6 ms·
There is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane. Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself
by Anotheroneagain 2y ago
There is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane.
Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself completely wrong with an experiment, an "intelligent" man concocts a social conspiracy theory, but nothing proves him wrong: instead, he pronounces those who "don't get it" hopelesly stupid, too socially dumb to participate in a society.
- baq 2y agoThis sounds like memespeak cope. There is a deficit from the perspective of other people participating in the society. Yes, nothing died inside. No, it isn’t necessary for anything to be dead for a deficit to exist.
- hiciu 2y agoThe double empathy problem explains why it may not be a deficiency, just a "different brain language" between ND and NT people. Basically, from autistic perspective, it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication. There's been a whole lot of research about that in the last 10-15 years or so. And a lot of memes in the community.
- blueflow 2y ago> it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication Example: In a Job interview, when you get asked why you did apply. Its the social norm to lie and make up some reason that sounds good, and saying the truth "i need money to pay my rent" makes you the weird one. People say ND people are blunt and frank... but the other side of the same coin would be that NT people can't talk about facts.
- zozbot234 2y ago> when you get asked why you did apply. What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?" Then saying "hey, I need money for blah whatever" is non-responsive, but you can just talk about why you think you might be a good fit for them after all. Much of this stuff is just cultural anyway. There are Western societies where being "blunt and frank" like that is quite accepted or even expected, unlike the U.S. and the Anglosphere more generally.
- saghm 2y ago> What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?" Then saying "hey, I need money for blah whatever" is non-responsive, but you can just talk about why you think you might be a good fit for them after all. Yes, and that's exactly what's confusing to people like me who have autism; the question being asked isn't actually the question that they're looking for the answer to, and it's up to us to figure out what they actually mean. In this context, it might seem obvious to someone neurotypical, but I don't think I can easily articulate just how common this type of thing happens on a regular basis. The problem for me is that while I might understand what to do in this circumstance due to having encountered it before, it feels impossible to extrapolate what people mean when I'm in a new situation that I haven't had a chance to learn the "rules" for yet. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've had to separately learn what the expected norms are for pretty much every circumstance I've ever encountered when people say one thing but assume that it's clear that they mean something different. The fact that most of this stuff is cultural doesn't really change the fact that implicitly learning rules like this is something that most people don't struggle with to the extent that people with autism do. To me, the issue isn't that I specifically want people to be "blunt and frank" or not, but that no one directly communicates what the expectations are, and that it's not as simple as a binary of whether to be blunt or not. Most people might struggle if they suddenly found themselves in a culture where the expectations were different than they were used to, but they probably didn't struggle to learn the expectations of their own culture. For me, learning the expectations of the culture I've spent my entire life in is still an ongoing process after over three decades, and I don't expect that it will ever really be complete. An culture of all autistic people wouldn't be identifiable merely by how blunt they are, but by the giant binder they give everyone who comes to visit with all of the expectations written out to avoid any confusion. The reason I struggle with communication every day of my life is because I never got that binder, but everyone else seems to already have it memorized.
- zozbot234 2y agoI think I've made the case above that it's not merely about "being neurotypical", it's also about being steeped in a very specific culture. That peculiar use of "why did you apply" might as well be described as an idiomatic expression, a play on words that happens to be common in that well-defined context. If you aren't familiar with that usage because you are from a different cultural context (or even something as simple as a different "low-class" socio-economic stratum in the same society), you might misunderstand the question in the exact same way - or perhaps you'll grok it but you'll still be bothered by the implied "dishonesty" in it and be inclined to subvert expectations by starting with a straight and to the point answer, and then getting into the actual topic of why you think you were right to apply.
- saghm 2y agoYeah, at least in my experience as someone autistic, I sometimes joke that everybody else got together and decided on a bunch of rules for how everyone needs to talk to each other going forward, but somehow my invite got lost and I missed my chance to learn them. I don't pretend to have any idea if things would be better or worse for society as a whole if everybody did things the way that would seem more natural to me, but it does seem pretty likely to me that neurotypical people would probably struggle in a lot of the ways I often do. In a certain sense, this makes the experience of being autistic more frustrating. If there were some definitive flaw someone could point to in my brain that would make communication difficult for me regardless of social norms, that might be easier to come to terms with; the feeling that I'm not actually struggling due to any actual issue other than not being in the majority makes it hard not to feel resentful sometimes though. That being said, it's so hard to conceive of a clean separation between the parts of my personality that I do like and the parts that make me struggle to communicate in a neurotypical fashion that if there were a magic switch I could flip to make me like everyone else (whatever that would mean), I still don't think I'd do it. At the end of the day, it's part of what makes me who I am, and I wouldn't recognize who I'd become without it.
