This is why I prefer typing over speaking. I can go back and proofread what I said before I say it. When I speak, all that comes out half of the time is word salad.
Also, you know, the searchable record which gets created. I legitimately don’t understand why some people insist on having important conversations in real time when that conversation just vanishes instantly into the ether once it is finished
Shit, I’m over 50 years old and it’s the first time i encounter people describing my daily chicken run through social hellscape. For once, it feels nice not to be alone.
To be fair though, most engineers I know overestimate their intelligence and just ignore entire fields of knowledge. And are even weirdly proud of that. Cringe
I used to work in an engineering firm and the way I’d explain some of my coworkers’ inanity to my wife at dinner is that the engineering mindset is to search for simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and in cases where there is no such simple solution (let’s take social or political issues as a common thread, here) that tends to lead to the engineer preferring a spherical-chickens-in-a-vacuum oversimplification over the complex and nuanced reality – usually accompanied by protestations that “If only people would act rationally!” their ideas would work and make things better.
There’s some overlap as well between engineers and the sort of mentality that one is a disembodied intelligence piloting a meat puppet, which feeds into those sorts of thought patterns. Like, dude, you may think of yourself as a purely logical being, but the fact of the matter is that like all of us you’re a bodge-job mess of higher-order thinking strapped to a tribal ape with duct tape and baling wire. You can’t ignore the rough edges that come with that if you want to find social or political ideas that actually work.
Have you fucking met me? And English not being my native language makes it 10 times worse. There is always this “translation layer” that I have to process everything I hear/say through.
Not trying to boast, but I appear to be one of the “smartest” people in my field. My evidence for this is that regardless of what company I work for, and I’ve worked for several at this point in my career, I become the “go to” person for solving complex issues that stump my co-workers. I often can solve whatever problem brought them to me in a reasonable time frame, or at least propose a solution that will lead to the desired outcome.
Personally, I would mainly attribute this to my propensity for learning everything I can about everything I touch. I’m not just looking for the “how do I make this work” of it, I’m always looking for “why is it broken and what do I need to do to make it not broken”. It’s a small difference, but the former is very results focused, fix it, regardless of whether the solution makes sense, and the latter is understanding the issue and finding a way to make it work from there. I don’t think I have any special ability or intelligence that others don’t have, nor that I’m smarter or better than anyone.
I spent years studying human behaviour. I’m certain I’ve lost friends due to my efforts. I spent a lot of time carefully paying attention to everything from body language, tone, phrasing, vocabulary, speech pacing… Just everything I possibly could. I examined the presentation of statements and the responses based on all those factors to try to find trends for how to approach making statements that people reacted positively to.
I’m neurodivergent, I have ADHD. I may have a touch of autism in there but that’s never been checked nor verified, so I hesitate to say that I’m on that spectrum. I feel as though people are far too frequently saying that “I think I’m autistic” or something of the sort, without any proof thereof, and IMO, that cheapens the diagnosis. We’ve seen such callous disregard of serious disorders before, particularly with OCD and statements like “I’m a little OCD”. Unless you’ve been diagnosed with the condition, you’re not. You probably don’t understand OCD well enough to say whether any activity is classifiably OCD or not, and the misuse of the term has led to it becoming a meme at this point. I don’t want to contribute to that happening to another condition.
Regardless: after years of effort and observation, I have been described as helpful and approachable, which has always been my aim.
I know of people whom I would consider to be easily more intelligent than I am, who get regarded as combative and difficult; mainly because they haven’t spent as much time as I have examining the nuances of communication and putting in active efforts to adjust how their statements are made so that they are recieved in a more positive light. They have, instead, spent most of their time enhancing their knowledge, and have understanding in many complex topics that I simply have not spent the time learning in order to understand.
I explain all of this to contribute to your point. Social capability does not and should not imply someone’s intelligence or knowledge. There’s a lot of factors that go into someone’s perception of another person that aren’t things that you can really quantify well. From emotional intelligence, tone, the phrasing of the words used, even the selection of words, among many other factors, can be very deceptive in demonstrating someone’s intelligence.
There’s also the factor of having a deep knowledge in something you’re interested in, and a very limited knowledge of everything else. You can be extremely well spoken in your area of expertise and make completely irrational and insane statements regarding things you know little about. There’s also the matter of vocabulary. Even very well larned topics can be portrayed as something you know little about, simply because you either lack the vocabulary to speak about it, or that your vocabulary on the topic is so advanced that it comes across like you don’t know what you’re talking about, since nobody knows what you’re saying, and it sounds like you’re making things up to sound like you know more than you do.
There’s a lot of factors here and there all important to the perception of whether a person is intelligent or not.
I’ve worked with plenty of people who were regarded as “brilliant” by management and a few other employees (from different departments). And nearly every time it was they were just really charismatic. Like, they could have easily have been highly successful as a used car salesmen at a junk yard.
In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we’re absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider’s perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.
Engineers are good at following certain rules to solve a very specific, if broad, subset of human problems.
It sure as fuck don’t make them intelligent.
I wouldn’t trust an engineer to be able to solve the most trivial societal issues we face over some tennis player’s.
Our strength as a species comes from every single one of us going in depth and be experts at the most random things. Being a supreme expert at any one thing does not mean you are a supreme expert at every single thing.
Engineers are good at following certain rules to solve a very specific, if broad, subset of human problems.
