31
votes
What’s a point that you think many people missed?
The point can be a common phrase or lesson, the message of a work of media, something directly stated, etc.
It doesn’t have to be “universal” and can be a story from your life/school/workplace where, say, a lot of people missed the point of a meeting or directive or whatnot.
Whatever its source and impact, it’s something where you think that a lot of people really missed the point and went with a different and more incorrect understanding/interpretation.
What point did people miss? Why do you think they missed it? And why do you think your interpretation is the more correct one?
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I don't really know where this idiom originated but it boils my blood anytime I hear it. It's one thing to be able to do something. It takes an entirely different skill set in addition to knowing a topic to actually be able to teach it. Teaching is the easiest job in the world to be terrible at.
I have a different perspective on this quote. I’ve found that people who, at some point, could not, made much better teachers than those who always could. The most talented in a field are rarely effective teachers since they never struggled to learn. While the skillsets are different, I don’t think they are orthogonal, since the experience from struggling to learn material often serves a teacher down the line. I still believe that if one wants to train to teach, they can develop those skills separately.
I also know this isn’t the original intention of the quote, but it’s unclear what the original intention was. From Shaw’s play Man and Superman, it may have been a satirical subversion of Aristotle’s “Those who understand, teach.” written for a one-off gag, or written as a line to illustrate the egotistical character of the protagonist. It could also simply represent the actual perspective of the playwright. I’d have to read the actual play to know, but I do think he didn’t intend for that quote to be spread so widely today.
I think many of us have had that one genius math or engineering professor who had never once struggled with these simple and basic concepts themselves, and thus they're unable to teach it beyond just writing the proof and underlining it three times in exasperation.
So, while I also dislike the original saying, i would like to offer, "those who couldn't but now can, can teach."
That lines up with my experience. I briefly majored in English education since I'm a pretty good writer, but quickly realized I'm not cut out for it because it's all intuitive to me at this point. I can't tell you when a semicolon is appropriate or not, I just know. Back in high school when dissecting story structure, I also remember struggling to explain why a fight scene early in one classmate's story wasn't the main "conflict"... And also because our teacher (who, to be fair, had been pulled from admin into teaching our class and probably didn't specialize in English) also reached that conclusion.
Other aspects of writing I learned through experience, so I have no baseline for what people would need to be taught at... Any level, really. Recently I watched a couple videos with writing advice relating to plot structure, and I'd figured out a lot of it myself long ago. Nowadays it seems so obvious to me that it wouldn't occur to me to mention those things if someone explicitly asked me for advice.
In a similar vein, I have given up explaining many aspects of technology to my mom. I'm not an expert by any means, but there are things that just click intuitively to me (i.e. why our TVs weren't 100% perfectly synced back when we had cable), and I lack the language to explain it. There's not even any mental dialogue I could try to use like, "Oh, it's because [reason]." If I had learned about it in a class, I could at least try to repeat what I was told, but I just have my brain saying, "Yep, makes perfect sense that it works that way."
Coincidentally I ended up accidentally teaching a math-heavy course when I am famously poor at mental math. My lack of skill at it made me think that I would be a terrible teacher, but surprisingly my students are all getting it fairly easily. Being able to teach the different methods of solving problems is key, it turns out, and sucking at mental math means that I know many of those methods.
You see this a lot in professional sports. Sometimes some of the most successful managers in the sport used to be a player, but they were very "bad" from a professional standpoint.
To be a good teacher is to be the machine that builds the machine. And that is much harder.
I think the harsh reality is that in most fields the best people get sucked into doing because that pays much more. It really shouldn't be that way. We will do better as a society if the incentives are reversed.
In my experience, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, sell real estate."
I like this. That said, I see those who think that real estate is an easy path to glory burn out fast, too. All of that fakeness has to be so taxing.
Or cars
I'm one of the people who has the instinct for how to teach. It is infuriating the amount of times I've stepped to the side to let someone more experienced than me take the wheel in training only to garble the ever living hell out of the material and leave the poor trainee completely confused. Then I have to come in later and validate their frustration and help them out. I thankfully work somewhere better now, but every other job i've had has done nothing but turn my hair grey at the incompetence from the most experienced people torching the newcomers.
