h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The most annoying thing, I think, for technical people, is we encounter future managers at school.

We work hard, we excel in "difficult" subjects (which to us seem easy to the point of obvious) like physics, chemistry and mathematics. We sit at the front and we ace our exams.

Meanwhile, the thick kids are sitting at the back chatting and doodling, and in the middle are the managers - kids with "people skills", but no academic talent to speak of, just enough to get by.

And then we grow up. And the kids sitting at the back flip burgers and sweep streets and live in flats and council houses and drive rubbish cars if they can afford one at all, and this is as it should be.

And the kids sitting at the front, the ones who believe the lie of education, we end being the engineers and scientists without whom modern society could not exist or function at all. And we live in niceish houses that we have to pay a mortgage on and drive decent cars we pay for, and this seems OK.

And the kids sitting in the middle go into "management", and they end up with fscking mansions driving BMWs the company pays for.

Bitter, me?

We should gather up all these people and put them on a space ship and send them away. We'll make up a story about the end of the world, like a giant space goat is coming or something like that.

The managers who become hotshot bond traders or investment gurus are even more insufferable. See Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the vanities," or Ada Smith's "Roarng 80s."

Yeah I suppose all that's true to be fair.

I was going to counter this with a line about how the head of Glaxosmithkline is always a chemist by trade. But I've just looked and she's got an MA in Classics

Yeah, in the good old days companies like Glaxo and ICI had tech type people at the top. Nowadays most companies like that are run by arts grads and accountants.

Well, technically, my major in college was French. But then I went for the professional degree in the field I worked in. There are good places in the world for arts & sciences graduates.

And maybe people get a more varied education in American high schools and universities than in British ones. My college had core requirements that included sciences, social sciences, and even foreign languages. I enjoyed my geology and math courses a lot. Of course, time has a way of diluting the value of some of the science that you learn. New discoveries are made, old truths are debunked. Maybe the geology I learned is still largely true, though. Geosynclines and granite and gneiss and ammonites still mean what they did in the late 1960s. Botany might have seen a few changes, with various plants being reclassified into different genera or classes over the years.

"maybe people get a more varied education in American high schools and universities than in British ones"

Haaaaaaaaahahahahahaha.

Good one.

"Maybe the geology I learned is still largely true, though. [stuff I learned probably] still mean what they did in the late 1960s"

I wouldn't be so sure. I was born in '69. I grew up taking tectonic plates and continental drift for granted as settled science. It surprised me when I later learned that plate tectonic theory was only really accepted less than a decade before my birth. It seemed incredible to me that something so basic and even perhaps obvious was so newly minted as theory.

It blows my mind even more when I think about physics - I had left university before it was even realised dark energy was a thing. The up to date science when I was at uni was that we weren't quite sure whether the universe was expanding fast enough to overcome gravitational inertia and spread out forever to a cool heat death, or whether the initial bump of the big bang was insufficient to overcome the gravitational potential and the expansion would eventually go into reverse and a "big crunch". It was the mid-90s before we established that not only is the expansion not going to go into reverse, it's actually SPEEDING UP for no reason we're particularly clear on that's something to do with the cosmological constant. As I heard it described, it's as if you threw up a tennis ball, and as it rose up into the air away from you, it slowed a bit, then suddenly accelerated upwards and away out of sight. If that happened, you'd conclude pretty quickly that there's something going on that you don't understand - and that is exactly what's happening to the universe as a whole. And we've known that for only about half my life. I'm persistently amazed that something so fundamental and mysterious has happened in my lifetime, and I only hope I live to see it at least partly explained.

I was careful not to talk about computer science and electronics and physics. I also hoped no one would pick up on the revisions in paleontology since I graduated. What my generation knew of as brontosaurus is now called an Alliosaurus, unless that too has been revised.

Continental drift was, in fact, taught in my geology course. Granite and gneiss are still useful descriptions of types of rock.

For what it's worth, I read a biography of Douglas Adams. The author talked about the channeling of students into either arts or sciences/technology long before college. We don't do it that way in the U.S. If the biographer was wrong, what can I do about it? Nothing.

It's possible, though, that the idea of core requirements has been diluted somewhat or altered in ways that I haven't kept up with.

Go ahead, laugh. You know you want to. I liked the ancient Greek concept of dramas being either comedies or tragedies. May I make the wry remark that some scientific research suggests that pessimists are more accurate than optimists, but it's the optimists who live longer?

Very late to this, but here's the best visual representation of imposter syndrome/condition I've ever seen, and it's very reassuring...

https://images.zapier.com/storage/photos/53d2a8dfa8a0a693e8e87c5cfeaa04b2.jpg-large?format=jpg

I was going to mention the Dunning-Kruger effect, but Baron Grim has already mentioned it.

If you have imposter syndrome, you're not an imposter because of Dunning-Kruger - experts underestimate their own skill and overestimate everyone else's. But if you're reassured by that and imposter syndrome goes away, you're probably unaware of your own lack of skill, because Dunning Kruger. Or something like that.

Imposter syndrome is another name for an inferiority complex. I have not had this as my chosen field and work came to me later in life and my approach to language was unique (not totally as my wife pointed out when she picked up a book somebody had written on the same thing but not pursued to its ultimate form as I have). This doesn't mean that the end material is perfect by any means and I hope somebody will improve upon my rough draft. It also doesn't mean that I haven't kicked myself when I can't make sense of something and the amount of bruising on my battered old body proves that (me and Dmitri have been laughing about that lately).

Do you mean the opposite of Dunning - Kruger syndrome, is Trump syndrome?

Of course optimists live longer - pessimists know they are going to die and give up sooner (why bother? Seen it, done it all already). They know there is nothing to look forward to but a big, gaping hole of blackness - No afterlife, no previous life even. Oh God, why do we bother, really? And then there is Eddie, the on-board computer...

My father was an optimist for 99 years. Then he became pessimistic, not longer before the end....

"What my generation knew of as brontosaurus is now called an Alliosaurus, unless that too has been revised." - yep, Brontosaurus is back! A87884752

That is an excellent visual representation, Otto Fisch

"We work hard, we excel in "difficult" subjects (which to us seem easy to the point of obvious) like physics, chemistry and mathematics. We sit at the front and we ace our exams..." - I recognise that, also...

"Here's a thing: whatever makes you a good [x] doesn't necessarily make you a good manager of a group of [x]s. " Yes indeed - parachuting a manager in rather than promoting someone who is good at x can be beneficial, but they need to recognise that they are managing people with expertise and can't do everything themselves so they have to choose a management style accordingly... The most difficult job I had was when the manager learned a little bit about what I had learned and decided I was doing everything wrong - that made me feel very much like an imposter, as I doubted myself even though things had gone well in the past. Things went less well after that, so everything gradually changed back again!

I still struggle with imposter syndrome, though - most recently someone asked me a question and I looked over my shoulder to see if they were actually asking the person behind me, but it was me that knew the answer...

Thank you, Sasha. It's always sad to see a dinosaur lose its head!

The thing is, no matter what you call it, it still is what it is. In other words what you sense stays the same, even if the name has been changed to protect the innocent (Al O'Saurus or Bronty Saurus).

By the way I have felt intimidated by bullies or pretentious middle class people, trying to make me feel uneasy because they feel uneasy (class imposter syndrome as the landed gentry try to be inclusive or used to be, suffering fools gladly, according to my wife).

I would recommend reading Asterix and the Big Fight because it shows the fun you can have experimenting, without anyone's ego getting in the way.

Apart from my language thing, I also have had a philosophy thing going on as well, which maybe why I haven't suffered imposter syndrome except in a mild form (the fault dear Brutus lies in us, not in the stars, that we are underlings).

"My father was an optimist for 99 years. Then he became pessimistic, not longer before the end...."

The week before my grandfather died, we covered his back in butter.

After that he went downhill quickly.

@Paige
You could say a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Here's a thing I've often wondered - how much is our impression of a thing really affected by the sequence of syllables our language has settled on to describe it?

Words definitely have... texture. Swear words, for example, almost invariably have hard phonemes - funT, cuCK, shoT, etc. "Sponge" would not work as a swear word. Is this universal? Or am I being culturally/linguistically parochial?

Douglas Hofstadter talked a fair bit about how thinking in a different language requires you to think in a different way. How much difference does it make to your life, your abilities, if the language you're brought up in puts the verb at the end? I find it hard to imagine that it has NO effect. Consider:

"I am going to the park." Straightforward English. I am going. Where am I going? To the park. Oh, fair enough. Seems logical.

Some languages (German?) would have it as "I to the park am going." The verb is like a punchline, held back to the end. I... OK. The park... OK... am going. Oh, THAT's what you're doing to the park. It's quite a different experience.

And to choose a language I speak more of than I do German, how about "To the park going I am." Object, verb, then subject. You really do have to listen right to the end to understand what's going on. But then I guess someone who didn't speak English would think that about the original - where are you going? (Object-verb-subject is the word order used in Klingon).

The point is, the syllables we use and the order we put them in must, surely, affect how we feel about the things we're discussing, if only a bit.

So... would a rose be as sweet smelling if the word for it was, I dunno... zonk? Or, conversely, if something is sweet smelling and nice to look at, is there something about our language that precludes it from being described using phonemes like that?

Some things we think are swear words aren't anywhere near the same 'sweariness' in other languages - so merde or merda in French/Italian are not really the same thing at all.

I briefly lived in Italy so learned quite a lot of their language when I was there, but not long enough to be any kind of expert (like I can't really speak it much at all). Someone did spend an evening over a beer teaching me Italian swear words and there are a few that stuck out as having the hard phoneme thing attached.
Catzo, va fan culo.... (spelling not, sure). But I was actually told that the *real* swearing in Italy was far too offensive to be taught to me and really was massively taboo in case you came up against someone 'traditional'.... blaspheming.

So really without many swear words it became quite creative, so if you want to insult someone it's a bit like Tuco in the Good the Bad and the Ugly ' you are a bar steward son of a thousand barstewards, who were all sons of whores...who all had chicken pox...' I find that both creative and entertaining - but then because it's not me on the receiving end and also not my culture, it's easy to be 'unmoved' by it in a negative way.
So I'm guessing (though I know little of Spanish, but Tuco...) that this is similar in other, very religious mediterranean, latin based languages...