HEY! I’m not good at following rules to solve very specific problems. I solve problems, some of the time, but rules are seldom involved. It’s mostly luck and caffeine.
It sure as fuck don’t make them intelligent.
First off, as a mentally underdeveloped engineer, I can say that fucking is never a certainty. I don’t know if that invalidates the rest of your sentence but… Secondly we’re generally dumb as bricks.
Do you know what bullshit is? As usual nobody gets the point. Tell me what soft systems methodology says about what constitutes a “good society”. I will literally wait for your answer here.
Frankly that’s a pretty rude and disingenuous reply. You wouldn’t treat me like that in person, and I see no reason why you should online.
If you’re genuinely interested in an answer, soft systems methodology is a framework for decision making. By its nature it is not intended to make value judgements or dictate how you should build a good society, beyond the implicit assumption that any solution should come from clear consultation with everyone involved in the problem situation. What it is intended to do is provide a way for engineers and policy makers understand the problem situation they are stepping into, explicitly consult all the stakeholders involved, and develop clear definitions of the system they’re working with so that solutions can deal with the root cause of problems, rather than surface level measures.
To take an example tool, let’s consider applying system archetypes, and specifically success to the successful. The obvious application is the current economic system, where wealth begets wealth (landlords, investment banking, etc.). If we as policy makers wish to counteract this feedback loop, then we know that wealth redistribution will only go so far, since the reinforcing feedback loop will force more wealth to those who already possess it. Instead, if we want equity, we need to decouple that feedback loop, by e.g. restricting the number of properties a landlord can own.
As I initially said, it is just a tool, and I’ve only covered a small part of it, but it is one that explicitly forces policy makers to consult stakeholders and allows us to effectively model complex social systems to bring about real societal change.
Nah, she just wants to reply some snarky comments that don’t really inform people other than letting them know she thinks they are wrong, and that’s she thinks she’s some kind of authority on the matter.
Just take anyone who speaks a second language and ask them to explain their expertise in the second language. Almost everyone will start sounding stupid trying to do the translation in their head to the second language.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t think said person is stupid at all. There’s just difficulty speaking about a concept you would innately know and have learned in one language and translate it to a second one. Except for all those genius polyglots out there of course.
That depends on how you learn the second language. I speak three languages, but I learned them organically. If I speak in English, then I also think in English at that time. But that leads to a different problem - I cannot translate between languages I know. I can explain what is written in language A to a person speaking language B, but that won’t be a translation, it will be just a free form description. My brain just don’t have connections between words in different languages. I understand them, but can’t make links between them.
That only applies to people who don’t speak that language well enough to go straight from concept to words in that language in their minds, without passing via an intermediary language.
People who need to translate between languages in their heads as they speak in a second language are at the same level in speaking foreign languages as those who need to count with their fingers are in Maths.
On the upside, once you start going directly from concept to words in a language you’re reasonable good at, it becomes possible to do it in languages you’re not at all good at.
I have a bit of a different experience. As an engineer, I mostly use English at work, so I usually have issues explaining my area of expertise in my mother tongue and other languages I know. There are lots of terms I know only the English words , so I end up using the term in English or try to translate it and it sounds stupid.
Well yeah, ok, I have the same issue too because I’ve spent most of my career abroad and learned many technical terms in English and even Dutch, so for those things I have no idea what the words for it are in my native tongue.
But I just use whatever word I do know when I don’t quite know the technical word in the language I’m speaking, and it’s the same when speaking my native tongue as when speaking some foreign language which is not English: if I miss a word in that language I just almost seamlessly fit in the English word for it instead (or, in the case of German, I might use a Dutch word and hope it just sounds like the right word said in a strange way) and clarify if requested.
That’s not at all the same as having tons of trouble speaking because you’re translating in your mind.
As far as I can tell it doesn’t sound at all stupid, though maybe that’s because I’m generally using a foreign language to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of yet another foreign language.
It is easy to answer that particular question. I’d just answer with: Probably somewhere at B1 or B2 level, although I haven’t been assessed in ages regarding that.
People don’t understand that I choose every word carefully in a sentence to convey the most meaning and answer follow-up questions up front. Then they think I said something that literally contradicts what I said or that I already accounted for in my first sentence.
Yes I’m a programmer with Autism and ADHD, why do you ask?
I do this enough that I’m convinced my friends gaslight me. It would be easier to just say that I’ll watch something later. Instead I’ll tell someone I know of it and why I haven’t watched it yet. Easy for them to interpret I’m not interested and then later they’ll tell me I’m not interested in it and I’ll be very confused and then multiple people will agree.
The problem is that they probably never gaslight me, and that fear stems from a situation where I so vividly internalise a situation that leads to the conclusion they don’t gaslight me that I forget the end result. The example being I have no idea which pronunciation of yoghurt is American and Which is British, because I used to be made fun of for saying it wrong. I only remember I was made fun of, I don’t remember what I used to say or what the right way is.
Edit: The fact I bring up yoghurt tells you everything
the ADHD tendency to write stuff as lengthy and precise as possible vs the ADHD inability to read anything longer than two paragraphs (or less depending on how tired we are)… irresistible force meets immovable object
Sometimes it feels like the classic you said you like croissants, that must mean you hate bagels
You put in so much effort to make your point crystal clear, choosing your words extra carefully to form a sentence that means exactly what you need it to mean, and then some people just interpret the wildest things.
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