I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless

I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless socially capable, simply through distilling social problems into a set of hard rules. Sometimes you get edge cases and he gets into trouble, but for 90% of the time, he was actually way more socially able than I was, simply by having a better-formed understanding, less overwhelmed by immediacy and assumptions. You need a degree of alien anthropology to be able to respond to what's really important in a conversation - an extremely socially capable deaf friend of mine pointed out, for instance, that body language is more important than verbal content in most casual interactions. These kind of insights are kinda hard to gain from a neurotypical, non-deaf perspective like mine, because you're a bit like a fish that doesn't realize he's swimming in water.