Interesting Links for 22-02-2023

[andrewducker]

1. I could hear the Indiana Jones music watching this, even with the sound off

(tags:video indianajones music )

2. The seven ways the matter of Brexit and the island of Ireland can be ultimately resolved

(tags:Ireland UK Europe trade )

3. Brexit and the UK's tomato shortage

(tags:UK Europe trade vegetables epicfail )

4. CNN on Rowling's history of anti-trans comments

(tags:lgbt transgender jkrowling bigotry )

5. Why disabled people answer questionnaires wrongly. (Because they're supposed to be filled in by medical professionals, but cutbacks mean they aren't)

(tags:disability questions OhForFucksSake austerity autism )

6. Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID

(tags:vaccination heart health Pandemic )

7. Three social failure modes

(tags:social fail communication )

Comments

[movingfinger]

5. I wish I'd seen this before I filled out a questionnaire for PT screening yesterday! We are all so conditioned to be chipper and positive and hide problems and not make any trouble.

[andrewducker]

Next time!

[greenwoodside]

Really like Three Social Failure modes. I think a lot of the UK can veer towards "guess culture" .

Drives me bananas. If you want to know my preferences, please just ask them FFS! (Is what I'd like to tell, but don't.)

[andrewducker]

I'm also very much an Ask person.

[greenwoodside]

*tell = yell

[channelpenguin]

Yeah. Ask Vs Guess is utterly bemusing until you find out about it.

I wonder, do us Askers have it harder because we have no clue what people want unless they say outright, or is that balanced out by the Guessers having to live with what they see as our dreadful rudeness (even if it's at least clear to them what we want)?

I actually STILL don't know how to deal with Guessers properly. Sigh. I THINK I have just basically unconsciously selected my friends not to be. And it's rarer in work, at least in my work. Or maybe I select for that too...

[greenwoodside]

I do meet some guessers are good at guessing, but quite a few are bad at it and carry on anyway. At their best, guessers can be empathetic and thoughtful. At their worst, they're people who don't ask questions because they prefer their own internal narrative.

There's a manager at my current place who's been loudly blaming a couple of twenty-something interns in another department for making mistakes, instead of looking into the management structure there and seeing what's going on. Drives me frothing mad, though I have to conceal it. Admittedly, that's more a case of him being an arse than being a guesser.

A more pertinent example would be a colleague who, as I was about to leave at the end of a year's fixed-term contract, said "I'm sorry to see you go. Though you're kind of mysterious..." Well, she'd had the whole year to ask me questions about whatever she thought was mysterious about me, and I'd have answered. But I didn't talk much about my life outside work because I assumed no one was interested. It didn't bother me, since it's probably better to be mysterious than boring!

[aldabra]

Hang on, what? I always thought "do you have problems with socks?" meant "can you reach your feet?" Does it mean "did you give up decades ago on matching them?" And "does it take you eighteen months to buy replacements when they get holes because nowhere is selling the ones you got last time?" And "Are your feet the wrong shape for female-coded socks?" And "Ugh! Wool!"?

Are they sure? I still think what the disability people want to know is whether you can reach your feet.

[andrewducker]

If they wanted to know if you could reach your feet then they'd ask if you could reach your feet.

[aldabra]

That's what they're interested in fixing, though.

Or are they proposing to give me someone who can find the socks I bought last time? Because that would be a useful service but I don't for a moment think the government is interested in providing it.

Also, I am more preoccupied with my problems with phone companies and anti-perspirants and Royal Mail, because I do in fact have a System for not bothering about socks.

[andrewducker]

In this case they specifically stated "neurodivergency screening tool"...

[anna_wing]

Also quite often, there are things that you can in fact ask, and some things that you can't.

Things you can't ask

[channelpenguin]

Do you mean things you *should not* ask about or things that you feel *unable* to ask about? (Or maybe things that are logically impossible to ask about?)

(Depressing thought - or things that if you did ask, would be met with violence. :-( )

[anna_wing]

It can be both, depending on the society, who the parties are both individually and in relation to each other, the context in which the issue arises etc etc etc. All societies have elements that are both Guess and Ask, but they will vary according to context, and often natives may not even consciously know the difference themselves, because they have totally internalised the unspoken rules.

Foreigners usually have a bit of leeway in that allowances are made for ignorance, especially in social situations and if they are clearly manifesting good will.