Are you good at problem solving?

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What are some examples?

Yes. My intercom broke a year ago and so did my neighbours. I asked the housing association if they would fix it, but they said it was an internal problem inside my apartment, so it was my responsibility. It looks like a telephone handset for clarification. If someone wants in they buzz up and I answer the handset.

I took it apart to find the issue. It was a broken wire. I found a new handset on eBay and used parts from it to fix the one on my wall. It works now.

My neighbours is still broken.

I put up temporary signs with less than half the usual amount of wood, but nobody copies my methods.

My boats won races right off the drawing board, but the problem of getting the same principles applied to save 20% of the fuel on ships seems insoluble.

One of the smartest 12-yr olds in my city got killed in traffic. I figured out how it happened. His parents were not impressed - they wanted an answer that would let them sue someone, so I didn't actually solve the problem they had set.

Reading a short article on the Air [powered] Car, I realized that the numbers violated high school physics and called fraud, years before someone got proof from a test.

If i am feeling relaxed and at ease yes. Otherwise i can barely function.

I am a good confidante.

People trust me to tell me things they wouldn't even tell their closest friends.

This is because I build up trust and they sense it.

I won't give examples of people's problems, as they are personal but people have said I have helped them.
I think I can sometimes be helpful online.
My coach says I help her as she is undertaking even more training and says that my coaching is good practice for her.

Rubrics cube, computers?

A big one was a network issue.  I determined the cause of some problems that had been plaguing the network department for months -- a single pair of CAT5 crimpers that were out-of-tolerance for the newer CAT6 connectors.

Strangely, while I’m good at most problems, I have some blind spots; I’ve never been able to do a Rubik’s cube, for instance.

Here are a couple of examples of real life “off the wall” I was able to answer:

In my first job, where I was responsible for some mechanical aspects of a radar suite under development, I was asked to go to the magnetron section to see if I could solve a sparking problem that had them stumped. This was the first time I really noticed body language; the three (or was it four) guys I met there were positively radiating resentment! I suppose it was embarrassing that someone in management thought a guy qualified in mechanical engineering could help some microwave guys in this respect?

Anyway, I first asked them if they’d removed or rounded off any projections in the area, to which one responded “there aren’t any” in a “what a fool question “tone of voice” (but such “fool” questions need to be asked; assumption is the mother of all screw ups).

I then went to the library to check something I could just vaguely remember from high school Physics, and then went back to suggest that they try running it without any insulation. They laughed out loud and looked at me like I was a complete plonker. I gave them a few moments to get it out of their systems and then reminded them that the best insulator of all is a hard vacuum. I then indicated that the next best we could hope for in the circumstances was air. That stopped them dead, and they all bent forward at the waist and looked at the floor, with a distant look. I then suggested it was worth a try, at which point they all spun around on one foot, still with the same posture, and waddled off to the lab like formation dancing penguins!

It must have worked as I heard no more about it, so it’s good I can enjoy a laugh about it; having saved a £300M project, I got not as much as a thank-you note for my efforts!

In another job, which involved the launch and handling equipment for a minesweeping ROV, I realized there might be a limit to the angle which a handling tube could turn, and still allow a cable to slide through it (there was, and lock-up happened a lot sooner than expected!). Before seeking the funds to test it, I thought I should be able to calculate it, and should have been able to do it with calculus. Unfortunately, by then, I’d forgotten how it worked. It then occurred to me that I could use the formula for hoop stress in a pressure vessel (don’t ask me how; I’m far too old for that sort of thinking) as an equivalent. Wacky or what? Nevertheless, some years later I found the very same formula I’d derived, in a Crane manual for winches.

I like to think so, though when I tried to think of examples I felt reluctant to post them because they all seem so obvious. Here's a couple of examples anyway:

1. Not surprisingly, caffeine helps to alleviate my tiredness when I want to stay alert and it isn't convenient at the time to postpone my activities by sleeping, and I prefer to take it in tea. I wanted to control the dose carefully so I could tailor the exact dose to my circumstances, e.g. to avoid taking too much caffeine too close to bedtime (which would have interfered with my sleep) or to take a larger dose when feeling particularly tired in the daytime. But tea manufacturers rarely indicate the caffeine content of their produce, and even when they do, they don't do it very accurately; also I didn't want to make the amount or strength of tea I drank at any given time dependent on how much caffeine I wanted, because I drink tea for pleasure and for hydration all the time. I fixed it by getting decaffeinated tea and adding known amounts of pure caffeine to each cup.

