Interesting Links for 07-11-2019

[andrewducker]

Revealed: Russian donors have stepped up Tory funding

(tags:conservatives Russia OhForFucksSake )

Transgender Laws in Transition: European Courts on Non-Binary Gender Recognition

(tags:law gender europe )

"Orbital Comics" of London to Stop Selling New Weekly Comics

(tags:comics doom UK )

The proposed ITV debate format is flawed. Other countries do it better.

(tags:uk debate politics tv )

A thread of rating every horse emoji

(tags:horses emoji )

Help me ask "Why you didn't just…?"

(tags:advice questions etiquette )

If You Like to Complain About 'Decimate'...

(tags:language rome English )

Evidence That the Clitoris Is Important for Reproduction

(tags:women orgasm reproduction )

Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid agree 60-seat 'Remain alliance' election pact

(tags:politics hope UK Europe )

Former Twitter employees charged with spying on users for Saudis

(tags:saudiarabia spying twitter )

October was hottest in Earth's recorded history

(tags:globalwarming doom )

A Study of Meditation Under the Influence of Psilocybin

(tags:psilocybin meditation psychology )

The Tories are having a _terrible_ start to their election campaign. Do not be reassured by this.

(tags:elections Conservatives politics uk )

Craigslist's 'erotic services' alone reduced the murder of women in the US by 10-17%. (almost 500 women per year)

(tags:women murder USA sexwork )

The Vampire Apocalypse Calculator

(tags:vampires visualisation )

People have strange internalised rules about money and food

(tags:food money psychology behaviour )

It's Time to Take Down the Mona Lisa

(tags:art history )

"I was an astrologer - here's how it really works, and why I had to stop"

(tags:astrology fraud )

Comments

[rmc28]

So, first off, I am someone who gets asked "why didn't you just X" about a difficulty - technical or otherwise - and finds it intensely irritating, and I do find that a lot of my irritation stems from the "just".

"I think the sort of person who is going to be insulted by the original version of my question will have no trouble being insulted by any of those versions".

Of the five alternatives this guy comes up with, I strongly prefer either of :

* I'd like to know why you didn't use sshd
* There must be a good reason why you didn't use sshd

They convey that the person is interested in learning and believes I have something to teach.

"I don't see/understand why you didn't use sshd" doesn't convey any sense that there is a desire to learn here and "I'm not clever enough to understand why you didn't use sshd" is far too self-deprecating. It will come across as insincere/mocking if the person is not usually self-deprecating, and in any case is making it all about their self-esteem issues rather than the cool technical thing we could be sharing here.

[simont]

My suggestion in email was to listen to the problem description and say "Right, so sshd was presumably the first thing you tried ... ?", which seemed likely to provoke either a tale of woe about what unexpected thing went horribly wrong when they tried it, or a triumphant explanation of how they spotted the problem in advance and I didn't.

[doug]

Yeah, a lot of this is very contextual. I agree that "just" is likely to be pretty aggravating. Better to just leave it out.

I'm not sure I understand why you couldn't say "Why didn't you just use sshd? I suppose it's because there's some good reason I'm not seeing. Can you please point it out?". If that's what one means to convey, could one not say that?

One possibility might be that the first question risks being misinterpreted by the person you're talking to before you have a chance to say the explanatory sentences. If that's the worry, you could just reorder it to "I suppose there's some good reason why you didn't use sshd? Can you please point it out?"

Other possibilities I might use, depending on context:

- What's the reason why sshd doesn't work for that?
- Uh, this isn't as much my thing as yours, so I'd have gone for sshd. What are the problems with that?
- Presumably you thought of sshd - why doesn't it work here?
- I guess sshd doesn't work here, or you'd have used that. What's the problem with it?

Part of the helpful rhetorical move, I think, is to imply that you think you're wrong, and invite them to correct you.

I've realised on writing this that I say "I'm not sure I understand why/how ..." a lot. It's great, because most of the time I'm right that I don't understand and I get filled in, and it saves me from being That Guy (and he is usually, though not exclusively, a guy) who thinks he understands everything when he doesn't. And on a few, rare occasions, it turns out I've spotted something legit and we both learn something.

[simont]

I wonder if it's an office-politics / workplace-culture dependent thing. If I imagine being in the kind of workplace where people are (perceived to be) spending a lot of time trying to get ahead by discrediting each other, then it makes a lot of sense to me that the not-overtly-accusing wordings of the form "please explain" rather than "you nitwit" don't gain you much.

Supposing for a moment that the problem-solver did not in fact try sshd, and that it would have solved their problem in a day rather than a month, and they are an incompetent nitwit ... then any of those less accusatory wordings would provide plausible deniability to a questioner trying to expose the solver's nitwithood in (say) an important meeting in front of management. ("You heard me, I didn't say anything insulting or unprofessional, I just made a polite request for technical clarification.")

So, back to the case where the solver isn't a nitwit: if you've been beating your head for a month on a problem that looks easy but (in some way not obvious beforehand) is not, and you're worried that it isn't doing your reputation at work any good that you still haven't solved it, then I can totally see how you might already be feeling defensive, and half-expecting to be on the receiving end of that kind of veiled attack on your competence any moment. And in that situation, perhaps none of those wordings would provide enough Bayesian weight to make you discard that prior interpretation: you know that if someone was going to attack you, they'd know better than to do it by saying "nitwit" out loud, so you assign essentially no weight to the fact that they didn't.

