No political posturing.
Popping their ears. I can “pop” my ears by opening my eustachian tubes on demand. I can even hold them open if I want to. Apparently a lot of people can’t do that.
I can do this too. It feels like I’m trying to flex my jaw muscles downwards. And makes that satisfying crackling noise when they open up.
I can also do this but it feels like I’m flexing them outwards, not down. Weird!
TIL there are people who can’t do this
Same; can you also, by any chance, wiggle them?
Ear rumbling!
Do you know people who can’t do this? Seems pretty common.
I can pop them also! Which is good because I need to do it frequently because of sinus problems ‘clogging’ them.
That right there is a skill I learned. When I was a teenager I got these terrible sinus headaches, driving up and down hill would get me. Then I went to flight school. I can control the pressures in my head pretty precisely now.
I can do this but it makes me yawn
I can only do it by yawning, funnily enough
Holy shit, I can do that too. I noticed just now because of your comment.
Thank you for unlocking my new power.
Explaining difficult technical concepts to laypeople. Just gotta find the correct analogy.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.
That’s one of my favorite sayings.
The problem is that people who are subject matter experts in a field tend to over estimate the amount of knowledge a layperson has about their field.
With the caveat that a simple explanation stipulates a basic understanding of the topic at hand. I could explain the concept of First Break Positioning to anyone, but it’s gonna take a while unless they have a basic understanding of how a seismic survey works.
I am grateful and envious: I would love to have the same ability. Stuff is crystal clear in my mind, and I still hardly can transform it into something someone else can parse… analogies are great, but finding the correct one is often beyond me
I’m not a fan of analogies. They can be very condescending and convoluted and I find I dont learn much from them. I dont think there are any shortcuts to learning in that way really.
I find most the times the issue I have with someone teaching me something is that they are treating it as a one sided communication. If the person teaching won’t learn about the student, they end up assuming a lot of things and that is what breaks understanding.
Analogies are nice when the purpose isn’t to really learn but to socialize, though. Its more a way for people to acknowledge each other and show respect for the things we are interested in. Its a mutual thing in that way.
I excelled at tech support with this skill. I can quickly figure a person’s technical ability. If you talk below them, they’re insulted. If you talk over them, they’re insulted. Gotta hit 'em where they live.
I have this but explaining business situations with analogies to history
Being able to see through fake people’s masks. Like, people who appear nice and friendly on the surface, but are narcissistic snakes who will destroy you to benefit themselves. The people who everyone will swear “oh, they aren’t like that.”
It’s so obvious to my wife and I, possibly because we’re on the spectrum, but no one else sees it until one of us lays out all the supporting evidence that they are in fact like that.
It’s the dead eyes. Every photo of Mr. Beast has them.
In my case I just feel like I have a strong intuition about there being something off about someone. Usually I can’t even put my finger on what it is exactly yet I seem to often be right.
I grew ip with a narcissistic mother and I can spot those people, too. Sometimes others don’t believe me someone is bad news until month later when they get screwed by that person. I’m always baffled how people fall for the obviously fake niceness.
Computers just work around me. Steady the software and programs. I’m not in the tech or it field. I’m in retail management.
The amount of times people call me over only to say “well now it’s working but before it took me to some other screen”
“Glad I could help”
My husband is this way. I take advantage of it regularly. I used to consider myself tech savvy but I went into the arts and the tech world left me behind. I used to try and muddle through it, but eventually I just stopped trying because I’d be doing everything “right” without success and then my husband would look over my shoulder and suddenly it would work. So now I swallow my pride and ask him sooner.
Being isolated. It’s always confused me how much people complain about loneliness. I genuinely don’t think I have ever felt that emotion before.
There is a tv show called 60 days in. It’s about sending people into these US shithole prisions without anyone knowing that they don’t belong. The idea is to figure out what goes wrong and where drugs come from and so on. Anyway, they always talk about solidarity confinement and how bad it is. Like the biggest and baddest dude is worried about getting into “the hole” Then there was this one guy who was on the show who got into solitary confinement and enjoyed the shit out of it. He would get in trouble again and not do anything to get out of the hole.
I always felt like this guy.
