Have you interacted with a typical class of 30 children lately? Maybe 1 or 2 of them are doing what you described, but 15 of them don't understand how to navigate a basic filesystem because they haven't used anything more advanced that a Chromebook in their lives and they have no desire to do anything more complicated with a computer.
Also, I fundamentally disagree that reading code and error messages stretches the same muscle as long form prose, and I believe that sustained attention on long pieces of writing is how a lot of sustained cultural values are transmitted, where reading 3,000 lines of python does none of that.
Is this an actual situation or a weird hypothetical?
Perfect health is only really a requirement for the military, pilots, and a couple other niche roles. No medication history would constitute illegal discrimination for 99% of jobs in the US, and the company even asking for it on hiring would lead to a HIPPA mess.
Nobody in America requires no medication history for office jobs, not even the CIA.
I think that's something people have increasingly forgotten. My grandparents were active in their church for decades. They didn't talk about my grandmother's serious mental health struggles with the other parishioners.
People in the past had stronger community institutions, and I think a part of that was that nobody expected to bring their whole self to bowling club or the neighborhood potluck.
It's a balance though, isn't it? Like, sure, don't bring your whole self to every single bowling game, you're there to bowl so focus at the task at hand. Nobody is going to have a good time if every bowling game devolves into every little emotional issue anyone in the group is having.
But that doesn't mean those relationships originally started at the bowling club need to stay purely about bowling, a big part of community is to then open up when the context is right and when the other person is open to the sharing. It's how you grow your community, how you grow your circle. Don't expect every person in your bowling league wants to become your best friend ever, but it's also not healthy to assume that everyone there only ever wants to just bowl and only cares about bowling.
I've had a lot of people from work relationships that stayed purely work relationships. I've had some become friends. I've had several become important people in my life. If I forced myself to silo off work contacts are only ever work contacts, I don't think I'd be nearly as happy as I am today. I know I'd be a lot more lonely and probably a good bit less successful.
We talk about this huge loneliness epidemic and yet so many people are like "I would never talk to my fellow coworkers about anything personal, ever." Huh I wonder why we're so lonely. We're all convinced we shouldn't be personal with the people we spend a massive amount of our lives with.
I don't think you're fundamentally disagreeing. Your work community can be a source of friendships (and sometimes but more rarely, more than friendship), but you shouldn't confuse the two. Finding out your colleague also plays chess can segue into an invitation to play chess outside of work, and launchpad that into building a friendship. But that's not the same as playing chess together at work (get back to work?), let alone being emotionally vulnerable as an intentional part of building relationships with people who you're trying to trust with that vulnerability.
The latter sounds good (if you could have that with your colleagues, then it can only help, right?), but then again, the linked article is literally about someone violating that and firing the subject of the article. It is simply not possible to build emotional intimacy with every coworker, let alone under forced circumstances, so attempts to do so are more or less predictably going to lead to pain.
> Finding out your colleague also plays chess can segue into an invitation to play chess outside of work, and launchpad that into building a friendship.
Yeah, but if you make a point of never shooting the shit with your coworkers how will you ever really come across this kind of info?
I do ultimately agree forcing this kind of thing isn't usually good, and it definitely sounds like this retreat went sideways due to poor management. People probably shouldn't be doing things like keg stands at a company retreat, management should have stopped things well before people were pressured into such activities. And yeah, a company-wide forced "tell everyone your darkest secrets for trust" thing, forget that you're only going to get a watered down example. Management shouldn't be putting people in that kind of position.
Goes back to my point, things need to be balanced. It's good and healthy for a workplace to help people form these kinds of friendships in small nudges, but overly forcing connections that aren't forming naturally just isn't good. And excessive drinking at company events just leads to issues, that's for sure.
I mostly feel that people should be more selective about who and how they open up to in general in life. There's a lot to talk about that's not your past experiences with depression, and those don't need to be talked about to 99% of people, and discussing them too early is an easy way to burn bridges before they're even built.
I definitely talk to my coworkers about what I did this weekend, or travel, or the weather (I'm halfway around the world from my home country, so comparing the weather is a constant topic of conversation). I have a coworker I carpool with and we talk some about how I'm settling in to life here. But, I will never discuss my history of mental illness with any of these people. At best I will make a vague allusion to seasonal blues.
I think there's a difference between getting employees who work remotely from each other into the same room for a week, and a "retreat" offsite where pseudo-theraputic approaches are used to try to get employees to open up or bond socially.
From the article:
> “Vulnerability-Trust exercise”
From your parent comment:
> the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales
I was referring specifically to these sorts of things. Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea.
I've mostly seen "retreat" being used for cases where you go on a pseudo-vacation with collegues paid by your company, with or without pseudo-therapy bullshit.
I've been on a couple of them (without the bullshit) and people did indeed open up and bonded, but I should note that the conditions for this were positive in the first place (i.e. we weren't trying to invert some negative situation).