[skington]

A phrase I'd go with would be “my gut instinct would be to try sshd; I assume this wasn't appropriate here?” It makes it clear that you're very much handwaving, and lets them say “sshd worked technically but there were other issues that trumped it” etc.

[fub]

It is my experience that it is much better to resist the impulse to immediately focus on the solution that is obvious to you -- especially if this person has been working on that particular problem for some time. My preferred responses is to ask what they already tried, and why that didn't work.

[del]

Yes, I found the article excessively focused on the pain the writer felt not being able to dispense unsolicited advice. I'd like to tell them it's not about them, and if they want to learn from someone who's spent years with the problem, the thing to do is ask, and then listen.

I have this problem, not with technical issues, but with disability: everyone without fibromyalgia wants to tell me what they'd do if they had fibromyalgia. In my case my irritation is less for the word "just" than for the repetitive nature of the "solutions". Here we go again, Standard Suggestion #2...

[calimac]

Another problem similar to the "Why didn't you just?" question is logical fallacies in argument, such as the tu quoque. The logical-fallacy rebuttal assumes that the arguments were offered as logical proof, but I'm convinced they're used instead as triage. Thus, when I use a tu quoque, what I mean is not "You didn't apply your own argument to yourself, therefore it's wrong" but "You obviously don't really believe your own argument, so why should I give it consideration?"

Electoral pact is a promising notation, but with the Greens its effect is likely to be marginal, i.e. if Greens stand down for LD, it'll only work in those seats where the Green vote would shave off the plurality for LD. I hope that's enough.

Rules about money are not so strange if you consider that it's not the amount of money, but whether the item is worth it. I was once outraged by being charged 25 cents for a paper bag. (Usually it's 10 cents.) It's not that I suddenly considered 25 cents a lot of money. It's that it's a lot of money for a paper bag.

Mona Lisa article says it's been voted one of the world's most disappointing attractions. I'd be cautious about such ratings. I once saw Stonehenge on such a list ("small and not very interesting"), which I consider crazy: it's one of the most fascinating things I've ever seen. (Though why more visitors don't go on to Woodhenge, which has no stone pillars but which you can walk around inside, not to mention Avebury, I don't know.)

[cmcmck]

I saw one for the incredible Ring of Brodgar on Orkney which stated: 'a long way from anywhere and nothing there for the children'.

It makes your head want to explode especially when you wonder how someone who thinks like that ever got to Orkney in the first place!

[movingfinger]

They can't really have been there! There's a perfectly lovely ditch for children to fall into.

[darkoshi]

This made me laugh. :)

[cmcmck]

It's true too! :o)

[calimac]

And another another problem similar to the "Why don't you just?" problem is what's called mansplaining. When I do something like that, my intent is "Here's my understanding of the situation. Tell me where it's insufficient or wrong." But it can be hard to make that clear, or easy to omit it, in the rush of conversation.

[jack]

Thinking about the "why don't you just use sshd" thing.

I've previously not been very good at this either. I end up with something like, "Why is that hard? I mean, I know it is, but I don't know enough about it to understand why."

I think perhaps the best is something like, "What problems do you need to solve to get that to work?" If you assume the other person actually does know more about the problem than you, that will more directly find out what all the obstacles are.

Almost certainly that will explain why what seems like the most obvious approach doesn't work, and if it still seems like it would, THEN you can ask.

But even if sshd WOULD just solve their problem and they didn't think of it, you won't actually get to that faster if you ask immediately. Whereas, even if you don't think your top-of-the-head suggestion is likely to be better, asking about it immediately is still steering the conversation that way, instead of to the parts that the person working on it think are most interesting.

You shouldn't need to jump through those conversational hoops, "Why doesn't X work" is a perfectly reasonable question likely to find out relevant information. But some of the time it will sound arsey even if you didn't mean that, so avoiding it is probably better.

[zz]

as a problem-solving generalist information sponge, in my last job i'd often run into the "i can see the solution after 5 minutes that they've been stuck on for ages" issue.

i do remember trying to be tactful (in the example, i'd probably phrase it more as "could you use x?", or "have you tried x" for a long list of x's as a diagnosis method).

but sometimes i'd just try to minimise the effect afterwards, and try to emphasise enjoying collectively solving a problem rather than a smug "i win!". this was partly taught to me by the vast amount of bullying i got for being a "swot" at school, despite being lazy af. cf information sponge.

[zz]

actually, sometimes i'd pretend to find it hard, and/or go away to do a few mins' confirmatory research, both to seem less jammy and make sure i actually had the right answer.

Putinist Donations to the UK Tories?

[dewline]

And now I'm wondering about the Canadian Conservatives.

Re: Putinist Donations to the UK Tories?

[andrewducker]

Are Canadian donations transparent?

Re: Putinist Donations to the UK Tories?

[dewline]

I'm not entirely sure how transparent our donation process is right now. Corporate and union donations have been outlawed, and there's a maximum ceiling on how much any single citizen can donate...

re: why didn't you

[darkoshi]

If I was curious, I'd probably phrase it as "Was there any reason you didn't xyz?" or "Did you try xyz, and did it not work?".

[ginger_rude]

"Plaid?" You know, I know it's a total mess over there as well as here, but I have to say, there are things about the UK I wish we had. National level recognition of parties like Raving Monster Loony for a start.

Then again, that's unironically the GOP, so. That. :/