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Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

nautil.us

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#31
post #8

I have terrible sidewalk rage, but it has nothing to do with slowpokes -- I can't stand people who walk straight down the middle and don't make room. "Oh, I'm so sorry your highness, I didn't realize this was your sidewalk" [says the voice in my head that I can't vocalize because unlike being in an automobile the other person would hear me].

I've said "con permiso, abuelita" -- roughly "excuse me, grandma" -- to dudes half my age waddling down the street.

I should do it more.

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#32

Was it true that people were happy waiting 2 seconds for a webpage 10 years ago ? The unrewarding theory is still genius nonetheless. The faster the worse ?

Whether it's true or not, I get upset with web pages for being shoddily coded and running orders of magnitude slower than they should, not because of absolute loading speed.

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#33
It's a dopamine thing. When things are going according to a boring routine (like getting from point A to point B at constant speed, unimpeded by any jam), you get a dopamine reward. Supposedly, this is evolutionary. Being happy while bored helps you sit on a tree branch for hours until the predator below goes away. Once you've gone agricultural, it helps you do repetitive field work from dawn to dusk.

This is not specifically just "sidewalk rage". For instance, the annoyance at being disrupted in the middle of playing a video game is a facet of the same thing.

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#34

For me it's a combo between this /and/ just people's attitude - it's fine if you want to be slow, but you have to be considerate of others. I wouldn't be mad if you were walking slowly on the side of the street - probably wouldn't even notice - but I'll be mad if you're walking slowly in the middle. It often costs nothing to be considerate, and it makes life more pleasant for everyone!

I live in Toronto, and there is PATH - 30 km (and growing) network of tunnels and concourses connecting major downtown towers, buildings, subway stations and shopping malls. It is indispensable in winter and hot summer where you can buy goods and services without ever going outside. The problem with PATH is, ironically, pedestrians. My biggest gripe are people walking slowly, 3 or 4 abreast. The list goes on: stoppin…

That's nothing. If you ever enter a big, popular 5 or 10 km running race in Canada, expect people who are running in the "shortest line of sight" sections of the course to suddenly stop, drop and tie their shoe laces, without so much as glancing backwards, even though they obviously know that people are running all around, within two or three feet of each other.

Given that runners can't think about others in such a specific situation, you can forget consideration on walkways, which are subject to different concurrent uses.

Oh, oh, here is something! Sometimes I do interval training on an outdoor, rubberized running track. For some reason, though the town has many parks, people go to this track to walk around. And they walk around in the inner lane, lane 1! Some of them don't get out of the way and use a different lane when people do running workouts even after being passed several times. The last time I was there, a woman came with a baby stroller, and parked it in the curve, some 15 meters down from the starting line, in Lane 1! Of all the places in the city where you can go with a baby stroller and park it, she picked that spot. The mental process behind that must be astonishing ...

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#35

For me it's a combo between this /and/ just people's attitude - it's fine if you want to be slow, but you have to be considerate of others. I wouldn't be mad if you were walking slowly on the side of the street - probably wouldn't even notice - but I'll be mad if you're walking slowly in the middle. It often costs nothing to be considerate, and it makes life more pleasant for everyone!

This is the why I despise most cyclists. I wont speak for every cyclists, but around here (Portland, OR), cyclists often ride in the street (bike lane available), slow down traffic, do not obey stop signs, turn without signals, blow do-not-walk signals, etc.

Some of the most entitled, selfish people there are.

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being pretty inconsiderate yourself! You expect everyone else to constantly make an effort to get out of your way and don't consider how your rush is impeding others! Sometimes I like going for a walk with friends, we'll walk slowly and next to another so we can talk and enjoy the beautiful weather. And you expect us to walk behind another along the right side of the sidewalk? Please consider my priorities bef…

I'm guessing this is slightly tongue in cheek, but I'll bite anyway in the interests of decoding the hidden social rules :P * considerate: walking in the middle, but fast * considerate: walking on the side * considerate: walking slowly or multiple people abreast, when there's enough room * considerate: walking slowly or multiple people abreast, when there's no room, but paying attention behind you Really, you (in the…

Instead of "considerate", you might as well label those actions "convenient for me". Here are a few things I might label considerate:

* considerate: walk slowly so you don't startle others

* considerate: keep a respectful distance to people walking in front of you

* considerate: adjust your walking speed to the average to reduce the number of collisions

* considerate: take a less congested route

* considerate: leave work 5 minutes earlier so you're not in such a hurry

* considerate: smile at people to make their day brighter

* considerate: let other people walk whereever they want

* considerate: don't expect other people to be considerate

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#37
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read about people considered to be inconsiderate, I wonder: did anyone bother to make this clear to the "inconsiderate" people in question?

It is a basic social obligation to be alert to the impact that one is having on others.

What does that have to do with the social obligation to point out when someone isn't?

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#38
post #28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was waiting much more than 2 seconds, 20 years ago. But you'd do things like disable images to speed things up.

The pages used to display an active load-bar to reassure the user that something was happening. One expected slowness back then, especially on dial-up, and you could always hit [esc] once enough of the page loaded. There was a time, especially on older, slower Windows, that people would stab and swipe feverishly at the icon on the screen, resulting in multiple instances of the app when it finally emerged from the Sty…

A load bar also made sense back then because pages actually loaded and then were complete. These days with async calls a page doesn't ever have to be finished, it can keep refreshing parts of its content, or be one of those never ending pages you run in to at times. Now you can never really be sure what a page is up to without looking at the code.

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#39
post #38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pages used to display an active load-bar to reassure the user that something was happening. One expected slowness back then, especially on dial-up, and you could always hit [esc] once enough of the page loaded. There was a time, especially on older, slower Windows, that people would stab and swipe feverishly at the icon on the screen, resulting in multiple instances of the app when it finally emerged from the Sty…

A load bar also made sense back then because pages actually loaded and then were complete. These days with async calls a page doesn't ever have to be finished, it can keep refreshing parts of its content, or be one of those never ending pages you run in to at times. Now you can never really be sure what a page is up to without looking at the code.

Now it's canny enough to both cheer good initiative and keep VM dashcam minders for the late crosser crowd. Or is that while fox-walking, cheering the people who brake through the widest kerb-permissible turns to shine through their double hip replacements, and nudging lattes back onto roofs (which browser analogies seem more thin.) Mindfulness, my RasPi's HMC bus!

Re: Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

#40
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a basic social obligation to be alert to the impact that one is having on others.

What does that have to do with the social obligation to point out when someone isn't?

It depends on whether the offender cares or not. If they cared, they probably would not be transgressing in the first place. If they didn't care, they would probably react aggressively to being told off.
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