I think other people should know the sorts of skills they’d want to have to get around in unfamiliar situations—a lot of which is meta-information. I think having lots of specific knowledge is not nearly as important as knowing how to remedy the gaps when you find them, or at least being able to find workarounds. So things I think everybody should know: how to usefully use a search engine, identifying which resources are most likely to help you solve your problems, how to ask questions of people so they will give you good answers, summarizing and extracting main ideas from information sources. (There are lots of basics I think fall one level below that: doing practical math, using maps, essential self-care and first aid, etc.)
I’ve taught someone the basics of algebra (something else I think everyone ought to know) via IRC; he was a programmer but had a spotty educational background and never really understood the math. (How can you be a programmer without understanding algebra? I don’t know; that’s what those of us in the channel at the time asked him...) It took some group effort to convince him that he was not going to be hopeless and that math did not have to be painful, and after that it was fairly easy going.
Related: I’m often shocked that people don’t use common sense to handle situations where they don’t have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don’t have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
Languages are a good example.
The only foreign language I’ve actually studied systematically in school is French. And yet: I can understand a newspaper article in Spanish, get a printer that’s stuck in Dutch language mode back to English, use an Italian book as a reference for an art history paper, understand the lyrics to a Yiddish song, and navigate the subway in a German-speaking city.
It’s just using cognates and common sense. But people always act shocked, and seem to think that if you haven’t studied a language in school you have to be completely helpless.
Software is another example. Give me a new piece of software and I’ll muddle around and see what the buttons do, like a normal person. Apparently many office workers demand an official tutorial and won’t even touch the software until they’ve been “taught” to use it.
Software is another example. Give me a new piece of software and I’ll muddle around and see what the buttons do, like a normal person. Apparently many office workers demand an official tutorial and won’t even touch the software until they’ve been “taught” to use it.
My father is consistently amazed at my ability to successfully execute this algorithm several orders of magnitude faster than he can. Often I solve his problem by pointing out something on the same screen that he’s been staring at for fifteen minutes.
(He should find some way of hiring himself out as a usability tester or something; if there’s a way to misinterpret or overlook some option in a computer program, he’ll find it.)
Related: I’m often shocked that people don’t use common sense to handle situations where they don’t have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don’t have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
I tend to agree, and I’ve had the same experiences [1]. Still, isn’t this exactly how I look to neurotypicals in terms of social knowledge? Couldn’t they just as well say, “You don’t know how to do small talk? Gee, just try different things until it works!”?
[1] On the first day of Kindergarten, I ruined the lesson plan by being able to decipher “Welcome to Kindergarten” written in cursive on the blackboard, since (as my mom explained later) the lesson plan depended on the whole class not knowing what it meant, and “Kindergarteners don’t know cursive”. I didn’t, of course, but I knew enough heuristics to guess it’s probable meaning.
“You don’t know how to do small talk? Gee, just try different things until it works!”?
This could only possibly work if the person you’re talking to is an NPC, I should think. A real person may, e.g., stop talking to you if insulted, or grow bored with your attempts.
I think other people should know the sorts of skills they’d want to have to get around in unfamiliar situations—a lot of which is meta-information. I think having lots of specific knowledge is not nearly as important as knowing how to remedy the gaps when you find them, or at least being able to find workarounds. So things I think everybody should know: how to usefully use a search engine, identifying which resources are most likely to help you solve your problems, how to ask questions of people so they will give you good answers, summarizing and extracting main ideas from information sources. (There are lots of basics I think fall one level below that: doing practical math, using maps, essential self-care and first aid, etc.)
I’ve taught someone the basics of algebra (something else I think everyone ought to know) via IRC; he was a programmer but had a spotty educational background and never really understood the math. (How can you be a programmer without understanding algebra? I don’t know; that’s what those of us in the channel at the time asked him...) It took some group effort to convince him that he was not going to be hopeless and that math did not have to be painful, and after that it was fairly easy going.
Related: I’m often shocked that people don’t use common sense to handle situations where they don’t have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don’t have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
Languages are a good example.
The only foreign language I’ve actually studied systematically in school is French. And yet: I can understand a newspaper article in Spanish, get a printer that’s stuck in Dutch language mode back to English, use an Italian book as a reference for an art history paper, understand the lyrics to a Yiddish song, and navigate the subway in a German-speaking city.
It’s just using cognates and common sense. But people always act shocked, and seem to think that if you haven’t studied a language in school you have to be completely helpless.
Software is another example. Give me a new piece of software and I’ll muddle around and see what the buttons do, like a normal person. Apparently many office workers demand an official tutorial and won’t even touch the software until they’ve been “taught” to use it.
I wonder if they could be “taught” to use this:
My father is consistently amazed at my ability to successfully execute this algorithm several orders of magnitude faster than he can. Often I solve his problem by pointing out something on the same screen that he’s been staring at for fifteen minutes.
(He should find some way of hiring himself out as a usability tester or something; if there’s a way to misinterpret or overlook some option in a computer program, he’ll find it.)
I tend to agree, and I’ve had the same experiences [1]. Still, isn’t this exactly how I look to neurotypicals in terms of social knowledge? Couldn’t they just as well say, “You don’t know how to do small talk? Gee, just try different things until it works!”?
[1] On the first day of Kindergarten, I ruined the lesson plan by being able to decipher “Welcome to Kindergarten” written in cursive on the blackboard, since (as my mom explained later) the lesson plan depended on the whole class not knowing what it meant, and “Kindergarteners don’t know cursive”. I didn’t, of course, but I knew enough heuristics to guess it’s probable meaning.
This could only possibly work if the person you’re talking to is an NPC, I should think. A real person may, e.g., stop talking to you if insulted, or grow bored with your attempts.