Solitary confinement is torture. That guy just felt it to be less torturous than being with the general population. Which is quite a commentary on the horrors of the prison environment when you think about it.
i feel it when I’m in a group of people who I find alienating and miserable to be around. or after breakups briefly.
i recently had to quit a group i’d been a part of for years… because the new members were really petty and vindictive people and being around such people is awful. they’d sit around after activities and just talk shit and mock people, it was disgusting.
Holy shit that was kind of my old friend group. Every time we hung out it was just shitting on people that weren’t there. At some point i realised that they shit on me too when i’m not there and felt less and less the desire to hang out with them.
yeah 100%. it was depressing af. the OG people in this group were nothing like that. They were… interested in the actual activity… not pretending to be into so they could socialize and talk shit and spread gossip.
all the OG people left because they started families. the people who were shitty… were perpetually single.
With age, I have become more introverted also. I guess i havent met that many amazing people. But ive been working in offices a lot, so probably why.
Doing basic research on the people I vote for.
Not being on my phone at work.
I yelled at a coworker once for this. He was kind of a slacker, and known as such. One day I was to be teaching him my line (plastic extrusion and slitting). It was a tough product and the blade box was shit and wrapped. It’s a tense moment, we have to fix it quickly and do a restart, there is so much to do, and it’s a giant pain in the ass.
I go to grab a tool, and like, be on your phone when things are good, I don’t care, but it takes two to run this shit. I come back and he’s still just staring at his phone, Facebook of all places, instead of fucking helping clear the wrap and prep the line. I yelled at him to go sit down if he wants to be on his phone as now he’s in my way. I told him to get tf off my line if he wanted to play gossip on Facebook.
The only lady in my department, I don’t think anyone spoke to him like that before. He put his phone away the rest of the shift and I avoided working with him again. This dude worked there longer than I did, knew less than I did, and got paid more. Fuck outta here.
Manufacturing is an attractive environment for that type of person. The guys who skate by doing the absolute bare minimum and keep the job because finding new people is hard. They never excel, never rise above “machine operator 2” or whatever grade allows them to work the coil line with the least physical interaction possible. Every year or so they’ll be caught on their phone by the wrong person or at the wrong time and the company will issue it’s cell phone usage policy again, reminding everyone to keep the phones away until break time. And then for a few weeks bathroom stalls will be in short supply because 5 versions of that guy just can’t be bothered to actually do their job.
Then the crunch will come, overtime will be posted and that dipshit will volunteer every fucking weekend.
Yupppp
Not engaging with other humans. Whether in person or online, I simply don’t feel like talking to people is necessary.
Will I do it? Sure. It’s fine. But the difference is that I can go weeks without speaking to someone else - and frequently do since I’m disabled and a bit of a shut-in. However, it seems to really bother people to not have others with which to speak. I’ve never understood this.
Yeah, any time I watch Alone I don’t get how people can tap out after like a week because they’re lonely.
It’s not that it necessarily becomes unbearable after a week - it’s more about realizing that if you’re already struggling now, it’s not going to get any easier later. Better to tap out early than drag it out for two months just to reach the same conclusion.
But if you’re at the point of going on the show, you should definitely know whether you’ll be able to handle being alone for an extended period.
I don’t think that they want to talk to you…😁
Easy to understand! We’re social animals and evolved to cooperate. We’re not strong enough to survive 100% on our own and thrive in groups of ~150. You can only live like you do because it’s now and not 10,000 years ago.
We thrive in groups of around 150 people? That seems like a lot to me
Spotting fake BS on the internet. It just seems so obvious to me when someone is making up a story for clout, or to plug a GoFundMe scam, or to push an obvious narrative of hate toward a group of people. And then I go into the comments and want to fucking scream.
And then, when you point out that something is fake, half the time people get all defensive about it. “Who cares? It’s still a good story” or “Well, it might be fake THIS time, but I can imagine people actually doing this, so I’m going to internalize this as more proof for my biases.”
I don’t get it, how is it so hard for people to spot? Like, yea, there’s the occasional one that’s done so well that it’s easy to fall for, but 99% of these kinds of posts and videos are so blatantly fake that I worry about the level of critical thinking skills the average person has. I thought the explosion of AI shit would make people be a bit more skeptical with the things they read and watch, but it feels like it’s going the other direction.
