19 ms·

Anecdotal evidence: around me, several kids are on the autistic spectrum. It's hard to prevent them from intervening when they notice what they feel is an injus

• Podgajski 3y ago
  Hi, I posted this study because I have Asperger’s and this is what was always said about my behavior. Yesterday I literally had to stop myself from sending photographs to the police of a guy walking his dog off leash in a park that has signs forbidding it. And my reason for wanting to call the police is because of my compassion for the dog or for anyone the dog to hurt. Not so much that it was only that the man was doing something wrong. And I think that’s what gets missed in those of us with ASD, there is still a strong, empathy and compassion that motivates us.
  • mtreis86 3y ago
    I've never had a loose dog try to attack me. Plenty of dogs on leashes have lunged tho. So I treat the leash status as a signal of how much the owner trusts the dog to behave.
    • Podgajski 3y ago
      Your anecdotes are not data. For example. I can count no less than six times when off leash dogs tried to bite me. The most recent one was when two pitbulls and a Labrador charged at me.
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      I've never been shot, clearly shootings don't happen.
    • eyelidlessness 3y ago
      Not that I think there’s much credence to this signal as you’ve stated it, but it does have overlap with what I try to convey to people when I ask them to leash their own dog: it’s for the safety of their dog as much as it is for mine. In other words, as I’ve tried to explain it, “even if your dog is perfectly well behaved, you have no idea if my dog or any other you may encounter is a danger to your dog.” This has been universally unconvincing to those dog owners who walk their dogs off leash. They don’t—in my experience—actually care if it puts their dog at risk, any more than they care about putting anyone else at risk. Anecdata still, but my experience tells me that whether a dog is leashed or not is mostly an indicator of whether the dog’s human is more concerned with the dog’s safety, or with their own selfish convenience.
      • RoyalHenOil 3y ago
        This is 1000% my experience. Even farmers with working herd dogs, who can completely trust their dogs because they work off-leash 10+ hours per day, still clip on a lead in public. It's not because they don't trust their dog. It's because they don't trust OTHER people's dogs -- especially because a good 80-90% of people with off-leash dogs don't actually have control of their dogs. They just really like the aesthetic of an off-leash dog and, by golly, they're going to do it--even if they haven't put in the gruelling training it requires, and even if it means their dog is endangered by other dogs. They don't care or think about it because they don't actually have a deep bond with their dog and value it; it's an accessory.
    • GoblinSlayer 3y ago
      Of all dogs I met, only a police dog was disciplined (german shepherd), all others were unhinged (all sizes).
  • mjburgess 3y ago
    It might be important to realise that signs and rules are made up by sign-makers and rule-makers; often to their benefit. Reality doesnt come with a rule about leashing dogs on grass. It feels like something is going wrong here in your connecting a dog being off a leash with somehow empathy for the dog. I read your impulse to act here as your mind being hijacked by the sign-maker to conscript you into their preferred system of rules. Evaluate all signs, rules, commands in just the same way you evaluate the most average sort of person reading these things out in front of you. Who are you? Why? What do you want? and so on
    • themk 3y ago
      No, these rules exist so that everyone can have a safe space. Go find an off-leash area for your dog.
      • mjburgess 3y ago
        I'd imagine the person walking his dog was making the area no less safe for anyone else. Maybe people might feel safer. The rule, in the abstract, can be given some plausible 'social good' defense -- many rules can, even the most insidious. No doubt, on extreme averages, dogs being on leashes marginally improves the on-average saftey. But this 'on-average' is a radical abstraction. What it says is that the dog's freedom, enjoyment, and that of their owner must be Brought Into Order to fit with a system of values which discounts that entirely. The sign is a symptom of this system of disciplining people; it conscripts them into a value system which may routinely be against their benefit and that of many others. The sign doesnt tell you this; the sign gives you no critical autonomy to engage with its system of values --- in the way a conversation would. That is how I diagnose this commenter's issue: his critical faculties are not being triggered. Rather the sign is seen transparently as a command to be followed. There are no Commands to be Followed. There are only people commanding, and following them is advised only if it is advised.
        • Podgajski 3y ago
          For some reason you don’t think of the sign as conversation. Why not? Our community has put up the sign and when I read that sign I engage in that conversation. Rules that are agreed on are not authoritarian unless we have no choice in changing them. Since we vote, we have a say on changing them. What you’re saying is, we should have no laws and do whatever we want. We should have no rules and do whatever we want. I’m an anarchist and I don’t even agree with that. I would feel the same about the dog off the lease whether the sign was there or not. Dogs can be dangerous animals and if I don’t know them, I should be afraid.
  • JonChesterfield 3y ago
    Dogs like being off lead. Running around is sort of their driving motive.
    • Podgajski 3y ago
      A lot of dogs also like to bite people, or scare birds, or scare other dogs…. Just because something likes to do something does not mean we should let it do it.
