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Empathy. It shocks me how many “adults” have a toddler-level understanding of their relationship to the world (as in it doesn’t revolve around them) and society (as in we have responsibility for each other). So many “adults” sound like screeching toddlers whenever there’s a hint of someone else getting something they don’t get. It even reaches the level of “I don’t like this movie so it shouldn’t have been made” as if the very existence of entertainment or education or whatever in a field they themselves don’t prefer is a personal affront.
And this isn’t even a right-wing thing. The feminist National Action Committee in Canada was turned from a potent and feared political force to a laughingstock by ostensible left-wing women deciding that their concerns over daycare trumped native women’s active murders among other intersectional issues.
Something that bothers me about a lot of people’s sense of empathy is that they’re only able to employ it by directly relating events to themselves. It’s like a stereotypical “How would you feel if this happened to your daughter?” thing, where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it’s possible for them to get into.
I also hear this a lot around disasters, whether they be natural, terrorist attacks, etc. If you’re around somebody who has been anywhere near the location of the event, get ready for the “Gosh, that’s so awful. I was only there six years ago, it could have been me.” Can’t you just fucking care about the wellbeing of things that aren’t you? Feel bad because a bad thing happened, not by making it about yourself.
where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it’s possible for them to get into.
I wonder if there is a distinguishing term for this.
Empathy = The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (no matter how different they are from you)
? = The “ability” to imagine yourself in a situation that someone else, who’s very similar to you, experienced.
Sympathy?
Compassion?
Eskimo brothers?
I don’t see what’s wrong with that. That’s also empathy, just not everybody follow the same way to feel it.
God this is true, there’s a staggering amount of people that lack it. So much selfishness as well
Selfishness can be trained away, lack of empathy not very much it seems.
Happily we store all these non-empats in position of power.
I think empathy can be trained. Children in general (I mean very young children) have no empathy. They’re vicious little sociopaths. But if they’re gently introduced to empathy as they grow, by the time they’re, like, 5 they will have empathy. (Those who were not taught to be empathic by 5 will never be able to develop it.
coughMuskcough coughTrumpcough
But you can lose empathy over time. Trauma can make you lose empathy. Fury (c.f. my above rant about COVID-19) can make you lose empathy. Tragedy can make you lose empathy. THAT kind of empathy loss, however, can be re-learned. It’s not even all that hard. The world just has to stop beating up on you a while, or you just have to meet someone who has it worse than you do to snap back.
Well yes that was what I was meaning, if you don’t have empathy as an adult it seems it’s impossible to acquire.
Yeah, it seems you need a baseline instilled into you at critical junctures of your upbringing to have it at all. After that it can be trained, in effect, but only if you have it to begin with.
I lost most of mine during Covid. The amount of selfishness by people during that time has made me want to never be empathetic towards them… and there were A LOT of selfish people.
I have to confess I lost all empathy for people in the west over COVID for a while. While we were being hit with the heaviest and largest quarantine in history, cowering down in terror in our apartments, I kept one thought in my head in the first two weeks: “We’re suffering so the rest of the world has time to prepare and fight back.”
Then all y’all didn’t prepare. Didn’t fight back. Instead broke quarantine restrictions because you needed a fucking haircut.
I mean even ignoring the clown-pants-wearing CDC, the sheer utter shitfuckery of the average person freaking out because they had to wear a couple of fucking grams of paper over their mouth and nose, squealing like stuck pigs and generally acting like entitled shitheads over it, not to mention the people who not only broke quarantine, but fucking bragged about it on social media (like the bridal shower that turned into a massive cluster of cases), just had me gobsmacked in disbelief.
So when Wuhan opened up again and people did things like celebrate with a massive pool party that sent shockwaves of (typical) hatred at the Chinese around the world for daring to celebrate after living through the worst quarantine in history and coming out whole, I decided all y’all chucklefucks could die for all I gave a shit about.
Took me a few years to shove that rage back down and clamp it into a red-hot ball deep in my heart.
Now I feel sorry for people suffering again.
Except Trump supporters suffering at the hands of his idiot policies, I mean.
It’s akin to a skill, after all. Like humor. Having either one does not make someone good or bad. They’re just gimmicks in the end.
