Other people's procedural knowledge gaps
6Subsumed
5Vladimir_M
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13[anonymous]
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2Nornagest
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0JoshuaZ
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0TheOtherDave
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2NancyLebovitz
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There are lots of things I feel others ought to know (because after I knew them I felt I understood the world a lot better than before) but not many fall under procedural knowledge. Computer programming is one thing I really value having learned, mostly for non-procedural reasons (clarifies thinking, adds a large useful set of analogies etc.) which has also proved practically useful (e.g. writing scripts for repetitive things and understanding computer errors).
Another thing I've just recalled: If you run out of gas somewhere you can call a cab and ask the driver to bring a can of gas with him/her (this applies in Iceland at least, YMMV).
Here are some things I was ignorant about until a few years ago, when I realized I'd have to lose a few pounds or buy a new set of pants, which was followed by some successful self-experimentation.
Unless you consciously discipline yourself, and unless you're extremely athletic or have unusually low appetite, you'll end up consuming way more calories than you spend. It depends on your metabolism whether these will end up stored as fat, and in what proportion. For many people, this proportion is near zero, but only until some point in life. For me, this point came sometime in my late twenties.
One wrong-headed belief many people have is that they'll lose weight just by exercising. The trouble is, you can burn a significant amount of energy by physical effort only if you're in a great shape to begin with; otherwise, you can exert yourself for hours and still burn what amounts to (literally) just three or four bites of food. The key is to figure out a regime of exercise that makes you eat less, not more, which I managed; I'm not sure if this is possible for everyone, though.
There are insane amounts of sugar in almost any sweet-tasting drink, more insane than most people perceive them to be even if they've read the figures on the labels. (I don't really perceive those awful artificial sweeteners as "sweet.") The pictures on sugarstacks.com are worth checking out. One would do well to develop a feeling of disgust towards anything that's liquid and sweet-tasting. All this holds even for the hip and supposedly healthy pure fruit juices.
Carbonated water can be a fairly satisfying zero-calorie substitute for sweet drinks and beer. Try looking for Eastern European brands that are sold in ethnic deli stores. They're far superior to anything mass-marketed in North America.
Losing even a modest amount of weight can dramatically lower your alcohol tolerance. After losing something like 11-12 pounds, I realized that it took about half as much booze as before to get me drunk, and caused more severe hangovers. (Some of that was also due to less drinking in general during these months, but this can't possibly account for the whole effect.)
(This one I'd known even earlier.) Chin-ups are by far the most cost-effective way of working out for people with very little time and/or willpower. Just a doing a few sets every day every now and then while you're going around the house is enough to see rapid results. Again, this might be a genetic quirk of mine, not a universal law.
i'd supplement with dips so you aren't encouraging an imbalance in upper body muscles. you can get straps that hang from your chinup bar to do them on if there's nothing convenient around.
According to wikipedia, dips mostly work the "triceps, with major synergists being the anterior deltoid, the pectoralis muscles (sternal, clavicular, and minor), and the rhomboid muscles of the back (in that order). "
Aren't those all upper body muscles too?
Aren't those all upper body muscles too?
An imbalance in upper body muscles indicates more development in particular muscle groups in the upper body while neglecting the other upper body muscles that balance them. This can lead to posture problems and in the worst case injury.
The trouble is, you can burn a significant amount of energy by physical effort only if you're in a great shape to begin with; otherwise, you can exert yourself for hours and still burn what amounts to (literally) just three or four bites of food.
Why does exercising when unfit burn fewer calories? Is it because you cannot exercise as intensely?
sfb:
Why does exercising when unfit burn fewer calories? Is it because you cannot exercise as intensely?
Pretty much, both when it comes to the maximum power you can exert and the time you can sustain it. To take a very extreme example, Michael Phelps can exercise intensely enough to burn almost 10,000 calories in a few hours every day (of course, there's a large genetic component to it). An average couch potato would likely collapse before managing to burn the equivalent of a single Starbucks muffin in a stretch.
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.
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.)
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.
English speakers ought to know that its is the possessive adjective and it's is the contraction for 'it is'. It drives me crazy when people use it's to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it. Do people not learn how to write by reading? (I certainly did, and I don't see how else you could do it, but I realise I'm somewhat abnormal.) Or is the incorrect use of it's so ubiquitous now that even if people learn to write by reading, unless they read mostly stuff more than ten years old they aren't being exposed to a data set from which they can infer the correct rule? Or is it more a question of being published on paper than of age? And incidentally, does anyone know if schools have stopped teaching this and similar rules? (And if so, why?)
ETA: At least two people downvoted this, so perhaps I should make the following two points more explicit.
My comment was not intended to be censorious in tone (and rereading it I still don't think it is). The bulk of what I wrote takes the form of wondering about the cause of this, to me particularly irritating, phenomenon. (Thanks to Vladimir M, I am a little less confused now.)
The reason why I find the phenomenon so irritating is primarily that I value my ability to effortlessly produce correct grammar, spelling, etc., and seeing the same mistake consistently a large enough fraction of the time bollixes up my machinery, tending to decrease the effortlessness with which I can perform correctly. Also, I fear that others are subject to the same effect, and that there could be a threshold of criticality, and even that that threshold may already have been reached. So it's a (fairly minor) group rationality issue.
I do not understand why they do it
I do it (and then correct it, but only when I notice that I've done so) because using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.
Relevant apostrophe comic 1.
You might find this snippet of OKCupid's blog interesting - a correlation between being religious and being unbothered by poor spelling and grammar. It's a graphic because the blog post is long and has no way to link just to that point. Full link.
Still, downvoted because this is not a procedural knowledge gap you think should be filled, it's just ranting and possibly being in the pattern of having a subgroup of people over whom to feel superior.
using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.
For nouns, but not pronouns. Compare his, her, my, their, ...
As for comics, perhas I should not admit to liking this one.
The objection that it's not a procedural knowledge gap is probably valid. But I was not just ranting; I asked a number of questions in the answers to which I am genuinely interested. And whether I feel superior to people who use apostrophes incorrectly does not strike me as relevant--although I try not to, and understanding why they do it might help.
The negative correlation between religiosity and writing level doesn't surprise me, but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level. This is a site where people are trying to present themselves as well as possible to sell themselves to others, and most of them write at a standard below the work of an average high school sophomore?
Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don't correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.
but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level.
The tools used to evaluate the level of writing ability or even the quality of the specific test. The very nature of the questions being answered and the format appropriate to the context would play a large part in the ratings shown.
The trend reversal regarding seriousness about beliefs for agnostics and atheists is striking. ETA: Looking at that it may be small enough to be a statistical fluke. I wish they gave more detailed data for us to crunch the numbers.
It's (heh) usually a matter of accidental error, not ignorance, at least in my experience. When writing fast, it's easy to substitute a differently spelled homophone by accident.
The funny thing when you're a non-native English speaker who learned the language mostly from reading is that as your spoken English gets better with practice, you're likely to start making more of such errors, not less.
as your spoken English gets better with practice, you're likely to start making more of such errors, not less.
This is fascinating. It's not at all clear to me why such a thing would happen. I can't think of anything in my own experience that seems analogous.
When you learn English mainly from written sources with little speaking practice (and I was an extreme example of that), you end up composing written English sentences in your head and reading them aloud when speaking (or just writing them down directly when typing). This makes your pronunciation awful and your speaking stilted and unnatural, but on the other hand, your mind categorizes differently spelled homophones as completely different entities, so there is almost zero chance of mixing them up.
In contrast, if you're a native speaker or otherwise a truly fluent speaker, you compose natural spoken English in your head and, so to say, dictate it to yourself when writing. This makes it easy to confuse homophones, since your mind emits words encoded as audial, not textual information, and you have to disambiguate spelling on the fly based on the context.
This is of course a simplified picture, but still a more or less correct one in my experience. And as your spoken English gets better, you start gradually moving from the first category to the second.
Yes, this seems plausible, and it gives a fascinating insight, for me, into how other people process language. I've been noticing lately how frequent wrong homophones are in writing; in fact I just encountered one--are for our--in a textbook I'm currently working through (Lawvere & Schanuel's Conceptual Mathematics). This is a type of mistake I can't imagine myself making. But if, for many people, the textual encoding is not maintained, in parallel with the audial, when spoken competence increases past some threshold, the phenomenon is explained.
What can be done to help correct this bug?
I don't think it's a very pressing concern. Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely, and they don't lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.
Here's another related example I found fascinating. It was only recently that I realized that "rose" in its two different meanings (the flower and the past tense of "rise") is in fact pronounced the same by native speakers. Yet I somehow managed to register these pronunciations as totally different. When I introspected about it, I realized that my mind had them stored separately with a phonemic tonal contrast of a sort that doesn't exist in English at all but is common in my native language; I was even pronouncing them in this tonal way. God knows how many such things are still coloring my accent when speaking English.