Side note: Please validate a confused trainee's frustrations, guys. (rant incoming)
I get not wanting to get in trouble from someone finding out you said they taught it wrong, but it's better the leaving a trainee feeling like they're an idiot. Trainees are always vulnerable because they've opened up to not knowing anything, so when they've been left confused and downtrodden it only makes it worse when you pretend nothing went wrong. That creates the atmosphere that they can't ask anything additional, and once that happens you're both screwed.
May I ask what point you think people are missing?
I've always understood the point being to discredit having teachers in a "soft", you have to have it, field like acting or painting.
It is not about the teachiness but about de doiness as a way to both elevate the actor or painter as a naturally gifted person and the teacher as a failed wannabe.
I'm not saying it is correct, but it is the only way I have heard it used, so I dont understand what other point you think people are trying to make.
Ah, but now I see! Maybe, you are arguing that people who use the phrase don't realise that teaching is hard and a separate skill in itself. So, it's not so much that people have misunderstood or misuse the phrase but that the phrase just doesn't make sense.
This one also irks me... probably because I'm a math prof at a teaching focused institution. Before I found my current gig I worked at two universities where research pressure was the main thing. I wasn't a bad researcher, in that I was very effective at solving the problems I found interesting, but I was a pretty bad researcher in the sense that I only found a really narrow set of problems sufficiently interesting for that level of investment.
I love teaching and agree with everyone here saying that the teaching skillset is different from the doing skillset. The original idiom is straight up wrong, and many suggested by y'all are more reasonable.
I'd like to add to this discussion, though, the idea "those who cannot do, ought not teach". Where I work, due to the low research expectations, attracts some folks who genuinely "can't do", and boy howdy are they it great at teaching either. When I'm on screening committees, I am primarily interested in two things: technical skillset and social skills (specifically empathy, but also other communication stuff). If you have those, then good teaching is possible. You still have to want to teach well, but in our environment the skillset is still most important, and surprisingly often it's insufficient even in well-credentialed applicants.
I've always interpreted that as an age or mobility thing, like an ex-athlete transitioning to coaching little league after his knees go out or something. My dad worked in his field for 30 years and eventually lost his medical clearance for it, so now he's an instructor for new trainees in the same field.
No one is immune to social engineering. And it's not just scams and security. Marketing, algorithms and bias framing is all around us. Most people are too fatigued and overwhelmed to critically filter everything.
Something important to keep in mind is false equivalencies, especially in advertising.
Cheap is not always economical. Fast is not always efficient. Easy is not always simple. Impressive is not always useful. Likely is not ever guaranteed. Possible is not always ready. Popular is not always good. Newer/bigger/expensive is not always better.
There's so many times I've had someone intentionally twist their words to affect peoples judgement while covering their own ass.
Some examples comes into mind:
The boots theory : cheap boots doesn't last as long as more expensive one, so in long term you spend more buying several cheap pairs when you would have bought only one expensive one.
Swiss trains don't go as fast as they theorically could (for instance in the alpine tunnels are built for 250 km/h but the trains go at 200 km/h) . That's because its used as a buffer against delay. If for some reason a train departs late from a station, it can go faster to compensate. (there's other reason, such as the network design goal, and also just plain physics).
I don't know where this quote originates from, but I've heard people say "invest good money in things that are between you and the ground - shoes, chair and bed"
The boots theory is a quote from the character Sam Vimes in a discworld book by Terry Pratchett.
It's about how poor people can't afford to buy boots that will last. Rich people pay a lot more per pair of boots but over a lifetime poor people spend more on boots for a worse experience.
Im on mobile or I would include the exact quote.
Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, from Men at Arms:
Copied from https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/.
Add tires to that list.
And ladders
I recall seeing it first on reddit in a comment. The poster attributed it to their father. This was at least a decade ago.
