Critical thinking skills.
It just astounds me when people who should know what this is and how to practice it, don’t.
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).
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.
The difference between your and you’re.
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 don’t 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 didn’t want to get their hair wet to teach them.
For those who don’t 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 you’re specifically washing it.
So all the black parents never took their kids to the pool to teach them how to swim. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because they physically didn’t 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.
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.
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, they’re just looking for an excuse to be brutal.
True
How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything <s>
Yep and it can be difficult to tell if someone’s reacting badly because they’re vulnerable or because they’re a twat.
No shame in asking for help! Would you feel confident doing it on your own next time?
critical thinking
And what better place to show that, if you know what I mean.
The difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Ur not wrong.
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. 🤔
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, you’d never guess anything was wrong. He’s eloquent and well spoken. He can read just fine. But watching him type emails is an exercise in patience. He’s in his late 30’s and it’s not something that remedial classes or correction by his peers could “cure”.
There are a couple of words you might want to look up. These are “dyslexia” and “dysgraphia”.
For the latter, no, they cannot improve their spelling for the future. It is literally impossible and correcting them constantly is a huge drain on their self-worth.
(P.S. Good on you for asking, however, instead of lecturing.)
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.
Chicken doesn’t need to be covered in vegetable oil to be cooked.
Cooking & self reflection
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
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.
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!
Empathy. It shocks me how many “adults” have a toddler-level understanding of their relationship to the world (as in it doesn’t revolve around them) and society (as in we have responsibility for each other). So many “adults” sound like screeching toddlers whenever there’s a hint of someone else getting something they don’t get. It even reaches the level of “I don’t like this movie so it shouldn’t have been made” as if the very existence of entertainment or education or whatever in a field they themselves don’t prefer is a personal affront.
And this isn’t even a right-wing thing. The feminist National Action Committee in Canada was turned from a potent and feared political force to a laughingstock by ostensible left-wing women deciding that their concerns over daycare trumped native women’s active murders among other intersectional issues.
i wouldnt call empathy a skill
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 don’t see what’s wrong with that. That’s also empathy, just not everybody follow the same way to feel it.
where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it’s possible for them to get into.
I wonder if there is a distinguishing term for this.
Empathy = The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (no matter how different they are from you)
? = The “ability” to imagine yourself in a situation that someone else, who’s very similar to you, experienced.
Sympathy?
Compassion?
Eskimo brothers?
God this is true, there’s a staggering amount of people that lack it. So much selfishness as well
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.
Selfishness can be trained away, lack of empathy not very much it seems.
Happily we store all these non-empats in pisition of power.
It’s akin to a skill, after all. Like humor. Having either one does not make someone good or bad. They’re just gimmicks in the end.
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.
There are no smart people. Everybody is stupid (where “stupid” is defined as “prone to maladaptive behaviour and/or belief”), no exceptions. There are just some fields society values more when less stupid than others.
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.
And here we have an example of exactly what I was talking about.
Here’s a little hint, Sparky. Literally nothing you responded to translates to “everyone is the same”.
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.
And who will work your job while you do this?
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.
Now make one out of brick
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.