I don't think anyone would perceive this as wrong, though. I might also note that there are many english words which are exact homophones in some dialects but not others (although all the ones I can think of at the moment are spelled differently). And I'd have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms 'rose' and 'rose' stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
Spelling errors impede understanding very rarely,
They always impede my understanding; not because I have trouble figuring out what was meant, but because they distract me. It's not clear to me that this is something I should want to change about myself, but even if it were, I doubt that I could change it without what I would consider unacceptable collateral damage, or possibly even at all.
and they don't lower your status as long as they plausibly look accidental.
Well, the world is full of assholes like me who do have a tendency to take status away from those who make spelling and grammar mistakes, especially if they don't have some obvious excuse like being a non-native speaker. Most of us are probably more self-righteous about it than I am.
And I'd have to say I feel as though my mind has the two homonyms 'rose' and 'rose' stored separately even though they happen to have the same spelling and pronunciation.
I seem to have them stored separately too. It took me rather a while to even work out what the second version was having already resolved a first.
Well, the world is full of assholes like me who do have a tendency to take status away from those who make spelling and grammar mistakes, especially if they don't have some obvious excuse like being a non-native speaker. Most of us are probably more self-righteous about it than I am.
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
Unfortunately for you in most places that will backfire against all but targets that already have low status.
I guess it's a good thing you said this, because it shows me that I'm using the word 'status' differently from you. I'm not that much of an asshole! What I mean by 'take status away from X' is 'consider X to have lower status'. In other words, I understood 'status' to be a sort of tag I associate with particular persons in my own mind. One might, then, talk about 'status' as if it were actually an invariant (i.e. observer-independent) property of a person, the way 'karma' is an invariant property of a particular identity within an online community; but this would be understood as a sort of shorthand, an imprecise way of speaking. It would have seemed wrong to me to say instead, for example, 'lower my estimate of the status of X', because I do not think that X actually has a status. What should I have said?
My suggestion would be "lower my opinion of X."
I also suggest that you stay aware of this in conversations about social status, in general. Disagreements about whether people in groups actually have a status in the first place cause a lot of confusion, especially because (as in this case) it's not always clear at first that a disagreement even exists, and many other things hinge on this.
Incidentally, would you also say the same things about words like "popularity" or "privilege"? That is, would you say that talking about person X as more popular than person Y is an imprecise shorthand, and that it's wrong to talk about my estimate of X's popularity, because X doesn't actually have popularity?
My suggestion would be "lower my opinion of X."
Yeah, but then I wouldn't be invoking the concept of 'status'. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don't lower someone's status, so that's why I ended up using the term. But of course X's ('actual') status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others' 'opinion of X'. So it's only in that 'weak' sense that I meant my remark that X 'doesn't actually have a status'; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the various individuals judging X rather than a status simpliciter. X's status, simpliciter, could then perhaps be defined as the weighted average of X's status-in-the-eyes-of-all-the-others --weighted, perhaps, by their statuses. Or something, I dunno. Even that's probably too simple. But of course I realise that one usually refers to status as though X simply has a status.
On the other hand, when you ask if I would say it's wrong to talk about 'my estimate of X's popularity' (which I wouldn't), I realise that similarly I wouldn't have a problem with talk of estimates of X's status, if that were in fact what I wanted to refer to. So I misrepresented my own reasoning; I didn't choose not to say 'lower my estimate of the status of X' because I don't think X has an actual status, but because my estimate of the 'actual' status of X wasn't what I was talking about. I did mean, as you suggest, 'lower my opinion of X'.
Popularity, while being as vague a notion as status, does strike me as being a less complicated one; maybe that's why I've developed these intuitions. But the usage of 'popularity' that seems most normal to me is as a function of the opinions of some whole population; although people do occasionally use the term in an individual-indexed way. That usage isn't so popular with me, though. (And I'm not sure what to think about 'privilege'.)
Interesting, it seems to be the same for natives. I've drastically increased my amount of real-life socialising during the last few years, and seen a corresponding sharp increase in the amount of those kinds of errors that I make.
Again, fascinating. And I do very little real-life socialising. But on the whole I think I do a good deal more talking than typing. ETA: On second thought, I'm not sure why I thought that. Something made me overestimate how much talking I do. Probably the fact that I used to do a lot more, and certainly have done immensely more talking than writing over the course of my life so far.
I agree that grammar presents a minor group rationality problem. I disagree about what the problem is.
