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It's hard to give concrete insights into the people you encountered, but the fact that you say that "all autistic people you've known" don't admit they're wrong

by larve 4y ago

It's hard to give concrete insights into the people you encountered, but the fact that you say that "all autistic people you've known" don't admit they're wrong gives me pause. What did "wrong" mean in this context? What does "denying reality" mean? Did you maybe realize that you think those were all the autistic people you encountered because you define autism as not being able to admit you are wrong? Not only do a lot of autistic people not know autism explains how they feel, but most of us pass so well you will never know we might be on the spectrum. It's not something people broadcast loudly. I often get told by a certain class of people that I can't accept when I am wrong. I feel personally that I am one of the extremely open-minded, constantly learning, seeking out new answers, curious. I love listening to end-users and distilling their way of thinking about their domain to make left-field technical changes, for example. Here are some of the explanations I could come up why "all the highly functioning people you have met in your life don't seem to be able to acknowledge that they are wrong": A simple reason: - I am actually right, and you can't recognize it, either because you don't hear me out, or you assume that I am wrong from the start, or you just don't understand the model I am operating under. "Denying reality" is just shortcode for "operating outside of/denying my model of reality". Concrete example, very close to situations I've had in real life: You are my manager at an ecommerce company. You might think the checkout on our website is bad, and needs to be rewritten. I know we don't even have any analytics set up, so will question why you think the ecommerce page is broken. If you can't come up with a satisfying answer (I would often get something like "I read an article about how they use react at airbnb, we should do that too"), then I will not back down from me questioning the purpose of the change. I understand you think that, as a business savvyy person, you are keeping track of what the industry is doing, and that's indeed valuable. But you have to trust me that - a) the technology used has nothing to do with what the user perceives. This is absolutely obvious to me, but you might just have realized that there is such a thing called web frameworks, and that they are a big deal, and that people can be very opinionated and forceful about them. It's going to take me a while to explain it plays no role whatsoever for the end-user. - b) we need analytics to understand if checkout indeed needs an overhaul. Analytics are not easy, data lies very easily, data needs work. The statistics are not easy, the causality of things is not easy, it is going to be hard to get a good signal. - c) our current stack, team, software, technical debt, feature prioritization is the thing determining the technology choice. Many things come into play here, and each of them can be incredibly subtle (maybe it's hard to incorporate react because our SSR framework works entirely differently, etc...). It's going to take me a while to explain why certain tech choices might be good, might be bad. - When I'm wrong / don't know enough, I will just keep quiet and learn and figure things out on my own. You will just never realize it, and thus think that I "never" admit I am wrong, when in fact, I do so almost daily. Understanding that people think very differently, that I shouldn't bring it up, that I need to adapt to the 95% of normal people out there, is what makes me highly functioning. - You don't understand how I communicate. You think I might just argue about something you know is wrong, when I am actually asking questions and trying to understand what you are saying. I can't have a conversation if I don't understand what you are asking for in the first place, and you might not be used to the level of rigor I require to state an actual opinion. This turns into a circular dialogue where I will ask questions, you will think I question your premise and reject the question outright. I will either get frustrated (see next point), or usually just stop early, because I don't see the point, and have been in situations such as these countless time in the past. - I will only forcefully argue about something only if I deeply care and have put in the countless (thousands! tens of thousands!) of hours to learn more about the topic. Many people don't realize how absolutely obsessively I will research and learn things, nor how good I have gotten at learning things. Spending 14h a day learning about things and trying things and writing and designing and building really adds up. I don't really have hobbies or friends or chill out days or spend much time with family. Instead, I have known I wanted to be a programmer since I was 6. In the 35 years since, I have been away from my computer once for 7days, and never not had a programming book in my backpack. I enjoy computers and programming and software and anything related to it to a level that is I think completely alien to more neurotypical people. While people think individuals might maybe have one area of expertise, because they studied it and maybe held a job in that area for 15 years, adding up to say 20k hours of practice, a lot of it probably quite distracted / uninterested. I might have maybe accumulated 100k hours in the same 20 year span, a lot of it in obsessive single-minded pursuit. Probably only my wife knows what that looks like. - Because I care so deeply about these topics, there is indeed a tendency to overcommunicate / not realize that I need to police my speech and boil things down to a more "human" level. I also spend most of my time in the areas of the internet where people are similarly obsessive about a single topic, and communicating this way is actually my normal. You might not realize it because I have gotten so good at masking it.

