00:12
Hello, Lin.
Hi, Asami.
All right, so we've already kind of started talking without microphones.
This is very frequent, by the way.
And we decided, hey, this might be worth recording.
Yep, so here we are.
I don't know if it is, but let's just go with it.
So I was complaining to Lin about how I, as a millennial daughter to a Gen X,
or I don't know, I don't think my parents are boomer age.
I think they're Gen X.
I don't know. We don't have to go down the generational rabbit hole.
That's fine.
My parents, who are in their early 60s, I had to be their personal IT person, IT helper,
as I do, and I think many of us who have parents of that age do.
And this was one of my duties in one of the more recent episodes
where I had to teach my mom how to use Excel spreadsheet.
One might say, how does she not know?
Well, I'll give you a caveat.
She has never worked in the office for about 25, no, for about 30 years.
Yeah, yeah, that's good context.
Since she worked.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
She was only working between her ages 22 to 24 in an office corporate setting.
And given that it was in the 80s that she was that age, I think,
and her being a woman in Japan, in the workforce,
she barely had to do anything other than making coffees and making copies.
And she got married and she got out.
She was supposed to back in those days.
Yep, tends to have been how it goes for many, many people.
Yeah, and she had had jobs since, but those tended to be more creative
and more sort of hands-on practical jobs.
So she never really had to do office-y, admin-type jobs since the 80s.
Which explains why she doesn't know or doesn't have a ton of experience
putting together a spreadsheet.
Yeah, because for reference to the listeners, right,
and I went and double-checked this,
roughly the 90s was when it sort of boomed as Excel's usage in places.
Right, right.
Like it was, I think that one of the big hitters was it was integrated with Windows.
So you had like the Mac stuff and then like Windows got in and it was like,
hello, you have these options.
And I can also imagine, yes, yeah.
And I can also imagine that if there was a delay between American adoption of Windows
03:02
and Japanese companies' adoption.
So like my dad knew how to do typewriting with typewriters.
And he learned that on the job.
Those were the days.
Those were the days.
And so like it's not particularly surprising that my mom had never had to do this.
But like, boy, did it challenge a new kind of patience.
You know, because I had to go and explain not only like how to create a new file,
how to save a file, how if you don't explicitly save it,
you may or may not have access to what you wrote before.
Yeah.
And if you wrote over the template and don't save a copy of a template,
your template will vanish and it will overwrite itself.
So these are the basic things I needed to teach her.
But that was not even the hardest part.
The hardest part really was like asking her, what do you want to tabulate?
And like, what do these things mean?
And what is the most sensible, comprehensive way to organize these informations?
Like, for instance, you know, she's writing some kind of on-voice type information, right?
Like there is a product name and there is a price of the product.
Out of habit, she just puts them all in one cell.
And, you know, if you have written spritch, yeah, list them out.
Like she would in her notebook, right?
And to her eyes, it's very clear that those three things that she put in one cell
are three distinct different things.
But it is not clear to the Excel or to anyone else that these are separate things.
So I had to go back to teach her like, OK, one cell, one information per cell.
Like that's the golden rule.
You cannot put more things than one thing for each cell.
If you needed to put something, you need to make a new column or new row
and put that separately, right?
So that was like the first thing I needed to teach her.
And like, I realized from then on that she doesn't really have the idea for like,
what is the most sensible such like legible way to put together this information that she has.
Which is fairly simple.
Just like eight columns of, you know, things across maybe like 20 rows.
Like not this is not a big spreadsheet by any stretch of imagination.
But it just for someone who has never had to make this type of organization of information,
06:03
it was just like so bloody hard for her to wrap her head around to like,
oh, this column should probably come before this other column
because that's how you normally process information, you know?
Or maybe it's more helpful if I have a separate column for dates.
That way I can separate information with another filter, right?
Yeah.
And like these are things that did not occur to her and she's learning.
And yeah, it's just like fascinating thing how, you know, my mother is by usual measures,
like fairly quick learner.
She is a smart person.
But like, and I don't, at least not on daily basis,
I don't think of her as like a technically challenged person.
Like I was just complaining to Len how Japanese app system is like absurdly difficult
and badly designed.
I don't know why I need to download like three to five different apps
in order to like set up my transportation pass on my phone.
And I don't know why different point cards have like,
like five different other apps attached to it.
Like there's one app for collecting the points
and the other app to generate a barcode that you would need to use the point.
Like it's like fucking bonkers.
That's a whole other, that is so...
Who approved this?
Who fucking approved this?
I don't know.
But like she navigates these things just fine.