I think overall, most people are just too dumb. I mean you could always say that, regardless of how smart the population actually is in absolute terms, simply based on variability. But still, so many things can be traced back to this. Of course, smart people also do really dumb shit, just less often.
There are no smart people. Everybody is stupid (where “stupid” is defined as “prone to maladaptive behaviour and/or belief”), no exceptions. There are just some fields society values more when less stupid than others.
If everyone is the same, why do some consistently do far less stupid shit than others? That is not something the society defines. Some are literally too stupid to see how their actions directly lead to their own harm. No need to look at “complex” things like voting trump as an immigrant with the wrong skin color and then getting deported.
I believe it was Einstein that said “don’t judge a fish by its ability to ride a bicycle”, I’m probably misquoting somewhat.
Anyway, I think what the person you are replying to was trying to say that everyone has things that they are stupid at.
For instance, I can’t dance other than either specifically spelled out instructions like waltz or like an epileptic on crack cocaine in a rave.
I have a lot of other things I’m bad at but that’s just the squeakiest wheel to grease.
I honestly feel like these people are trying to say something and don’t have the skill needed to say it.
Not being good at everything is something completely different. Dumb is when someone says things like “English is God’s language because the Bible is written in English”.
I think we’re both saying the same things in different ways.
And here we have an example of exactly what I was talking about.
Here’s a little hint, Sparky. Literally nothing you responded to translates to “everyone is the same”.
i wouldnt call empathy a skill
I would.
I think they’re looking for compassion?
The difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Ur not wrong.
But u r.
tru
I’m neurodiverse so I spell things wrong sometimes.
Everyone spells things wrong sometimes.
Yep it’s a classic symptom for me though. It’s often not nice for neuro people to have it pointed out to them, and it really isn’t nice when people do it to me. It’s embarrassing and taps into horrible memories from school.
If you spell something incorrectly and someone points it out (as long as they do this in a respectful way) why does that trigger you? You can clearly spell perfectly well so if you spell incorrectly on the odd occasion and someone tells you this it doesn’t imply something bad. If anything, you can improve your spelling for the future. 🤔
Just asking, please no hate.
I akshuly no a gy ho rites lik this, bekaze hys brane litrly kant komprihend the difrense betwen fonetiks and speling.
Just by talking to him, you’d never guess anything was wrong. He’s eloquent and well spoken. He can read just fine. But watching him type emails is an exercise in patience. He’s in his late 30’s and it’s not something that remedial classes or correction by his peers could “cure”.
There are a couple of words you might want to look up. These are “dyslexia” and “dysgraphia”.
For the latter, no, they cannot improve their spelling for the future. It is literally impossible and correcting them constantly is a huge drain on their self-worth.
(P.S. Good on you for asking, however, instead of lecturing.)
Thanks for asking. Neurodiverse people are often labelled as thick and/or lazy at school, I was one of them. I had times where I was humiliated by teachers in front of class etc for making errors, and faced ridicule from students. Parents and teachers would flip on me for making mistakes, and I just couldn’t stop making them. It all really damaged my self esteem, relationship with parents, and education.
There’s other reasons that’s just the main one. And it’s fairly common with neurodiverse people IME
Thanks for replying. These experiences sound like people weren’t treating you with respect when correcting your spelling. That’s obviously pretty shitty.
But if someone does respectfully correct your spelling would you still be upset and take offence at them?
What are they trying to achieve correcting someone like that? IME they always do it publicly (so not through friendly DM), and often say it with ridicule.
critical thinking
And what better place to show that, if you know what I mean.
Listening to understand, rather than listening to respond.
Yep and just waiting for their turn to speak
In guilty of this. I usually know what they want to say at word 3 or 4. Waiting it out is exhausting. Not waiting it out is rude. Hard either way, not talking to people, way easier.
Agreed. The best responses come after one has understood.
The difference between your and you’re.
Imagining the potential of a prototype.
“So with this prototype I want to explore aspect A”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want this as a final product.”
“Ok. Do you like aspect A? Imagine all other things were finished as you like it.”
“No, I don’t like this product.”
Same for apps and sites. Having to explain to someone multiple times that I’m not trying to force their users to be bilingual just because there is “lorem ipsum” text on the page is rough.
Math, and I mean basic math: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division. Basic understanding of fractions, basic understanding of percentages.