      • scns 3y ago
        A few dogs are so aggressive that they bite people. Usually the owner is the problem.
        • Podgajski 3y ago
          So the owner should be on a leash? (coming back to this I realize that laws and rules are what put people on leashes.) And this would mean the owner who don’t put their dogs on leashes are also the problem. Also “More than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States” That’s a lot… https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/pet-owners/dog-bite-prevention https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/pet-owners/dog-bite-pre...
        • phito 3y ago
          You clearly don't understand how dogs function. The sweetest dog could bite someone if it is scared, startled, in pain, sick. They can be unpredictable and most people do not know how to read a dog's body language. I say that as someone who loves and has dogs.
          • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
            Most dogs that don't mean harm won't actually break skin, for them it's a warning rather than violence. This is not what people mean when they talk about people getting bitten by dogs.
        • 3y ago
  • mo_42 3y ago
    Can you explain how it's more compassionate for a dog to be kept leashed? In my experience dogs are less stressed without a leash. The primary reason for using a leash is that I feel compassionate about people who are afraid of dogs or don't like them. Seeing a leashed dog makes them feel more secure.
    • j-bos 3y ago
      If a dog bites someone, the dog will be killed.
    • Podgajski 3y ago
      I personally don’t think we should have domesticated dogs for pets at all because I think that is cruel on its own. Having an animal for a pet to me, is selfish breeding of pets should be outlawed. But using a leash is part of the domestication process. I can tell you I was at a national park this year, and two off leash pitbulls and a Labrador charged at me. If it wasn’t for my knowledge about dogs, I probably would’ve been bitten. So yes, having a dog on a leash makes me feel less stressed.
      • mo_42 3y ago
        > I personally don’t think we should have domesticated dogs for pets at all because I think that is cruel on its own. Having an animal for a pet to me, is selfish breeding of pets should be outlawed. I fully agree. Yet animal shelters are crammed after the pandemic. Adopting an animal can improve their live.
    • rjmill 3y ago
      I'm not GP, but I agree with their statement about it being more compassionate. It's a safety issue for the dog. I recently saw an off-leash dog get freaked out and run out into a busy road. (The dog didn't get hurt luckily, but it was a horrifying experience for all involved.) Sure, your dog might be "better" than that. But it's not a risk I'm willing to take with my dog.
    • sneed_chucker 3y ago
      Having your dog on a lease is better for everyone involved. It's very annoying how people anthropomorphize and refuse to take responsibility for their animals. Guess what, your dog isn't a person and if it gets agitated and attacks someone, that's your fault. If it decides to chase a squirrel he sees across the street and gets hit by a passing car in the process, that's your fault. Barring all the worst case scenarios, consider that other people don't like your dog jumping up on them nor do they want it pissing and shitting on their property, which is what most dogs do if left to their own devices. Often people who won't leash their dogs claim that the animal is trained well enough to not need it, but this is rarely true. In reality, such dog owners usually just don't care about others and will readily blame anybody but themselves when their unleashed dog gets into trouble.
  • worldsayshi 3y ago
    This rhymes with my prejudice(?) that people on the autistic spectrum has a lower tolerance for cognitive dissonance. Like it's harder to ignore two truths that are incompatible. If it's true it kind of says more about non-autistic people than autistic people.
    • gizmo686 3y ago
      That seems plausible. Cognitive dissonance seems to play a significant role as a social lubricant. Even if there is no direct relationship with autism, the reduced social capacity could mean that they simply do not have the opportunity to develop as advanced a capacity for cognitive dissonance.
  • pnut 3y ago
    Curious what stopped you. Consider that narc'ing people for victimless crimes is something that can be done to you as well, and you definitely will make enemies and earn a reputation by casually reporting people to the police... so maybe just "leave people alone" is a good default policy.
    • Podgajski 3y ago
      I stopped, because I know how cruel people can be. I’ve had a lifetime of doing this and seeing the outcomes. People are vengeful, but today people are more on edge and more likely to carry a weapon. For example, I nearly gotten murdered on an Amtrak train once, because a man was talking loudly, and I asked him if he could please be quiet because he was clearly disrupting everyone and no one else was speaking up. I spoke up, and he followed me off the train and I had to run into the station to get help.
