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How Do You Stay Upbeat Amidst the Idiocy?
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."
I remember in online games, if everyone else looks like they're lagged, it's really you that has the problem. Perhaps, when everyone else looks like an idiot... well, you know.
Here's a clue... You encounter idiots everywhere in life. Sometimes they are just caught off guard, sometimes they are having a bad day, sometimes they are outside their domain of expertise, and sometimes they are simply a waste of space.
You have to find the patience within yourself to get on with your life, accepting that there are some things you can't change.
But getting angry or depressed about it certainly won't help.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
But getting angry or depressed about it certainly won't help.
I prefer pathological apathy - I'm working towards just not giving a shit anymore. There's nothing I can do about much of anything: I'm just an average and sometimes below average peon with no power. I might even be one of those idiots, so I guess it's a good thing that I can't do much.
I used to get frustrated a lot. That was before I grew up and realized not everyone follows the same life path I do.
Dumb questions do exist. I laugh when people say "there are no dumb questions" and I laugh even harder when people say "the only dumb question is the one not asked." In all honesty, both are wrong but I have learned that the only dumb question is the one asked repeatedly. If I have to explain something to someone twice, i figure "ok they just forgot, happens to me too." But if I have to tell someone, or explain something to someone over and over and over, then it's a dumb question asked by a dumb person. However, with that said, feeling frustrated doesn't help. Just walk away, don't help them, don't explain. Tell them to figure it out and stop wasting your time. If this is on the job, tell their manager and get them replaced for incompetence.
It isn't worth getting frustrated and angry. Your emotions are your responsibility. A wise man once told me, "10% of life is what happens to you, the other 90% is how you deal with it."
I find that it's easier to avoid taking other peoples' idiocy to heart when I can pay various non-profit organizations to deal with it on my behalf. Some recent favorites include:
The ever-present EFF
The Freedom from Religion Foundation
The American Library Association
The Wikimedia Foundation
The Nevada chapter of the ACLU (which is explicitly pro-Second Amendment, unlike the national body)
There are plenty of other worthy causes; those are just the ones on my list this year. Think about it this way: the God-botherers contribute a full 10% of their income, pre-tax, to try to drag civilization back into the Middle Ages. What's the best you can do?
The easiest way to stay upbeat is to remember that you, too, are an idiot. Everyone is an idiot from time to time. When you see idiocy in others that is the time to take an even closer look at yourself to see what lacunae reside in your own thinking.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
In the long run, Everybody Dies.
Haha, true. This is a very fortunate thing. Reading the first paragraph of TFA, I realized that they were describing the same exact thing I felt reading Conservapedia. It's like, funny for 5 minutes, but then it starts getting you depressed, and you start wanting to kill someone, usually the idiot doing it... then you start wanting to kill yourself because you realize that they're all around you.
The thing I keep telling myself is that these are concentrated stories of idiocy, and that the real world isn't composed of nearly the amount of them that I think there is by reading those stories. However, true. That they're going to die someday certainly helps. Here's to Schlafly's eventual death!
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
You accept the fact that the world has always been dominated by idiots and malcontents and yet, somehow, it has managed to survive.
I'm beginning to realize too many engineers and computer nerds fall into a trap where they can only see how things will fail. This makes sense, because that is what a good engineer should do. However, the brightest engineers I know often have a hard time thinking outside the box. When given an idea that doesn't mesh with their existing view of the world, they are often quick to shoot it down.
I think many engineers would do very well to learn things and associate with people who are very far from their occuptaions. Hang out with somebody who does Feng Shui for a living--it really is just a different language for expressing good design and architecture. Read up on Taoism. Hang out with people who deal with the public--a nurse or something. Hang out with a couple artists. Learn Jazz, where the idea is to *not* have a rigid musical structure. Force yourself to enjoy sports... hockey has a lot of skill! Force yourself into doing things that don't require stringent rules like programming. And for god sake, stop trying to fucking correct your girlfriend/wife/whatever on minor technical details (even though it is hard sometimes, trust me)!!
The more you force yourself to *stop* thinking like an engineer, the better you'll be at engineering and the happier your life will be overall.
the complete idiocy that intelligent, tech-savvy readers often have to deal with in their day-to-day lives
It's these self-proclaimed intelligent, tech-savvy readers I find to be the biggest idiots of all. Clearly a smarmy, self-righteous bunch too.
Similes are like metaphors
But I think the secret to "caring" is to pull yourself out of yourself, so to speak. Stop worrying about your existence and thing about how we as a society are evolving.
You are but a small twig on a mighty river. You might be able to paddle around a little bit. You can always choose which twigs you want float next to. You can always choose how you want to react to wherever the river takes you. But ultimately, you cannot control the path the river takes through the universe.
To put it more succinctly:
Try reading The Long Emergency or Kunstler's blog. While he's a little doom and gloom, the basic fact that we aren't living sustainably, and when the oil gets more scarce or environment starts getting all up in it, there's going to be a lag before any major energy change or sustainability movement is going to kick in - and it is likely going to require a significant reduction of the human population.
So, make sure you have some basic tools on hand and have done what you can to prepare. The next few decades are going to be interesting.
Surely since you are an IT professional, you can talk to me about the advances in GPUs. Which shader programming language is the best?
I bet you love when people ask you, "The computer guy" what you think about some computer topic you know nothing about. Obviously since you know about computers, you can help them install the game their kid downloaded for their RAZR, right?
You know what I hate more then what you hate? When people try to pretend they know about my profession more then I do. People who know just enough buzzwords of whatever I do that they have fooled themselves into thinking they know stuff I dont. And I dont know much, trust me.
But I dont really hate those kind of people. I just pity those people and hope someday they learn that they dont know nearly as much as they think they do.
I dont know a fucking thing about how to design an embedded software application, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know how to program for mainframes, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know (but I'm trying to learn) graphics programming, but I'm a computer guy. Should I, a "computer guy" know about all these topics in great detail?
The world is a big place. Maybe being a "metal guy" means more then just knowing about whatever steel type you read in a magazine? Maybe being an English teacher means knowing more then just "basic grammar rules" you read on "grammar-nazi.com". Maybe being a nurse means a fucking bit more then just knowing details about medications (hint, that is the doctors job, not the nurse, but obviously you know more about nursing then a nurse, so you knew that, right?). Maybe being a doctor means knowing more then just modern smoking complications?
The world is a big place. Bigger, maybe, then you can comprehend. It pays to be humble. Being a wise-ass know-it-all will just get you nowhere in life.
You didn't see his title then: stay humble. We all have some stupidity lurking with on. It's harder to drum up that nerd rage when we look at our own.
Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
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!
Well, there is something to what you say. Having worked both in an engineering capacity and as a skilled tradesman, I've noticed that there is a distinct difference between between the two. Doctors and nurses are skilled tradespeople, like highly trained auto mechanics. No one is ever going to ask a doctor to design a better human being, any more than anyone is going to ask an auto mechanic to design a better car. This is not to say that it's easy to be able to instantly recognize the symptoms of disease (x), or the bad interaction of drugs (y) and (z); just that it's not a particularly creative field of endeavor. Engineering and the hard sciences (including programming) are less about being able to instantly reference huge volumes of memorized information, and more about taking a small amount of basic knowledge and putting it together in new ways.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Well, we all know Vets are smarter than people doctors -- after all, the dog can't tell the doctor where it hurts.
Actually it's more than that. They also have to deal with the anatomy of more than just one species.
medical profession does require memorization of a large amount of raw data, but it's the synthesis of that base knowledge that makes you a doctor.
Unlike mathematics and it's branches like CS or physics, you can not derive how a human being works from some raw initial data (like you can derive a theory from axioms). Hence in math you just memorize the initial axioms and nerves of proofs of important theorems and go from there. If you are good at it you can get by with just that. If you are not so good you memorize more of the key points of the proofs.
In medicine you actually don't have axioms just raw data and very few theories on how things should work. So you must memorize that data.
But as a practicing doctor your daily life depends on the synthesis of that data. You must derive conclusions from much larger base of knowledge and be good at recognizing patterns.
Usually several hundred ailments have similar symptoms. So the first step is always to make a differential diagnosis listing all possible things that might have those symptoms and then sorting the list by likelihood, and then you start eliminating the problems one by one by doing diagnostic tests and routing patients further to people who specialize in particular areas.
Needless to say mistakes can be costly both in terms of patients well being if you do not consider something in your differential diagnosis or economically if you suspect something whose elimination requires an expensive diagnostic test or invasive for the patient.
So I guess all I'm saying is that oversimplification of professions like that is never going to lead to reliable conclusions.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.