4 ms·

No, I do think this is still an example of disordered expectations. What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expecta

by yterdy 2y ago

No, I do think this is still an example of disordered expectations. What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not." Which is probably worse. As the other reply mentioned, there is an empathy (double empathy) problem, but the answer is not for one party to have to assume responsibility for the other's comfort entirely by having to guess all of their unspoken emotional desires for the conversation. "The query explicitly didn't include [...]" is kind of a ridiculous thing to expect someone to respect or even predict. Also, I don't mean to pick apart your comment, but: >Neurotypical communication 101 is that a casual conversation question about your favourite things is probably a cue for you to be enthusiastic and effusive about things you care about rather than a prompt for you provide names only I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves.

notahacker 2y ago
> What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not." No, it changes it from "if you would be interested in hearing anything other than the briefest and least informative answer, it's your responsibility to explicitly state how much information you expect and in what form" to "of the vast set of theoretically possible answers, those which take into account what will be meaningful to the other person are generally better, although it's entirely understandable and expected that autistic people might not be able to do this". And the article here wasn't insisting autistic people should make conversations flow or that neurotypical people shouldn't ever modify their expectations or followup questions, it made the simple observation that the high-functioning autistic twin has actually learned to do this, pattern matching well enough to provide additional context on behalf of his brother (who apparently regularly struggles to form sentences, presumably even when the question explicitly demands it). I think the conclusion that this is because one of the autistic identical twins has developed better communication skills than his brother (who quite possibly has other learning difficulties) is correct, and it definitely isn't an example of his brother being trapped in a world where all human communication except children's TV is just too imprecise for him. > I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves. There is a happy medium between staccato answers and relating the entire plot of the episode or insisting that all other shows pale in comparison with it, and a difference between bringing up $nichepursuit because someone asked and bringing it up because they were talking about something else. And yes, this happy medium is going to be more difficult for people on the autistic spectrum to recognise. But even excessive enthusiasm about something most people find extremely boring is more endearing than repeated one or three word responses that technically answer the question.

by yterdy 2y ago

notahacker 2y ago

> What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not." No, it changes it from "if you would be interested in hearing anything other than the briefest and least informative answer, it's your responsibility to explicitly state how much information you expect and in what form" to "of the vast set of theoretically possible answers, those which take into account what will be meaningful to the other person are generally better, although it's entirely understandable and expected that autistic people might not be able to do this". And the article here wasn't insisting autistic people should make conversations flow or that neurotypical people shouldn't ever modify their expectations or followup questions, it made the simple observation that the high-functioning autistic twin has actually learned to do this, pattern matching well enough to provide additional context on behalf of his brother (who apparently regularly struggles to form sentences, presumably even when the question explicitly demands it). I think the conclusion that this is because one of the autistic identical twins has developed better communication skills than his brother (who quite possibly has other learning difficulties) is correct, and it definitely isn't an example of his brother being trapped in a world where all human communication except children's TV is just too imprecise for him. > I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves. There is a happy medium between staccato answers and relating the entire plot of the episode or insisting that all other shows pale in comparison with it, and a difference between bringing up $nichepursuit because someone asked and bringing it up because they were talking about something else. And yes, this happy medium is going to be more difficult for people on the autistic spectrum to recognise. But even excessive enthusiasm about something most people find extremely boring is more endearing than repeated one or three word responses that technically answer the question.