- blueflow 2y agoIs it the majority? For me its always the moral guardian type of person, and they are definitely not the majority.
- saghm 2y agoI'm honestly not quite sure what you mean here (which I guess is fitting given the topic of conversation!). In case what I was talking about might have unclear, when I talk about feeling like the majority of people are different than me, I'm saying the idea of social norms being communicated implicitly, or at least being something most people seem to be able to infer from previous examples. To use the example of the interview given above, someone might be able to explain to me that when I'm asked that question, I shouldn't treat it as literal and instead given an answer that fits the expectation they'll actually have, but if the interview instead asks a slightly different question like "what's one thing you would change about your current job?", someone like me might not realize that this is _also_ not a question where it's good to give an answer like "I wish I got paid more for doing less work". For me, it's impossible to take all of the norms and expectations that I've learned over the years and apply them to an entirely new situation that I'm not familiar with, and that's not something that most people seem to struggle with as much as me.
- Aurornis 2y ago> Example: In a Job interview, when you get asked why you did apply. Its the social norm to lie and make up some reason that sounds good, and saying the truth "i need money to pay my rent" makes you the weird one This question has been included (not by my choice) in some hiring loops where I’ve been an interviewer. There are a lot of good answers that are definitely not lies. You see a lot of candidates who actually care about the work they do, the people they work with, and advancing their career. You don’t even need to pretend you love to work. That’s not the question at all. Good answers include “This role is a natural next step in my career and I could leverage a lot of my experience at past jobs here” The cynical myth that it’s just a trick question to see who lies the best does not match what I saw. Honestly, it’s not hard to see when someone is treating an interview question (or the whole interview) like a competition to see who can lie the best. > People say ND people are blunt and frank... but the other side of the same coin would be that NT people can't talk about facts. That’s a deeply unfair characterizing of “ND vs NT” given then that “neurodivergent” label covers a multitude of different modalities. There are people who identify as neurodivergent in ways that make them obsessively love their work, for example. I personally don’t think the “neurodivergent” label is very useful any more because most people use it to describe themselves as if everyone “neurodivergent” is just like them and everyone not like them is “neurotypical”, as you’ve done in this comment.
- dooglius 2y agoIf you offered minimum wage, do you think those candidates would still accept? If not, then you can deduce that the compensation must be a significant factor, but one that goes unstated.
- chubbyFIREthrwy 2y agoGood points, I appreciate the perspective! But, as someone probably on the spectrum, I still feel like the point about "NT people can't talk about facts" holds up. Like, if someone replies, "I need the money etc" why can't NTs better clarify what they mean? For example, "Okay but why this company/role/specialty" as opposed to <alternative>?" If someone lacks the self-awareness to narrow down what they're looking for in a case like that, and just writes off the interviewee as deficient somehow, I'm happy to label the interviewer as being bad at "talking about facts". I've had a case where I got a similar kind of prompt, and I asked a clarifying question to better get at what he was looking for, and he replied, "Just, whatever you interpret that to mean." Like, what? You're the one asking the question, and you don't know what you want out of it? You'll knowingly let the interviewee "interpret" it, in a possibly incorrect way? There was a reddit thread I'll try to find where they were asked "What's your favorite drink" and they replied "water" to which the follow-up was "come on, you can do better than that". A lot of commenters said, "oh yeah obviously that was an attempt to get you to see if you can intelligently defend your preference" or whatever. Okay, but the interviewer can also clarify what they're looking for! Is it really (always) a bona fide occupational qualification to be able to guess the wishes of someone who's making no effort to express them on their own end?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoThere is NO deficit. While science allowed the schizophrenics to fix their material related thinking (but they eventually corrupted that anyway) and become somewhat funcional in that regard, they have always stayed socially isolated. As such, all recent history that we are taught is narrated from their perspective. People suffered horribly, until science allowed the people to rise up against THEM. Anything else is at best mentioned as a side note, utter madness, a fringe belief only held by the 95% of the people. They were harmed, opressed, subjugated and gassed, and whatever else, but now they are free.