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It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party. I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it. Edit: I'm n

• philipov 4y ago
  The site is called 'scapegoat'
• moonchrome 4y ago
  And the OP is never actually wrong, he just couldn't explain himself
  • engineeringwoke 4y ago
    That could be your ego talking? Always re-interpreting reality to put yourself on a pedestal? It is a bit silly talking in circles with people that have theory of mind deficits. You just have to avoid the "correctness conversation" and try to point them in the right direction, but it's honestly like pulling teeth.
    • moonchrome 4y ago
      My comment was sarcastic, not sure it came through.
• zrail 4y ago
  Not the author but the framing in the article implies that the author would have zero issue acknowledging if they actually were wrong.
  • JackFr 4y ago
    And yet none of the hypothetical examples seem to entertain that possibility.
    • larve 4y ago
      I realize I was too quick to edit this down into a single sentence in the first paragraph, but my standard MO is to go “oh you’re right” if someone points out an error in my thinking. And if I can’t realize I’m wrong, but I also can’t explain why in precise terms, I make a note and go study the heck out of the topic in the next few days. Interestingly, as I’ve grown more experienced, it has become much easier to realize that I don’t know jack about anything really, and that it is so easy to go out and look for answers with the resources we have nowadays.
• Kiro 4y ago
  I think it pretty much invalidates it and just enforces the stereotype. "There must be another explanation than me being wrong".
• larve 4y ago
  thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions. These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.
  • korijn 4y ago
    > I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. Alright, thanks for responding directly to that. In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.
    • larve 4y ago
      That’s what I think is happening indeed, and I’m almost never the one shutting the conversation down. I didn’t go into “strategies” to address the issue in this article, mostly because I just don’t have enough experience to back it up, but I think recognizing that something is spiraling, saying “let’s continue in writing/retable this/i will try to understand your point of view” is something to try.
  • petercooper 4y ago
    People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification. Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
• xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE 4y ago
  So you want them to prepend every paragraph with "I know I'm wrong sometimes"? What does that achieve? The article is nice, concise, and gets the point across beautifully. Everybody's wrong sometimes, but some people are genuinely very rarely wrong in their area of expertise, and I'm willing to believe this guy is one of them. I'm glad he doesn't give in to the petty workplace politics, and I wish more people would.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nibbleshifter 4y ago
    It makes the allistic reader feel better to have it repeated, even though its stated in the first paragraph.
    • larve 4y ago
      Thanks for reading. That is a very good point I have taken away from publishing this. I stated in the first sentence that I have no problem being wrong, in fact, I want to be wrong because it means I can do an even better job and learn new stuff. If anything, the ratio of “you can’t acknowledge you’re wrong” to “oh i’m wrong” situations is about 1:1000. In future articles, I will spread and repeat things out a bit more, instead of editing an article like I would a strategy document.
    • undersuit 4y ago
      I've never been diagnosed with autism, but I'm certain I'm on the spectrum. I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion. You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.
  • korijn 4y ago
    I didn't ask for any of that. I'm explaining why the article came off badly to me. I'm assuming that was not the author's intention. I provided this feedback in my comment so that they may reflect on why this is so. There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stkni 4y ago
  This was my take too. The break-down in communication might not be WHAT is being said but HOW it's being said. This is certainly my experience of being a dev and a manager, sometimes people just seem a bit rude and it's hard to get past. Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness. And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.
  • Bedon292 4y ago
    This reminds me of a time, many years ago now, another engineer and myself ended up in a debate with one of the executives. We seemed to be in a very strong disagreement with them. After well over an hour of getting nowhere we ended up going back and essentially starting over breaking everything down into little pieces and ensuring our definitions of everything lined up. Turns out we agreed the whole time, but how each side was saying it made us think we did not. I believe it provided me a valuable lesson in this but it was so frustrating at the time and that certainly didn't help the cause. Sometimes I have to remember back to it and to take that step back take a breath and reframe things. How things are being said can really affect the conversation.
    • larve 4y ago
      Yes, it’s a hard skill to learn, and … it’s why I ask so many questions / make sure we have the same context. Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  Sometimes the blame is with the other party. An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1] The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average. An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%. Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant! Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well. Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team. The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits. [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in. [2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep. [3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.
  • HPsquared 4y ago
    On [1], you are assuming there is no such thing as negative intelligence!
  • denton-scratch 4y ago
• jackmott 4y ago
  Yeah it is either a fantastic bit of art or hilarious lack of awareness of the irony. The guy actually reminds me of a coworker that I like a lot who is on the spectrum. Once in a meeting a manager was describing why we needed to do some task. Autistic coworker: “oh so we need to do it for political reasons”. and manager starts to freak out and backpedal trying to say its more than just political reasons. Autistic coworker, calmly: “oh no its ok, political reasons is fine!”
  • sp527 4y ago
    How is that demonstrative of autism? Does not tolerating bullshit make a person autistic?
• 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  the blog domain is called scapegoat.dev after all