I’m not amazing at math but I consider this basic and with relatively regular day to day application. I’m not saying people should be able to make these operations without a calculator on the fly, I certainly couldn’t in many cases. But I would expect people to know what math you need to apply to, say, calculate a 20% discount. I would expect people to know if, say, two thirds is more or less than three quarters. But no. Nope
I frequently do blatantly inaccurate math just to spitball, and when I say the numbers that I’m computing out loud, people get amazed that I can keep track of so many numbers when I’m only tracking the result of the previous calculation and the operator that I’m about to perform.
I’m like, dude, if you accounted for the rounding errors, you would realize how fucking wrong I am, but this math is not precision-important, and so I’m just trying to get an idea of the scope of the numbers that I need to address whatever problem I’m working on.
For instance, if you asked me to spitball how far it is from Los Angeles, California to Atlanta, Georgia, and how long it would take you to drive that, I would assume you would average about 50 miles an hour after breaks and whatnot that you would be able to drive approximately 12 hours a day, which means you could clear 600 miles, and off the top of my head I would guess it’s about 3,200 miles between Los Angeles and Atlanta, assuming that you stay on the 40 as much as you can once you get to Amarillo, TX, so I would assume that the average driver would take five days and approximately four hours to drive that distance.
This is very off the cuff, off the top of my head, I could be 600 miles off on the distance in either directions, I could be 10, 12 miles an hour in drive time off in either direction, and I could be off 4 or 5 hours or not even account for a co-driver on the trip.
You can do the trip in like 2ish days. I have done the trip in like twoish days.
But, reality and guesstimation are two separate things, and there’s no reason to be amazed by somebody’s guesstimation capabilities. It’s very basic math that doesn’t require any skill greater than your multiplication tables.
I don’t know why more people aren’t good at it.
People being bad at math isn’t a new thing but it is getting worse now with everyone having a calculator (phone) in their pocket.
Also. Great time to dust off this old gem.
I’m not sure if having a calculator available makes it worse. The calculator only does the operation. It doesn’t reason which operation needs to be done, it just does what you tell it to do. And that’s where people fail at, understanding the concept behind the operation.
Yep. I agree. Knowing the logic behind math, namely what values need to be where in a formula and processing it in order, is a problem.
I think this is one of the reasons a bachelors degree in comupter science is so highly valued for too many jobs. The degree has a good amount of math requirements even though they’re not needed for programming. I think the reason behind that is succeeding in that much logical thinking means you can learn/follow the rules/syntax of coding languages.
In the business world they hope people with that much understanding in math have a good head on their shoulders.
I’m an engineer by training which includes a lot of higher math training. Also have been running my own company for years. But still learned this basic stuff way later. This is something that should taught in school.
… you got an engineering degree not knowing basic percentages and fractions?
… isn’t this taught in schools? I definitely learned it before age 12
Applications in daily things like taxes, rebates and the like. It is, but somehow it only sunk in late in life.
Where I live this skill is normal. I was on vacation to the usa once, and people were amazed I could add two digit numbers at an arcade. I only realized how odd that was in retrospecr
very basic sewing repair, like reattaching a button or sewing back down a popped seam
but then again fast fashion makes these skills seem worthless to many people
Agreed, fast fashion and it’s equivalents have pretty much killed off basic repair in general. My great grandmother taught me how to rewire a lamp, and I think I’m the only person in my friend group that can do it. Most people just toss them when they stop working.
Nana was in her early 20s when the great depression hit, and her influence is probably why I’m so in favor of right-to-repair.
your Nana rules. I can’t rewire a lamp myself, but I’m fortunate I have a handful of nerd friends I know could do it for me. I’d bake them some bread (mom’s recipe) in return
You should try it sometime, it’s actually really easy!
there’s a broken one at work I’ve been meaning to take a stab at. wish me luck lol
You can do it!
Honest question: what is there to learn? You’ve got a thread, a needle, you put the thread in the needle and then you stab the things that need to fit together with it. The only thing that i was told during such stabbing to a button once was that i should wrap the thread around the button when done, but it hasn’t prevented me to attached them so far?
You would be surprised how many people are unable to do that, who are physically capable of doing it.
At least where I live there’s a cultural learned helplessness around sewing. “Nobody does it anymore so how am I supposed to have learned?” or “doesn’t sewing something cost more than just buying a new garment?” (both I’ve personally heard people say)
For sure it’s likely either a learned helplessness or a passive indifference. People like to give up before they even try.
