When do unto others doesn't work

I've been struggling for quite a long time to compose this post, because it's very hard to write without sounding whiny or "woe is me". So I'm going to cop out and state outright at the outset that my intention is not to sound whiny or "woe is me". My intention is simply to observe an invisible obstacle that makes it harder for people to understand each other and enjoy pleasant social interactions. I use many personal examples, but that's because those are most accessible to me - I'm not often inside other people's heads.

So this train of thought started with this:

When it comes to not understanding the inner state of minds too different from our own, most people also do a lousy job, Schwarz says. "But the non-autistic majority gets a free pass because, if they assume that the other person's mind works like their own, they have a much better chance of being right."

I've blogged before about how this is a problem for me as an introvert in making conversation with extroverts. It's also been a problem in other areas. For example, when I'm going through an emotionally difficult time, I tend to retreat within myself. Talking about it doesn't help - it actually makes it worse because it keeps me dwelling on it - I just need some time and space alone. However, sometimes my friends feel neglected when I withdraw, and if I tell them I'm withdrawing because I'm going through a difficult time, their feelings are hurt that I'm not confiding in them. So where an extrovert would be able to heal themselves and tend to their friends' feelings with a single action - by talking about their problem with their friends - I can't do both at once and they actually work at cross-purposes. If I heal myself I'm hurting my friends' feelings, and if I tend to my friends' feelings I'm hindering my healing.

Before I had even heard of the difference between introverts and extroverts, someone told me that a friend of his had just had her dog hit by a car, so they were taking her out to a bar to get drunk. I was shocked and appalled. How could you possibly think someone would want to go out when their dog had just died? They'd totally want to sit alone in a room and drink by themselves! How dare they burden a bereaved dog owner that way! So since I was completely unaware at the time that other people's brains and emotional needs worked differently from my own, if the bereaved dog owner had been my friend I totally wouldn't have given her what she needed (and would probably have abandoned her to wallow in her grief on the assumption that that's what she needed); and if the bereaved dog owner had been me, I would have been so pissed off at my friends for trying to take me out to a bar of all things, at a time like this!

This also applies in situations where your innocent individual preferences are different from the norm. For example, suppose someone decides to hold a barbecue in the park, with all kinds of sports activities for everyone to enjoy. Conventional wisdom is that this is good and fun and a win-win-win situation. The barbecue will feed everyone, and it's the kind of food that people actively enjoy eating. Being outdoors is nice, spending time with lots of people is nice, and sports activities are fun. So your typical person gets their hunger sated, the pleasure of yummy food, the enjoyment of being outdoors, the hap hits of social interaction and the fun of playing sports. If they were a Sim, their hunger, social and fun meters would all be going up, and they'd have a few positive moodlets. And on top of this all they get the social capital of having participated in the group activity.

However, I, personally, don't get pleasure from most of these things. I'm vegetarian, so a barbecue is always a struggle to find something I can eat (and what's usually available will do the job, but isn't the kind of thing I'd go out of my way to eat.) Spending a day outdoors in the park would get me bitten to death by mosquitoes - even if the typical person isn't being bothered at all - and if bugs get near the food I'm going to have a panic attack. Sports simply aren't fun for me, and as an introvert I am drained rather than energized by the large group. So, if I were a Sim, my hunger, social and fun meters would all be going down, and I'd have a few negative moodlets. (And, as we all know from playing the Sims, if your mood rating is too low, you can't doing activities you don't enjoy - the option simply isn't available in the menu until your mood rating goes up.) But if you tell people this, you're no fun, a stick in the mud, a spoilsport. So if I want to gain the social capital of having participated in the group activity, I need to convince people that my needs meters are going up and I'm full of positive moodlets when they're actually going down and full of negative moodlets. Then, once the activity is done and I'm back home, I have to treat all my mosquito bites and eat something that makes me happy and get my mood back up so I can function at work the next day, whereas the people who actually enjoy this activity are sated in every way and already have their mood back up. So it isn't just the fact that you don't have access to do unto others and it isn't just the fact that you have to perform to gain social capital rather than just being yourself, it's also way more time consuming to have needs and preferences that are different from others'. Not only can you not multi-task the barbecue into meeting multiple needs, but others assume your multiple needs have been met. "What do you mean you need to go home and relax and have something to eat? You've been at a barbecue all day!"