Like, you know, like she can do this.
She's not technically challenged in like a sense that it's like,
she like, you know, cannot handle technology
or is like allergic to any new technology.
She's not that.
But like when you don't have like any experience
of doing this spreadsheet way of thinking,
like I didn't realize because I've been using spreadsheet for so long
or like, you know, matrices,
like putting information in matrices has like become a second nature to me
that like it has never occurred to me that it's so hard and unintuitive.
Yeah.
It's unintuitive because it wasn't intuited.
It was not created right in the way to be necessarily like...
It's unnatural.
So you mentioned how like right at the beginning
puts everything into one box, right?
These things go there.
And you started talking about that like order of operations.
And now you've brought yourself this idea of things being like matrices
09:01
and organized boxes.
There's overlap in the way that we describe this.
And also in the way that I think we're kind of dancing around,
which is the impacts on how we think
and like the ways in which our thinking is impacted
by the tools that we use.
That definitely leans in to large language models existence.
But caveat that, we can sidebar that.
That's a separate three-hour conversation.
You said there's interesting because, for example,
like in your mom's case,
you probably also have somebody who can look at the stuff they've written down
and they absorb that all at once, right?
Yeah, it's very intuitive for her.
Yeah, it's not about like going one at a time, right?
The information is right there.
It's actually very easy to parse, right?
Because it is, in fact, in the format that's available.
It's not in like the most...
How do I put this nicely?
I was gonna describe it sort of harshly, right?
Because it's such a cold mechanical structure, an Excel sheet,
because it removes what anything would be considered as inefficient,
even though, okay.
Yeah, there is zero room for imagination, right?
Yeah, you're just putting stuff into the box.
It's got one thing to one box.
You've got specific instructions that are if-then logic statements, if anything, right?
Right, yeah.
It's pretty rigid with the type of thinking that has to be applied to it
before you arrive at an answer.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's usually one-directional.
It's not both ways.
And...
It yells at you if you try to do something recursively,
because that would break it.
Right.
When my mom, with her neatly drawn table on her notebook,
can just, with a quick glance, know what it means
and can do the maths in her head, no problem.
It's just like, for her, this is such a redundant activity,
you know, just to be able to share the information.
And, but like, you know, the way, like this way,
she will sort of, you know, look more professional, one thing,
and then secondly, you know, would probably avoid human errors to a better extent.
So like, she sees the point in learning this, right?
And so she's willing to learn, which I very much appreciate,
because not everyone is willing to learn new things,
especially at her age.
It's a valiant task and something I think is fair to be proud of, right?
That is great.
Right, yeah, yeah.
But like, it's like, it's a very unintuitive way for her to think,
because she has a faster circuit in her head, right?
And she now has to break down every step of like, her circuits
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and like, tell them what to do when she can just look at it and get it.
Yep, yep.
That's a big break it down and rebuild type process, right?
Like, you now have to design a new pathway for that,
which can be enlightening for a whole other set of reasons, right?
You might find shortcuts, you might find some crossover.
It could be not at all enlightening as well.
We, you know, we forget that that might also be the case.
But it is at least as you said, functionally usable, right?
She's like, I see where this comes across.
I can do it and then we'll have this skill, right?
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, I'm glad that she's willing to at least put some effort in trying to do this.
And even though, you know, this is very extraneous of her,
like, I feel like her boss should just give her the template
and like, you know, instead of her making her own template.
But that's probably because they're also
not used to making spreadsheets in their businesses.
I was gonna say, I don't know how deep this like goes, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
It sounds like this is a very much like family operated business,
like where a lot of handwritten notes fly about instead of emails.
That's how you're keeping track of things, right?
We're just, it'll be fine.
It's on paper somewhere.
It's on paper somewhere and like, that terrifies me.
But like, they seem to be chill with it.
Yeah, it's fine.
We're just used to this thing, right?
So, that's a whole other dynamic, right?
Between just like, anyway, the way we offload some of those notes.
But yeah, let's stop the conversation here though, before we like jump into it.
I liked what you brought up about like the different ways we think.
I'll link it.
Yeah, I'll link it.
We can link it with thinking and we can link it with another idea that came from this, right?
When you talked about, you know, this surprise, right?
Between what you might expect someone to know and what they don't.
We can link all that later.
Yeah.
Great and kudos for, you know, your mom's learning process.
I think that's awesome.
Yeah, if you ever had to be the dedicated IT person for your parents, you know, be patient.
Yeah, yeah, be patient.
That is, I know it's hard.
Everybody, we know it's hard.
Yeah, all right.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
