Time to Do More than Like

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions tend to have a idea of themselves as Good People. recognising or acknowledging their own capacity for harm contradicts that idea. so they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the 'Bad People' box (which conveniently doubles up as the 'People I Am Allowed to Hurt' box), and just like that, the world is made simple again.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with 'difficult' or 'behaviourally challenged' children. his refrain is kids do well if they can - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

It's been true for a long time that the academic project has accumulated more information than any person can readily comprehend the scope of, so if you want to learn something the immediate challenge is figuring out what is already known about it, and where to find it. Library science is structured around this problem, and has some interesting approaches and answers! Mostly following a sort of decision-tree model, where the organizational categories are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, the important thing is that they're clearly defined enough that you can ask a series of questions about "it is this or that?" and arrive at a location.

But the set of arbitrary categories does unavoidably influence the way knowledge is generated and interpreted, the "silo effect" of different fields of study not knowing how to talk to each other about their areas of overlap, and not necessarily even thinking to check what areas of overlap exist and who they could and should be talking to.

And hypothetically digitization provides the potential to completely change this up! You can build database structures that can be filtered by many different criteria simultaneously! You can look for certain keywords wherever they appear regardless of category!

But then you face a whole new conceptual headache, which is figuring out how to categorize things in a parallel access structure. And you quickly have to contend with the fact that different fields are often using completely different words and conceptual approaches, and how do you link these things up across the database? How do you provide relevant context for what kind of background framework is in play, for someone coming in with an unknown level of background knowledge in potentially a completely different approach?

And then - this is where I get unclear on the historical timeline. For some reason, from the early digitization grappling projects to the internet I grew up on, something happened where the internet got very full of surface-level answers, and also extremely technical answers, but there's a huge slice missing in between, which is SPECIFICALLY the college level "introduction to how this field is thought about, including slightly more than surface information but also an orientation to the framework of thought which has been built in academia so far, and which will be useful for knowing how to find and interpret more technical information on this subject." This type of thing is INFURIATINGLY difficult to find on the internet, and has been even since back when google worked. There's a handful out there of thoughtfully curated websites - usually hosted by some university where someone took the trouble to build out an explainer for their field of study - but they've always been random lucky unicorns to find. As a fallback you can try downloading some random textbooks and reading them, but I can't call that a good approach.

And then, in parallel to that, there's the search engine thing. Google early on hit a really interesting and compelling strategy for sorting webpages by their relationship to a web of knowledge - but the proxy for this was a web of links, which rapidly became Extremely gameable. For a while they were on top of managing this, somehow, I don't actually know the technical details.

There was a brief window where search expanded from just including your exact keywords, to triangulating sets of concepts related to your keywords - this was like 2015? There was a fleeting moment where a search of several meaty keywords could actually tell you what the field of study you wanted was, could point you to things slightly beyond the scope of what you'd asked for, which was so cool. And then fairly rapidly over several years this collapsed into showing you instead things that were related to vaguer, less technical versions of your keywords, and then eventually to the point where if you had more than about 3 keywords it would just start ignoring most of them.

This seems to have happened in parallel to a hard turn towards microadvertising and to google itself as an ad service. I have a suspicion that google stopped TRYING to get ahead of the gaming of their searches and instead just leaned into it, because this brought them more add revenue via content aggregators who ran their ads and also gamed their searches aggressively. Resulting in the rapid search engine sloptimization of everything.

Meanwhile database structural approaches really lagged, because search was so easy and powerful through google for a while, that straight keyword searching felt clunky and high-effort in comparison. There could have been a lot of work in this field that just... failed to materialize, as far as I can see.

Instead the data science world leaned in hard on machine learning - which could offer some interesting approaches! I think not unrelated to what 2010s google was up to actually! - but then all that got swept up in the push to natural language models. Which is INCREDIBLY frustrating, because the output you're going to get from a language model for a search query is AT BEST equivalent to asking some guy who's read approximately everything ever to summarize of the top of its head. In practice it's worse than this, because a language model does not actually have a conceptual understanding of what it's read, a fact which is only semi-compensated by the sheer volume of information it's processed - if a clear conceptual approach is strong enough in it's text sources it's statistically likely to cough that back out, but that's entirely a gamble. But even aside from that, this completely fails as an indexing strategy because it can't send you anywhere! It can't tell you where it got anything! It's a total dead end on the project of organizing and accessing the body of knowledge which exists!

- when you’re jay walking, cars will actively accelerate bc the drivers want to kill you for breaking the rules

- servers in restaurants act very scared and apologetic, so maybe people aren’t nice to them here??? or I could be terrifying

- it’s really cute when little kids have British accents, but I’m unmoved by adults with accents

- extremely good gluten free options. this country is like 20 years ahead of Canada in that regard

- people will give random insignificant buildings names with little plaques. and then that’s the name that shows up on the map. like even a smaller than average family home, you can name it like it’s a dog

- lots of brick and stone buildings. looks cute and charming until you enter one and there’s no air conditioning

Prev tags also wrong @e-the-village-cryptid

“I know. That’s why I’m not stopping!”

“In either direction!”

Oh.

And like there was no permanent cast, all these celebrities seem to have gotten a scene or part of a scene to do (i’m not sure exactly, I did not ever watch Quibi and thus haven’t seen this yet), and then they just… recreated it as best they could. At home. Under quarantine.

So like, you had Jennifer Garner in a blanket cape playing Princess Buttercup AND the Booing Old Woman with a crowd comprised entirely of stuffed animals:

Or Taika Waititi paying Westley off a badly-drawn Inigo on a piece of cardboard held in front of someone’s face:

And it’s all just delightful.

But my absolute favorite part of this thing that I’ve sadly never seen but assume is probably absolutely hilarious and a treasure and I want to find it some day and watch the whole thing… is that Carey Elwes is in it.

