I was grateful that my teachers were chill with this

I'd finish my math work while the teacher was still explaining it to the class, and just start reading a book. Teacher was fine with it because I was a good student and got good grades.

Rant incoming

Although I do have one particular gripe with that teacher unrelated to any of that. Question was how far was a person in a pool from the life guard on a life guard tower. I found the hypotenuse, moved on to other questions. Got marked wrong so I brought it up to the teacher, and her explanation was that she wanted the distance from the person to the tower (the BOTTOM of the tower?????) under the logic that you wouldn't just float on up in a straight line to the life guard. First of all, the question was specifically worded as distance from person to life guard, NOT travel distance. Secondly to the BOTTOM of the life guard tower??? You wanted that value, not even the added distance of the length to the bottom of the tower and the length to climb the tower??????

If you asked me how far away a plane in the sky is from me, and I answered 5 feet, I'd look like a damn idiot.

I kind of wish I pushed her on that question harder. I kind of just thought "good lord she's out of her mind" and sat back down because it had little to no impact on my grade. But I have lived years being pissed about getting that question wrong, I simply cannot move on from it.

Reminds me of one of my elementary school English teachers. We were all given a blank hardcover book and had to make a story with illustrations. Mine was called "The Loose Kitty". Every page basically had the kitty on the loose in different areas of a city, running into other animals that had some rhyming. I spent so much time with the art, proofing it, etc. This teacher took hard red ink and strikes through loose and put "lost" ON EVERY PAGE. I tried to tell her no it is loose because EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK related to being "on the loose". Nope. Got like a C- on that thing.

Am I still sour about it 30 years later? Yes, I still loose my shit.

Its because teachers hate the idea that a smart student isn't enthusiastic about the topic they're teaching and that they'd do clearly what is their bare minimum and then mentally drop out. Its insecurity.

I had a ton of teachers like this.

I actually started getting more recognition when I started producing 60-70 % or less instead of 120 %. It was like management thought that, if my tasks took longer, it was probably because I was very thorough and the task was very difficult, even though the end result would be the same. If I solved a task in 1 day, instead of 5 days, they regarded the task as easy instead of me being good. The slower i worked, the more applause I got from my manager... But, he was also an idiot... But, i wouldn't be surprised if this was a pattern in other companies as well.

I learned that lesson in high school. Always more tasks if you finish any

I used to try to smash through everything as quick as I could. I would've told you I was just quick and efficient but I think the reality was I was usually tired or hungover or daydreaming about whatever thing and just didn't have the attention span to do a good job.

I've been self employed for the last 10 years or so, which means extra efficiency on my part doesn't reward anyone else.

However, during that time I've become a lot more methodical and diligent. I am consistently accurate. Basically because I need to own any oversights, which can be very costly, I make far fewer.

Exactly! Employers and managers typically won’t know either, unless they are micromanagers who track your every move. If this was a start up and doing more will have a big impact, then putting in more effort is justified. Med/large company? Nahhh

My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I'm usually between 85-105%.

If I'm doing ~30 hours a week of work I've been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I'm probably in a pretty good place. I don't tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I'm still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.

If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it's the norm, the whole system has failed. I'm well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.

Do just enough work to avoid getting fired.

“Antisocial” doesn’t mean “introverted”

Yeah like I've never actually had enough of this solitude people kept threatening me with

Are you sure you don't mean asocial?

Out of curiosity, how old are you now?

This was me in highschool, I was so bored of the pace we were going at, so I skipped a lot of classes, came in and aced tests, not with the correct answers they were looking for, but still correct. 🤣

See I use to do the same in history but I got an F. Loser

This was me in world history and chemistry. I napped and got woken up if no one else had the answer in the former, woke up after the lab was explained (that was just regurgitating what was in the lab sheets) then did the lab in the latter

Based

This is the way.

Don't procrastinate the work....just procrastinate the turn-in.

This way, you can feign being busy and be done at the same time! Nobody needs to know that you're done. That means you can slack off right up until the last possible second, completely stress-free.

If you start showing your hand, they're gonna start expecting more from you. And what will you get in return? Maybe an extra 0.5% on your raise? Nah brah. Keep it. 0.5% on 100k is $500/yr. Is less than $10/wk...after taxes, they barely bought you a coffee every week.

By all means...work at a medium pace while you're new. Don't want to get caught while you're still green. But once you're comfortable in a place...

My professional burden has been saddled with people who want applause for taking twice as long to less than 50% of the same amount. And those numbers are probably generous.

6? You were a year behind already! ;)

Damn does your family still remind you of it 30 years later and are you me?

Wtf does that have to do with the post

Just reminded me what Pareto Principle was and now I have business school PTSD. Thanks.

You just described MAGA.

I loved to read, so if I got my work or test done quickly, I had time to read while everybody else was still.workung.

I was especially good with reading tests, because I was always the best reader in my classes in elementary school. I was always the first done.

I see you also had Mrs. Anz for computer class.

Unfortunately? I’d call that fortunate. Glad you made it out of WoW alive

Quick ≠ bad

Yeah but if the work were bad, she probably would've included that in the criticism, because it's a way better criticism

A task is always only so big that the weakest child can do it. That's often not enough to learn something thoroughly.

Whelp, math is all about the tedious details

This works, until it doesn't. And then you can't go back and find the mistake, and save time by both realizing the error part and not having to redo it all to get there.

I get it, I was bad about that too, but any form of writing improves the understanding of the concepts because it uses a different part of the brain that I think retains better than the one doing the thinking work.

I once had a teacher write “I have no idea how you got here, but this correct” on a test.