Two things to keep in mind here.
Firstly, the toupee fallacy: all toupees look fake. You may be able to spot all bad toupees but the good ones fly under your radar and thus you can’t ever know how good you’re actually at spotting them.
Also the assumption-as-fact bias. You think a story is false but did you ever get confirmation that you were right or are you treating your assumption as a fact?
Yeah, this is just confirmation bias at work. Nobody is immune to propaganda, because our brains are biologically hardwired to initially reject data that contradicts our worldview.
They are stupid and take everything at face value and their brain things the world is as it appears. They think marketing is real.
You are skeptical. The other thing is skepticism… is mental work… and most people are incredibly lazy mentally.
There are levels of utility to identifying such things though. Like the amI<insert adjective> subreddits, in fact who gives a shit if that’s made up? Its entertaining. But for news, yes, critical thought is useful.
The thing is, on places like AITA, those made up posts may seem benign and just entertaining, but I encourage you to look with a more critical eye. Well over half the time, there is usually someone in the story specifically acting unreasonable or idiotic or “bad” in some way or form, and they tend to belong to some group or another that the poster is relying on biases of to try and make more convincing. It’s not usually minorities exactly, but things like bosses, or in-laws, or tourists, or women in general. Just some group that people often have preconceived biases against. And then people read the made up story and go “Yea, those people really ARE like that!” and even though it’s completely fake, there is now mental support for those biases; and the world gets just a tiny bit more unfriendly and a tiny bit more isolating.
Another common defense I see is “the same thing happens in all forms of fiction, but I don’t see you complaining about movies or books!” which completely ignores that other forms of fiction aren’t trying to pass themselves off as something that actually, really happened, for real; with real people, that actually exist and act like that. And that’s the difference between telling a story for entertainment, and just fucking lying.
Spatial awareness/reasoning. How far things are, where are we relative to this landmark, which direction are we headed, how to account for the moving shadows when choosing a place to settle down at the beach, and so on and so forth. It seems like people around me are utterly lost in space
Fixing things. Repair. Assembly. Construction. Diagnosis. It always surprises me how many people are incapable of understanding how something works or what needs done to repair it.
From engines to furnaces to plumbing, computers, electronics, whatever, I do it all myself. And it’s not even remotely connected to me career. Repairmen hate me!
Repairmen hate me!
No I don’t. I sometimes even give free tips to my customers on how to do something themselves so that they don’t need to pay for me to do it for them.
I struggle with mechanical jobs, but I try anyway. About everything I can repair, upgrade, repurpose, etc. I but almost nothing new. If everyone had those habits and knowledge, the economy would collapse.
Cold turkeying stuff. It’s not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.
Same. It’s the only way to actually quit stuff for me. I’m all or nothing and don’t do moderation.
Executive function.
I don’t know but it seems like a lot of people around me are just in a haze. Probably some of it is ADHD.
I thrive in my chaos thank you.
a lot of people never develop it because they don’t have to. they survive by mooching off others their entire lives who do all the execution function for them. parents, friends, partners.
such people really struggle with being alone or independent.
Sounds like you know some borderline individuals
so like 40% of the population is borderline?
borderline is a rare diagnosis dude. most people are just lazy, selfish jerks. that isn’t being borderline. it’s being a human being who never developed.
Being happy by myself.
What about something that everyone else thinks is easy but it’s difficult for me?
Whistling. I’m fucking 35.
Once I took this giant thc gummy and learned how to whistle quite loud. Went to sleep, woke up and can’t do it anymore 😭
It’s funny you say that. When I was a child, I could whistle for one day. It just… Worked all of the sudden. But, like you, I slept and then could never do it again.
Reminded me of a time when my gf’s dad blamed video games for why gf and I can’t whistle.
it’s genetic. some people just don’t have the right mouth shape to whistle easily. just like you might not be build for distance running or power lifting. we all have different dispositions. i’m super flexible and i’m in my 40s. often way more flexible than kids. i’ve always been that way.
My younger brother, who taught himself how to play guitar, was amazed that I can whistle in tune.