And another part of the problem is that even if you know other people's needs or preferences are different from your own, you don't necessarily know what they are. For example, now that I know something of introversion and extroversion, I know that an extrovert who has just lost her dog probably doesn't want to be left all alone. However, I would never ever in a million years come up with the idea of taking her to a bar. That is simply so far removed from anything that feels remotely helpful to me.

So what do we do with this? I'm not quite sure. But a good start would be to stop putting value judgments on individual preferences, and to be open to the fact that not everyone's mind works the same as our own. Something I've been experimenting with recently (not sure if it's a good idea or not, but I'm in a place where I have a bit of leeway) is being completely out about the fact that I'm not sure what to do and asking other people for advice. "Is it appropriate to ask the mother of the hospitalized preemie baby how her baby is doing?" "Is this the kind of event where it's better to arrive early or to arrive late?" "This is the first time I've trained anyone, at all ever, so if I'm ever being less helpful than I should don't hesitate to let me know, because I'll never figure it out otherwise." If it doesn't result in everyone thinking I'm a total idiot, maybe it will at least give people an idea of the range of things I do and don't know.

Le contexte est plus fort que le concept

A piece of evidence from a relatively high-profile local crime was found very close to my home. (No worries, I have no reason to believe my neighbourhood is any less safe than I thought it was.) It isn't too hard to figure out which recent news story I'm talking about, but I'm not naming names or identifying features for googleability reasons.

I've been following the media coverage closely and have been reading the associated comments threads, and one thing I discovered to my surprise was how much of the general public's speculation is just wrong because they lack what I will term hyper-local knowledge. By hyper-local knowledge, I mean familiarity with the usual behavioural patterns and motivations of people in this neighbourhood. Not in terms of normal human motivation, but rather smaller and fussier things, like where people would take a shortcut or a smoke break or walk a dog, which entrance people would use if approaching a certain building from a certain direction on foot, stuff like that.

It sounds so inconsequential, but I'm reading through the comments threads dismissing theories left and right with near-certainty. "No, a visitor to the neighbourhood would never use this street to get to that destination." "Actually, people leave their personal effects there all the time and it hardly warrants a second glance." "Yes, it isn't far, but they simply wouldn't come here unless they had a very specific reason. People just don't do that." "The only way a person with a car would end up there is if they were very familiar with the area and had been in that exact location for a specific reason previously."

I never would have thought this if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but there are so many little nuances that you just don't perceive until you've spent a lot of time in a particular context. Half the time I can't even articulate why, but I'm absolutely certain that no one would ever to that thing one of the commentators is proposing. It's not like these commentators are stupid or ignorant or anything, they just don't know that people tend to run their dogs in this bit here, and sometimes they block off that sidewalk for construction, and the subsequent ripple effect in overall neighbourhood behaviour until you get to "Well, of COURSE he moved it! I would have moved it too! It's the obvious reaction!"

This makes me wonder how many thoughts and ideas I have that are just completely wrong because of some tiny little nuance that I can't even see.

(Fortunately, based on what I've seen in media coverage, the police do seem to have this hyper-local knowledge.)

Are we not holding the United States of America to high enough standards?

Barack Obama strikes me as a decent enough fellow. He seems capable of a certain amount of critical and nuanced thinking, and looks like he's generally trying to make good things happen and make bad things stop happening. He seems to have a reasonable quantity of perspective, wit and charm, and strikes me as the kind of person who would like to make the world a better place. And he also happens to be President of the United States of America.

This should all be unremarkable. Most people reading this have most of these characteristics. They should be a minimum starting point - an assumption until informed otherwise (apart from the President of the United States of America part, of course).

But I think today they were the rationale for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.

Understand, I have nothing against Barack Obama. I find him a likable individual and very rarely end up shout at the TV when he's talking. It wouldn't surprise me if one day he did do something worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

But he hasn't done it yet. Basically all he's done is be President of the United States without being an idiot. And while that's a refreshing change, it isn't grounds for a Nobel Prize. It shouldn't even be noteworthy.

