What did the author likely do, which “drove someone to shout …”?
Response:
Based on the context provided in the message, it seems that the author likely engaged in persistent efforts to fix a coordination or maintenance problem related to reading and writing. They might have been advocating for or trying to implement a system or activity (e.g., a reading or writing initiative) that they believed most people would prefer (X) over the current situation (Y).
However, despite some people endorsing the idea of reading and writing (X), they didn’t have enough genuine interest or willingness to invest in the transition costs or maintenance efforts required for the change. This lack of true commitment led to the frustration of the person shouting at the author, expressing that nobody else liked reading or writing as much as the author did. Essentially, the author was trying to solve a coordination problem (or maintenance problem) that didn’t have enough genuine support from others, and this led to tension and frustration.
Which is essentially what seems reasonable to guess, though it’s not very specific. My first guess as to specifics is “Elizabeth tried to organize a weekly gathering where people would pick a paper, read it, write up their thoughts, and discuss it at the meeting, and couldn’t get people to commit the time necessary, and ended up questioning someone along the lines of ‘Well, several people said it was good to practice these skills, and that the summaries are valuable public services, so why aren’t they …?’, leading to the incident at the end.” Other variations that came to mind included hiring a writing teacher for a group, or some kind of large-scale book buying, though neither of those involves both reading and writing.
That’s a pretty reasonable guess, although I wasn’t quite that dumb.
I’m temporarily working a full time gig. The meetings are quite badly run. People seemed very excited when I introduced the concept of memo meetings[1], but it kept not happening or the organizer would implement it badly. People (including the organizer) said nice things about the concept so I assumed this was a problem with coordination, or at least “everyone wants the results but is trying to shirk”.
But I brought it up again when people were complaining about the length of one part of a meeting, and my boss said[2] “no one likes reading and writing as much as you”, and suddenly it made sense that people weren’t failing to generate the activation energy for a thing they wanted, they were avoiding a thing they didn’t want but endorsed (or I pressured them into expressing more enthusiasm than they actually felt, but it felt like my skip boss genuinely wanted to at least try it and god knows they were fine shooting down other ideas I expressed more enthusiasm over).
So the problem was I took people’s statements that they wanted memo meetings but got distracted by something urgent to be true, when actually they at best maybe kind of endorsed memo meetings (or maybe just skip boss endorsed them, and no one else argued?) but did not actually want them.
Like my sense is they would genuinely prefer inefficient meetings to the work it takes to make them efficient, but that sounds bad so no one strongly advocated the position.
where the organizer writes their thoughts ahead of time and the beginning of the meeting is people synchronously reading and commenting on the doc. This lets the organizer get their thoughts really crisp, without worrying about forgetting something, people read and process at their own pace, get time to articulate their own thoughts well instead of trying to shove it in, read other people’s thoughts at their own pace instead of sitting through 40 seconds of contentless thought while waiting for the good part, missing the good part because they’re thinking about their own thing, or navigating who talks when.
You do this synchronously partly for fast responses and partly because no one else will actually read and comment on documents in a timely fashion if you don’t force them.
I asked ChatGPT:
Response:
Which is essentially what seems reasonable to guess, though it’s not very specific. My first guess as to specifics is “Elizabeth tried to organize a weekly gathering where people would pick a paper, read it, write up their thoughts, and discuss it at the meeting, and couldn’t get people to commit the time necessary, and ended up questioning someone along the lines of ‘Well, several people said it was good to practice these skills, and that the summaries are valuable public services, so why aren’t they …?’, leading to the incident at the end.” Other variations that came to mind included hiring a writing teacher for a group, or some kind of large-scale book buying, though neither of those involves both reading and writing.
That’s a pretty reasonable guess, although I wasn’t quite that dumb.
I’m temporarily working a full time gig. The meetings are quite badly run. People seemed very excited when I introduced the concept of memo meetings[1], but it kept not happening or the organizer would implement it badly. People (including the organizer) said nice things about the concept so I assumed this was a problem with coordination, or at least “everyone wants the results but is trying to shirk”.
But I brought it up again when people were complaining about the length of one part of a meeting, and my boss said[2] “no one likes reading and writing as much as you”, and suddenly it made sense that people weren’t failing to generate the activation energy for a thing they wanted, they were avoiding a thing they didn’t want but endorsed (or I pressured them into expressing more enthusiasm than they actually felt, but it felt like my skip boss genuinely wanted to at least try it and god knows they were fine shooting down other ideas I expressed more enthusiasm over).
So the problem was I took people’s statements that they wanted memo meetings but got distracted by something urgent to be true, when actually they at best maybe kind of endorsed memo meetings (or maybe just skip boss endorsed them, and no one else argued?) but did not actually want them.
Like my sense is they would genuinely prefer inefficient meetings to the work it takes to make them efficient, but that sounds bad so no one strongly advocated the position.
where the organizer writes their thoughts ahead of time and the beginning of the meeting is people synchronously reading and commenting on the doc. This lets the organizer get their thoughts really crisp, without worrying about forgetting something, people read and process at their own pace, get time to articulate their own thoughts well instead of trying to shove it in, read other people’s thoughts at their own pace instead of sitting through 40 seconds of contentless thought while waiting for the good part, missing the good part because they’re thinking about their own thing, or navigating who talks when.
You do this synchronously partly for fast responses and partly because no one else will actually read and comment on documents in a timely fashion if you don’t force them.
he would like me to note he wasn’t shouting, I exaggerated for comedic effect