As Prince Fucking Humperdink.

Here ya go

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.

The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.

And it's that thing where you mentally place yourself as the second, auxiliary party to someone else that you consider to be "In Charge" of whatever space or occupation or responsibility you are assigned to

And when you are IN that mindset, it *feels* like you're being responsible. It *feels* like you're being respectful, and helpful, and contributing to the load.

But what you don't SEE- because it *feels* like deference- is that the other person who you're seeing as The Authority you report to- by being assigned that role, has also been assigned the invisible load of BEING YOUR MANAGER.

This is by FAR most commonly seen in husband-and-wife relationships, where the man says, "just tell me what I can do to HELP- you don't have to do it all by yourself, but it's like you won't even tell me when you NEED help. You just do everything and then get mad at me for not doing it first. I can help clean. I can help with the kids. I can help"

But I also see it- and am guilty myself of doing it- at work, at school, in public- that mental, "this is THEIR space, and i will be respectful and helpful to THEM"- without realizing that subservience in this manner isn't actually a good thing. That it actually shifts the burden of responsibility to the other person. That aspect was totally invisible to me.

I didn't understand that when I was told, "if you see something that needs to be done, just DO it", or, "take the initiative", what they ACTUALLY meant was, "I am not above you", or "you have equal say in what kind of environment you want to live or work in", or "I do not want full control over what happens here, I do not want to order you around, I do not want to be in charge, what I WANT is to co-command WITH you"

Being in The Assigned Authority position NOW, that is all so much clearer.

I am the senior member of my team at work, and now, every time I train a newbie, every time I finish catching them up to speed and giving them a list of everything that needs to be done, my next big hurdle seems to always be, "now take pride in the space when I'm not around". "Now don't assume I'll tell you when something is due or what orders to plan things in".

Now, having been on both sides of the struggle, I can appreciate the sticking points here

TO THE PERSON "IN CHARGE": The person deferring to you doesn't understand the invisible labor you're doing. They genuinely believe you know more, you WANT more, you see things they don't, and that they are being respectful and good by staying out of your way and waiting on your orders. THAT is the bit that's not clicking.

TO THE PERSON "WANTING TO HELP": "Help" implies that you are providing assistance to a problem that belongs to somebody else. Stop thinking like that. Understand that the problem belongs to BOTH of you equally, and consider what kind of shared space you BOTH want. What is your SHARED GOAL? Not THEIR goal, but a goal that belongs to you too. Own your space.

This is not a Commander-Lieutenant problem. This is a Partnership problem.

I have a fun mental cocktail that contributes to it, but the end of the line is that If A Mess Does Not Physically Endanger Anyone, I Will Not Notice It For Days.

This OBVIOUSLY causes irritation for people who are, say- NOT ME- and comes back to bite me in the ass only AFTER they lose their temper or clean up after me like a nanny and I feel ashamed, embarrassed, and weirdly violated. THEN the atmosphere gets super tense and we will slowly start avoiding each other, because *I* feel like they hate me and my presence and nothing I do will ever be good enough, and *they* see me as an inconsiderate slob.

So- if it's something I don't SEE because I don't CARE- I gotta find a way to care.

And what works best for me to MAKE myself care is to think, "okay, so *I don't care* if there are half-empty cups of water all over, and it's not immediately dangerous, but it's important to THEM, and do I really want to live somewhere that feels like a minefield? Do I WANT to live with someone who is always upset with me? Or do I WANT to live with someone who is happy and comfortable and enjoys being here as much as I do, where we can come and go without worying about setting each other off?"

What I've learned is: Live and work with people who have the same goal as you. Discuss the goal. If the goal is, "low stress environment where we don't hate each other", then it's not a matter of, "do I care about dirty cups". You don't HAVE to care about dirty cups. You only have to care about not making you hate each other

Now I'm not looking directly through an invisible pile of whatever. NOW I'm looking at, "oh shit that's a pile of Make-Roommate-Stressed, and I don't want that for myself"

Happy Birthday Christopher Lee

13 reasons why you may be cool, but will never be Christopher Lee cool....

1. He played Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Mummy.

2. He not only played a Bond Villain, but his cousin was Bond-creator Ian Fleming.

3. He was a direct descendent of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, and even recorded a rock album entitled: “Charlemagne: The Omens of Death”.

4. Played both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes

5. He recorded several Heavy Metal records. He nearly duetted with David Bowie, but the two couldn’t decide which song to use.

6. He was a spy during World War II; prior to his acting career, Lee served in the Royal Air Force, where he was attached to the No. 260 Squadron RAF as an intelligence officer where he was a liaison officer for the Special Operations Executive. Following his World War II service he retired from the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant.

7. He succeeded his friend Peter Cushing in appearing in the Star Wars franchise as former Jedi Master Count Dooku.

8. Played Saruman the White, and remains the only actor in the Lord of the Rings movies to have actually met J.R.R. Tolkien

9. During the filming of Saruman’s death scene in “The Return of the King”, Lee’s character was meant to scream after being stabbed, but he refused to do it that way, asking director Peter Jackson, “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody is being stabbed in the back? Because I do.” He was recounting his spy days in World War Two. Jackson did not need any more convincing, and the shot was filmed according to Lee.

10. Spoke several languages, including French, German, Swedish, Russian, Greek and “conversational” Mandarin.

11. He was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the world's tallest leading actors (6'5"). Lee is said to have had more recorded sword fights than any other actor in history.

12. Nearly married into the Swedish Royal Family, even being given the King’s permission to marry Henriette von Rosen, daughter of Count Fritz von Rosen. Unfortunately, Lee called the wedding off, concerned that his financial insecurity in his chosen profession meant that she "deserved better" than being "pitched into the dishevelled world of an actor."