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Saturday, Nov 08, 2014 - 00:21 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Free Consultation Today

Having recently come across a self-diagnosed case of social impairment vainly attempting to masquerade as the more presentable (and cuddleable) Asperger's, I thought it a good opportunity to comment, especially as I have never felt particularly comfortable in larger group settings (and also because I haven't quite managed to digest the library loans that I had meant to feature this week)

It was postulated, by the woebegotten self-pitying sufferer, that this was due to some inborn deficiency in cue-spotting. Now, I am one of those who tend to try to interject at inappropriate moments, such as when the speaker has paused but is not yet quite finished, or when the flow has shifted by some consensus - but apparently, not to me - which had previously been the source of some vexation.

Thereupon I resolved to ruminate upon this deficiency at length, and I isolated several possible factors after some introspection. Since this is based on personal examination, I would not presume to discourage other afflicted individuals from their mild mental disorder goals for 2014.

First up: Is it true that this inability is innate and immutable? In general, my leaning is towards most people being able to get pretty decent at most things, if pursued with dogged diligence. No guarantees of world-class, or even top twenty percent, but okay. Given the abundance of fulfilled Dale Carnegie and Toastmasters acolytes, I am not easily convinced that social savvy is an all-or-nothing affair.

However, with this realisation comes the unavoidable corollary that being a borderline social pariah might at least partially be one's own fault. A direct example - I am very bad at singing, but I also have next to no interest in doing that. I therefore do not discount the possibility that, with suitable motivation, competent music tutors and voice coaches, and the passage of a few years, I might get tolerable. At least, I wouldn't put it down to a busted voicebox all that hastily.

The fix, then, for similarly distressed individuals, would be an Asperger's Anonymous of sorts, where participants sit in a circle and lend each other their support. Sessions could start from an activity as foolproof as taking turns to recite the alphabet in order, then sentences (again in fixed order), slowly progressing towards free-form speech. This could surely be done, and I daresay that it would likely help.

But, let's get real - deep down, you - okay, I - simply don't care*. Or at least, nowhere close to enough.


(Source: photobucket.com)


I must emphasize here that the carelessness is not towards the persons involved! My friends and acquaintances, be assured that you are no doubt excellent, your tastes exemplary, your presence divine; I trust it no more necessary to hint at these facts, than to expound regularly on how the earth remains solid, or the sky mostly blue. However, I am also spectacularly uninterested in whether the chicken rice or laksa is superior and/or has changed, and am continually amazed at how this can be spun into a full-fledged exchange.

Bound as we are by a common humanity, all reasonable assistance is, if sorely required, certain, and unnecessary to inquire upon. Despite possible appearances to the contrary, your opinions - those of which are not reassuring filler-glue - have been silently noted, and minutely dissected. Minor inconsistencies have been forgiven, given the time-sensitive nature of this mode of communication. In the regrettable event that your representations are irredeemably unsalvageable, I try to cough and look the other way, if explaining just why would have any chance of causing undue embarassment. Be at ease, my fellow sentient being.

[*This however is not an ironclad rule, as our resident Asperger's aspirant is probably in agreement with. Refer to (Martin, 2004) for a much-beloved example:


Note that title does not match x-axis;
But yeah, we don't sweat the small stuff
(Source: blogs.iac.gatech.edu)


"...You see, the cuter the girl is, the more willing I am to hear about the cat. Oh really? Yeah he's so intuitive. But you'll notice that at a certain point I don't care how cute you are - I don't want to hear about your f**king cat** anymore."]

[**Not that cat. I noe u one ah.]

Therein, I gather, is one of the major rubs of the problem. To me, at least, there is virtually zero connection between "number of words exchanged" and "quality of acquaintance" - this is not a matter for those I know, to concern themselves about. Unfortunately, I recognize that others may value this metric differently. I apologize, it can't be helped.

Proceeding on - I have no hard evidence as yet, but I can tentatively agree with Mr. Woe-is-me that there does exist some... order in group dynamics, and that a significant proportion of people do operate by it. Amateur anthropologists might recognize the origin of mana, before it got co-opted as "that blue bar" in video games - it was a sort of... energy that could be exchanged. Well, given that the Polynesians likely came from (the other) China, a resemblance to the property of guanxi is perhaps only to be expected.

Stealing Graham's celebrated piece on high school social dynamics, one could see it as a form of "popularity hierarchy". Each of the kids is endowed with some initial quantity of "popularity" through their abilities (football stars more than math whizzes, so Graham observes), which they can grow (or lose) by judicious association (hence, the dreaded "I dun frenz u liao"), through a mechanism I suspect is not unlike Google PageRank (and thus, also producing clusters, or under the more pertinent sociological terminology, cliques)


Seriously, does it have to be said, if it is true?
(Source: Fist of the Blue Sky #2, mangapanda.com)
[N.B. One can almost feel for the baddies in this series.]


