Interesting Links for 04-04-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Fast fashion: European Union reveals crackdown

(tags:fashion clothing waste Europe regulation )

2. Ukraine finds half-burned civilians in mass graves shot in the back of their heads

(tags:Ukraine Russia war genocide )

3. Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music naming

(tags:names music language technology )

4. The pleasures of the five course automated meal

(tags:food automation video funny )

5. Education by punishment

(tags:education punishment socialisation )

Comments

[anna_wing]

5 Unfortunately, quite often, at least in the adult world, the deficiency of social skills manifests itself in the inability to recognise the deficiency and therefore the unwillingness to correct it. If the person in question also lacks the professional competences that might make up for the deficincy (which would usually be the case in any job in which social skills play a large role), the willingness to spend energy and other resources in bringing them up to scratch will not be endless.

[channelpenguin]

5. Strikes me very much as much more someone's personal experience and (ongoing) sense of victimisation than any actual sound or usable pattern or theory.

And I say that as a "weirdo" who was picked on at school and never "fitted in". I guess the difference is that I have always had confidence in my learning, artistic and technical abilities and social anxiety seems to have bypassed me. I never truly CARED enough what others thought. Plus maybe just enough pragmatic skill at getting my own way. And working in a very geeky field. :-)

[adrian_turtle]

The essay in #5 says nobody ever teaches explicit lessons in social behavior. I'm sorry he never got any. These days, good schools teach them. They are, explicitly, part of early childhood education. I don't have kids, but I see what books and videos are all over the children's section of the library. When I was picking up my nieces at their elementary school, I saw teachers leading role-playing exercises on the playground: this is how you ask to join a group, this is how you invite someone to play, this is how you resolve a conflict.

Like McIver says, many of those lessons were presumably taught by kind well-meaning adults who did not know what they were doing. But they were trying to teach by instruction and demonstration, not just punishment. Of course, some of it is included as "health education," or "anti-bullying education" or "social and emotional learning," all of which are political targets of the right wing.

[andrewducker]

That's excellent to know

[calimac]

There's one fundamental problem with teaching social behavior. People who do well at it don't have to be taught, they pick it up. If you need to be taught it, you will have developed no instinctual idea of how to do it, and will consequently do it badly. I've had people do incredibly awkward and annoying things to me, and when I tell them (gently) that it doesn't work like that, they respond that this is what people like, because that's what they were told when they were taught to do it.

(instance, which I've mentioned before: the Dale Carnegie rule that people like to hear their own names. Leaving aside the fact that this isn't universally true, anyone who needs to be told to use their interlocutor's name will wind up sounding like Hal pleading to Dave not to pull the plug.)

Problem with operant conditioning, too: if you reinforce behavior that merely tends in the right direction of the desired behavior, your subject will learn that that is the right behavior, and be put off and confused when they learn that it is not. I've been through that one.

[channelpenguin]

LIKE!

There's another thing - even if you are an observant child, and study the rules others in your group follow, and attempt to play by them yourself... you could still find that it won't work for YOU with this group. Social rules seem for most to be NOT objective, rather subjective. There are the rules for "people we like" (or "people like us") and for others, they don't count or work. The whole classic "in-group / out-group" thing, or my pet hate "blood is thicker than water" - holding your family to less strict standards than everyone else. For those of us whose natural tendancy is to consider All Humans our "in-group" this can be tricky to grasp.

Then there are the status-based rules, the classic aristocratic "one rule for us, another for them " so gorgeously displayed by the uk tory gov (and many many more) or "might is right" or other status hierarchies like religion. Again, a non-obvious mindfuck for those of us who are naturally meritocratic, egalitarian and anti-authoritarian (or is that last redundant given the first 2?)

My satisfaction with my work life improved immensely when I observed that the only way what went on made sense was that it was pretty much all social (or "monkey") status games. It's not about getting the job done. It's not about getting it done well or better or efficiently. It's not even about making a profit. Pretty much none of what goes on above the individual worker level makes any sense for any of those. It DOES seem to make sense if you think about status, territory and in-group/out-group. For large conventional companies,for management it's mainly what I call "minion-herding". I came up with this when a boss who really disliked me fought to keep me in his team purely to keep his headcount up. Can't have fewer minions than the others at his level, that loses status!

For small companies/startups, it seem more about what makes the bosses/founders able to feel most like whatever their version of what "rock star" (in the literal sense) would be for me. Lots of travel and conferences, wowing your own geek-group, helping save the world, beating "the system" having loads of minions under your tight control, even looking after your employees really well! Can be varied. Can even be genuine and not just about showing it off to others. (All these are from small companies I have worked for)

[calimac]

I think the effect of this is largely dependent on corporate cultures. I worked in non-profit and government jobs, where egoistic monkey status was rare. In fact, people would do a lot to avoid promotions because that meant they ceased being workers, which they found interesting, and became supervisors which they detested.

So instead of being a status game, the workplace became a social culture, with people chatting and gossiping whenever they met. This was very hard on me, being on the spectrum and very bad at social interaction and not liking it much anyway.

[channelpenguin]

Interesting. More like the (better) small companies I've worked for then, with the "saving the world" motivation in the leadership. Except the social thing. . I don't do that. I had my one close drinking buddy at my 2nd job. That was it. (Probably not that) oddly, he later tested out as Asperger's after his son was diagnosed. Make of this what you will, but in my first job they took it upon themselves to try to teach me to say "good morning" and so on and "hello" when I met folk in corridors and not just "ignore" them or launch into deep work / current problem talk (I tried to work out if it HAD to be EVERY SINGLE TIME as that seemed unnecessary). In O
One other place, the Mormon Essex Boys (yes really) did successfully teach me to not berate myself / express frustrations out loud whilst working. Other workplaces have found me socially odd in undefined ways, mainly utter disdain for small talk. (But again, see the Gen X thing... I'm not there to make friends!). I'm a Software Analyst/Dev and female and good "on stage" (and on stage), that probably covers up a lot. :-). Plus almost none of my colleagues have ever been "normal". Normal Nick (a great guy) was a great developer and a great workmate and understood my joke in calling him that after so many years in the biz!

I can usually work out the social rules, it's just I can only rarely be ARSED to try to follow them. And if I'm thinking hard, I've got no spare processor capacity to run the "deal with people" service as it were. Zero filter, and if you do manage to break my concentration it's not good. Better just silently put a cup of tea on my desk and sneak away if I don't react. Of course I think THAT'S normal!!

Conversely, if you've got a work or practical puzzle or problem to solve, I'll drop everything to help, if I can. But the painful part is that I tend to expect that of you...

Headphones on is a universal geek "do not disturb" sign, right?

Lol. We all have our social rules, eh? Most people seem to really really NOT like it if you state them explicity, or ask for clarification!!

Like I said, I've been lucky to be in IT.

I've also assiduously avoided "promotion" (but see the Gen X link!)

My main large places of work have been the purest of evil - investment banks and hedge funds, one insurer - but that was a independent dept made up of a company run by a couple that got taken over, and was small company awesome.

The rest have been 1-4 person startups, mix of amoral-evil in terms of management.

[yalovetz]

I enjoyed 3. very much, and so did my library metadata expert colleague.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad!

[jducoeur]

3 -- Fine reminder not to make assumptions, and reminds me greatly of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

4 -- Delightful -- I always love gadget videos. (But dessert definitely qualified as a choking hazard there.)

(An unexpected consequence of the numbering: trying to figure out a way to respond without Markdown doing The Wrong Thing.)