We have two courses that have been severely under enrolled both times we offered them. They don’t go towards any degree requirement. As a result, the Dean’s office decided not to offer them in the Fall. The people teaching these courses are understandably upset. They are not tenured, and the absence of these courses means they make less money. They started pressuring me to open these sections. I explained to them that this is not a decision I am authorized to make. There’s no procedure by which I can open any courses without the signature of the Associate Dean. I promised the colleagues to argue their case to the Dean. I immediately did exactly that and sent all of the paperwork. The Dean’s office informed me that they have taken the issue under consideration and will let us know the decision soon. I communicated that information to the colleagues involved.
Immediately after that, the colleagues organized a pressure campaign on me from the students. I started receiving dozens of messages, spamming my inbox. Teary delegations of students started showing up at my office and classroom and interrupting my teaching.
I wrote a very kind message to the colleagues involved, explaining once again that there’s nothing more I can do and kindly asking them to stop. As we all know, I have a bit of a temper. It took a lot of self-control to write a kind, polite message. This is the busiest time of the academic year. I’m drowning in paperwork and email. But I overcame my deep desire to call these colleagues absolute walnuts and egregious numbskulls. In response, they told the students to badger me harder. The obvious result is that I’m not motivated to do any favors to these colleagues at all.
My question is, under what theory of the mind do such people operate? These are both very middle-aged people, not excitable kids. They should have found out by now that the only way to interact with somebody on whose goodwill you depend for many different things is by making yourself agreeable. I have gotten an enormous lot of good stuff for my colleagues at the department by cultivating goodwill among the administration and support staff. I’ve smiled, I’ve been patient, I’ve thanked for every little bit. People are stunned by how much I managed to wrangle out of the cold, steely jaws of the administration. I’m naturally not given to any of these behaviors. I’m naturally grumpy, cantankerous, and with a tragically short fuse. But I overcome these inclinations because if I gave free reign to them, my department would be where the Physics department is now. Which is not in existence.
It is not my decision whether to open these sections. But it is 100% my decision whether to make the position of one these colleagues permanent. The next Chair is a very close friend of mine which is widely known. Am I extremely motivated to inflict the colleague who is being an absolute walnut and acting like a total brat on my own close friend as a permanent hire? Clearly, not. Why is she tanking her chances for a permanent job over something that cannot bring any gain? There’s got to be some reasoning behind it but I can’t figure out what it is.
Clarissa's Blog 
Absolutely baffling to me. I mean, in August I’ll have put in 15 years, and I’m about as childishly unaware of how the university works as it is possible to be, and I know those decisions are not the department chair’s call.
It’s a little like the old Hollywood joke–the wannabe starlet who was so dumb she slept with the writer.
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LOL, you bugger, I almost choked trying not to spit juice on the keyboard ;-D
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Happy to oblige.
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And also, I told them. We had a long, in-person conversation that I thought had gone very well. I explained everything. But clearly it didn’t land.
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Some people just don’t see any further than their own nose. You are the one explaining the decisions, so you must be the one making them, in her mind, I guess.
Also she might think the students contacting you is evidence of how good she is, and not think of how disruptive it is for you.
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“she might think the students contacting you is evidence of how good she is”
I think that’s part of the strategy for sure.
“Clarissas clearly doesn’t realize how much the students appreciate me! If I show her then for sure she’ll work her magic skills and get the course reinstated!”
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Two more inquiries since I wrote the post and I want to slaughter everybody. This is why I requested time off and left campus. I was about to go off on somebody like a crazy petard.
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I told her. And very kindly asked her to stop. In response, she got pissy and stepped up the campaign.
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Theory of Mind is a crock, and always has been.
Everybody has theory of mind: unless they’ve developed a keen awareness of other people’s differences from themselves, that theory of mind is: “Everybody thinks like me, responds like me, and has the same priorities as me.” Which means if they don’t respond the way I expect, it’s because they’re being a jerk on purpose.
For the majority of people, the majority of the time, this works well enough.
Frustrates the hell out of the rest of us though.
-ethyl
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“Theory of Mind is a crock”
The term has been expanded… a lot but originally it’s about human cognitive development and is about a valid cognitive milestone (some people know things you don’t and some people don’t know things that you do know).
In popular usage, yeah, it’s often kind of cringe and has devolved into what you said.
I have a colleague who assumes that any resistance to any suggestion about something they want you to do is due to insufficient problem solving skills on your part and tries to solve the problem so you’ll be free…. the idea “I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to do that” is almost impossible for them to process.
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I first encountered it in the context of the “Sally-Anne” scenario (or whatever they call it): a little skit where Sally puts the toy in a covered basket, leaves, Anne moves the toy into a box, Sally comes back, and then they ask the kids (spectators) “Where will Sally look for the toy?”
Normie kids say she’ll look in the basket. Aspie kids say she’ll look in the box. This is taken as evidence that the autistic kids lack theory of mind. Which is horsesh*t. Autistic kids have the same ToM as everybody else: they assume that other people think exactly like they do, at least until years of painful experience teach them otherwise. They don’t think like normie Sally, so projecting their inner model fails the test. Normies trying to project their internal models onto autistic people also fail theory-of-mind tests, but nobody accuses them of lacking theory of mind…
“Some people know things you don’t, and some people don’t know things you do” is kind of oversimplistic here. When you’re a weird kid, the way other people think/know is basically magic. How do we know that Sally wasn’t watching through the crack in the door? What happened while she was out of the room? Did someone tell her that Anne moved the toy? What if she knows just from the way I’m staring at the box, that the toy is in the box? What if Anne met up with her outside and said: “Oh, hey Sally, I put the toy in the box”? Could be anything, and if you’re that kid mysterious stuff like that happens all the time. The whole world is just people who know more about everything than you do, from information sources you don’t have access to. For all you know, normies are psychic and just think information at each other. They clearly all come pre-programmed with some giant handbook of rules and procedures that you somehow didn’t get.