I’d forgotten some trig identity and derived the cosine law and then solved for all the angles with it to get the answer.

It was like that math joke where a mathematician is asked to boil water. The first time he takes the pot off the shelf, fills it with water, then puts it on the stove and boils it.

The next day he’s asked to boil water again. The pot is on the counter with water in it. He dumps the water out, and puts it back on the shelf, as that is a known solved state for boiling water.

So why memorize the formula we were studying when I could just solve more angles and then get the lengths.

It's usually an understandable thing to expect for a math problem, but sometimes they can get pretty petty with it when the skipped parts are obvious for that level of understanding

I see why you would be working as an electrician.

JK, I'm the same way. I'm fast and good at my job and that's why I'm not cheap.

That's a bonus award in Smash Bros Melee, did they also call you a bird of prey or peaceful warrior? Maybe you misinterpreted.

Dude how tf did u manage to retire at 38 and have a house? Like u must be literally a millionaire.

I had a great manager a few years ago. Basically it was a manufacturing job. At the beginning of the shift(or near it) he would come by you and say something like "I need 150 devices done tonight". Near the end of the shift he would come by and ask how many devices you got done.

As long as you got done the number he asked for he didn't care. Take an extra 10 minutes on lunch? Having stomach issues and used the bathroom for 30 minutes? Take a personal phone call? Had a chat with a co-worker about how they got engaged this weekend? All perfectly acceptable, as long as you got done with the 150 devices. If a machine broke or some material ran out so you couldn't complete it? Acceptable because it was outside of your control.

That said, if you didn't get the number he wanted done but everything at your station was fine I'll describe him with 3 attributes 1. Puerto Rican 2. Ex-marine 3. Drill Sargent!

Next few days he would be on you for every thing since you showed you couldn't be trusted to do what was expected. He would check periodically that you were at your station. He would check every hour or so to make sure you were on schedule to get the required work done that day instead of just checking at end of day. This of course added extra work for him which he didn't like. Do it too often and you had a not so nice "meeting".

But... Do what was expected (almost always reasonable) and he left you alone. You didn't have to watch a clock for exact minutes. It was assumed you were an adult and could accomplish what was asked without constant monitoring, until you proved you couldn't.

efficiency is just high functioning laziness

Reminds me of discussions about how economists working for capitalist oligarchs, define efficiency in terms of value extracted per dollar invested without taking into amount negative externalities like environmental destruction or worker well-being. Such economists are “lazy” about those last two points which, for billionaires that hire them to get their next corporate merger approved, is a feature, not a bug.

Your comment reminds me that every efficiency is tightly coupled to a specific goal that benefits a particular group of people that may not necessarily include myself.

Chapter 40 of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement.

The rebound effect of this paradox can be mitigated only by adding other factors to the uptake of the more efficient method, such as requirements for reinvestment, taxes, and regulations. So they say in economics texts.

The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers. And so on ad infinitum. At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere. And yet many still exhibit this naiveté.

Associated with this lacuna in current thought, perhaps a generalization of its particular focus, is the assumption that efficiency is always good. Of course efficiency as a measure has been constructed to describe outcomes considered in advance to be good, so it’s almost a tautology, but the two can still be destranded, as they are not quite the same. Examination of the historical record, and simple exercises in reductio ad absurdum like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, should make it obvious that efficiency can become a bad thing for humans. Jevons Paradox applies here too, but economics has normally not been flexible enough to take on this obvious truth, and it is very common to see writing in economics refer to efficiency as good by definition, and inefficient as simply a synonym for bad or poorly done. But the evidence shows that there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. Examples of all four can easily be provided, though here we leave this as an exercise for the reader, with just these sample pointers to stimulate reflection: preventative health care saves enormous amounts in medical costs later, and is a good efficiency. Eating your extra children (this is Swift’s character’s “modest proposal”) would be a bad efficiency. Any harm to people for profit is likewise bad, no matter how efficient. Using an over-sized vehicle to get from point A to point B is a bad inefficiency, and there are many more like it; but oxbows in a river, defining a large flood plain, is a good inefficiency. On and on it goes like this; all four categories need further consideration if the analysis of the larger situation is to be helpful.

The orienting principle that could guide all such thinking is often left out, but surely it should be included and made explicit: we should be doing everything needed to avoid a mass extinction event. This suggests a general operating principle similar to the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as “what’s good is what’s good for the land.”[cmt 2] In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as “what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere.” In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational. Robustness and resilience are in general inefficient; but they are robust, they are resilient. And we need that by design.

The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. We must fix that if we can. It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions”. Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?

Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.

I was also absolutely told this by at least one teacher, and in my case they weren’t wrong.

Can you provide evidence to your point without having to listen to a 3+ minute song?

I did that, but on the ride to school.

That's so weird. Even today I try to get as many grocery bags upstairs as I can in one go, because who wants to bother with the back and forth if they don't have to? There's an art to managing six bags of heavy groceries across your arms, a relief that I can get all the cold and frozen things put away sooner, and the natural reward of being able to move onto another activity more quickly. I fail to see what's wrong with being efficient with chores and errands.

when I was a kid. I was helping bring in the groceries and was carrying as much as I could (which was a lot, but obviously not more than I could handle)

Y'know that children are notoriously bad at judging things like that, right? Obviously I don't know the guy, but I would have easily said this as a joke at how many things my kid was trying to carry at once even though that ups the odds of dropping and breaking things.

he was fast and right tho

So what do you suggest? Busy work?

It's not a student's job to teach themself. If a student excels, they're a special needs student.

To me, this looks like an obvious failure on the teacher's side.