tristor 4y ago
Wow, this response really resonated with me. Especially your last point. > Because I care so deeply about these topics, there is indeed a tendency to overcommunicate / not realize that I need to police my speech and boil things down to a more "human" level. I also spend most of my time in the areas of the internet where people are similarly obsessive about a single topic, and communicating this way is actually my normal. The other critical feedback I receive from people relatively often is that I "talk too much" and that I "never answer their question" because I grew up, for the most part, on the Internet in circles of people who are highly engaged and educated. In most cases my communication is focused on establishing context first, and then making a statement, assertion, or answer. A lot of people tend towards just skipping the context, which I think is sometimes reasonable if you can assume context is shared, but my experience in work/business is that /most/ miscommunication is due to lack of shared context. I often get interrupted when answering someone's question, where they came to me /specifically/ because I'm an expert on the topic, because they think I'm not answering their question, where from my perspective to be able to truly answer their question I first need to establish shared context, and teach them a deeper level of understanding of the topic so they can even understand my eventual answer. What's interesting is I am now in a role not as an engineer, but as a product manager, in part because I've gotten very good at distilling complex topics down to be understandable to others and teaching other people (I also guest lecture, give conference talks, and do internal classes at companies I work at), and most of my life has been focused on reading and writing, so I am very good at writing, which at least in business matters as much or maybe more than talking. So, obviously I've adapted in some way that's successful to perform my job function successfully, but I still face these challenges primarily in personal relationships. It's not really clear to me that my methodology is inferior to the alternative, and I mostly think that other people simply lack any reasonable attention span because of the current situation with social media / our distraction economy. If someone wants to learn something from an expert, they should be prepared to listen to the answer, but I have friends who've told me this is arrogance on my part to believe this way. I see it as a two-way street though, and despite preferring reading to listening/watching, I've spent hours listening to experts when they've been willing to give me their time.
jgilias 4y ago
Thank you for the very valuable in-depth insight! What I had in mind was actual, demonstratable instances of being wrong. Such as assuming a parameter in a function of a library works a certain way based on how it's named, and what _should_ be the _correct_ way such a parameter should work leading to a subtle bug that I then helped to debug. And then the uphill battle being trying to convince the person to try to use the parameter the way its documented, going against their understanding of how it _should_ work.

by larve 4y ago

tristor 4y ago

Wow, this response really resonated with me. Especially your last point. > Because I care so deeply about these topics, there is indeed a tendency to overcommunicate / not realize that I need to police my speech and boil things down to a more "human" level. I also spend most of my time in the areas of the internet where people are similarly obsessive about a single topic, and communicating this way is actually my normal. The other critical feedback I receive from people relatively often is that I "talk too much" and that I "never answer their question" because I grew up, for the most part, on the Internet in circles of people who are highly engaged and educated. In most cases my communication is focused on establishing context first, and then making a statement, assertion, or answer. A lot of people tend towards just skipping the context, which I think is sometimes reasonable if you can assume context is shared, but my experience in work/business is that /most/ miscommunication is due to lack of shared context. I often get interrupted when answering someone's question, where they came to me /specifically/ because I'm an expert on the topic, because they think I'm not answering their question, where from my perspective to be able to truly answer their question I first need to establish shared context, and teach them a deeper level of understanding of the topic so they can even understand my eventual answer. What's interesting is I am now in a role not as an engineer, but as a product manager, in part because I've gotten very good at distilling complex topics down to be understandable to others and teaching other people (I also guest lecture, give conference talks, and do internal classes at companies I work at), and most of my life has been focused on reading and writing, so I am very good at writing, which at least in business matters as much or maybe more than talking. So, obviously I've adapted in some way that's successful to perform my job function successfully, but I still face these challenges primarily in personal relationships. It's not really clear to me that my methodology is inferior to the alternative, and I mostly think that other people simply lack any reasonable attention span because of the current situation with social media / our distraction economy. If someone wants to learn something from an expert, they should be prepared to listen to the answer, but I have friends who've told me this is arrogance on my part to believe this way. I see it as a two-way street though, and despite preferring reading to listening/watching, I've spent hours listening to experts when they've been willing to give me their time.

jgilias 4y ago

Thank you for the very valuable in-depth insight! What I had in mind was actual, demonstratable instances of being wrong. Such as assuming a parameter in a function of a library works a certain way based on how it's named, and what _should_ be the _correct_ way such a parameter should work leading to a subtle bug that I then helped to debug. And then the uphill battle being trying to convince the person to try to use the parameter the way its documented, going against their understanding of how it _should_ work.