ToM just means… everybody has a very difficult time understanding anybody who isn’t very similar to themselves. Affluent friends do not understand the roadblocks we encounter in trying to buy a house– they cannot imagine living on less than half their current income– even the ones who in fact lived on less when they were younger. Urban people can’t understand the priorities of rural people. Secular people are stymied by the assumptions of religious people. Smartypants intellectual people continually fail to understand what drives average-intelligence people. It’s universal.
-ethyl
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“For all you know, normies are psychic and just think information at each other”
What your’e describing sounds like…problems with relative likelihood. I think a lot of normie kids (as their brains develop) think of possible alternatives like you describe but go with what seems most likely while the weird kids don’t have enough…. something to be able to sort things by probability. It’s maybe a bit like a multiple choice test, which I was always weirdly good at if I knew the subject very superficially and liable to sabotage myself if I knew the subject better. In that case I end up micro-managing the question until it’s more or less meaningless.
I had some similar problems with not getting/knowing things that everybody else seemed to know but it was more environmental than neurological in my case, my parents just had different priorities than explaining certain day-to-day things. I’m grateful enough for some of the things they did make sure I knew about to not have much of a grudge about having to learn for myself how to make myself presentable for other people or what not to say in polite company…
The other stuff you mention while all true and a pain in the you-know-where are less ToM and more… something else, not sure what to call it.
On the other hand, I’ve had to learn how to operationalize ToM living in a foreign country with very different realities and assumptions about the world and life. I remember learning to never answer questions about money in the US directly but to apply a bunch of filters so that the answer wouldn’t seem like it came from Harry-Potter-ville (or supply extra information about things they had no idea about so that the answer might have some kind of context).
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https://x.com/i/status/2036835559738429841
What can one expect from a brain-dead hooker? People who kept trying to convince me that she’s not just that, what can you say now?
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I try to keep close track of AI and AI hype, but I was not aware that Melania had ties to the artificial intelligentsia!
In this case, it’s as if the sales pitch is about recreating the aristocracy of antiquity, who had slaves to educate their children, but now anyone who can afford a humanoid robot gets to be part of the new elite. And while Melania has no philosophic history known to me, she is certainly part of the West’s current oligarchic aristocracy (what people have dubbed “the Epstein class”).
Meanwhile in China, for the lunar new year, they had humanoid robots vigorously participating in a Shaolin Kung Fu spectacle. Interesting how the two countries try to integrate the extremely uncanny and destabilizing phenomenon of humanoid robots, into their existing culture.
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“they had humanoid robots vigorously participating in a Shaolin Kung Fu spectacle”
They were pre-programmed by remote control and not autonomous (according to one debunking video I saw).
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There’s no scenario under which the elite will let these robots anywhere near their children. This is for the plebs. The goal is to eliminate the public education system in any meaningful sense.
The most expensive private schools don’t allow any technology not only in the classroom but even at home. The children of the rich write by hand on paper. I strongly recommend this practice to everybody. Keep technology away from children for as long as you possibly can.
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That the administration didn’t put a politician with electoral expectations next to the robot is the only good sign. They are floating this as a trial balloon and ensuring plausible deniability if the response is negative. We should collectively provide a very negative response putting aside partisan affiliations.
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One of the challenges of sensory/perceptual abnormalities is… even the most basic assumption that “we are all seeing/hearing/smelling the same thing” is wrong. But since you can’t step outside your own perceptual environment and see what everybody else is seeing… it can take a long time to sort out which things belong in the “everybody” category, and which things do not… and it’s brutally complicated by the part where you absolutely can’t mention things in the latter category because for some reason they are taboo. The black gnats are real. The shiny ones are taboo (and there will be trouble if you talk about them). It’s OK to know B-flat because “it sounds right” but taboo to find it by the way it tastes (metallic). It’s OK to like or dislike math. It’s taboo to like or dislike cardinal numbers because of their personalities. It’s OK to make mistakes reading aloud because you’re dumb. It’s taboo to wash up on the wrong line because the text is glimmering and the words are rippling on the page. The only way to know the difference is trial and error. There’s no manual, and nobody ever explains.
Where will Sally look for the toy? The fluorescent bulb in the back of the room is buzzing and flickering and it might as well be the whole Wild Hunt galloping by back there but we’ve already figured out that we are not to mention that and what was the question again? Where is the toy? Well, in the box of course.
One does work it out over time, but it’s painfully slow, and easy to miss subtle things.
-ethyl
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LOL, c’mon Kid, in most couples certainly realize that their spouse does not always think the same as themselves — mais certainement, “vive, la difference” ;-D
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“People are stunned by how much I managed to wrangle out of the cold, steely jaws of the administration”
See? That was your first mistake…. you created an aura of being an all-powerful mover and shaker so the less savvy of your colleagues (and university faculty ime tends toward the extremely non-savvy) think you can get anything done and if you don’t it’s because you’re being mean and unreasonable.
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This is very true. Whenever I report any problems to my Italian committee, people look at me with happy, luminous faces and say, “oh, we know you’ll solve everything because you always do.” It’s endearing but I wouldn’t mind some help every once in a while.
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