>I'm even more confused about what autism is than before. There's a full list of diagnostic criteria you can look up, but in short Autistic people lack the "ha

>I'm even more confused about what autism is than before. There's a full list of diagnostic criteria you can look up, but in short Autistic people lack the "hardware acceleration" that neurotypicals have to assist them with social interaction (and, in the more extreme cases, language). In childhood, this usually shows itself as a deficit in theory of mind (ie, the child will assume that the other people know what they know). In adulthood, it usually means that people struggle to maintain the types of cognitive dissonance that smooths over interpersonal interactions (I suspect this is because neurotypicals run multiple systems to simultaneously process the concrete reality and socially agreed-upon "ostensible reality", whereas Autistics rely on a single system to process both). Just like any other group, this does come with shared experiences. Just like any other group, though, just because there are some shared experiences it doesn't mean everybody is the same.