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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."
Liquor.
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.
I was going to blog about this very subject today, but I couldn't get onto my Journalspace for some reason.
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."
Yeah I hear a lot of people do that when they move into the retirement home. Helps pay for the funeral down the track.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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?
Pretty good combat the horror of life advice. OTOH, DFW killed himself this year, so maybe that's not a ringing endorsement
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 think you're on to the right idea here (if a bit over-the-top on implementation), in that we do need to shut down some of the 'news' we have to deal with. Find the things that interest you, and learn about them; don't let others tell you what is and is not important for you to know (I know that technically I'm doing the same thing. Semantics are awesome.).
:)
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get rid of your TV, it's just a tool, after all, and what you do with it is up to you. Of course, if that is what it takes for you to finally shut out all of the unnecessary garbage... do so with my blessing
As of today, we shall call this sort of stuff MBR - Mediocre Blog Rubbish.
Newsflash: Businesses care squat about technology. They're in it for the money. I'm currently employed in a gig with a 300 percent growth rate (and rising!) and we build our stuff by standards that are close to outdated in some parts. So what? Who cares if the application model is a mess and half the team barely know how to use versioning? ... Well, I do, actually, and I tell my teammates to *use* versioning and f*cking comment their commits, but I try not to be to pesky about it, it leads no where. A few weeks ago I showed one programmer on my team that you could mark a line by pressing shift and the down key. He didn't know that. No joke. He didn't know Keyboard Computer Interface 101, first lesson and has been programming in this company for 1.5 years and has quite some IT experience prior to this. Is he stupid? No. Ignorant? Maybe. But I trust he just didn't know and nobody had shown him yet. And from his reaction - he was glad I showed him and wanted to hear some more 'tricks' :-) - I judge he is an open minded fellow in this respect.
And as long as we are able to push out the code faster than our competitors do and are able to deliver products our customers like, we'll all keep our jobs. And if the company shrinks some time in the future, wether I know how to correctly normalise an app-model, what the LAMP stack actually looks like from the inside and why the MS Windows line of OSes actually really *does* suck in ways beyond most regular IT peoples imagination and my teammates don't, doesn't matter squat when we all are scheduled for layoff. The only difference is that I take more interest in certain details of my field and have more experience than some of them and that I am thus more suitable for research or foundation work. Such as building better tools, training or optimising the pipeline. Which I intend to (continue) to do in the future, for my projects, my department and my team.
Bottom line: If you're oh-so-much smarter than the rest around you, get in to management, team-lead, FOSS project maintenance or an academic gig in computer science. Otherwise shut the fuck up.
My 2 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
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.
Visit the
Part of my job is working as help desk. The only way to survive is to make fun of the noobies. When someone sends you an email reading "Please help, my internet doesn't work." you can't help but laugh...
Having interacted with Gord in the wild, I can safely state that these 'acts' are pure fantasy. Revenge fantasy. Tell-your-boss-to-fuck-off-because-you-won-the-lottery fantasy. Because really, while he fantasizes about being a big man... those stupid customers are ultimately his employers.
I've found a combination of liquor followed by swift and blinding violence generally works for me.
Everybody on Slashdot has far less brain power then me. I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here? We are all smarter then everybody else here. We merely exist to point out how much of an idiot people not like us are.
If you point out that *I'm* and idiot, you are wrong because remember I'm the smartest Slashdot poster here. The point of contention then becomes the fact that you cannot have two "Smartest Slashdot Posters" and so we debate.
However, since everybody but me is an idiot, they lack the mental ability to understand how smart I truly am. This thought, that I alone am the only Smart Person On Earth, makes me depressed. However, I'm no idiot like the author of this "Ask Slashdot". Smart people dont "Ask" questions--they already know the answers. Questions are for clueless sheep.
Obviously I do have the answer to the "question", but only an idiot would give it--it would reward asking questions and thus reward not knowing things. Never answer questions, people should learn on their own. Any Smart Slashdot Poster knows this.
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
They have trouble evaluating things that they are emotionally invested in (particularly things that affect them directly), but they do try on some level
Simply replace the word "They" with "I".
The dumbest, most miserable people on earth are those who cannot find fault in themselves.
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.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
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:
I took freshman economics in college. I've studied differential equations (which those business weenies never had to). I've written in assembler. Economics *has* to be easy, those guys never had to study calculus based physics! Same with marketing--those guys never studied assembler like I did, so how hard could their profession be!? I mean, just show the clients a plain text file that highlights which features in our product are better, and which are not and let the client decide!
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!
If you really were the Smartest Poster On Slashdot, you'd be smart enough to know that in fact I was actually the Smartest Poster On Slashdot. Only I am smart enough to know that I am the Smartest Poster On Slashdot.
...and this is a prime example for why there should be a +1 sad, cruel truth mod.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Quick tip from a fellow nerd: when people say something that is obviously retarded or meaningless when interpreted literally, they often are speaking figuratively.
For example, "it is what it is" is often used to mean that they want people to focus on what's possible in the current situation, rather than what is ideal.
A lot of what I previously thought of as psychobabble actually now makes good sense to me. Once I realized that although I'm intellectually bright, I'm relatively weak in both interpersonal and intrapersonal areas, I spent some time studying hard in areas that come naturally to most people. If you're interested, I'd start with Emotional Intellgence, which is a pop-sci examination of how intelligence is not a single axis, but has a number of areas along which people vary somewhat independently. Then run with the references from there.
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.
Calling people "Idiots" is 1) not helpful for others and 2) only encourages aggravation in yourself. Its counterproductive in every way. Selfishness and altruism are both fine qualities, they can co-exist, and will get you far in life. Being a zealot won't get you anything.
People are naive, stubborn, uneducated and manipulated. But all of those are qualities that can be changed--they are not idiots.
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.
One habit I've taken up is to always remember all the times I've screwed up and done something idiotic. I also try to remember how graceful people have been about those occasions. That's not to say that I'm always all forgiving -- I've been known to go unhinged on programmers who don't bother testing their code at least once. Still, when someone screws up and if their intention is benign, I recall similar situations I've been in and it makes it easier to say "No worries". Some of you might have never been in a situation where you were the idiot but I'm thankful that I'm been the idiot a few times at least.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
je bent een echte klootzak
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.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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