How Do You Stay Upbeat Amidst the Idiocy? 442
Techdirt has a wonderful summary of how hard it is sometimes to stay upbeat when faced with some of the complete idiocy that intelligent, tech-savvy readers often have to deal with in their day-to-day lives. While the frustration will probably never go away, nor will the news calling attention to it, it does seem that opening people's eyes to problems helps things move in the right direction, so keep it up. "Yes, we're in the midst of a brutal financial mess — but that won't stop innovation. Yes, incumbent forces, with short-sighted plans and a desire to hold back the tides are annoying and disruptive (not in a good way) in the short run. But even they are finding they can't hold back progress. Robert Friedel has a wonderful book called A Culture of Improvement that details how we, as a society, are constantly looking to improve on what we already have. We add ideas and ingenuity to old concepts and build something better — not because of the desire to grab some "intellectual property," but because of the desire to improve our own lot, to build a better tool that we want to use. Incumbent short-sighted players have been able to hinder and harm progress, but they can't keep it down completely. That culture of improvement can't be stopped entirely."
Stay humble (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of focusing on all the tech details that other folks get wrong, think of all the economic dogma and confused legal interpretations that otherwise intelligent people allow themselves to parrot.
listen to David Foster Wallace (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty good combat the horror of life advice [marginalia.org]. OTOH, DFW killed himself this year, so maybe that's not a ringing endorsement
Frank Herbert explains it (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, incumbent forces, with short-sighted plans and a desire to hold back the tides are annoying and disruptive (not in a good way) in the short run. But even they are finding they can't hold back progress.
And Frank Herbert, in Heretics of Dune noted that:
"Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?"
Knowing why people sometimes block good ideas helps me cope with it. Thank you for that, Frank.
You typed the same thing I was about it (Score:4, Interesting)
You are an idiot, I'm an idiot, we are all an idiot. A month ago, I called the cable company to complain about how the History Channel never seemed to come in clearly. The lady on the phone walked me through basic trouble shooting. She had me re-seat the coax connector on the back of the tuner. Well gee I thought, I had the wire tightened down to the back of the tuner with a cresent wrench, what will this solve? Guess what, after re-seating the damn thing, the History Channel worked like a charm.
Did I feel like an idiot for having to call for tech support only to have my problem resolved after walking through the "is the computer plugged in" level of troubleshooting? Yeah. But if I didn't call, the History Channel would still come in pretty shitty.
We are all idiots. All you can do is laugh at yourself and enjoy your life. When I did tech support, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoyed chatting with the people whose computer I was fixing, and I enjoyed how thankful most of them were that I was able to fix their black box.
I dont do tech support anymore, but it was a lot of fun when I did.
Stop focusing on "idiocy" (Score:4, Interesting)
Recognize that intelligent, tech-savvy people are just as much a font of ignorance, error, and groupthink as anyone else. Study the psychology of learning and decision making and discover that most of what you call "idiocy" is actually the same set of heuristics and biases that make us intelligent in the first place applied in situations where they don't work. Now, for the real mind-binder -- start looking at what you think you know and how you came to know it. How much of it is based on your own direct research and controlled experimentation? How much of it is based on incomplete information or a biased investigation? How much of it is just stuff your friends happen to believe?
The answer is "almost all of it". Turns out it's really hard to actually *know* anything at all, even from a practical standpoint. We get away with being wrong most of the time because there are few direct consequences for most of our beliefs (when was the last time your political opinions really mattered?). And once you understand how easy you are to fool, it becomes a lot easier to see how other people can make the same mistakes, and how often they're the ones who are right, not you.
But before you do any of that, drop the Slashdot Superiority Complex. There are few things in this story more ridiculous than the implicit idea that the world should be run by the same people who write comments on tech news sites.
Re:Charitable contributions (Score:2, Interesting)
That's because many atheists believe that helping the downtrodden is everybody's responsibility and so should be done by society, paid for by taxes, as opposed to private charitable contributions. If there's no god, why do so personally when you don't score brownie points and won't solve the problem when you can rally everyone to solve the problem compulsorily instead? Good works through social programs solves the free rider problem with regard to charitable contribution.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading about a survey where they asked people how good a driver they thought they were. The majority of people considered themselves above average drivers. Now by definition the majority of people can't be above average so it seems the average person has an inflated opinion of their capabilities.
