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:
-
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
-
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
I want to third this as well in a very strange and not-fun way but also this would be very fitting for it to be my first actual Copoast on Cohost. Apologies and I hope you folks can keep up with my 'I should probably be sleeping' rambling.
I work for a sewer utility in a large Western US city. Operation and maintenance of complex systems that humans both rely on and are extremely hecking clueless about, either willingly or not, is my bread and butter. It's what gets me up in the morning, it's what rattles around in my brain some nights when I'm trying to sleep if I'm not in the field trying to resolve an issue of some sort so that I can crawl back into bed an hour or so later.
"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"
Is actually a pretty good quote (And one I absolutely agree with, @apocryphalmess!) I'd like to add a fourth statement: "Or simply find the system too gross to think about until they're forced to confront the reality of their situation, often at inopportune times"
It should be known by most, if not all of us, that when you think of 'infrastructure,' particularly public infrastructure: where our poo goes isn't exactly at the top of the list for a lot of folks. Some of my sewerage textbooks even mention this exact issue! Elected officials, the vast majority of the voting public, and much to my dismay, quite a few radicals who seek the demolition of the Current State Of Things, many of whom I may or may not share political alignment with, express little interest in where the drain goes.
While "The sewer" is a good preliminary answer to "Where does the poop go?" I'd argue it shouldn't be left, ever, as a complete answer on its own. In that state, it's about equivalent in terms of complete understanding as JK Terfling's "The wizards simply magicked their piss away." "The sewer" as a 'complete' answer on its own becomes a reason to discharge any sense of object permanence, it becomes "Away," the same place our solid waste disappears to, a place where we don't have to think about things anymore (but that's another subject all on its own.) The problem is, "Away" isn't really "Away." It's another massively complex system beneath our feet that requires a dedicated, experienced, and trained set of individuals and teams to operate so that we can maintain the illusion that 'Away' is a thing that actually does exist.
The flushable wipe that Average Joe sends down the toilet one night may seem to disappear forever, but to me, it's something I may very well have to confront. It could be the final part of a ball of other similar things tens, or hundreds of Average Joes have sent 'away' that coalesces in a pump intake and blocks it up, reducing its capacity by 50% or more. It on its own could wedge itself in the less-than-a-half-a-millimeter-wide space between pump impeller and wear ring that causes a hundred-horsepower motor to throw its hands up and trip out on overamperage. It could be one of the things I have to shovel out of a hopper because a grinder got rocks from a poorly-maintained part of the system caught in it again. And even if it does make it through all those steps, it probably ends up getting raked out at a bar screen and fills a dumpster at the treatment plant. Or, in the case of a grinder situation, contributes to the growing issue of untreatable microplastics in our oceans, some of which may be Posted About by Average Joe, clueless as to where these microplastics could possibly be coming from.
... But I thought mommy or daddy really did disappear behind their hands!
Another absolutely banger quote: "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"
Damn. I wish I could forget the horrors I understand but can't fix. I wish I could look away when I see a king tide completely filling up an outfall line used as a "Overflow here as a Last Resort if the combined stormwater/sanitary sewer system fills up due to rainfall" point, followed up by looking at the weather forecast and being thankful to the weather deities that we don't have a rain squall roaring toward us. When I look at pump stations with all their pumps running but only barely able to keep up with rainfall and what's leaving homes, shops, and industries, I ponder: Do people know?
Or is it something they'll only care to think about when I'm out there hammering a sign into the beach or along a trail saying "SEWAGE OVERFLOW, DO NOT SWIM." When they're forced to confront that "Away" is really just a carefully maintained illusion, keeping the odor from their noses and the sewage-caused algal blooms from dissuading them from their swimming or fishing holes?
I live in a perpetual state of varying levels of horror, but I do so, so that most folks don't have to think about what happens after the tap turns off or the flush lever is tugged. Oddly enough, I kinda like it. But in the end, when things go wrong and the complex system gets screwed and misbehaves, I'd like a bit more thought behind the outrage than the thinly veiled "But my parent revealed themselves! They were there the entire time during this game of peek-a-boo!" that we usually see from most folks who don't have to think about these systems every day.
Much thanks to the two Chosters above me for inspiring this little late-night chostrant. You two keep being awesome!
