the expense of pulling away from someone running for the bus. Yes, you should enforce fares, but not at the expense of holding up the whole bus for someone who boarded with yesterday's metropass. Make sure they aren't creating a culture that favours performance indicators over actual customer needs, and just focus on customer needs for a while.

Building a better protest rally

The problem with protest rallies is ultimately they are boring and not particularly productive. You're standing there in a crowd while the people on stage tell you stuff you already know, then you walk around a bit and make noise so people notice you. Not especially fun or interesting, and doesn't achieve anything other than visibility.

I do get that visibility is the point. A big loud crowd of people gets attention and makes it clear that a lot of people feel strongly about the cause. Critics are likely to dismiss petitions, email campaigns, facebook groups etc. far more readily than an actual crowd of people. But instead of just showing up and making noise and shouting at each other stuff we already know, we should do something, make something, create something, help something. Surely we can make better use of thousands of intelligent, engaged Canadians than just being extras in a crowd scene!

So here's what our Something has to be:

1. Tangible: The value of the crowd is its tangibility, and we need to retain that. If everyone showed up in Yonge Dundas Square and left their mittens behind, that would show how many people were there (problem: then we'd all have to buy new mittens).

2. Visually impressive: Close to 10,000 people is a lot of people. It's "Holy shit, look at all those people." The Something has to be similarly visually impressive. For example, if everyone put their business card in a jar (problems: not everyone has a business card, and not everyone is free to take political action in their employer's name) that wouldn't be visually impressive - 10,000 business cards isn't really a lot. If everyone left their mittens behind or brought a can of food, that wouldn't be particularly visually impressive either - it would look like a lot, but it wouldn't be "Holy shit!" But if everyone brought a live squirrel and released it in Yonge Dundas Square (obvious problems: how do you catch and transport a live squirrel? Plus it's cruel to squirrels), the reaction would be "Holy shit, look at all those squirrels!"

3. Practical and feasible: So suppose everyone showed up at Yonge Dundas Square, stood there and knitted a scarf, and then we left all the scarves on the ground, carpeting the entire square. Tangible and visually impressive, but the problem is not everyone knows how to knit. If everyone got in a car and drove around really slowly with a sign on their roof tying up traffic, that would be tangible and visually impressive, but would severely reduce the numbers because you can't assume everyone has a car. But if we all showed up and drew chalk outlines of our bodies (problems: symbolically inappropriate for this protest, dependent on the media being willing to go to the trouble of photographing it from above) that would be extremely feasible. Leaving your mittens behind might be impractical enough to deter people, but bringing a can of food is generally doable (the problem being that 10,000 cans of food aren't that visually impressive.)

4. Productive and helpful: The ideal would be for the protest to have some lasting positive impact, beyond political awareness. That would give us more of the moral high ground and be good PR vis-a-vis people who are wary of protests in general. The squirrels and the slow-driving cars would just annoy people (and squirrels) so we wouldn't want to do that. The scarves, the mittens, and the cans of food could all be donated somewhere where they'd do some good. It would be even better if the Something could be permanent, like building Habitat for Humanity houses (problem: even if a tract of Habitat for Humanity houses springs up overnight, it isn't obvious to the non-expert how many people were involved).

While writing this I came up with the idea of everyone coming to the protest site and building a small (like 1 or 2 feet high) inukshuk. But that's not super-feasible and not particularly productive. (Where would we get rocks from? How would we make it visually apparent what the inukshuks represent? Plus critics would say that maybe just a few people showed up and built many inukshuks each, and it would annoy people if we cluttered up Yonge Dundas Square with inukshuks.) Plus I don't know whether 10,000 small inukshuks in Yonge Dundas Square would be visually impressive or not.

Then I had the idea of building inukshuks out of nonperishable food, and after the protest is over donating all the food to a food bank. Questions: is it architecturally feasible to build an inukshuk out of nonperishable food, and would the amount of food required be generally affordable? How much trouble/annoyance would it be? What would we do about critics' inevitable allegations that maybe it was just a small number of people building a large number of inukshuks? And would it be visually impressive?

Any other ideas?

Wherein a foreigner who knows nothing about privatized health insurance tries to fix the US health insurance system

What if US health insurance companies weren't taxed on their earnings, and were instead taxed on the value of the claims they decline? If they pay in full every claim submitted to them, they won't pay any taxes. If they pay none of the claims submitted to them, they have to pay taxes on the full amounts of all the claims submitted to them.

Other problems I've heard of are a) insurance premiums being too expensive, and b) patients being refused insurance coverage at all because they are or have been sick. So in addition to taxing the amounts of any claims that are refused, they should also tax the amounts of any insurance premiums above a certain percentage of the client's income, and there should be a penalty for every applicant they refuse to cover, equal to either the cost of their average client or the cost of their most expensive client (I can make arguments for both).

Now the obvious flaw here is that taxes are never 100%, so the insurance companies would still be saving money by doing whatever they want. It's possible that anti-tax sentiment would provide sufficient motivation, but you can't make policy on the assumption that people are that stupid. So the next step is to use any money collected through this coverage denial tax to create an insurance fund for people who can't get or afford coverage elsewhere. So basically the insurance companies are paying the insurance premiums of people they refuse to cover.