Re:PEBKAC (Score:3, Interesting)
Case in point number 1: I forgot my password. The company tech person gives me a password. It's wrong. It just isn't the style I would make a password in, and I know. I try to tell them it is wrong in a polite way. They get defensive until I try it. They later realize they can't distinguish a 1 and an l which may be a font problem on their computer. I never got mean, but I was a bit too thankful when she finally gave me the right password though. The kind of thankfulness that when you receive it, you feel like a jerk for having been acting like an ass.
Case in point number 2: I call TDS tech support about TDS webmail for my grandmother. It overall works well, but she needs to be able to make the text larger to read. Because the lines have the break positions hard set as so many characters, she ends up having to scroll ridiculous left/right distances at the font size she needs. The setting is editable in the TDS webmail preferences, but the numbers in the drop down aren't nearly flexible enough.
On the phone I recommend she try to perhaps drop a line with the developers. She says that webmail is an extra feature and is not meant to be used for general usage. I would more inclined believe her, but recently TDS has made it mandatory for the users to go to their main portal page to get to webmail.
In any case, she kept going back to how I should be using outlook express instead. This is a lovely program that doesn't quite work how my grandmother can adjust, and on top of that the interface can't be enlarged. Yet she kept repeating that is what I should do. I'm 90% that was written on a queue card or something.
I eventually switched my grandmother over to linux with Thunderbird as the mail client. In the end was the best option at the time because I could make the text for everything huge and get rid of any interface elements that would confuse her.
One of the more disappointing things about the conversation was how she didn't try recommending any other software. It was only Outlook Express. She didn't even say anything about screen reading software that may have helped get around the problems that Outlook Express would impose on the situation.
Case in point number 3: Tech support tells be about the wonders of emptying the IE cache and resetting the history. It can speed things up and fix bugs. I didn't want to say I was using linux, and so never did. She was too damn nice and I didn't want to end the conversation saying something that would destroy happy the mood, especially with how rare they are with tech support. I couldn't help bug get the feeling that she was really happy to have learned it herself and wanted to pass the information to the world.
Damn that was a long post. Nit pick it as you want, guys.
Re:Idiots are everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what the Socratic Method [wikipedia.org] is for. Instead of just giving them the answer, you ask them a lot of questions that they can answer until they've reached the desired solution. If people aren't willing to try to learn what it is you're helping them with, then they won't bother coming to you.
The added bonus to this method is that people can't tell when you're spinning a line of bull because you don't know the answer yourself... ;*)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
You've paraphrased something I've being saying for decades. Back in my university days, I was a TA. I quickly learned that if 1 or 2 of my students (in a class of 15) didn't get it, it was them. If 12 or 13 didn't get it, then it was me. It meant I hadn't explained it properly, or I'd made a false assumption about what they knew.
The other important thing is that even when it was one student who didn't get it, it didn't mean that the student was an idiot. It often meant he or she simply marched to a different drummer. I had one student pass by the skin of her teeth, and even that was only after considerable tutoring. But that same student went on to get a PhD in a totally different discipline. There's a difference between being a fool and being a fish out of water.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in. Engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this, because unlike writers, musicians, or artists, we deal with deterministic systems. We design, build, and fix things so that they are reliably predictable. But people aren't reliably predictable, and expecting them to be is going to stress you out.
I've seen people get bitterly angry because someone didn't know the difference between an AMD processor and an Intel one. I know one person who, when a co-worker on a project casually asked why Linux would be a better choice than Windows, got so angry his hands were physically trembling with rage, and he had to walk out of the room, because "otherwise I'd have to punch that stupid bastard in the face for such a retarded question". I know one person who has exploded in a rage in a restaurant, because the waitress brought his sandwich on the wrong type of bread.
Not surprisingly, two of the people I know like this have already had heart attacks.
The problem with stress like this isn't that there are foolish or annoying questions about. Of course there are. Always have been, always will be. The problem is how seriously you take it. If you treat foolish questions as personal insults, if you expect everyone to have your level of expertise in your field, then you're going to be stressed out. Let's face it; if you get angry about bread, the problem isn't with the bread.
If a discussion of bracing styles forces you to leave the room because you're going to hit someone, you're either wound too tight, or you're in the wrong profession. Possibly both.
