I was having a discussion with an intern about how it’s quite possible that whatever I say or do or that a colleague does is “wrong” or at least not the best solution and how they should feel free to comment on that with their thoughts.
It’s really easy to say that, but doing it, especially when you just started somewhere is super challenging and they mentioned it. I can understand, you don’t want to make people think that you think they’re stupid. You also might not be sure if you’re right! I mean if this more senior person said it, then I mean I probably just don’t understand it!

I think this goes back to framing and to framing questions compassionately. What I mean by that is, you can even change the phrasing of your question to make it so you’re not “questioning” what they wrote, but asking for more information.

I try to do this as much as possible when helping clients. If I don’t understand, or if I suspect they are wrong I won’t say “I think you’re wrong and this is why” but rather “Can you elaborate on what you mean by xyz? I’m not sure I follow the connection to abc. I was under the impression that xyz123 meant that abc456.” Asking for more information is always a good thing. And while in many circumstances you should stick to not saying what you’re thinking while asking a question (great read here about it) in cases like this I think it can be quite useful to move the conversation.

All that to say, don’t be afraid to ask questions, framing them as compassionate questions has helped me:
1) Have less anxiety about asking questions / questioning things of people I believe are smarter than myself.
2) Which in turn has helped me learn and grow!

Reviewing and debugging a lot of code gives you some interesting insight. In the past when I’ve written code comments I’ve often answered what and how.

[code]// Grab the remote content and transform it to JSON[/code]

That comment for example is useless. Anyone can read the code and see what it’s doing and how it’s doing it.

[code]// We need to re-fetch the remote content here because our cached version may be stale after a write operation.
//We know this by checking the $potentionally_stale_cache variable.[/code]

With this comment we know why we’re refreshing the cache and can understand if this code is still needed or might not be because of changing requirements.

I’ve never liked the term “woke“. It sounds like something you achieve once and well that’s it, you now are aware of all the struggles people encounter and don’t need to focus on understanding and compassion towards others who you disagree with because clearly, they are not “woke” like you.

I had a good reminder of this a while back. Someone I look up to greatly in terms of diversity and inclusion and who has first hand experience with a lot of the biases, the prejudices and harassment that people may endure made a comment regarding Bronies (Adult fans of the My Little Pony TV Show, generally male).

Something to the effect that Bronies were freaks or weird. I challenged them and mentioned I knew someone who was a Brony and that they were on the Autism spectrum. I also mentioned that while actual data is sparse, there seems to be many bronies who are on the Autism spectrum. (# #)

There are various theories as to why the correlation but one seems to be that people on the Autism spectrum appreciate how clear the emotions of the characters are. In a world where some struggle to understand human interactions the characters of the show are clear and understandable. They make sense.

I think my friend was taken a bit aback by the revelation that even with all her knowledge of the various struggles people endure she had just made a comment that could be taken as offensive towards an under-privileged group.

It was in a sense relieving for me, that even people who I look up to and who I would want to be as “woke” as could still make mistakes and still had things to learn about various groups and the privileges they may or may not have.

To be clear here, I don’t fault them for it. It’s just something that’s never been part of their life and has been a part of mine. And much like I have much to learn, I think it’s a good reminder that maybe if someone says something that is offensive or could be re-enforcing stereotypes or makes a comment that indicates they do not fully understand the day to day struggles of a particular group that they may not be malicious. They might not of had the experiences I’ve had or have had people who they are close to in their lives who have had those experiences.

I think it serves as a good reminder that when someone says something or acts in a certain way, that I shouldn’t start by assigning ill intent to their actions but rather have compassion and try to help grow their understanding of the issue. And that means that I don’t think one can, or should, believe themselves to be “woke” as it will have a detrimental impact on their willingness to learn, listen and grow as an individual.

When me and my partner got married she decided to take my last name. I didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. Truth be told I wanted us to both change our last name to something awesome like DragonHeart, sadly that got vetoed.

The reaction from some people to that decision is interesting in that some seem to assume if she took my last name we may be all about the gender stereotypes and she certainly couldn’t be a good feminist.

I think that misses the root goal of feminism which is that all genders are treated equally. In this case it’s the fact that she made the decision and not me that counts. Feminism doesn’t mean that she keeps her last name. It means that she’s empowered to make that decision on her terms.

With the same logic I don’t see how we can outlaw Hijabs or other religious garment in the name of “protecting” women from oppression. ( see Québec’s new law on the matter). It seems a bit like trying to combat theft by telling people they can’t have iPhones because people will steal them instead of stopping the person doing the theft.

If there is a case when someone is forced to wear something they don’t want to wear, whatever that may be, shouldn’t we stop the person doing the oppression instead of targeting the victim?

All that to say that the state and society should promote personal freedom ( within the constraints of certain responsibilities that come with those rights ) and not enforce some misguided decision regarding what personal freedom means for each of us.

