comment I just made in a chat, regarding coworkers making no effort to keep email threads readable:
It's wild how Coworkers are always oblivious. Invariably, everyone you ever speak to as a direct acquaintance will be the only person that they work with who pays any attention to their environment or surroundings, or actually looks at the effect of what they're doing, or thinks about taking actions that would make their job easier or their work cleaner. There's only ever one person, and that's the person you know, and somehow every other employee at that entire company is just utterly oblivious.
it's been that way everywhere I've worked. anyone else I talk to about i.e. "hey maybe we should stop using our full signatures on every single message, so email threads are more readable" looks at me like a Martian; I gave up years ago. They hate the way emails look, I can watch them on a screenshare struggling to find a simple piece of information in an email because 95% of the space is taken up by the same signature over and over and over, and the actual data is relegated to hard-to-parse lines of text tucked in between these huge, useless boilerplates. They obviously don't like how this is working, but they seem incapable of recognizing that it frustrates them.
The email thing is just an example, there are hundreds of problems at every job I've worked at that that would be simple to fix if people would just think for a second about what irritates them or slows down their work, but they won't even acknowledge that the problem exists even if it's right in front of them, and I just don't understand how I could be the only person who can see this, or how My immediate friends can be the only people at each of their employers that can see problems like this. The probabilities just don't make sense.
in my experience, the majority of people in the world do not look at systems, only the immediate happenstance. even people whose job descriptions are “build and maintain this large, complicated system” are usually unwilling or unable to look at a system as a whole, but must instead look at each individual part as if it was a discrete thing, leading to the kinds of technology and organizational failures we’re all so familiar with. you can show them things like “How Complex Systems Fail” and it will have absolutely no effect because they simply cannot model a system in their minds
this doesn’t appear to have anything to do with being neurodivergent vs being neurotypical, being from a technical background, etc. it’s a specific kind of intelligence that isn’t even necessarily tied to memory, but is closed related to problem-solving. it feels like it should be related to spatial awareness but it isn’t; I’ve known a number of people who are terrible at directions and are completely lost trying to interpret maps, but who are otherwise quite capable of modeling (for example) a complicated social structure in their heads. it’s entirely disconnected from math, too
as our world becomes more reliant on huge, interconnected, complicated systems, more and more people are just going to end up completely lost because they are either incapable of modeling a system, have never been taught how to do so, or find it in their best economic interest to simply ignore everything outside of their immediate perceptions
as to why it seems like it’s just your friends and close acquaintances who can see the flaws in the machinery, I think there’s two possibilities:
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queer folks tend to be able to break out of simplistic, “this is how things are” viewpoints, for obvious reasons. clearly there are exceptions, and being very wealthy means you can simply buy yourself the world you want instead of figuring out how it works, but being able to realize that you are not what your label says you are requires a bare minimum capability to understand that the map is not the territory
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the kinds of people you (and I) like to talk to and hang out with are people who are not dumb as a box of hair, so there’s some selection for minimal comprehension going on here as well. after a certain age, you’ve filtered out all the dumbasses you used to hang out with just because you shared hobbies
the downside of being able to model complicated systems is that the world is even more terrible due to it being understandable. “horrors beyond your comprehension” are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix. being able to look at the food you eat and understand what had to happen for it to arrive on your table is not a blessing in the world we live in
this was longer than intended
this one is still a banger