Well, while I suppose more adult interactions are hardly that banal, I think that there may remain some degree of... precedence, if not exactly status (which could be another sticking point, for those who take themselves a bit too seriously), in group discourse. Then again, this is probably only fair - why should a rare contributor expect as much of a hearing as the consistently more active participants? It's a give-and-take, after all.

Also, piping up only once in a long while gives rise to another issue - the other fellows might not be sure how to react. By observation, a large part of why conversations "flow", is because those involved know what to expect, which also means that the reasonings put forth cannot be more than mildly complex - or worse, adversarial - which then brings us to the sad conclusion that the effective informational density in such exchanges is not as high as it could be, and pretending to be surprised can... wear thin.

This also causes a tendency towards groupthink and peer pressure, a classic expression of which is beginning with the quite blameless assertion that the world would be better if we were all nicer to one another, and somehow ending with the conclusion that, however, only our way of being nice is right, and the rest of them can go roast themselves. Shrug.

Maybe, then, this is the crux of it all - there might, not wholly unreasonably, be a convention that we trade influence of some sort through an advanced form of mutual grooming rituals, and thereby arrive at a... rough concord. If one happens to have no intention of buying into this system, then, why agonize overly over missing out on what one probably doesn't even actually want? Personally, I am content to be mostly proven accurate in my hypotheses in due time, on balance; who the hell cares what others think (no offense)?


Auth It Not Be So?

After one storage failure too many, I became concerned about my smartphone's Google Authenticator codes not being backed up anywhere else. This means that, if my phone goes missing or has it memory corrupted for any reason, I would not be able to access web services relying on 2FA - some of them possibly permanently (since, as one provider pointed out, if one could just request to remove 2FA on login, what would be the point of activating it to begin with?)

This not being a satisfactory situation to be in, I sourced for a lasting fix, and discovered that this issue had bedevilled users for years. Essentially, barring the service providers being comprehensive and allowing you to generate a new 2FA seed using the old one's verification code, the easy way is to store a copy of the original seed when setting 2FA up for the first time, failing which rooting Android and using an app like Titanium Backup/Authenticator Plus, or manually examining the database, seems to be the only answer, since I was loathe to risk my Mi3 with unofficial ROMs.

But then, one could understand if the fellows over at Google aren't too involved in coming up with a solution to this, given that they've much more exciting projects, like cleaning up the Chrome fonts (it was very noticeable, but just as quickly gotten used to), quietly upstaging Felix Baumgartner's space-edge leap, or messing with self-programming computers; of course, if you scan the actual paper on Neural Turing Machines, the headline's a wee bit exaggerated as usual. No A.I. demons on the horizon just yet, I'm afraid.

All the more as one of the pioneers of deep learning too emphasized that general A.I. is some way away, in his reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything, which can be taken... a bit too far); now, reddit may not exactly have the heft of a neatly-typesetted formal dissertation in Acta Arcanum, but where else can one watch as the likes of Obama, Buzz Aldrin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Jerry Seinfeld etc have their minds picked, and unmoderated (hopefully) at that?

[N.B. That said, as one of the blogs I kept coming across intermittently - before realising that I had taken an Intro To Philo module under a couple of the contributors - pointed out: even reddit can be a... suggestive hangout (and let's not start on 4chan). It's a fairly eclectic read, and I daresay I might be revisiting its content once in a while (N.N.B. the bit on taking sides in prison gangs explains cooperation rather better than dry theory, methinks - being labelled a snitch, even if falsely by sadistic guards, is very bad for health)]

And just an update on the anonabox gadget mentioned previously - its Kickstarter campaign has been suspended after someone noticed that it looked suspiciously like an extant router from China (an accusation that generally goes in the other direction). Still, given that it raised near US$600000 despite targeting just US$7500, this could be another clear sign that Joe Public is fed up with all the snooping that's going on in the name of security.

Which brings us to the China fact of the week: The People's Liberation Army (2.3 million active personnel) is under the control of the Communist Party of China, and not the state of China (which makes it, strictly speaking, a private army)! More and more, I wonder if I should in future bother to correct those who think we're a part of the People's Republic (see?), since I can barely tell the distinction myself...

Also notable: WTC reopens, shisha banned. Ah, and our newly-disclosed CPF management fund appears to have haemorrhaged some fifty million bucks on a mining concern, though this hardly qualifies as news nowadays.



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Next: Many Tiny Steps


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2 comments

wenhoo said...
relax lah
by the way i still owe u $50
i very soon coming back liao
can pay u plus interest (either chicken rice or laksa)


November 8, 2014 - 12:50 SGT     
Mr. Ham H. Let said...


...what, skip the overseas job for now? Fine, fine, it's your money, not mine, I velly relac one.


November 8, 2014 - 13:14 SGT     

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