  • kylebenzle 3y ago
    Ok, but we also have to accept that "empathy" is often misplaced, that's part of the issue I think.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I literally did this while walking in the woods the other day. A man asked me how I was and his dog was off the leash, and so I told him I would be better if he followed the etiquette of the trail and kept his dog on a leash. He didn’t seem to like that. However I saw him on the trail with the same dog a few days later on the leash So I’m not sure why this is a problem other than if people are worried that people won’t like them.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    People like us do tend to have a deep sense of fairness and caring yes. I see it too. I don't read other people's feelings so well. But I still care a hell of a lot how I make them feel. At least the ones I care about which is the default for people I meet. Though once someone is a dick to me they can die in a fire and I wouldn't help them, there is that side too which is not as pretty. However most people respond with kindness to kindness so I end up caring about most people as a result. The lack of reading them drives my behaviour a lot because I start pre-empting how my actions could make people feel. And usually going from the worst outcome option so I tend to be a bit withdrawn, going for the safest option. So my social withdrawal tends to stem from caring. It's weird. Ps another thing I notice is that autistic people generally tend to be really open-minded and non-discriminating. Because not really feeling part of a group also means not really feeling the need to set your group apart from other groups. We're all just individuals on a journey through life. It doesn't matter what colour, sexual orientation, etc people have, they're just other people <3 Sometimes I wonder if this is why silicon valley is driving diversity so much.
    • Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Are there highly social aspd peeps? I wonder sometimes
• OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I don’t think that concern for injustice is something universal or even necessarily widespread among autistic people. That is, I believe that there are plenty of autistic people who do not give a fuck, eschew social causes completely, feel misanthropic, etc. Rather, I think that the examples you encountered represent that segment of autistic people who do care, and due to the difficulty that autistic people have with understanding social roles and social boundaries, they felt a need to act and did so, when normies might not have felt a need or would have held back.
  • kstenerud 3y ago
    Every autistic person I've met (and I've met a LOT of them) has this similar drive to stop injustice when they see it (regardless of how much they hate society in general).
    • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      There are plenty of people on the spectrum here who will disagree. Moreover, as someone in that category in Eastern Europe with local peers in that category, I find that quite a few of us share the fatalism that the region is known for and can be suspicious or mocking of attempts to stop injustice. Indeed, could it be that in your region (or in the region of the linked study) concern for social justice is simply a common feature of society such that autistic people will share it, and therefore this is a matter of culture and not autism worldwide?
    • idiotsecant 3y ago
      As a fellow amateur batman fantacist and definite sperglord I think it's not so much about justice necessarily, as much as it is about the system. I need for the world to work on a rational systemic way to be comfortable and counter examples are deeply unsettling to me.
  • wormik 3y ago
    Why such irrelevant comment? You have the crystal ball or all seeing eye or what? Read the study before making such comments
• jollofricepeas 3y ago
  Hate to be another person with another anecdote. But… I manage several neurodivergent people and to be honest they are the best thing about our company. They lead in areas that neurotypicals do not which often is being one of the few to speak out when something appears to be wrong or is wrong. Specifically… - issues that impact women, ethnic minorities & lgbtqia - issues that impact healthcare coverage for pay - issues that impact compensation for themselves and others we about had a riot when they found out our org was not matching inflation.
  • Yoric 3y ago
    I've had similar experience managing ND people. I'll be more than happy to repeat the experience!
• verisimi 3y ago
  Is it injustice, or is it adherence to certain principles (rules) that they have grasped?
  • Yoric 3y ago
    I parsed this as injustice, but I could be wrong.
• jprete 3y ago
  From the outside, it's very very difficult to tell what the actual motivation is. As a kid on the spectrum, I learned very early to shut up about everything genuine in myself, because peoples' social reactions were so painful. I still have to unlearn that decades later. I did things similar to what the kids you mention do, and I think it was out of a very strong desire to "make incorrect things correct" rather than "make unjust things just". Both of those urges are out of the mainstream, but if a person acts in a way that matches both, then there's strong social pressure on everyone else to treat it positively.
  • seba_dos1 3y ago
    Ha, I kept wondering whether I feel such a strong need to "make unjust things just", but "make incorrect things correct" rings much closer to home. I guess the former gets crippled hard by social anxiety, while the latter can drive a lot of behaviors where social contact isn't in the foreground.
• omginternets 3y ago
  I've often remarked (informally) that autistic people seem to operate under the assumption that the explicitly-stated rules are the actual rules. "Help others in need" would be the go-to example of how this confusion(?) can lead to a positive outcome.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    How is “help others in need” confusingly explicit? Maybe it’s my neurodivergence talking but that seems pretty straightforward advice.
    • omginternets 3y ago
      Because of the “sometimes people who help get in trouble” part.
      • hughesjj 3y ago
        Flashbacks to highschool, and my underage...
    • Name_Chawps 3y ago
      Sometimes those in need don't want your help. Sometimes you aren't skilled or knowledgeable enough to help, and you'll just do more harm than good if you try. Sometimes by helping, you'll cause more harm to yourself than you'll prevent in the other person. Etc.
  • aeyes 3y ago
    As a person on the spectrum "help others in need" is actually a very difficult concept because I don't really care about them. When something happens around me where I'm not directly involved my instinct is to ignore it or to get out of the situation so that I can go on with my life. The only difference is when I see unfairness or injustice, then I feel like I have to do something about it. But it usually isn't about the person, it's about the principle.
    • 3y ago