That’s a very salt-of-the-earth depression era kind of saying, but in the modern era, I’d include something that may be controversial: smartphones. They are the boot to the earth that is the internet, something that we all have to interface with these days.
To counter this just a little, imo not everyone needs go spend flagship money on a smartphone. Most people would be better off taking an honest look at what they use their phone for and buying the cheapest phone that fulfills those needs. I think a lot of people could save a lot of money by scaling back how much they dump into the latest and greatest that they are not actually using.
To add some context, I am a big tech guy, so I have a fancy flagship smartphone..... thats old by current standards. I havent seen much in newer phones thats actually useful but doesnt cost obscene amounts to get me to upgrade.
I see lots of people in my life upgrade on the regular cadence set by their phone contract (1-2 years) and then use their phone for stuff their old phone did just as well. People are free to spend their money however they want, but as stated above, I think many people would be better off saving the money if they dont need the hardware.
I can’t speak for boots in particular but the price-quality link has been degrading for the last few decades and it seems there’s no way it will slow down, let alone reverse. This is especially true when it comes to clothing and accessories. It’s not too hard to find $200 articles of clothing at high end stores that are made entirely of synthetic fibers - plastic, basically. Even quality sewing techniques are becoming more rare. Shoes are harder for me to judge because I try to buy as few as possible but the last time I went I noticed that it’s basically impossible to get the quality of shoe I got for $50 a decade ago even at $80, and outsoles are generally made with much less dense materials than they used to be. A particularly weird cost cutting measure I have seen is that a lot of stores seem to have fewer slip-proof options, a feature that should be near-universal.
I've noticed that a lot of people seem to think that marketing is just like 'I see a commercial for coke and then suddenly I want a coke'. Which like, yeah, I'm sure that's the case with some things, especially when it's something you could easily get/order right then and there like an online product, or maybe a fast food restaurant. But there's a shit ton more advertising that's more about brand recognition.
Like most car companies don't expect you to drop what you're doing and go to your nearest dealership to purchase a car after seeing their commercial. But the next time you're in the market for a car, you'll be much more likely to purchase one that you have good feelings towards. And those good feelings came to reside inside you partially through those advertisements. They're just trying to get you to A) remember their product/brand, and B) associate it with a specific term that you might value, such as practical, or affordable, or luxury, or whatever they're going for.
I noticed the brand recognition issue when I was a little kid and I was trying to figure out why McDonald's had commercials with a clown and strange costumed characters and sometimes didn't even mention food.
It seems like false equivalencies are effectively universal in advertising. The one that bothers me the most right now are these ads saying “the more you spend the more you save.” It’s a fundamentally false statement. If you are spending more you are doing the opposite of saving.
Caring about personal privacy should be important to everyone, even if you think you "have nothing to hide."
The point of protecting and maintaining privacy is not just to hide your own criminal/embarrassing actions, it's about protecting yourself from the potential actions of others in power who might abuse and weaponize their access to your information against you.
I often feel like trying to explain this to a lot of people (across the whole spectrum of tech-savviness) is like talking to a brick wall.
Ugh, I literally just got an email just a few days ago letting me know that my healthcare provider just settled a class action lawsuit because they were selling data to marketing companies. It’s simply disgusting.
I would say that it's even about much more important things.
To me it is about upholding the moral value of honesty (and things I derive from that). If you can't lie (hide, deceive, omit, etc), you can't be honest (open, including, etc) either. If you can't chose to lie you can't in any meaningful way be honest, sure you can still say true or false statements but that is not the same.
This isn't necessarily inaccurate, it's true that honesty is only a virtue because you have the chance to be dishonest, but in general I don't find "we should embrace a bad thing because it gives people a chance to overcome it" a compelling argument, personally. We don't tolerate trials because they're necessary evils to give people a chance to be jurors, we have trials because they themselves are useful, and the ability to be a juror is a new service that happens to arise from this. Similarly, I don't tolerate privacy because it's a necessary evil to give people a chance to be honest, I value privacy because imo it itself is good, and the ability to be honest is a new virtue that happens to arise from it.