We, the international community, would never deem one of our own leaders Nobel-worthy just on the grounds of not being an idiot. We should hold the US to the same standard.

Teach me ebay etiquette

As an experiment, I bought a gizmo on ebay from china for 50 cents (it would normally retail for about $20 here). I received it, and it turns out it has a flaw that probably renders either useless or unsafe to use. (It's electric, and one of the plug prongs is loose.) No big deal, you get what you pay for, life goes on. I really just wanted to see what would happen. I don't feel in any way put out and, from a "time is money" perspective, this isn't worth any more of my attention.

My question: what do I do about feedback? I don't want to give positive feedback because the gizmo is flawed. However, it doesn't seem fair to give non-positive feedback when I'm not giving the seller an opportunity to resolve the problem. I don't know what happens if you give no feedback whatsoever.

Any thoughts on what I should do? What would you want me to do if you were the seller?

Blah

I have like three long posts festering in my head, but they're the kind of things that require organization instead of braindumping and I can't seem to convince myself to buckle down and put together cohesive prose like a grownup.

Why doesn't baby brain make people smarter?

I've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that when you're pregnant you get tired and sometimes forgetful. And it's a fact of life that new babies wake up at night a lot, waking up their parents and leaving them sleep-deprived, and everyone knows from firsthand experience that you don't think quite so clearly when sleep-deprived.

In my own observations of people dealing with pregnancy and new babies, the result seems to be that they lose a level of critical thinking. Where before they would go "Interesting article. I wonder if the assumptions are valid and broadly applicable? I wonder how this premise is affected by the economic stimulus? What are the environmental implications? Would this hold if the stock market crashes and interest rates skyrocket?" they now go "OMG, you GUYS! Check out this article, it is SO TRUE!"

Doesn't this strike you as poor design? Why make the people responsible for the most helpless of our young temporarily dumber? How is that good for the perpetuation of the species? Wouldn't it be far more sensible for pregnancy hormones to give your cognitive powers a boost?

I love Improv Everywhere

Invisible dogs!

This would actually be interesting as an acting/improv training exercise, because you have to get in character as the dog. You see a pigeon or some garbage or another dog, what would your dog do? I think it would be a good way to practise committing to a character without the complexity of a human character that you don't know everything about.

Things They Should Invent: clear communication meter

Sometimes I think I'm communicating perfectly clearly with no room for ambiguity, and my interlocutor doesn't understand what I'm getting at at all. And sometimes someone is telling me something that makes no logical sense whatsoever, but they're acting like what they're saying is perfectly obvious. And sometimes the miscommunication in these cases is so great that the speaker can't even tell what aspect of it is not obvious to the listener. (This isn't a question of misunderstanding the language being spoken, it's a question of the clarity/logic of the message being communicated.)

As a translator and as a human being living in the world, I know intellectually that both parties are responsible for ensuring that communication is clear (assuming both parties are more or less equals - when an adult is talking to a three-year-old, it's obviously the adult's responsibility to understand and make themselves understood). But it's still frustrated, and there's often a part of me mentally screaming at my interlocutor "STOP BEING STUPID!" And if this happens often, it's very easy to feel like I'm the only sensible person in a world full of idiots, when in fact it's quite possible that I'm the idiot.

I wish there was some way to objectively measure who is making more sense and who is at greater fault for the miscommunication. That might make it easier to clear up any miscommunication, and people could get a sense of how often they're the idiot in the conversation. Maybe they could make an iphone app to do this.

Things They Should Study: ROI of socio-economic security

The older I get, the more of life I experience, the more I come to recognize the vast and disproportionate value of security, in the socio-economic sense of the word. Having a Good Job. Having safe housing. Having dental insurance. Having a bit of money put aside that you can throw at any moderate unexpected problem that might arise. Having a role in society that is generally considered respectable. Having the majority of people you encounter every day not look down on you. Simply being able to do, without drama or a second thought, whatever small and harmless thing you want to do, whether it's having a long hot shower, or making love to the consenting adult of your choice, or dyeing your hair red, or enjoying a glass of wine before bed.