I think they either did or were talking about making a rule in the states where every citizen has to buy health insurance, so it would be perfectly logical to tweak legislation at this point to make that more feasible. And if the insurance companies don't want to pay any denied-claim tax and just want to revel in unbridled capitalism, all they have to do is provide their services to anyone who asks at a fair price.

What if the solution to ignorance isn't found in formal education?

You often see people interpret any ignorance they observe as a failure in education. "They should teach this in school," they say, "they should make it a required course."

I wonder if this might be doing us all a disservice?

As I've blogged about before, I didn't learn everything I needed to know about anything in high school, but rather got a starting point for learning things myself as the need arises. I'm wondering if, by treating ignorance as a failure of education, we're collectively absolving ourselves of our own responsibility to keep learning? If people don't know what prorogation means, even if they should have learned it in school and didn't, their job now as adults and functional members of society is to recognize that they should know what it means, and find out what it means. Not having learned it in school isn't nearly as bad as sitting there going "Waah, I don't know what prorogation means because I never learned it in school!" instead of spending 30 seconds googling.

I also wonder if, by deeming it a job for formal education, we're inadvertently giving it a mystique, framing it as something that needs to be taught instead of something that you can figure out yourself. And I'm worried that this will, in turn, alienate people who aren't so very into formal education. I read in Big Sort (and have observed hints in real life) that sometimes people who have not gone through formal education tend to perceive formal education as Other (and sometimes as a bit suspicious). If we view ignorance as a problem to be solved with formal education, would we be marking it as Other for people who don't have formal education, giving the tacit impression that understanding these things isn't for them, and/or that learning them is only for people who have formal education.

I'm not opposed to adapting our formal education system to meet our ever-evolving needs, but I am worried about giving the impression that formal education is the only way out of ignorance, rather than that people should be bringing themselves out of their own ignorance.

Half-formed theory: men can smell rapists

When I was 9 years old, I was allowed to go trickertreating without parental accompaniment for the first time in my life. After many many lectures on safety, I went around the neighbourhood with another neighbourhood girl, collecting candy, feeling very cool walking around in the scary dark without a grownup. Then we got to this one house where there were two great big scary teenage boys in the driveway playing a very violent-looking game of basketball. We quickly consulted with each other. What should we do? They're Big And Scary! Look at how they're body-checking each other to get at the basketball - they totally look like the kind of people who would beat someone up! (At the time, beating someone up was the worst thing we could imagine.) And we'd totally have to walk right past them to ring the doorbell! So we decided to skip that house, and hurried along to the next house. But the big scary teenage boys saw us skip their house, and shouted at us "SNOBS!" OMG! They saw us! They're shouting something at us! What do we do? So we went straight home to my house (because it was closer) and told my parents what happened. My parents were like "What's the big deal? They were just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy."

Thinking back on it as an adult, they were totally just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy. But my 9-year-old self couldn't tell that. She saw large intimidating man-sized boys behaving in a way that was unusual and unpredictable, outside of the norm for the context, and seemed unnecessarily violent. She was scared, so she decided to remove herself from the situation. She also saw that when she went to remove herself from this situation that she found scary, the large intimidating guys tried to shame her into coming back. So while she did completely misread the situation, isn't that what you'd want a 9-year-old to do with the information she had on hand at the time?

Now, as a mental exercise, I want you to think about how you would explain to my 9-year-old self, in terms she can understand, why exactly those boys were safe. Give her clear specifics without any adult "Because I said so!" involved. You want to empower her to autonomously make more accurate decisions in the future without putting her at risk. Remember, Paul Bernardo is going to turn up in just a couple of years. So give her the information she needs to reduce false positives without introducing false negatives.

That's a tall order, isn't it? I was there, I saw the boys through my nine-year-old self's eyes, I can see them now through adult eyes, I see exactly why my child-self saw them as dangerous, and I can see them now as harmless. But I can't articulate in a way that my child-self would grok why exactly they're harmless. "They're just playing basketball!" But playing basketball wouldn't make a person harmless. "They're just teenagers!" But teenagers aren't automatically harmless, especially not to a preteen child. "They were just being violent with each other as part of the basketball game. They wouldn't hurt kids trickertreating." Yes, that's my read on the situation as an adult, but how exactly do you tell? I've been thinking about this for some time, and I still can't articulate it clearly. It might have something to do with the fact that on Halloween there are all kinds of adult eyes on the street, so if those guys had been up to no good they would have been more stealthy about it or waited until later at night, but I still wouldn't quite be comfortable telling a 9-year-old that without further precisions.

That Halloween night was the first of several false positives I've gotten when attempting to assess whether a particular strange man is a threat to me. There have been maybe 5-10 false positives over the years, but no false negatives. A man behaves unusually, or invades my personal space, or just gives off a wrong vibe, so I raise my shields and take evasive manoeuvres. Then I either find out that there was a perfectly good explanation for his strange behaviour, or I remove myself from the situation without him actively attempting to hurt me. None of that is noteworthy, that's just everyday life. What is noteworthy is that I often have other men - men who were completely uninvolved in and have no particular investment in the original situation - scold me for behaving so rudely to the strange man who pinged my creepdar. They really seem rather disproportionately offended that I'd take evasive manoeuvres against a man who wasn't a rapist. That was always really WTF to me. Can't they tell that I have no way of knowing who is and isn't a rapist, and only have my gut instinct to work with? (c.f. Schrödinger's Rapist.)