Nothing that can't be achieved over couple of beers after work, thats how (not only) Czechs do it and it generally works very well. Bonus points if you can get customers for such event too, a lot of things can be figured out quickly instead of corporate meetings.
We do that too sometimes but it doesn't create the same kind of memories as spending a week in a tropical paradise or going on some kind of adventure together.
I think a lot of it is that the US doesn't take a paternalistic approach to mental healthcare or addiction treatment, so there are a lot of junkies and people with psychosis out on the streets in many cities. My understanding is that in Europe these people are more likely to be receiving some kind of treatment and be living in supported housing of some kind, whether mandatory or not, where in a lot of the US they are ranting and raving on the streets and on public transit. But, it's their freedom to refuse shelter and to refuse treatment (and our freedom to choose not to fund it).
English actually has the exact same saying "You're not made of sugar, you won't melt."
A lot of people in car dependent regions have forgotten that you can dress for the weather, and that people have been traveling in all sorts of weather for hundreds of thousands of years.
Also, I think some of it is that decent parts of North America are vulnerable to heavy thunderstorms with hail and possible tornadoes, which are very different from the drizzle that Vancouver and Seattle get.
I live in New Zealand, where they are big efforts to cull non-native wildlife, including all mammalian predators. There are traplines through the woods here, and I remember seeing a Department of Conservation visitor centre with a diorama of stray cats being killed by a kill trap.
Locally we've got an overpopulation of goats, and apparently they're going to start shooting them from helicopters.
They also drop a poison bait called 1080 that kills mammals from helicopters in remote regions here.
I think you're right. It's very easy in any hobby to make the gear side of the hobby be disproportionate to how much you actually do the hobby. Think someone who's spent $3k on camping gear and constantly researches gear, but rarely camps. On the other hand, if you do actually camp a lot, it is nice to have the lighter weight higher performance gear, up to a certain point. So, Stephenson, as someone who does actually write a massive amount, is right to be using high performance gear, but for someone just getting started, getting into fancy pens/paper is a distraction from actually writing.
If you are writing a lot and have dysgraphia, a cheap fountain pen like pilot varsity ($2) or platinum preppy ($7) can help you fight the excessive pressure we tend to use leading to less hand cramping. Using tools that make you write more because it is more enjoyable is good, using tools that make you spend time thinking about tools is bad. I really liked those tiny comp pads cvs sold, but I haven't seen them in a while and I don't like the dollar store ones. I just grab random pads that aren't bigger than my phone so they sit nice in my pocket.
Writing notes by hand feels like it etches the concepts into my brain in a way that listening alone does not. Typing does not have the same feel.
I have never learned how to do something substantially difficult (math, foreign language, any science, or memorizing a substantial amount of content for a humanities course) without handwriting it. I remember in 8th grade latin, I copied down conjugation charts onto a chalkboard over and over until I had them memorized.
I cannot do university level mathematics without writing it down by hand.
My typing is much better than my penmanship, but it doesn't tend to make topics stick in my brain in the same way that handwriting them does.
Like, handwriting doesn't do a thing for me. It doesn't help me learn at all.
I can't help but wonder if there's some advantage that I'm missing?
But on the other hand, I don't seem to have any problems paying attention or learning. So I'm still just so confused as to how it helps. Like, is my brain already doing the things that some other people need handwriting for? Or is it not, but handwriting doesn't do those things either?
I think I'm extra-baffled because I can't even imagine how it could help. Like, I can't think of any analogy to anything else that would help me understand. I already understand the things and listen to and see, I don't have any issues with concentration or anything... so what does the handwriting add?
I see a lot of people say that it forces you to think more deeply about the material, but I'm kind of always on "maximum thinking mode" already.
It's hard to describe. In upper level math (real analysis and the like) in college I would write every single thing the professor wrote on the chalkboard down in my notebook. I didn't really study or do much homework, but copying down those proofs made the concepts stay in my brain.
Do you write when you do math? Math and handwriting are so intertwined in my experience, I can't imagine doing math past high school without at least jotting some parts of the process down.
Math is different, because most people aren't quick/accurate enough with LaTeX to take notes with a keyboard.
And taking notes in math is different from other subjects anyways, because you are literally just copying verbatim. You're not doing any of the summarization and selection that people talk about being so important to do, because handwriting is slower.
So I think that copying down math notes verbatim is not really what people are talking about at all when they talk about the benefits of taking notes by hand.
I recommend it. I'd been living in places that were a class 9 on the bortle scale, with occasional camping trips to places that were a class 5. I recently moved to the south island of New Zealand, and it's a class 4 in town and a class 1 on camping trips nearby. Completely different skies. It's rainy here though, so we don't get cloudless skies nearly as often as Chile does.
Also, I fundamentally disagree that reading code and error messages stretches the same muscle as long form prose, and I believe that sustained attention on long pieces of writing is how a lot of sustained cultural values are transmitted, where reading 3,000 lines of python does none of that.
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