And they got screenreaders and legislation that makes Braille labels mandatory at certain places and that facilitates accessibility.
Speaking openly and not in riddles and interpretive dance would work for everybody. Or I at least can not imagine why it wouldn’t.
If you get fifty dialects of Cantonese that aren’t mutually understood, you have to speak Mandarin. As simple as that.
It’s not “coded”. It is intentionally(?) obscured.
I am doing that, with decent success. With the (numerous) exceptions where the knowledge of the other party doesn’t allow understanding the very technical concepts being talked about.
Speaking for me, I find this language ineffective, so much so that I want to actively turn away from the discussion when stated this way. Now if someone said
It’s about getting stuff done and being effective at your job
I think it’s about both, and there are elements of both that stop companies that have well-intentioned policies from actually achieving equality. The same applies outside of a working environment.
Well, to me “privilege” is tightly coded to “I want to have a meta-discussion that’s going to be a huge time sink and an incredibly risky political morass where you’re probably gonna say the wrong thing” versus
I want to get work done
I believe average men would be far more motivated by “here’s how your team can work even more efficiently and get even more stuff done” explanations of, say, listening to everyone in fair proportion as noted in the great article@chgoliz brought up. That was also what I proposed much earlier in the topic.
If women are 50% of the population, crippling their productivity by, say, not listening to them is ultimately harmful to the forward progress of the entire human race.
You interjected to complain about unspoken information in teams that were studied for being highly functional. This is real experimentation done by Google on its own teams to try to figure out what made a good team work, and there were two factors identified. one was “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking” and the other was “average social sensitivity.” You seem to be arguing against the example used to illustrate this as an oblique way of arguing against the idea that “average social sensitivity” is important to teamwork.
In other words, you are advocating for speaking plainly, but you are leaving me guessing as to what you mean. If your point was merely that intentionally obscuring your meaning is a bad way to be understood, then I’ll simply say that I agree and I’m sorry I misunderstood you.
The people who speak Mandarin have all the same kinds of misunderstandings and communication barriers we are discussing in this thread. Clear communication would be a Vulcan mind-meld, and the reality is that I don’t think our brains are sufficiently similar to even translate from one to another.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. But we have examples in this very thread of obstinate people simply refusing to listen. Also, I am old and jaded as fuck.
I’m not going to stop talking about meta-issues, honestly, in most cases its the safest way for me to discuss these issues.
The article said that the ability to read the unspoken is crucial for team function. As one of those who cannot do so, I strongly object and propose a non-discriminatory alternative.
Trying to clear it up.
Relying on the unspoken counts as intentionally obscuring.
Maybe because they talk too little shop and too much gossip, and cannot state clearly what they want.
That’s also why math and pseudocode are used frequently and why all sorts of standardized symbolics were invented.
This is why engineers should stick their domain of expertise.
Or do you wish to explain to us why the field of Natural Language Processing is so wrong-headed and backwards and would have solved the problem of interpreting speech and natural language decades ago if they had only listened to you? Because unlike power supplies, communication is “not hard”?
There is no equivalent to screen readers for this purpose. The only solution is to work with the people you are working with to try to find better ways of communicating that suit everyone’s needs. There can’t be universal accommodation.
That is absurd. Every time anyone speaks there will be more things unsaid than said. You cannot know what the other person didn’t understand unless they tell you. Unknown unknowns are universal.
For practical suggestions, I really love The Recurse Center’s 4 main Social Rules.: No “feigning surprise”, no “backseat driving”, no “well actuallys”, and no “subtle -isms.”
In my experience, a good bit of the airtime that Male Dominators take up involves using a combination of the first 3 in order to try to establish themselves at the top of the intellectual pecking order by putting the ideas of others down (bro’s gotta neg). Since I’ve found these rules I’ve worked to introduce these types of social rules as the desired way that people on teams should interact, as it helps to establish a common language for identifying and reporting these verbal “bugs” that detract from group productivity. If you think you can introduce them without threatening the tender egos of bosses, I’d suggest it, but if not I’ve gotten good results introducing it on the sly to peers.
The solution is actually fairly easy - change the language.
Helps a lot. Mostly doing that myself.
There are some efforts with augmented reality and face and expression recognition. But I bet that the plebes will be all in arms about “privacy” and will hold back the deployment by at least a few years.