Sit back, take a break, and wonder why it is that you're always so angry about everything, when everyone else seems to take it in stride. And if you come to the conclusion that "that's because everyone is stupid and I'm not", resign yourself to be miserable and angry for the rest of your life, cause life isn't going to change any time soon.
Re:Mediocre Blog Rubbish (Score:3, Interesting)
Being smarter than other people actually seems to be a disadvantage in management.
This is not true, although it appears that way for two reasons.
One, a big part of management skills are people skills, and a lot more people are strong in one area than in two. People tend to specialize in things they're good at.
Two, people tend to undervalue skills that they don't have, perhaps for reasons related to the Dunning-Kruger Effect [wikipedia.org]. Intellectually average managers may look at a dorky programmer and mainly notice their lack of social skills and poor dress sense. Equally, that programmer may fail to appreciate what the manager is actually good at, and focus on how much lower their IQ is.
Another confounding factor is politicking. The larger the company, the more room there is for individuals to advance themselves without regard for the company or their colleagues. Some of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen came from perfectly smart people who were just acting in their own personal interests.
Re:Think outside the box. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to disagree with your suggestions. Engineers (like scientists) live in the real world where being *right* matters, because Nature doesn't get swayed by appearances.
The people you are talking about - managers, artists, feng shui charlatans etc. - live in a world of appearances, where success depends, to various extents, on convincing others of the value of their work. These are important social skills for most people to have, but are not important for engineers in their dayjobs. You can't negotiate with a bridge about please not falling down.
In fact, if an engineer consciously tries not to think like an engineer, they'll do themselves a disservice. Most engineering students, when they start university, do not think like engineers. It's hard work learning how, and those who can't do so tend to switch majors, because they can't handle the harshness of physical reality.
Re:Charitable contributions (Score:3, Interesting)
Those same God botherers have been shown in study after study to be far quicker to give a large percentage of their income to charities that directly reach out to the poor and down-trodden than their secular counterparts.
I call bullshit. Let's see some citations on these nonexistent "studies". I seriously doubt any such study exists for Americans and even if it did this strikes me as something extraordinarily difficult to study in the US because it has been proven that Americans lie about religion and charity a lot. You would have to find a way to identify people's religion without asking them, an extraordinarily difficult task.
After the Christians killed them all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even some atheists have admitted that Christianity is doing wonders in Africa at changing the hearts of millions and bringing them to a point where they can build peaceful, stable societies.
Yes... this is like saying, "Those gosh darned natives, after a hundred years of starvation, murder, torture, and succumbing to European diseases, have finally decided to give Jesus a chance."
Christianity was the excuse used to destroy the perfectly civilized tribes of Africa in order to give the Church and the King the right to plunder their natural wealth, as they did in the Americas, and everywhere else their foul hands touched. It would have happened anyway, but the Church and colonialism are like bread and butter. Perhaps you are just finally giving all the money back that you stole from Africa. It's too bad there's so much corruption in the churches and governments now that it doesn't reach the people who need it.
Aww heck, just ignore these details. Go back to using God's word to divide the country and give political power to the Republicans who can't stand you, or Sarah Palin. Go back to pretending that the bible doesn't say that your own wealth will nearly guarantee that you won't enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Go back to the church where you sit in an air conditioned auditorium for a whole hour once a week with people who think exactly as you do, and pretend you're a spiritual being who's really involved in the "community."
Christ almighty, indeed.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
I sincerely hope you're joking, otherwise your engineering degree makes you nothing more than an educated idiot.
Most professions aren't just about acquiring knowledge. They're also about applying that knowledge. That application takes practice. In your example, a surgeon would be taught how to make incisions, keep the area clean, avoid damaging major organs etc. A medical procedures textbook assumes a lot of knowledge has already been acquired in medical school and won't walk you through these critical things. What's more a surgeon trains with other surgeons and gets taught how to do things one piece at a time with oversight. Eventually they get good. In the meantime there's someone there to do the trickier parts of the op and take over if required. You're not just going to blunder your way into doing it based on a google searches and library books. I wouldn't want to be your first patient. You might get good after a few months or years, after killing a few dozen (or hundred) people.
I've never understood how intelligent people could make such faulty assumptions about the application of specialized knowledge. You remind me of a fruit loop on a flight simulation news group who insisted that because he could program a flight computer, that he'd be able to put down a major airliner if the pilots were incapacitated. Perhaps he'd succeed, and perhaps he wouldn't but I wouldn't want to be on that flight.