This all came to mind with a recent internet meme, Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed To Work. Again, the reaction from some men (not all men, but I only ever saw this reaction from men) was the same as the reaction some men have to my false positives - rather disproportionately offended, as if to say "How dare you show this to men who aren't rapists!" This reaction really seemed bizarrely disproportionate, as though there was something else going on that I couldn't see. So I've been thinking about this a really long time, and come up with the following theory:

Men can smell rapists.

Specifically, there are some men who can just tell by gut instinct, far better than I can, whether another man is a rapist, just like we as adults can tell better than my 9-year-old self could that the teenage boys playing basketball were harmless. Extrapolating to a general theory, men have better creepdar than women, at least in terms of avoiding false positives. (I have no data for false negatives.) So these men with the more effective creepdar think our creepdar works the same as theirs, thereby assuming that we can tell that dude isn't a rapist just as easily as they can, and therefore are taking evasive manoeuvres against some dude who clearly isn't a rapist due to some technical violation or perceived slight. Meanwhile, we're assuming that men's creepdar works the same as ours, so what we're hearing from them is that we should ignore our gut and take greater risks with our instincts so as not to inadvertently offend someone.

So what do we do with this? It sounds like I'm teeing up to saying that women should just listen to men's judgment on whether other men are safe or not. That's not workable. As we all know, some men are rapists, some men have different concept of what does and does not constitute rape, and it's certainly not unprecedented for a guy to vouch for his buddy to help him get laid. On the other side of things, some men are overprotective of women they care about, and might be reading false positives themselves. (Oddly, I've never seen a man get similarly disproportionately offended at another man's false positive on behalf of a woman he cares about.) There's also the problem that the vast majority of hitting-on happens when the woman is unaccompanied by a man, so the disproportionate offence/retroactive creepdar reading happens after the fact.)

So I think what we do need to do is just be aware of this difference in creepdar effectiveness, and communicate. If you're a man and you see a woman taking evasive manoeuvres with another man who clearly isn't a rapist, start thinking about how to articulate precisely why you can tell he isn't a rapist - to the same degree of specificness and with the same care to avoiding false negatives as you'd use in explaining why the basketball boys were safe to my 9-year-old self. Not why he "might not" be a rapist, not hypothetical explanations for his questionable behaviour; you need to describe the actual tangible ways you can tell for certain. You might not be able to articulate this right away, but just think about it. Try to figure it out so you can articulate it next time. Conversely, if you're a woman and a man scolds you or otherwise seems pissed off that you took evasive manoeuvres on what ended up being a false positive, ask him for specifics about how he knows the guy in question was safe. He might not be able to articulate it right away, but have him think about it.

And if you're a man and women seem to be getting false positive readings from you, think about why they should be able to tell that you're safe, and work on highlighting those aspects. (Schrödinger's Rapist can also help you avoid inadvertently giving off false positives.)

Thoughts from Big Sort

A while back, I was chatting with my hairdresser and found out that most of her clients are childfree. I thought on this a while, and it led to my noticing that in a great many areas in life, I choose things that are most suitable for me, and find myself surrounded by people who are like-minded in other ways on top of the factor that led me to that choice.

So I was googling around this idea for a while, and found this book: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. The book is very US-centric, but parts of it still seem applicable to my reality, and it led to a number of interesting trains of thought, which I'm going to blog about here.

(Note: The book deals with generalized demographic trends, so this post necessarily does to. I started out putting all the necessary mitigative language in everywhere and it quickly became ridiculous, so everything here is to be interpreted as a generalized trend, not an absolute truth, even if it is phrased absolutely.)

How do educated people perceive education?

One of the things touched on in the book is that people who don't have higher education tend to be...suspicious is the best word I can come up with, but that isn't quite precise (I'm foolishly writing this without the book in hand)...of people who do have higher education. They see us as up in some ivory tower completely removed from their reality, with perhaps an undertone of that we think less of them. That's just completely unlike my corner of reality. Round these parts, education is just something you have or have not done depending on your circumstances and inclination. It's morally equivalent to having read a particular book or not. If you've read the book, then you've...read the book. If you haven't read the book, you can always read it later, or watch the movie, or google it, or continue to go about your life without it. No big deal.

But then in some of the recent strikes (TTC, City of Toronto workers), some people were getting really pissed off that these workers were earning a decent living in jobs that didn't require higher education, and even calling for these jobs not to pay a decent living on the tacit basis that they didn't require higher education. That's so totally WTF I can't even begin to speculate.

But this raises a lot of questions. How many people with higher education think it's no big deal like I do, and how many think it's like some sacred golden key like the strike haters do? Do people with less education perceive people with more education as Other because of the strike hater types, (or vice versa, although I couldn't imagine how that would work), or did the two evolve separately? Could we create a better-functioning society by getting more people to think of it as no big deal? Would affordable tuition do this?