The older I get, the more of life I experience, the more I enjoy doing what socio-economic security I do have and enjoy being empowered to do these kinds of small and harmless things that you can't always do (or at least not without drama) when you don't have socio-economic security, the more I become convinced that the benefits of socio-economic security are exponentially greater than any investment required to achieve it. I've already blogged about how I think the best way to help consumer confidence (and therefore economic recovery) is the perception among the general population that their jobs are safe. I've also found that the more social acceptance and less social censure I receive, the less defensive and more socially pleasant I become (which snowballs into even more social acceptance and less social censure), and I'm also in a better position to truly see and respect other people's points of view when I don't feel defensive about my own. I also find that in general, having a sense of my place in the world makes me a more productive citizen of the world. For most of my life, the world was a blur of confusion, swirling around me in an impenetrable mass of unwritten rules and unspoken expectations and uncertain futures. But the more socio-economic security I achieved, the more this blur came into focus. Instead of stumbling through a fog, it's more like walking down a busy street. Still lots going on, still lots of unknowns, but I have a better sense of what they are. Instead of using all my energy on not falling into unseen traps, I can spend some of it on inventing stuff and learning things and thinking about the societal implications of my choices. It's all very Maslowian.

So, thinking about all this, I think it would be fascinating if someone could quantify the ROI of providing people with socio-economic security. What would we have to invest to give everyone safety, a respectable place in society, and the leeway they need so that an innocent mistake or stroke of bad luck won't ruin them and so that they can enjoy harmless indulgences often enough to keep morale up? And what kinds of benefits would we gain from it?

Currently pondering

Suppose OHIP started covering 100% of the cost of glasses, including frames - whichever frames the client ends up choosing.

How would that affect the fashion aspect of the eyewear market?

Because fashion is a factor. You wear your glasses on your face, and often all the time. I'm sure the primary argument against OHIP covering 100% of the cost of frames is "But then people would get posh expensive designer frames for free!"

But would designer frames still be expensive if the status symbol factor wasn't there? Would more people buy designer frames, or would fewer people buy them since they're no longer a symbol of wealth? Given the (in my view tacky) habit of certain designers (**cough cough dolce&gabbana cough**) of putting their brand in giant letters on the arms of the frames, it seems some people value the designer name. Unless they merely tolerate the designer name to get the frames that they like best. (Personally, the big designer logo is a dealbreaker. It strikes me as hella non-U, not that I can claim to be U.) Are designer frames objectively better? (I don't know if they are, I can't afford them.) How would this affect the fashion choices of the general public? What if OHIP didn't put a limit on the number of pairs of glasses you bought?

State of everything

Craig Ferguson thinks everything sucks:



Louis CK thinks everything's amazing:

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"
Uploaded by Meowbay. - See more comedy videos.

I agree with them both.

"Microblogging site Twitter"

Sometimes when news articles refer to Twitter, the first mention describes it as "microblogging site Twitter".

Is there anyone - even one single person in the world - who knows what microblogging is but doesn't know what Twitter is?

I did hear of microblogging in passing before I became familiar with Twitter, but the concept didn't make sense to me. Then, later on, when I found out that various famous people I want to stalk like and admire were tweeting, I went and checked out their Twitter feeds and from that got a sense of what Twitter is. And from this, I groked the concept of microblogging.

But there has been no point in my internet experience where my concept of what Twitter is could ever have been clarified by describing it as a "microblogging site."

Things Sleeptracker Should Invent: "I'm going to bed now" button

I've been playing with a Sleeptracker recently. I might post a more comprehensive review later, but my preliminary assessment based on the first couple of tries is that it does what it says it does.

However, there is one thing that annoys me. If you want it to track the quality of your sleep during the night (rather than just waking you up at an optimal time), you have to set a "to bed" time, i.e. tell it in advance what time you're going to bed. Setting the "to bed" time involves as much fussy button-pressing as setting an alarm time on a regular digital watch, which is annoying because I don't go to bed at the same time every night and despite my best efforts never end up in bed at the time I planned to - which is why I need a Sleeptracker to wake me up in the first place. So this means that if I want to track my sleep quality, I have to fuss with buttons and set the time just before I go to bed every single night. Not especially user-friendly, and probably won't be something I can keep up in the long term.