Knowing the absolute basics of using a computer
Eh, it depends. I don’t know how to sew, except to fix a hole in my sock. Couldn’t make a coat, never needed or wanted to.
My mother can’t use a computer besides checking her emails and finding a movie to watch, which is all she needs and wants to know.
Now, if it’s your job to use one effectively and haven’t got a clue? I expect you’d end up in management in no time.Sounds like your mom does know the basics
Taking feedback constructively
How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything <s>
To be fair, many people don’t know how to give constructive feedback very well either.
Yeah, too many people simply think brutal honesty is the same as constructive criticism. When in reality, they’re just looking for an excuse to be brutal.
True
Yep and it can be difficult to tell if someone’s reacting badly because they’re vulnerable or because they’re a twat.
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How to cook? Or even follow a recipe. Not like hard stuff either, a simple casserole recipe or cookie recipe. Not even find a good recipe, that’s actually very hard online these days what with bullshit generators and stuff. I hand you a recipe.
Yes I second this one. Some people can’t even hard boil an egg
Makes me remember that old boomer joke “My wife cooks water in the evening so that the next day I just need to warm it up for my tea”
I can cook great, I suck at following recipes. Not because I can’t follow instruction, but because so many recipes are written full of jargon
With something like cookies there’s actually a bit of assumed institutional knowledge, like what “cream together sugar and butter” means. Sometimes the devil is in the details and those details you kind of need to have seen every episode of Good Eats to get.
Cooking & self reflection
To do very basic home repair and DIY. I keep wondering how people get through life without being able to drill a hole, fix a clogged drain or even change a light bulp. Do they get some sort of service technican for all these things?
Yep… Some people pay electrician to come and change a lightbulb…
I’m one of them! Neither parent could do DIY and I’ve got poor manual skills. Recently I had to ask [email protected] how to put picture hooks up. They kindly and patiently explained it to me 😊
While I understand that there could be a lucrative market here… It warms my heart to know that there are people who would just volunteer their time to help others… Because that’s kind of what a dad would do. Just straight up give advice and experience with the thought that they would be helping the future.
I know! It’s really kind of them and they really put effort into their answers
I use a bizarre system that eliminates hooks entirely, relying on velcro instead. AND peels off the wall without a scratch when you don’t want it any longer.
That’s a clever idea! What do you use?
It’s something I saw on Taobao’s “try this for practically free” section (where new products get introduced) and tested. They’re advertised as being able to hold up to 0.9kg for 2 small ones to 7.2kg for 4 large ones. Let me see if I can find a picture.
That’s what they look like in package. The sticky backing is a weird form of “gel tape” that sticks to almost anything, but can be removed by just stretching (at the point where you see the arrows) without leaving a mark. Here’s how they’re used:
your shocked
It’d be spelling.
This isn’t a spelling error. This is a grammatical error. “Your” is correctly spelled. It’s just the wrong word.
Haha I’m neurodiverse
Edit: thus the spelling errors
And I’m tall.
But not very forgiving. You’d think your head being so far away from the problems would give you a little more space to be kind.
Low clearance for bullshit.
And apparently also very nice.
I mean, you seem nice.
People do tend to remark how nice I am. I’ve got them all fooled.
This isn’t reddit. You can edit your post to fix the title here.
There’s a lot of comments about my spelling, so I’m leaving it so it makes sense to people that join the thread late
Are you looking for “dyslectic”?
I went to school with someone dysgraphic. I edited all his papers because he couldn’t spell the same word five times in a row with the same spelling. While the profs were aware, we very tightly link mental capacity with linguistic capacity and even with the best of intentions his inability to spell would cause marks to go down.
Yep, classic neurodiverse problem. We’re held to a neurotypical way of working despite our brain being wired different
Well to be fair, that link of intellect to language is something NTs can’t help either. That’s their wiring. Indeed I’ve used that wiring to hack judges in some of my students’ speech competitions back in the day. It works really well. 😂
Haha true! Love the hack it’s really smart
The ability to use the correct words
The ability to use the correct words
“The capacious aptitude for the judicious deployment of linguistically felicitous and semantically apropos verbiage,” I think you mean.