Why do people who value self-sufficiency need small-talk from strangers?

One of the points made in the book was that people who live in more rural areas tend to value self-sufficiency and independence. This surprised me, because one thing I have noticed in real life is that people in more rural areas are tend to want to small-talk with strangers, and find it off-putting that city people tend to not initiate conversation unless there's a specific reason to. My reasoning behind not talking to people unless I have a specific reason to is out of respect. I assume they're perfectly competent people with their own lives and their own concerns, and there's no reason why they would be interested in me. And yet, the population that disagrees with this approach correlates with a population that values self-sufficiency. So what's the story?

Are people who value self-sufficiency more actually more broadly competent?

As I mentioned above, people who live in rural areas and are more conservative tend to value self-sufficiency, seeing it as practically a moral imperative. This reflects something that has long been baffling me. If I mention that I can't do something or can't do it well enough to bother, certain people I know try to convince me I can - like they try really hard, far beyond social ego stroking, and seem really invested in the idea that I really can do whatever if I just try. After reading the book, I realized the people who do this are among the most conservative people I know. So they view self-sufficiency as more of a moral imperative - if you're self-sufficient, you're a good person; if you're not self-sufficient, you're being a lazy-ass and therefore a bad person. These people generally see me as a good person, so their initial gut reaction is that because I'm a good person, of course I can do whatever it is!

But, of course, the way real life works is that different people are good at or not good at different things to different degrees. So people who value self-sufficiency are going to do things themselves whether they're good at it or not, and are more likely to interpret the results of their efforts as adequate even if they are sub-optimal because they view it as a moral imperative. Meanwhile, people who have no particular problem with the idea of not being self-sufficient are more likely to look at sub-optimal results as "Meh, I'm not very good at this" and hire someone to do it next time.

It would be really interesting to study people who do and don't value self-sufficiency as a moral imperative and see how good they are objectively at various things. The trick is you'd have to control the results for the amount of practice the people have. For example, my parents think it's excessively decadent to hire someone to paint, so they paint themselves, and they've probably painted a whole house a total of four times in their lives. Meanwhile, I'm not very good at painting neatly and the smell of paint nauseates me, so I've painted maybe a quarter of a wall in my life and very much hope never to paint anything ever again. (I would unhesitatingly choose to live with peeling paint if I couldn't afford painters rather than attempt to do it myself.) So if you wanted to study who is objectively better at painting, you'd have to control for the fact that my parents have painted so much more than I have. Maybe they could study what people consider an acceptable result for their effort or something like that

What if we're working with two different definitions of self-sufficient?

One of the major examples the book gives of these attitudes towards self-sufficiency is that the self-sufficiency as moral imperative people view public transit as a waste of taxpayers' money and everyone should just STFU and drive themselves. (No mention either way of how they feel about toll roads - I haven't seen many toll roads in exurban areas.) This made my brain explode a little, because my initial, visceral attitude towards public transit is that it provides self-sufficiency. You can just go anywhere, no need to be dependent on a car or on other people to drive you, life is easy.

This all reminded me of a conversation I once had with my father back when I was a in my early teens. They were thinking about extending a bus route into our neighbourhood, and my father thought it was a waste of money because everyone in our transitless neighbourhood had a car - that's why they chose to live in the transitless neighbourhood. I was all "Um, no, I don't have a car. Kids who are old enough to go places themselves but not old enough to drive don't have cars. Seniors living with their adult children can't necessarily drive." I could think of dozens of individuals in the neighbourhood who would be well-served by a bus route. But my father was like "You don't need a bus, your mother and I drive you places. Kids are driven places by their parents. Mrs. Old Lady down the street is driven places by her adult children." A very disheartening thing when you're at the point where you're starting to want to do things independently of your parents, like all the protagonists in your favourite young adult novels.

But in that conversation, my father and I personify the two different views of self-sufficiency that I think are on the two sides of the Big Sort. I see self-sufficiency as an individual's independence from other individuals. I don't want to be dependent on my parents to drive me around. I see my grandparents also being dependent on my parents to drive them around, and I don't want to live like that either. However, people like my father see self-sufficiency as what I will for lack of a better word call their "tribe" (family, household, relatives, neighbours) being independent from outsiders. I think they feel that they take care of their tribe, and they don't want anyone else meddling with it. And I think they also feel that they're already doing the right thing and taking care of their tribe, so they shouldn't have to take care of someone else's tribe too. So at the crux of the divide is whether you think the tribe should be independent of the government, or whether you think the government should enable people to be independent of their tribe.

How you feel about this isn't necessarily reflective of the quality of your tribe. For example, I once saw someone propose that to save money, hospitals shouldn't give their patients meals, on the logic that hospitals are in the business of medicine, not catering. Patients' families should bring them food instead. Now, if I were in the hospital, my family would totally bring me food. We don't always like each other, we don't agree on most aspects of politics, but I have no doubt they would bring me any and all food I wanted for the duration of my hospital stay. However, I can totally imagine dozens of situations in which this model of the patients' families bringing food would be unsuitable, so, despite the fact that my tribe would totally feed me, I remain vehemently opposed to the idea of leaving people dependent on their tribe for food.