Could be. But people insist on being obscure and ambiguous and hard to read and communicate in unreadable modalities.
It’s ableist and discriminatory.
Pretty often they use out of band signalling. And then get disappointed when the message is ignored.
It’s not necessarily discriminatory. It’s not discriminatory to disallow a person in a wheelchair from being a firefighter because the job simply requires the ability to climb ladders. If “social sensitivity” is a qualification for teamwork, that doesn’t mean that no one who doesn’t have it can be useful, but it might mean that they ought not expect to get work where teamwork is important.
Beyond that, I don’t know why you insist on imagining that people do these things on purpose. For someone who claims to not read in unspoken messages, you seem pretty insistent on that one (or do people tell you that they do this on purpose?).
Persecution complex aside, that might be promising, but it is necessary and hard to implement because communication is complex. There isn’t a shortcut where everyone just expresses themselves exactly.
If you think that’s an easy solution, you just don’t know anything about people. People are meat machines with limited capabilities, you know, you can’t just reprogram them, and they can’t just reprogram themselves. It’s okay to not know anything about people, but maybe you should defer to people who do when questions about people come up instead of insisting you have all the answers?
Changing a language spoken by 340 million people around the globe is “fairly easy!?” When was the last time you persuaded 340 million people to change the way they did something, and how did that work out?
In the case of people who have trouble reading people, there are a lot of avenues for reasonable accommodation. Like, for example, not having meetings that seem to be a free-form scrum - hearing about the meetings described in this thread make me glad I don’t have meetings like that
There are varying degrees of disability - firefighter with paralyzed legs is an extreme example to show how refusing to hire someone with a disability is sometimes not discriminatory to counter the idea that we can easily say that not accommodating a person is discriminatory. The burden of the accommodation has to be considered.
A lot of the time accommodations actually make things better for everyone, not just for a person with a particular disability. But sometimes disabilities legitimately do affect a person’s ability to do a job. My disability is a straight up detriment in my work, but I’m able to function anyway. It’s not anyone else’s fault that the way everyone else wants things to be is the opposite of what I want, but fixing it for me and making it worse for them doesn’t make sense.
However, if you have skills in visual pattern recognition you can learn for yourself rather than waiting for the hardware to catch up.
Human interaction styles are likewise relatively predictable once you recognise that there are patterns in speech and behaviour.
Except that we can reprogram ourselves to a great extent. Every time we realise we made a poor decision, decide to do it differently in the future then actually do it; every time we learn a new skill and practise to get better at it; each time we deliberately override a reflex; every time we choose to pick up a book and make new memories; we are making new neural connections and consciously reprogramming the way our subconscious brains react.
Could be perhaps combined with the Epson Moverio BT-300.
The hardware will catch up sooner than I’d be able to learn this. I tried for years and got from zero to highly mediocre. The computer will have better success rate.
Indeed. A couple defaults will get you through most. It’s the more advanced more nuanced stuff where they fail, though.
Well, normalizing a language into something that is logical and unambiguous by design, and machine parseable, would do them a lot of good in long run.
Of course they don’t see it.
I have zero “natural authority”. Can’t even order a friend’s dog to leave the table. Oh well.
Which seems to be pretty much everywhere.
People keep doing that even when repeatedly asked and begged not to. So…
Well, Google Glasses did not allow face recog.
But the demand is there and will make it available anyway, terms of service won’t stop people from getting and sideloading the code from third parties. See some adblockers for android.
And the complexity is why the reported data are usually an array of percentages.
When people don’t have enough introspection to know what they are actually communicating, how can I be supposed to pick up on it? Shouldn’t they be the ones most aware of what they want to say/express/communicate?
Do they actually try? Or do they just go their merry way, happily discriminating against those who are non-neurotypicals, and making things hard even for the “normal” ones (and then usually complain when they get misinterpreted)?
I have a few positive experiences that show that it can work pretty well and it is possible. But they are few and far far between. So I have a small handful of first-person case studies confirming my hypothesis.
Using those tools? Or these (they work too)? Or something else? I went from well below average to 95% accurate in less than a year of very part time practise. And it does come in useful.
More like variations on half dozen or so, but still amenable to pattern recognition.