The distinction between its and it's does nothing to improve writing, either in terms of clarity or in terms of expressiveness. Reserving "their" for the plural possessive complicates writing and adds nothing. A broad class of grammatical rules fall into one of these classes. Wasting education time on these rules (I would estimate that I've spent at least 10 hours on clearly useless grammar in school) and using them as a status indicator seems like destructive behavior that should be corrected.
People who make the error may have simply spent less time in their lives thinking about the distinction, which as far as I can is probably better for everybody. If you don't understand how the error can even happen, as opposed to why people don't learn to correct it, then I think the issue is the variety of human brains (or else a failure of introspection). Personally, I get information from my thoughts to my hands by reciting; the natural failure mode is to switch between homophones freely. The difference between its and it's is an even easier substitution than most (although I believe I generally write the correct one).
Sure.
Similar things are potentially true of all aspects of grammar/spelling/word choice that aren't strictly necessary in order to convey the meaning of a phrase... for example, you'll generally no what I mean from context even if I confuse "no" and "know."
For my own part, I have a fondness for using different signals to invoke different referents (and for not using different signals to invoke the same referent), but I acknowledge that other people's mileage varies, and that we could accept a lot of linguistic/orthographic abberations without significantly reducing comprehensibility.
The phrases "generally no" and "generally know" both appear frequently in English. "it's a" is orders of magnitude more common than "its a." Replacing "know" with "no" doesn't significantly reduce comprehensibility--but it does make the phrase take longer to parse. Replacing "it's" with "its" doesn't reduce comprehensibility at all, nor does it make the phrase any harder to read.
There are a few situations where making a distinction can eliminate a syntactic ambiguity, as in "its fun"/"it's fun". There are also a few more where it eliminates a non-ambiguous but awkward construction, as in "it's its own server". And of course it'd introduce another kind of irregularity unless you got rid of the contraction apostrophe altogether, which might lead to some other strangeness that I haven't thought of yet.
It drives me crazy when people use it's to mean its, and I do not understand why they do it.
Because it is one of the most grating flaws in the language. Whether I say its or Clippy's when trying to indicate ownership depends on whether I wish to use its name or be generic. The ad hoc rules of grammar that we use are a kludgy hack and this is the most annoying kludge.
I personally choose to use the prescribed grammar. Defection would be pointless. Yet while I am usually rather particular when it comes to spelling and grammar this is one instance in which I have more respect for those who use "it's" in error than those who indicate contempt for and incomprehension of those who do not understand the mistake.
Apostrophe rules are scatterbrained, but I'm not sure how high they be on a list of grating flaws or kludges in English. I might not even have made them a separate list entry; they're a subset of homophones, and many other homophones are more detrimental to clear communication. Non-phonetic spelling rules make it harder for everyone to learn to read. Irregular conjugations add unnecessary and illogical hoops to jump through before anyone can even speak without unintentionally signaling low intelligence. Hell, I used to think of I/l/1 as a programmer's problem until I discovered that toddlers stumble on the same unnecessary ambiguity; at least programmers get to choose their own fonts.
I always write capital "I" with three lines, lower case "l" as a single straight line, and the number "1" with three lines. I was always taught to write the two letters that way, but I decided to write the number 1 that way on my own.
Just to be clear, are you saying you now have less respect for me, categorically, than for people who use it's incorrectly? That would be most unfortunate; I certainly hope I am misunderstanding somehow. I do not believe, incidentally, that I was expressing contempt for anyone; I apologise for my incomprehension, but it is genuine.
And as I mentioned above, its belongs to the same family as the other pronominal adjectives her, my, our, ... None of them have apostrophes (and one besides its has an s).
ETA: And whose. That's another one people seem to get wrong a lot.
Just to be clear, are you saying you now have less respect for me, categorically, than for people who use it's incorrectly?
I categorically have quite a lot of respect for those whose English grammar ability breaks down at the weakest point in the grammar. That I punctuate correctly while they do not is an indication not that they have learned poorly but instead that I have more completely immersed myself into the peculiarities of the syntax.
I loved the cartoon link on apostrophes that one of the cousin comments provided!
I categorically have quite a lot of respect for those whose English grammar ability breaks down at the weakest point in the grammar.
That interpretation would probably never have occurred to me. You must be using 'respect' to mean something like 'tolerance'. If so, I will try to tolerate your tolerance.
How to get decent medical care-- people can have a hard time finding competent doctors if their symptoms aren't the result of something obvious, and in general judging whether treatments are worthwhile.
I don't know whether patients need to be more vigilant in the US.
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