What I'd like to be able to do is press one button (or one button sequence) to tell the tracker "I'm going to bed right now." Then it automatically sets the "to bed" time as whatever the current time is. Surely we have the technology to do that?

Happy International Translation Day!

As ever, using Fête St-Jerôme as an excuse to post an Eddie Izzard bootleg*




*(Dear Eddie: Massive, massive respect for your ever-increasing awesomeness and I'mma let you finish, but if you'd bring your tour to Canada we wouldn't need all these bootlegs.)

Teach me eBay etiquette

I emailed an ebay seller asking how much shipping to Canada would cost. Seller quotes an amount, I bid accordingly and win. Then I get a standard "YAY, you won!" email from the seller quoting a shipping price that's 20% higher.

The item ended up selling for close to my upper bid, so this 20% higher shipping price is enough to tip it from "cheaper than retail" to "more expensive than retail."

I already sent the seller a polite email asking WTF, but if they won't lower the shipping price back to their originally quoted amount, is there any way I can cancel the transaction without incurring any sort of penalty? I don't even particularly want the seller to get any penalty, I just don't want to buy the thing if shipping is 20% higher.

Update: Seller corrected it with no drama, all is good.

How to teach financial literacy in high school without changing the curriculum

A recurring theme during this recession is that they should teach financial literacy in high school. Of course, adding mandatory courses isn't that simple. There's only room for so many courses over the four years, there are all kinds of other courses that people want to be made mandatory, and there still has to be room for people to take electives like French and Physics and History all the way through to Grade 12.

So here's what we do: make every single word problem in the textbooks about a financial literacy concept, whenever mathematically possible.

For example, one thing I learned in one of my high school math classes was the formula for compound interest. M = P(1 + i)^n. I still use it to this day when trying to plan my personal finances. However, every word problem we had on this concept was about earning interest on investments. They could quite easily have made some of the word problems about credit card interest. Same mathematical concept, same word problem, but now you've taught how credit card interest works, which is one of the concepts people are complaining that they don't teach in high school.

Apparently calculus is used in economics similarly to how it's used in physics. I don't know enough about economics to know how this works. (And I find it SO WEIRD that so artificial a concept as economics would follow the mathematical laws of the physical universe.) But they could have taught this quite easily with a sentence or two about how calculus is used in economics, followed by some economics-based word problems. Then everyone who takes calculus will know a bit about economics. They did that with physics - I learned about derivatives and velocity and acceleration in Calculus class before I even took the relevant Physics class - so it shouldn't be any harder to do it with economics.

As an added bonus, it will make mathematics seem more relevant to students, because everyone knows you have to do money stuff when you're a grownup.

It will take some rewriting of textbooks, but that's more painless and possibly faster than rewriting the curriculum.

Real-life Things They Should Invent

Voting for Project 10 to the 100 is finally open! You can vote here!

I'm trying to decide which one to vote for. Obviously my first thought is either the one that will give the most help to the most people, or the one that would be most beneficial to me personally. But then I started wondering whether I should also be thinking about feasibility? Which of these projects can actually be achieved (or have significant progress be made) with $2 million? Which of these projects could Google actually make happen (as opposed to being dependent on external factors)? So I'm going to have to give it more thought before I vote.

You should go check out the finalists and vote too!

I had a long, difficult day of translation today

But not nearly as difficult as this guy.

This is why I hope to be able to stick to written translation for my entire career.

Only one person stopped to help

Sometimes in the Star's Acts of Kindness and other good deed stories, you there are stories where someone's in trouble and only one person stopped to help, everyone else just walked by, pretending they didn't see it.

Today I saw a lady fall down, and another lady immediately stopped to help. I didn't see any further need for help (fallen-down lady was getting up, no apparent injuries, they didn't need more people to pick up her personal effects) so I didn't linger and, to protect fallen-down lady's dignity and privacy, did my very best not to stare.

What would they have me do instead? I certainly wouldn't want a whole crowd gathering if I were the one who fell down.