That reminds me of when I stopped using Facebook. There was some kind of app that connected with Facebook and allowed women to freely denigrated their previous sex partners. I found that outreagous from a privacy standpoint and announced my departure. I was then met with a torrent of snark because apparently privacy was an excuse and I was a pig with lots to hide. It's been years and I'm angry just remembering it.
I think the easiest example that most people will be directly familiar with are social media companies. They were built on harvesting personal information, and we've seen what they chose to build with it. Endless addiction machines, doom scrolling, the death of nuance, and the erosion of the social fabric. All in pursuit of extracting every last bit of value they can from their users. If there's more money to be made in your misery than your happiness, companies like Facebook have chosen to do so and will choose to again. If wealthy groups want to target the vulnerable, social media companies will happily serve as the middlemen so long as they get their cut.
In short, anyone who's unhappy with the state of social media, whether its direct effects or the indirect ones, have a vested interest in privacy.
The point of sous vide cooking isn't magic fancy gorumet food, it's to remove the high skill and experience barrier and replace it with exact scientific easy reproducibility so anyone can nail it first try. All those times learning a recipe from Gram Grams who judged doneness by humidity and barometric reading plus season of ingredients and hardness of water etc, who adjust things on the fly by feel and eyeballing, remove all that and just set beepy water fan to X for Y time, done.
Not that Tildes folks aren't aware, I'm sure.
Excluding recipes that rely on ultra low temp pasteurization, that is pretty magical.
I was not aware, that is really cool to learn.
I remember it being really popular in the 2010s when celebrity chefs seemed to be bigger, with people sous vide'ing (?) at home.
I'm guessing to your point about reproducability, it's way easier to train a cook to put the bag in the water for Y time than it is to hire another chef. With the growth of really big gourmet restaurant chains like Nobu, I can see this being implemented as a cost-cutting measure.
The other advantage is that you can leave bag in the hot water for a while after it's done, before you have to worry about texture going too soft: sort of like restaurant heat lamp / tray that stays moist.
I use mine when I'm making a multipart complicated dinner because I don't have the skills to time everything on multiple burners right. Or when I want to start a part of dinner hours before while at work or overnight. It's usually not useful once I've learned to do it on regular heat fast, if I only have a few items to time correctly.
A restaurant might use it to keep many portions of popular items hot and ready for the next step, to cut down the skillfully finishing and plating part. It's how they can also sear and serve well done steak that's not jerky charcoal. But there's a lot of skillful magic that's happening after the wet, gray coloured food comes out of the bag: sitting in hot broth doesn't make food taste complex or look pretty.
You're right, but I'd add that you don't want to take that thinking too far and start assuming it necessarily cheapens or worsens the outcome.
It's like a lot of tools: you can use it to do a tedious job you'd otherwise have to do manually or just not bother with (even in a world of unlimited staffing budgets I don't think a lot of chefs would be lining up to stand around all shift watching thermometers on a bunch of pots and taking them on and off the heat to keep them steady for hours), you can use it to do something with better precision than you could realistically do manually (good luck targeting a reaction that needs to be held at 73C +/-0.5C for eight hours without a tool of some kind), you can use it to make a difficult manual job easier and more consistent (you can temper chocolate without one, but you'll never get a better result and you'll often get a worse one), or you can use it to make a job easier at the expense of a not-so-good result.
If it's expanding the repertoire, or cutting costs by simplifying things at equal or better quality, you actively want the restaurants to be using it for those things! The tricky bit comes when they start overusing it and the cost cutting comes at the expense of the final product.
Sous vide is a natural extension of the written recipe: a way to take out the guesswork and learning by heart that made cooking basically magic for countless generations. But a lot of people still seem to have this magical thinking notion that cooking is not a skill that you learn, but rather is an inborn talent that some have and some don’t. Hogwash, of course, but pervasive.
People also greatly mistrust and misunderstand microwaves much the same way. As long as you understand what a microwave does and what it’s best suited for, it’s an essential kitchen gadget you will turn to time and time again; there’s a reason Chef Mike is in pretty much every kitchen ever.
My family is still convinced microwave re-heated food doesn't something bad to it.
My copy of Modernist Cuisine At Home has a very good microwave tilapia recipe. It's a good tool, but yes you're right that the chef needs to understand how it works to use it properly
Totally get what you mean. Honestly I think having a French name probably accounts for a lot of the fancy gourmet vibes. French-sounding cooking terms and words in English tend to be fancier as a whole, possibly even snobbish or posh. So I think it's natural that 'sous vide' sounds gourmet. If it was called something like 'bath soak cooking' it probably wouldn't have the same connotations, lol.
Tax brackets and progressive tax systems in general.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "yeah I'd earn more if I took that position, but it'd bump me into a higher tax bracket and then I'd be worse off anyway".
That's literally not possible. Tax brackets tax your income earned above that threshold, not all of your income.
There's no way to earn more money, but take home less of it because of income tax, all other things equal.
Similar thoughts to "tax write-offs", which many people think somehow means the government pays you for the entire value of the thing you're writing off.
It's crazy how financially illiterate people are.
And charitable deductions. I often read and hear people say that wealthy people donate to avoid taxes. They're certainly donating because they believe in the cause or out of vanity (or likely some combination of both), but they're absolutely not getting ahead financially through philanthropy.
I think the process I've heard about is buying something with an appraised value, like art, getting it appraised at a higher price, and then donating it. Art can fluctuate in appraised value dramatically making it possible to cost effectively buy and donate to come out ahead.
this is just fraud, at least in the US the IRS have their own team of people who independently assess art values to prevent this
Spec Ops: The Line
Spec Ops: The Line wasn't specifically condemning you, the player, for being complicit in virtual war crimes that you had no choice except to participate in, or else quit the game. The game was condemning the actions of Walker. The 4th wall breaks were no more aimed at you personally than the scarecrow toxin in Batman: Arkham Asylum was.
But the game might nevertheless make you feel uncomfortable, because the moral lapses that Walker participates in might be relatable in some small way. Not to the level of war crimes, but from the making of self-serving decisions with noble justifications that just make everything worse.
Real life is not an action movie, and you are not the hero at the center of a story. That's the lesson of Spec Ops: The Line.
Understanding and empathy are not forgiveness. Just because I understand why you did the thing you did, and I empathize with the conditions that resulted in that outcome does not mean that the behavior is excused, and it doesn’t mean that I cannot demand that you pay penance.
—-
And one thing I’ve found myself boiling down for many people in my life again and again is:
Fast, Cheap, Good: pick two.
If it’s fast and cheap, it ain’t going to be good. Is it’s cheap and good, it ain’t going to be fast. If it’s fast and good, it ain’t going to be cheap. These are damn near universal rules of product creation and consumption, but everyone seems belligerent on being shown the truth that you basically cannot have all three, ever.
If there’s something that’s seemingly all three, then you’re falling for good advertising. You’re probably settling for a lower standard on one of the three merits and don’t realize it. But it’s the job of advertisers and marketers to assure you that you are, in fact, getting all three, somehow circumventing production realities. It’s maddening.
I think that depends on definition for the good and cheap axis.
If they're cheaper than usual because you've travelled to the source or cut out some middle man or have some sort of secret sauce advantage, you could actually get all three. Eg: Just going to the restaurant to eat instead of using delivery is faster, better, and cheaper.
There are also some things that by nature of specialization became all three: East Asian convenience store foods are cheap, fast, and good; gyūdon, ramen, Lanzhou beef noodles, Dai Pai Dong/HK cafe
etc all work on limited varieties, easy serving method, speed, and low-profit-high-volume to deliver insanely good products at rock bottom prices.
For "good", sometimes something is good enough for an off purpose use and doesn't need to be any better quality. Eg, these toothpicks fell on the floor and now they're discounted to 10% - perfect, I'm buying them for crafts. But I'll concur this is a settling for lower standards.
Your last section is getting at a very important point, there's a world of difference between "good" and "good enough." I work in engineering and in my experience that distinction goes into just about everything that ever gets designed.
Sure, you can build a machine that'll make 1,000 things an hour by using the best possible technologies. And naturally the customer will ask for that because who doesn't want the best? But then you do the math, and find that a similar machine using more basic tech will make 900 things an hour for a quarter of the price. Or maybe you look into their process and find that some other step has a much-harder-to-fix bottleneck where they can really only handle 500 an hour anyway. The best solution is usually the one that's just good enough for the requirements, not one that's overkill.
You hit on a point I failed to make: a good marketer, or a good designer, can make "good enough" not feel like a downgrade from "good" and make the customer feel like the sacrifice is reasonable.
And the flip is... most people really don't care about all three, even if they think they do. Most people really only care about one or two, the others can be "enough" if you can explain why they're ultimately not important to their end goal.
So I'll amend it:
Good, fast, cheap: pick two, apply the "Enough" tag to one or more at your leisure.
I think you're saying two different things. You're right that you can personally forgive and still expect to see them face consequences. @Narry is also right that that you can empathize and understand and not forgive.
Both are viable.
I turns out I didn't really know what the word "penance" meant.
It seemed like you were still saying two different things to me ┐( ˘_˘)┌
People who know how to clean actually look for the dirt. People who don’t know how to clean only clean what they can see.
I think I'm missing the point here!
I'm not the OP, but at a guess, it's that folks who've cleaned a bunch know where the really gnarly stuff is hiding? E.g. on the underside of your upper cabinets in the kitchen, caked on dust on the top side of the trim around doors, behind toilets, etc.
Alright, hmm well to me that just sounds like a preference. Like cables behind furniture being sorted all tidy or a jumbled mess because out of sight, out of mind.
Depends on what needs to be clean. When it comes to anything involving food, food equipment, etc., "out of sight out of mind" could turn out to be life-threatening. See practically any episode of Kitchen Nightmares.
Sure! I'm just relaying what my interpretation of the statement is. To some people, the definition of "clean" is that all areas must be absent of "dirty", so being able to locate all the places the dirtiness is hiding is critical for their definition. If your definition doesn't include that (i.e. out of sight, out of mind), then we've successfully identified that you, me, and my interpretation of OP's position are all different. Which is OK!
I didn't know my mom was on Tildes!
You don’t need to like Holden Caufield to like the book. It is almost a meme to rag on A Catcher in the Rye because Holden is not very amicable. But… so what? There are so many books with protagonists who are objectively worse people than the troubled youth Holden is, but the hate for him as a protagonist is so amplified in comparison. I never understood why. Not sure whether it’s the haters who are missing the point or if it is me! :b
Pretty sure the reason everyone dunks on Holden Caufield is that Catcher in the Rye is a commonly assigned book in school.
Yeah, a lot of other books have douchey protagonists too, but if I get annoyed I can always just stop reading.
I personally loathed ACitR because it was assigned reading on high school English, my teacher wouldn't stop frothing at the mouth about how brilliant it was at capturing the disaffected youth experience, and meanwhile I, a youth of the same supposed age, couldn't relate to a damn thing, with Holden reminding me only of my classmates that made my life hell.
That makes sense, but what is curious to me is that it was not required reading when I was in school. There are also lots of other books that were required reading whose protagonists don’t get as much hate as Holden. Anecdotally, it seems like the internet could have something to do with it.
The Observer Effect in quantum mechanics does not imply that quantum particles "know" that a mind has perceived them. It implies that fundamental particles are so incredibly small that any means of measuring them disrupts them in some way.
Much of the world elite seems to miss the whole point of the cyberpunk genre.
It's not meant to be aspirational.
This is something I've been experiencing with young aspiring writers.
Taking negative criticism well does not make you subservient to the critic. It is quite the contrary: it displays your ability to put criticism in the context of a much larger artistic pursuit that is not defined by a single data point. Criticism may provide great insight, but only you can determine how and if it will impact your work.
We live in a society and have obligations to one another; no one is an island.
A portrayal of a certain viewpoint or behavior in media does not imply endorsement of the same.