I think a problem with the tribe-centric view is that it doesn't always allow for the possibility that individuals do need to operate independently of the tribe. For example, I have seen several cases where right-wing fathers (I've only ever seen it with right-wing fathers, although I'm not discounting the possibility that other people do it too) have opposed some political measure because they think it would make it harder for them to provide for their children. However, they either didn't notice or didn't care that said political measure would make it easier for their children (who were either already or almost launched) to provide for themselves.

It would be interesting to study this self-sufficiency/tribe-centricity thing to see if the attitudes correlate with a person's position in their tribe. For example, cities are full of people who have left their tribe of origin upon reaching adulthood, which means that their only role without the tribe has been one of dependence. This would lead one to conclude that the people who value the individual's independence from the tribe are those who would be dependent upon the tribe, and the people who value the tribe's independence from outsiders are those with provider roles within the tribe. However, there are still people who stay in the more rural/conservative areas by choice despite their dependence on the tribe, even though they could live as independent individuals with the greater amenities available in urban areas. So there must be some other factors going on there, but I can't see them at the moment.

So how do we unsort ourselves?

As the book points out, people don't choose where to live because of the presence of like-minded individuals. We choose where to live because it suits our various needs. It's a reasonable commute to work. The quality of the housing is as close to ideal as we can manage. The distance from or proximity to various things is as close to optimal as we can realistically manage. Similarly, I chose my hairdresser because she specializes in long hair, not because she and her clientele are childfree. I chose my job because the work is a good match with my strengths, not because I'd be working with people with a similar family immigration history.

So how can we unsort ourselves? I don't know about you, but I'm not about to move to a less suitable neighbourhood, job, or hairdresser, especially not in service of spending more time with people whose political opinions I consider somewhere between sub-optimal and repugnant.

Or should we?

One thing that has really baffled me about Toronto municipal politics is people who live in Toronto proper, but don't want the trappings of urban life. They don't want bus service on their street or a subway stop in their neighbourhood or mixed-use zoning. They want to be able to park three cars on their property. I honestly do not understand at all why they choose to live in Canada's most urban municipality when they don't want urban life, and when the lifestyle they do want is readily available (at a significantly lower cost) just over in 905. As I've blogged about before, I chose my neighbourhood of highrises specifically for its urban nature, and it's very frustrating when people who live in houses outside our highrise neighbourhood try to stop the building of new highrises. So maybe we'd all be happier if we sorted ourselves fully.

But it doesn't seem right to position ourselves so we're completely disregarding a whole chunk of society just because they prefer a different lifestyle.

"The older you get, the smarter your parents get": two possible perspectives

I've been very frustrated with my elders lately, because they aren't being smarter than me in the ways I need them to be. I'm not talking professional knowledge or knowledge specific to certain hobbies and interests, I'm talking life knowledge and skills that you absorb or figure out just by living life. How to remove a stain. How to invest your money. How to answer the "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in your workplace" job interview question when you haven't actually had a conflict in your workplace. I keep finding my elders know no more than I do in these areas, and sometimes are two steps behind me. It's very frustrating, and also utterly baffling. I came into the world in 1980 knowing literally nothing. Since then, I've had to learn how to walk and talk and eat and read and socialize and balance my bank account. And during this time, I also developed a certain amount of expertise in stain removal and investing and job interviewing. But my elders, who had already figured out how to do all the walking/talking/bank account stuff long before 1980 and have been removing stains/investing/job interviewing since well before 1980, don't seem to know anything more than I do.

So my first theory is that they have some huge amount of extra knowledge in areas that I can't even see, can't even begin to imagine. So I was wishing that there was some way to tell how much of a person's knowledge you aren't seeing. In the Sims, if a person has five personality traits but you only know three of them, you can see that there are two other traits you don't know. I was thinking it would be so helpful if we could see something similar for people we're talking to in real life. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but when I talk to someone I tend to get the impression that what I'm getting from them is representative of the whole person. It would be far easier to respect an elder who tells me "wash your clothes inside out" as though that were panacea, as though I haven't already been doing that for a decade, if I knew that I was only seeing 10% of what they have to offer, rather than thinking they had lived for decades and decades and the best they have to offer is that I should wash my clothes inside out.

In a fit of frustration, I tweeted that I've learned more from my elders about what not to do than about what to do. But that ultimately led to my second theory: our elders don't actually have decades of experience on us, because in living alongside them and observing them we're constantly absorbing the lessons they've learned from their decades of experience. I'm not even talking about stuff our elders try to deliberately teach us, I'm talking about lessons that they learn when we're kids - we learn right along with them.

For example, both of my grandmothers are still living in their own homes, but they need their kids to drive them places and help with stuff around the house. I look at that and think that's not what I want my golden years to be like (especially since I won't have kids), so I've already altered my life accordingly by choosing to live in a highrise in a high-density, walkable neighbourhood. My parents were constantly painting and fixing up their house, and I hated it. The smell, the mess, the instability...so because of that, I'm never going to buy a fixer-upper or go charging starry-eyed into a DIY redecorating project only to end up weeping on the floor of a half-ruined room. My parents also took us on a lot of trips, and I hated it. Close quarters, carsickness, lack of control over food and accommodations, and I simply don't get any pleasure out of sightseeing or being on a beach or whatever. So because of this, I'm never going to waste thousands of dollars and a year's worth of vacation time and ruin a relationship on some idealized "OMG, travelling = sexy!"

