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.
I don’t see what’s wrong with that. That’s also empathy, just not everybody follow the same way to feel it.
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?
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 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.
i wouldnt call empathy a skill
I think they’re looking for compassion?
The difference between your and you’re.
critical thinking
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
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.
The difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Ur not wrong.
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.
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
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.
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
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 to buy 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.
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
Knowing how to swim or ride a bike. It’s not too common, but when someone tells me they can’t, I’m quietly kinda shocked.
socioeconomics plays a large part here. I learned to swim at the ymca, but schlepping my silly ass to and from swim practice meant parental involvement.
bikes? learning to ride a bike in the suburbs is natural; learning to ride a bike when you live in an apartment building - hell keeping a bike from getting stolen is difficult when you don’t have a garage.
imho, these are both easy to understand when you view through a larger socioeconomic starting point: we don’t all have the same opportunities and resources.
Race also plays a large part of it. In most cases, if your parents know how to swim, you do too. But many black people don’t know how to swim, even if their parents know how. Not because of a lack of transport or means, (though that could certainly play a part) but because their parents didn’t want to get their hair wet to teach them.
For those who don’t know, ultra textured hair is a very special beast, and takes a lot of specific care to keep it looking nice. And getting it wet tends to be a big sin unless you’re specifically washing it.
So all the black parents never took their kids to the pool to teach them how to swim. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because they physically didn’t want to get wet. So swimming knowledge gets broken from one generation to the next. So the black people who know how to swim are typically the ones who go out of their way to learn on their own, or who have non-black friends who taught them.
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
Are you looking for “dyslectic”?
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
Taking feedback constructively
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.
How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything <s>
How to reason through solving a problem or fixing something. Not necessarily being successful, but just the process of thinking about possible things to try or steps to take.
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.
The difference between your and you’re
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.
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.
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
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.
