No political posturing.
Having calm discussions without screaming. Even if its a passionate discussions for example about Cheese. (Yes this gets very heated with me and my friends haha love them so much)
Openes to new facts even if it challanges your world view.
Empathie
Organization. By nature I’m extremely organized. People are always commenting on how well organized my home is, but this is just what’s normal for me. I get kind of neurotic when things are in disarray.
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?
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.
I’m very aware of my own body and how it’s positioned, so I have good balance, makes me a great dancer, and ambidextrous to some degree.
Being assertive
Empathy. Some people just have a brain for math and understand numbers in ways other people just never will. Others, like myself, have brains that are really good at understanding others, and we perceive and understand others with a facility some other people just can’t. It sounds pompous to say, because all human beings are at least somewhat skilled in this area, due to our species being highly social, but it’s still a cognitive speciality and some of us are innately better at it than others.
It can be frustrating too, because when other people don’t understand what you see in someone else, they question your decisions about them, and it can be hard to see why other people don’t see what you find obvious sometimes. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but I know people who can’t see that Donald Trump is a highly transparent narcissist. Even ones who didn’t vote for him and hate him for all the obvious reasons can’t see the personality disorder in him, and I find it so glaringly obvious that I sometimes just can’t fathom how anyone could miss it. But, if I really think about it, and I imagine what it might be like for a person who doesn’t have a natural talent for empathy, I can see how they just might not connect the dots and just see a bombastic, arrogant asshole, rather than the much more complex pattern of malignant narcissism that underlies that comparatively superficial persona.
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
Doing basic research on the people I vote for.
Situational awareness.
Math is the big one, and logic by extension. Everyone around me seems to have difficulty breaking problems or logical arguments down into relevant incremental steps. They either get distracted by irrelevant things, or can’t figure out how the output of one step provides the input for the next.
Reading an article before offering an option.
Building stuff out of a pile of scrap.
Assembling flat pack furniture, bbqs, bicycles, snow blowers, cement mixers. Pretty easy to do but customers will pay a fee to the store to have the assembly done.
Cold turkeying stuff. It’s not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.
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
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
Being open to learning new things which may contradict previously held beliefs. I enjoy becoming more informed and having my ignorance diminished, but I find for the bulk of humanity most people do not want to know things - they want to be continually assured the things they hold true are true, regardless of the validity.