But I think part of the problem is that our elders think that we're in the same place they were when they were our age. I'm pretty sure at least one of my grandmothers thinks I don't realize that, in being childfree, I won't have any kids to take care of me when I'm old. I'm pretty sure she and her husband bought their house when they were in their 20s without giving any thought to what life will be like at 80 so she assumes I'm doing the same, whereas in real life I learned about the long-term unsuitability of car-dependent housing at the same time that she did.

Analogy: Our elders are like pure mathematical theorists coming up with new proofs and equations. We're the math students decades later casually using those proofs and equations in our applied math textbooks. I certainly could never come up with a way to calculate or prove derivatives, and I promptly forgot the long-form equation as soon as we started learning the product rule and the quotient rule. But I can still use derivatives in physics for velocity and acceleration, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of my physics work is being discounted because the senior academics think my theories on velocity and acceleration are worthless because when they were my age they didn't have a way to calculate derivatives.

How ignorance/closed-mindedness works

I've blogged this story before: When I was in about to start Grade 9, my then-best friend called me up and said "We have a problem. The Grade 9 gym teacher is a lesbian!" That's basically how my homophobia worked at the time. I hadn't ever heard homosexuality described or spoken of as anything other than a problem or a shame, and it didn't occur to me to question that. Because everyone was talking about it like it's something bad, I unthinkingly assumed it must be bad.

I think that's how a significant quantity of ignorance and closed-mindedness works. You only ever hear of things spoken of a certain way, and perhaps it doesn't occur to you to question the underlying assumption.

The solution, which I don't know how to execute, is to encourage people to question the underlying assumptions. This is tricky, because you don't want to come on too strong and put them on the defensive. For example, you might have noticed an ongoing theme in my blog that bugs are yucky and puppies are cute. My personal neuroses aside, this is an automatic reaction that a lot of people have. When I write blog posts with the underlying assumption that bugs are yucky or that puppies are cute, the vast majority of people accept those givens. If someone wanted to convince people that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky, they couldn't just outright say it because people's automatic reaction would be "WTF?? You're insane! Get this looney away from us! Save the puppies! Kill the bugs!" It's such a shocking attack on what we dearly hold to be most basic truths that our reaction would be violent and visceral. To make it work, the pro-bug anti-puppy lobby would have to sort of plant the seed of a suggestion and let it grow until people feel that they have come to realize independently that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky.

So, when faced with ignorance and closed-mindedness, we have to somehow figure out how to plant the same seed of questioning heretofore-unquestioned assumptions. I don't know how to do that.

(But don't go around breeding bugs and exterminating puppies please, okay?)

Let's consider friends a luxury, not a necessity

"But my friends are a necessity," you're thinking, "I really do need them!"

Don't worry, I don't want to take your friends away. But just stick with me for a second; if we consider friendship a luxury, then everyone will have the opportunity to get the same friendship benefits that you do.

If a person doesn't have any friends, society in general thinks there's something wrong with them. And while it's true there might be something wrong with them, they also have simply never had their paths cross with someone who is compatible to be a true friend. Think of how many people you know. How many of these people would you let call you at 3 in the morning with a crisis and gladly drop everything so they can cry on your shoulder without begrudging it even an instant? Probably not a super-huge percentage - for me, I can count the people on one hand.

Given how small this percentage is, isn't is possible that the friendless person just hasn't met any compatible friends yet?

There were a few years where I had no friends. The problem was that my bullies would mock me for having no friends, and people wouldn't want to be friends with me because the bullies were mocking me. So because of this, I adapted two personality traits that are hindrances to making friends: I got really defensive, and I acted like I had a whole nother active social life outside of school so I didn't need to be friends with anyone there. This kept the bullies away, but it also kept prospective friends away. Frankly, I'm astounded that I ended up with any friends at all!

Even now as an adult, if I found myself in a situation where I didn't have a sufficient number of friends, I would do everything possible to hide it. I would get defensive, I would dissemble, I would make up elaborate excuses, I would generally become an unpleasant person to spend time with. All of which would make people disinclined to be my friend, thus perpetuating the problem. If it were socially acceptable to admit to not having enough friends, or to admit to the trappings and side-effects of not having enough friends, I could be frank and candid and pleasant.

This train of thought originated from that guy who shot up an aerobics class because he couldn't get a date. I originally started blogging about how not wanting to have sex with someone isn't a personal diss. (Do you want to have sex with me? Probably not. Do you think negatively of me? Most likely not. Although, if you do, why are you wasting your time reading my blog?) Similarly, not being friends - like real, true, call-at-three-in-the-morning friends - with someone isn't a personal diss. (Think of your co-workers. How many of them can you chat perfectly pleasantly with, but don't have any particular need to see outside of work?) But if a person hasn't had sex in a long time, or doesn't have friends, society in general tends to think negatively of them. When developing a relationship, the revelation that one's prospective friend/lover doesn't have friends or hasn't had a lover in a long time is generally seen as a red flag. How is anyone supposed to self-actualize in this context?