Wal-Mart caffeine tablets were unsatisfactory because they contain 200mg of caffeine each, which is rather a lot, and other weird substances I don't want to consume, such as yellow dye. I was able to dissolve them in water to a known concentration easily enough, which gave me good control over the amount of caffeine I put into each cup by simply adjusting the volume of the mixture that I added, but there was still the problem of the dye etc.

Vendors no longer sell tubs of pure caffeine powder to the general public, because a few idiots had managed to kill themselves with it by taking huge amounts (not the first time I've been put to inconvenience because of the stupid mistakes of others ) . But I found a supplier of capsules of pure caffeine. They were again 200mg each, and I didn't like the idea of consuming the gelatine capsules either, but I found that as long as I kept them bone dry with silica gel, it wasn't hard to pull them apart and make a 10mg/ml solution of the contents. Problem solved. I can now drink tea whenever I like, and just add the right amount of caffeine as I see fit. It's a tad nerdy but quite easy to do, the most laborious part being opening the capsules and extracting the contents. It would be easier to just dissolve the whole capsules in water, but the gelatine might start to rot if I keep the solution too long.

2. There was a power outage and I wanted a cup of tea. Being a thrifty person I happen to own a couple of water heaters that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter power socket of a car, in order to make my own hot drinks while on the road (it's tons cheaper than buying drinks), so I simply used one of those to heat the water for my cuppa.

I am pretty good at figuring out word problems. It is just about the only math I am really good at. "If This person has X items, and that person has Y items, and this third person wants Z items, what is the sum of X and Y?"

I think that me having to figure out the parts of existing that required me to figure out what information was useful, what information was useless, and figuring out what other people want you to do made me pretty proficient at this sort of problem. The good news is that I can usually sort out these on a more complex scale, where people present a problem, are trying to find a solution, and have XYZ options and/or tools at their disposal. I can pretty efficiently sort out the parts that need work. But getting people to use my solution? Nope. Also, I can't seem to figure this out for myself. Really bad at it. Can't do, or can only do in a limited capacity. I mean... I can figure out the problem, but I can't seem to resolve it, because all my observations tend to indicate that the issue is with other people (And I am fully aware that I am part of the problem in these situations, but it is hard for me to identify how, exactly).

I have realized, however, that having some skill at problem solving doesn't mean you SHOULD solve a problem. Some people get really upset if you do that. Not really sure why, but...ok, I guess.

Women tell each other their problems to get sympathy. Men share their problems hoping to get solutions. Providing solutions instead of sympathy just makes people feel stupid and resentful. People get emotionally attached to the best thinking they can do, and like to think that nobody can do it better. To get around that, you need emotional tricks. That's why the stuff that gets built is designed badly by good salesmen, instead of designed well. Partnerships between good salesmen and good problem solvers are rare, but Rolls-Royce and Apple Computers are examples.

Cool analogy, I dig it. You're absolutely right in that everything selling like hotcakes is marketed well. It doesn't have to be a very good product or service, within reason.

I usually come up with ways to make my work easier, without doing less. I'm also good at improvising.

I think this video must have been made to illustrate your point:

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 02 Aug 2021, 1:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[continued.......thanks a bunch, Cloudflare ]

Sadly I'm not good at emotional tricks, so I just try to live in hope that the real world isn't quite such a gender-binary place and that the situation isn't quite that black-and-white. I'm OK with showing a bit of empathy if I feel it, like if somebody tells me about a hard time they've been having, I might well notice how I'd feel if I'd been through that, and my facial expression would probably show that I'd "felt it for them," but I'd also want to make any helpful, practical suggestions I could to mitigate the problem if it were ongoing. On a good day I'd first ask them if they'd thought of any solutions or were in need of any, and I'd encourage them to discuss the question of how best to fix it, if they seemed to want that kind of discussion. I think modern feminism also comes into it sometimes, as some women these days will express disdain for men who see every bad experience a woman has as an opportunity to play the knight in shining armour, to come over as tough, smart protectors of supposedly helpless, stupid women.

It's quite interesting because somebody was recently saying here that they'd annoyed a bunch of people, and that when they mentioned that to another person, the reply they got was "no, they weren't annoyed." But they knew that was rubbish, and wondered why people make such responses. The comment that impressed me the most was one that said Aspies want a response similar to what a coach might say - i.e. honest feedback about performance shortcomings and advice on how to improve - while NTs want somebody to just go "there, there, everything's allright." All of which seems to back up the theory of Aspies having a "typical bloke" mentality, though I still think that theory has serious limitations for ASD as a whole.

I would add that there are cases where a product that makes a tidy sum doesn't actually seem to work at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeadOn