The Last Word On Nothing

*If you are home and not busy, would F. be able to get a Ziploc of ice?

*Would one of you be able to do Monday morning carpool next week?

*Any chance you’d have time to work Friday lunch? S. is home sick.

*S. is staying home sick. Is there any chance you have time to do lunch today?

*Is one of you going to be home today? S. is home sick but I might leave him for an hour so I can exercise and not [have a mental health crisis] . . .  He says he is fine by himself but if something catches fire he will come and get you.

*Did R. seem ok to you on Friday? She’s been kind of low energy all weekend.

*Could I have a grownup buddy . . .to hide in the kitchen with me . . .?

*Can we split carpool Tuesday?

*Could S. come over to your house until about 3?

I was feeling weirdly uncomfortable last week when my husband went out of town. Being on my own with the kids is easier than it’s ever been—they’re friendly and fun to be with about 95% of the time, which is more than I can say for myself. On request, they empty dishwashers and make beds and get ready for school and even cook their own mac & cheese. There were no health emergencies, work crises, or other issues that made it particularly stressful.

I couldn’t figure it out until I looked at my texts.

Ugh. I hate asking for help. Typing out all those texts a second time feels like chalk squeaking along the inside of my ribs, a combination of how awkward each question sounds (“any chance”? Double ugh!)  and the fact that I had to ask it at all. The accumulation of each small request seems to weigh much more than it should.

I know I’m not alone. More than 40 years ago, psychologists Bella DePaulo and Jeffrey Fisher highlighted many of the reasons why it’s so hard to ask for help in their paper “The Costs of Asking for Help.” Someone who is contemplating asking for help, they write, “is almost always in conflict.” Some of the challenges come down to what’s being asked: In particular, “if the task with which help is sought is an especially easy one, or if it is especially important to the individual to be skilled at performing the task, then helpseeking may be especially threatening to the individual’s feelings of competence.”

I do feel a little incompetent. I’m not sure why—it is true that I cannot simultaneously pick up two carpools on opposite sides of town, but I feel like I should be able to. (There is one family involved where both parents work in the ER and still seem to be able to be helpful everywhere all at once, while the only thing I can resuscitate are badly written drafts–and then only sometimes.)

I did have a few grown-up buddies hide in the kitchen with me one night when one of my kids had a bunch of friends over, and they started talking about whether and how they use ChatGPT in their work. So I figured I’d give it a try—asking AI for help seemed like a manageable step.

And its answers did seem helpful, even though it felt weird to get advice from something I don’t quite understand. One of its ideas: “Be specific: Clearly articulate what you need help with and why you’re asking for assistance. Providing context can make it easier for others to understand how they can support you.”

This is one thing researchers noted when they studied how robots can generate effective requests for help, in a paper with the charming title, “Recovering from failure by asking for help,” which seems to apply to more than just robots. In their experiment, robots trained to put together an IKEA Lack table–a 48-step process–tried different types of requests when their assembly stalls out.  The robots were instructed to issue the shortest unambiguous request, because, as the researchers write, “Interpreting this request places a minimal cognitive load on the person, who is able to quickly render the necessary aid.”

But what really stood out to me was this: “When failures occur, a human can often intervene to help a robot recover. If the human is familiar with the robot, its task, and its common failure modes, then they can provide this help without an explicit request from the robot. However, if a person is unfamiliar with the robotic system, they might not know how to help the robot recover from a failure.”

Something about this made me feel better. How could I help a robot if I didn’t know what it needed? How could someone help me if they weren’t familiar with my system? If robots can fail and recover by asking for help, maybe I can, too.

And if I didn’t ask, how would I have known that having grownup buddies in the kitchen was the perfect antidote to incompetence?

*

Image from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons