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 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.
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.
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".
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. ๐ค
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, youโd never guess anything was wrong. Heโs eloquent and well spoken. He can read just fine. But watching him type emails is an exercise in patience. Heโs in his late 30โs and itโs not something that remedial classes or correction by his peers could โcureโ.
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.
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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
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?
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)
Yeah, too many people simply think brutal honesty is the same as constructive criticism. When in reality, theyโre just looking for an excuse to be brutal.
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.
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?
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 ๐
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.
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 donโt 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 didnโt want to get their hair wet to teach them.
For those who donโt 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 youโre specifically washing it.
So all the black parents never took their kids to the pool to teach them how to swim. Not because they couldnโt afford it, but because they physically didnโt 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.
Swimming, had to help fish a dude out of the lake because he swam far into the deep end and started panicking when he realized he didn't have the steam to swim back. His only swimming experience was water parks and kiddie pools.
I was on a paddle board a summer or two back, and noticed someone swimming with their really tall, inflatable kayak that they had been fishing off of. For some reason, they were dragging it through the water in one of our lakes.
I felt stupid, but I paddled over to them and asked if they were okay, as they were out in the middle of the huge lake.
He actually said "No, I don't know how to swim, and can't get back into my kayak" which made me ashen-faced, and I helped him onto my paddle board and back into his kayak. Thank fucking God he had a lifejacket on. He was probably about 700 feet offshore and fell overboard much earlier. Had he not had that lifejacket, he might have drowned. He never called for help as he was embarrassed.
That is ridiculous, on a lake there are barely any waves, you can just turn on your back and float around to catch a breath. Just remember to move from time to time so people don't think you're a corpse.
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.
Looking up the information online (beyond just googling it in your native language).
i.e. Trying out the results in other search engines, when looking for the information about something in a foreign land, or something the specific nation is very good at; try using the local language (and use the online translators to search it and read it).
Good communication skills. Being able to tell someone else what you mean so they or anyone else could understand. My boss is beyond awful at it makes getting anything done a struggle at times.
I think in a modern setting "common sense" refers to easily to understand lessons and concepts, but they still need to be taught. For me, it's common sense to perform proprioceptive rehab on a sprained ankle to restore function after immobilisation, but that's hardly common sense for everyone.
That I've been shown. But even with a fire bow from materials in the woods I can't. In some places there is the occasional rock that sparks when hit, but I've never used that.
To be fair I've never taken that too seriously. I didn't think and still think I'll likely never need such a skill
Like putting away one third of your money every month, keeping a budget, learning when to splurge to maintain self control (budgets not too tight) and learning to live below your means at any cost.
The magic part is the other half of that equation. Money grows in it's own (though slowly) and putting some away for later starts paying for its own pretty soon.
I agree, but assume everybody spends 30% less. The demand goes down for luxury goods. And things get more affordable. Disposable income is about what you can live without. And although I'm obviously not speaking about the poorest among us, most middle class people spend too much and live in debt because they want to keep up with the Joneses.
I guess basic home renovation suff. I literally do these kinds of things for a living. In my experience, itโs not so much that people donโt know how to do this stuff - itโs more that they lack the tools, the time, or theyโd just rather pay someone to do it properly. Iโve had jobs where it took me only a minute to fix something they couldโve easily done themselves, but honestly, I canโt blame people for not wanting to mess with something theyโre unfamiliar with. Most of the time, Iโm not any wiser than they are at the start either - but I guess I just have the ability to figure things out on the fly.
Apparently a lot of older people were never taught algebra. I have a lot of math in my life so I find that weird.
A basic skill that I lack is the habit of keeping things clean. I do my cleaning in bursts, which can be counterproductive because my space is messy between those bursts. It's a basic skill, and one that I'm working to improve, but it sure does not come naturally to me!
Think of everything you do as a circular process. It starts with a clean state. Progresses to using something and making something dirty, and it should end up where you started, so you complete that line by putting away stuff and maintaining the surfaces you used.
Some processes involve breaks for people, like eating and taking a nap, but then you get up and while making a coffee you complete the circle.
When you get advanced, these circles start to run in parallel and intermesh and that's fine if you can manage completing all of them regularly.
For me the hardest part is managing impulses and sticking to the process. It avoids emotions about lengthening the process later on (needing to clean up before being able to make food again).
Same as most kids don't know. there are a number of things. Money, listening, how/who to gather information from. I'm missing your point when you put adults in your question.
90% of the work of building a house can be done by a semi-competent DIY'er. Learning the basics of framing, roofing, plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc, is not that hard.
Sure, you can probably DIY half your house but then it's going to be shit.
I've learned from just maintaining a house that you better get professionals to the essentials. Especially when you expected your house to hold a few decades.
Only if you build it like shit. Again, like I said, a semi-competent person can do a not-shit job just fine. It just takes longer than having a pro do it.
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 wonder if there is a distinguishing term for this.
Empathy = The ability to put yourself in someone elseโs shoes (no matter how different they are from you)
? = The โabilityโ to imagine yourself in a situation that someone else, whoโs 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.
Well yes that was what I was meaning, if you don't have empathy as an adult it seems it's impossible to acquire.
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.
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.
i wouldnt call empathy a skill
I think they're looking for compassion?
The difference between "your" and "you're."
But u r.
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. ๐ค
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, youโd never guess anything was wrong. Heโs eloquent and well spoken. He can read just fine. But watching him type emails is an exercise in patience. Heโs in his late 30โs and itโs not something that remedial classes or correction by his peers could โcureโ.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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, theyโre just looking for an excuse to be brutal.
True
How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything
Yep and it can be difficult to tell if someone's reacting badly because they're vulnerable or because they're a twat.
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"
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
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 ๐
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
That's a clever idea! What do you use?
It'd be spelling.
Haha I'm neurodiverse
Edit: thus the spelling errors
And I'm tall.
People do tend to remark how nice I am. I've got them all fooled.
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.
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"?
Yep, classic neurodiverse problem. We're held to a neurotypical way of working despite our brain being wired different
Haha true! Love the hack it's really smart
The ability to use the correct words
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 donโt 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 didnโt want to get their hair wet to teach them.
For those who donโt 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 youโre specifically washing it.
So all the black parents never took their kids to the pool to teach them how to swim. Not because they couldnโt afford it, but because they physically didnโt 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.
Swimming, had to help fish a dude out of the lake because he swam far into the deep end and started panicking when he realized he didn't have the steam to swim back. His only swimming experience was water parks and kiddie pools.
I was on a paddle board a summer or two back, and noticed someone swimming with their really tall, inflatable kayak that they had been fishing off of. For some reason, they were dragging it through the water in one of our lakes.
I felt stupid, but I paddled over to them and asked if they were okay, as they were out in the middle of the huge lake.
He actually said "No, I don't know how to swim, and can't get back into my kayak" which made me ashen-faced, and I helped him onto my paddle board and back into his kayak. Thank fucking God he had a lifejacket on. He was probably about 700 feet offshore and fell overboard much earlier. Had he not had that lifejacket, he might have drowned. He never called for help as he was embarrassed.
That is ridiculous, on a lake there are barely any waves, you can just turn on your back and float around to catch a breath. Just remember to move from time to time so people don't think you're a corpse.
Critical thinking skills.
It just astounds me when people who should know what this is and how to practice it, don't.
I find it weird this isn't a standard part of education yet. I would be ashamed to lack those skills
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.
The difference between your and you're
Looking up the information online (beyond just googling it in your native language).
i.e. Trying out the results in other search engines, when looking for the information about something in a foreign land, or something the specific nation is very good at; try using the local language (and use the online translators to search it and read it).
Good communication skills. Being able to tell someone else what you mean so they or anyone else could understand. My boss is beyond awful at it makes getting anything done a struggle at times.
This. Weirdly enough autistic people seem to struggle less here. Perhaps because they tend to be more literal in their choice of words?
Why is it called "common" sense, if don't nobody have it anymore..?!
I think in a modern setting "common sense" refers to easily to understand lessons and concepts, but they still need to be taught. For me, it's common sense to perform proprioceptive rehab on a sprained ankle to restore function after immobilisation, but that's hardly common sense for everyone.
Why do so many people misconstrue "common sense" for "stuff that feels right or obvious to me personally"
Haha ain't that the truth!
Basic humanity/empathy for marginalised groups
I've started casually consuming history content. Othering is basically the #1 social activity for humans unfortunately.
Cooking your own food. No, it's not hard. No, it's not unaffordable. And no, it won't rob you of all your free time.
Starting fire with just a couple sticks.
Of dynamite?
That I've been shown. But even with a fire bow from materials in the woods I can't. In some places there is the occasional rock that sparks when hit, but I've never used that.
To be fair I've never taken that too seriously. I didn't think and still think I'll likely never need such a skill
Basics of money.
Like putting away one third of your money every month, keeping a budget, learning when to splurge to maintain self control (budgets not too tight) and learning to live below your means at any cost.
The magic part is the other half of that equation. Money grows in it's own (though slowly) and putting some away for later starts paying for its own pretty soon.
I highly doubt even half of adults, even in some developed countries, have the spare income to put a third of it away
I agree, but assume everybody spends 30% less. The demand goes down for luxury goods. And things get more affordable. Disposable income is about what you can live without. And although I'm obviously not speaking about the poorest among us, most middle class people spend too much and live in debt because they want to keep up with the Joneses.
I've definitely noticed this in the usa. Where I live this is less of an issue fortunately... I might be a little guilty of this though
Mental arithmetic
I guess basic home renovation suff. I literally do these kinds of things for a living. In my experience, itโs not so much that people donโt know how to do this stuff - itโs more that they lack the tools, the time, or theyโd just rather pay someone to do it properly. Iโve had jobs where it took me only a minute to fix something they couldโve easily done themselves, but honestly, I canโt blame people for not wanting to mess with something theyโre unfamiliar with. Most of the time, Iโm not any wiser than they are at the start either - but I guess I just have the ability to figure things out on the fly.
I'm one of then. I had to ask ![email protected] how to put pictures up cos I had no clue. They told me about sticky hooks! ๐
Apparently a lot of older people were never taught algebra. I have a lot of math in my life so I find that weird.
A basic skill that I lack is the habit of keeping things clean. I do my cleaning in bursts, which can be counterproductive because my space is messy between those bursts. It's a basic skill, and one that I'm working to improve, but it sure does not come naturally to me!
Think of everything you do as a circular process. It starts with a clean state. Progresses to using something and making something dirty, and it should end up where you started, so you complete that line by putting away stuff and maintaining the surfaces you used.
Some processes involve breaks for people, like eating and taking a nap, but then you get up and while making a coffee you complete the circle.
When you get advanced, these circles start to run in parallel and intermesh and that's fine if you can manage completing all of them regularly.
For me the hardest part is managing impulses and sticking to the process. It avoids emotions about lengthening the process later on (needing to clean up before being able to make food again).
Chicken doesn't need to be covered in vegetable oil to be cooked.
Same as most kids don't know. there are a number of things. Money, listening, how/who to gather information from. I'm missing your point when you put adults in your question.
How to build a house.
90% of the work of building a house can be done by a semi-competent DIY'er. Learning the basics of framing, roofing, plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc, is not that hard.
Now make one out of brick
Sure, you can probably DIY half your house but then it's going to be shit. I've learned from just maintaining a house that you better get professionals to the essentials. Especially when you expected your house to hold a few decades.
Skill issue, don't build like shit and you won't have shit
Only if you build it like shit. Again, like I said, a semi-competent person can do a not-shit job just fine. It just takes longer than having a pro do it.
And who will work your job while you do this?
Knowing how doesn't imply you actually ever need to do it. It's like knowing how to change the tire on your car.
Then it's not "how to build a house". It's "how to maintain a house."
I'd find it handy for home repair, or a fun project. You don't need to build a house to use those skills