Let's consider friendship and lovers as a luxury, the same way a dishwasher is a luxury. Dishwashers are awesome! If you've had one, you don't ever want to do without, and a lot of people who don't have them covet them. But if you don't have one, that isn't a sign that there's something wrong with you. It's mildly unfortunate, but doesn't have broader implications. "Oh, that's too bad. So how about that local sports team?" If we consider lack of friends the same way, stop looking at friendless people as inherently unstable, maybe fewer unstable people will feel the need to act out specifically because of a lack of friends.

Think about war. If you've never been in a war zone before, do you know precisely how you'd react if you were sent to a war zone and got PTSDed? Probably not. I certainly don't know what would happen to me, but it has the potential to be disastrous. But since I've never been in a war zone, whatever demons lurk there remain safely tucked away and have no potential whatsoever to be loosed upon the world. If people who don't have friends don't feel like they're under siege for not having friends, maybe any unpleasantness that might possibly be lurking will never have the opportunity to come to the surface. And when the unpleasantness doesn't ever come to the surface, it's much easier to make friends.

The Bird And The Worm (Album Version) - The Used

Why don't I have Entitlement?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes a concept (originally from Annette Lareau's research) called Entitlement. (Both Gladwell and Lareau lowercase it, but I'm capitalizing it to differentiate from the generic.)

Entitlement, in this context, is a sense that you're totally allowed to ask people in authority stuff. If you have a question, you can totally ask. If you need some accommodation, you can totally ask for it. If an authority figure is miss informed, you're totally allowed to set them straight. This concept is brought up in the context of child-rearing. According to Lareau's research, middle-class families tend to raise their children to have Entitlement, whereas working-class families tend not to and the parents themselves are more likely to quietly defer to authority. (I'm normally not comfortable talking about "class" like it's a Great Big Thing, but it's an essential part of this concept and relevant to my personal observations about my own experience.)

I've been thinking very hard about this, because I had a solidly middle-class upbringing (my own room, an allowance, chores and responsibilities on principle rather than out of necessity, family vacations, music lessons, extracurriculars, going to university was a given), but I don't have Entitlement. I don't feel like I'm allowed to ask, I feel like I'm imposing and breaking from What's Done when I ask. I feel like the people in authority know exactly what they're doing and are doing it for a very good reason (and, as I've blogged about several times before, it both scares me and pisses me off when they don't know exactly what they're doing and don't have a very good reason).

So I'm trying to figure out why this is.

My first thought is that my parents didn't raise their children to have Entitlement because they themselves weren't raised that way. Their upbringing was most definitely working class, and I can't imagine my grandparents had any time to do concerted cultivation. But here's where it gets bizarre: I think my sister (just under three years younger than me) has Entitlement. I wanted to be a musician, I signed up for music class in high school and only joined the more advanced school bands when specifically asked to do so by a teacher. My sister wanted to be a musician, she joined a band and later helped start another couple of bands, playing actual gigs and even making a CD. Could it be because I'm Gen Xish and my sister is pure Gen Y? Could it be that my parents had become familiar with more middle-class parenting techniques by the time my sister came along? Or could it simply be a difference in personalities?

My second thought was that my Entitlement had been bullied out of me, but upon further reflection I realized that I had less Entitlement than I was expected to long before the bullying started. My first pertinent memory is from when I was 3 or 4 years old, in Montessori school, in what would now be described as junior kindergarten. I wanted to play with these beads, and I was told that I wasn't allowed to play with them because you have to be able to count to 10. (The counting was relevant to how one played with the toy, but I forget how exactly.) This confused and frightened and baffled me, because I could totally count to 100 at the time. But it never occurred to me to tell the teacher that I knew how to count to 100, I just assumed they had some big grownup reason I didn't understand and slunk off to metaphorically (and perhaps literally) curl up and cry. Years later, while going through some papers at my parents' house, I came upon my old Montessori school report card. One of the comments was something to the effect that I didn't show the teachers what I could do and what I had learned, worded in a way that made it clear they expected me to take the initiative. Reading this, I was flabbergasted. I had had literally no idea whatsoever that the teachers might have wanted me to show them what I could do. The thought never occurred to me. I would never - not even with the benefit of adult retrospect - have come up with the idea myself that the teacher wanted me to take the initiative of showing her that I could count to 10. I always assumed that if grownups wanted something from me, they'd ask. So it seems I never had Entitlement in the first place.