I’ve day dreamed of blogging for a while. It’s always that my posts come out all perfect and logical, with great sources for all my arguments. You know, unrealistic expectations. The other thing stopping me if I think fear. The fear that I’ll write something and it be wrong or I’ll offend someone so much as to be publicly shamed. The odds of that are slim but I think the “safety” of Facebook, that only people you “know” can read your posts (if your settings are correctly set) is a part of why posting on Facebook is easier. I can just write something off, random thoughts and I don’t need it to stand the test of time and have it scrutinized by everyone who looks me up, either as a conference speaker in any potential future job applications or if ever I were to run for public office (The chances of which keep getting slimmer and slimmer). But I don’t think the fear of something should be a reason to not do something. The rational odds of something bad coming out of this are pretty slim, kind of like sky diving.

All that to say, I’ll be posting random thoughts here, and hopefully the public pressure of following up on this now that I’ve announced it will be enough to get me to stick to it.

I don’t think I’ll be auto posting to Facebook and Twitter as a general rule, but maybe the posts I think are worthy of being shared / read.

The Toronto housing market is in a bubble. Almost everyone seems to recognize that.

And yet in one article an economist said something I found  very interesting. Paraphrasing, they said that the bubble won’t bust dramatically because there’s no catalyst to set it off. Meaning unlike the 1989 Toronto bust and the 2008 US bust this will be a slow levelling off and not a huge bubble busting and surprising everyone. 

I think that’s a bit naive and optimistic. I think the catalyst will be self driving cars. Cars changed the way cities are built. I don’t think the subburbs would be as big a part of cities as they are now. I think self driving cars will lead to a similar revolution. I think I will drive (or ride as part of some sort of transportation service) in a self driving car in 5 years. I think over the next 10 years the preferences of where people want to live will be more and more away from downtown cores. Once people realize this, panic will set in and the new thinking will be that real estate in a downtown city is a terrible idea. 

I don’t think it will actually be the death kneel of realestate in Toronto. But I think it might just be what pops the bubble. 

Edit: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second-order-consequences has a good thorough breakdown of all the ramifications. He (probably wisely) stays away from predictions. 

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a lot of people talk about what they think the reason for Trump winning the election is. Some of them more interesting than others. But I haven’t really read anything from anyone taking responsibility for the rise of Trump. (Apart from some fake news artists trying to boast).

Everyone’s too busy to find someone or something to blame. No one is looking inward in what they could of done to change the outcome of the US election.

With that in mind here’s what I could of done differently:

• I didn’t make calls to get out the vote
• I didn’t make calls to persuade people to vote for Hilary
• I only posted a few posts on social media about the election
• I didn’t reach out personally to friends I have in the United States to talk about why I supported Hillary
• I took for granted the election results because of polling

Hopefully some introspection will help me better influence the outcomes in the future.

The kind of people who read my blog (all 6 of you) probably know of the Dunning Kruger effect.

The general knowledge goes something like this graph:

Basically it starts that you know nothing but don’t know it and then you know stuff but don’t know stuff (often people will tell others about this part and explain that it’s the scientific evidence of the Imposter Syndrome [I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this])  and then eventually you know what you know.

Now that’s all nice and fun. But it’s actually not what was in the actual paper.
Here are the actual graphs from the paper:

That’s a pretty far cry from that graph I found while googling Dunning-Kruger.

It appears many other “wisdom meme” like this may be false such as the “fact” more money might in fact mean more happiness and that hedonistic adaptation and happiness might not be as strong as we thought. ( This all comes from a great post here: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ ).

Now the goal of this post is not actually to talk about how wrong I am / you were (despite my clickbait title). What I actually think the goal of learning this should be is that we should be compassionate with one another. I see lots of people be it with the US election, Brexit, the migrant crisis, economic policies etc that are really demeaning towards people who don’t share their opinions. Now the thing is, odds are you are wrong on a great deal of those topics so be kind to others who disagree with you, because while they might be wrong, there’s a good chance you are as well.

I’m reading a book that talks about vulnerability. I think that is partially what I was trying to express in the previous post. Blogging is in a way letting yourself be vulnerable. The reasons we want blog posts to be air tight is because we are exposing ourselves. Others can come in and say things like: “I already knew all of that” or variations on what we said was not good for any number of reasons.

The truth is I never feel qualified to speak at conferences.

I just recently in the past few months pushed myself to do them, and at first I was sure no one would accept my submission, but I got a very high success rate. When I read up on the other presenters I’m always like wow this person did this, and that person did that. And I think I have a tendency to compare myself to all of them together, I think this a common thing we do with our “system 1” (from the Thinking Fast and Slow book). If you were to ask someone if they do it, they would be like, of course not that doesn’t make any sense. But in that moment, I think that’s what we do. Is it the imposter syndrome? Perhaps, I know I have many signs of it. And while I do think being humble is much better than being arrogant I think it’s sometimes hard for me to walk the line between humble and imposter syndrome. Maybe it’s the birds of a feather flock together scenario but it seems a common pattern in my friends.