I'm not sure if my parents tried to instill Entitlement or not. (They did specifically try to prevent any sense of small-e entitlement.) If they did try to instill capital-E Entitlement, it wasn't nearly to the same extent as the parents described by Lareau. In the example cited by Gladwell, parents taking their nine-year-old son to the doctor told him "You should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor." Not just that he can ask, that he's allowed to ask, but that he should. As though it's something he has to do to Be Good. My parents might have told me that I was allowed to ask questions, or they might have assumed that I knew I was allowed because no one told me I wasn't, but they never would have made a point of telling me that I should think of questions to ask. On the other hand, when I did find myself in a situation where an adult or authority figure unexpectedly tried to get me to express my thoughts or opinion or preferences, I'd become frightened. The first time I ever got a hamburger at Harvey's and they asked me what I wanted on it, I thought it was a trick. Throughout childhood and adolescence and even early adulthood, whenever authority figures unexpectedly asked me for an opinion or feedback or what I wanted, I'd panic (figuratively) and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Part of this is introvert brain - I don't always instantly have words for things that I'm not expecting to have to articulate or that I've never given a moment's thought to - but there was also an underlying fear that even though they were asking what I thought, they didn't genuinely mean it. I thought asking for what I really wanted was Not Allowed, and they actually wanted me to just quietly and passively go along with what they intended (as Lareau describes the working-class children and parents as doing.) The panic would be because I wasn't able to guess at what the authority figure intended, and I thought I'd get in trouble for giving a wrong answer.

Of course, there's also the possibility this whole thing is so generational it doesn't apply to me at all. I've noticed that in general pure Gen Y people are better at Entitlement than I am. I've talked to a few other people who are X/Y cusp and they don't think they were parented into Entitlement either (although there wasn't a large enough sample size to rule out the possibility of working-class influence). But Lareau's book was published in 2003, so the research was done probably shortly before then. The kids she studied are 15-20 years younger than me, so maybe the parenting techniques used on them are completely inapplicable to me. But the fact remains that I do see Entitlement in people of all ages around me - and in my own sister - and I don't have it. There must be something somewhere in there.

I'm not completely lacking in the ability to do Entitlement. I've been able to do it when it's really truly important. For example, when I applied for translation school, I wasn't informed of the date of the entrance exam and didn't find out I'd missed it until two weeks after the fact. I took the initiative of contacting them and asking if there was anything that could be done, and was granted permission to write the exam independently. I got it done because it had to be done and I had to be the one to do it. But if it can get away without being done, I can't work up the nerve. I clearly remember being terrified to ask my high school music teacher if I might possibly swap the size XL band shirt I had somehow ended up with for a size small and would totally have spent four years passively wearing an unflatteringly large shirt if I hadn't heard that one of the guys really needed a bigger shirt.

I'm only recently starting to see how acting with Entitlement is helpful not only to me but to the people I'm dealing with. I'm learning this mostly from observing my Gen Y colleagues. They walk in with Entitlement and look competent and professional, where I looked like a shy, nervous child. There have been a few cases where I was given more responsibility than usual and had to act with Entitlement or other people's work or the product delivered the client would have suffered, and my Entitlement ended up having a positive effect for everyone. When I do act with Entitlement, it always ends up getting mentioned positively on my performance reviews. And when I was recently responsible for training one of our summer students (Why, hello Impostor Syndrome! I haven't seen you in a while!) I couldn't have done it properly without her Entitlement. So it does seem to be something I need to be a proper grown-up. But it doesn't come naturally, and I'm not sure exactly why.

Things They Should Study: do linguistic innovation and fashion trends diffuse along the same paths?

My only basis for this hypothesis is a very small sample of empirical evidence. If I pick up fashion ideas from someone, I also pick up word choices from them. I've also noticed that people who might be picking up fashion ideas from me (it sounds egotistical to assert definitively that they are, but there are one or two things I was definitely wearing first) also pick up word choices from me.

Of course, this is all complicated by multiple languages and genders and looks. I pick up all kinds of words and phrases from people whose clothes I'd never wear.

Things They Should Study: economic demographics of people who are opposed to good wages for garbage men

I've been wondering why people who think the garbage collectors are overpaid don't look at the job as something they themselves could potentially do. After all, my personal inclination when I see a job I think is overpaid is to think that maybe that's the job I should be doing. (So far, whenever I've looked into things, I find that the job is either harder than I thought, or you have to pay your dues for longer than I thought, or it doesn't pay as much as I thought.)

But today it occurred to me that the people being most inconvenienced by this strike are mostly the rich. The garbage strike affects residential collection, but not highrise apartments. In other words, primarily the house people. Houses in Toronto are expensive - we're looking at $400,000 at the very least. This is a city where a million-dollar home can look perfectly unremarkable. If you own a house in Toronto, you make far more money than I ever will. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my apartment not noticing anything except that the bins on Yonge St. are rather full.

As a general trend, public sector salaries have a moderating effect. They tend to be higher than private sector at the low end of the pay scale (garbage collectors, daycare workers, receptionists) and lower than the private sector at the high end of the scale (investment bankers, senior executives, etc.) Anyone who can afford a house in Toronto would be at the high end of the scale, and therefore lives in a world where the natural order of things as demonstrated by empirical evidence is that public sector is paid lower than private sector.

So here they are, being inconvenienced by this garbage strike, not identifying with the garbage men because that work is so much more difficult and poorly-paid than what the house people themselves do. Then they find out, to their shock, that the garbage men are making so much more money than the rich house people pay, say, their cleaners.

Meanwhile, the people who can identify with the garbage men, who, if they learned the garbage men made more than they expected, would be inclined to think "Cool! I wonder how you get that job?", live in apartments and are hardly noticing anything is going on.

The mystery: how come so many newspaper columnists seem to have houses? Surely journalism can't pay that well.