If I need to move a little differently, or not hold eye contact when I speak, the fact that I get made fun of is the problem. If we just accepted, "hey, some people are like that" more, I think we'd have a lot fewer problems.
I am not autistic personally but working in tech and being into field-associated hobbies, I have a much more autism-dense social circle than the average person. This was awkward for me at first because it felt like I was either constantly irritated or being irritating to others by following my standard learned social conventions.
Once I changed my expectations to clarify and verify intent instead of derive and assume intent from others, this immediately stopped. Applying the same changes in social interaction with people who are not on the spectrum has actually felt like it leads to less misunderstandings and hurt feelings as well. I’m left wondering if the parts of human interaction that created these standards that autistic people find so frustrating might not even exist anymore and the rest of us have been upholding conventions that ultimately make life harder for us, just because we were taught to do so.
"Normal" people (whatever that means) tend to forget things quite quickly, and for us it's really hard when states change and contracts change. Meaning that if e.g. in a discussion 3 months ago we casually agreed upon "I do task X and you do task Y" then this will be the assumed state for autistic people until the end of time, because that's what we agreed upon.
When other people at work communicate their feelings, have a bad day and don't want to do those things, or are just lazy about it... Then this is a breach of a social contract. And dealing with those breaches of contracts without getting very defensive very quickly about it is really a huge problem for a lot of autistic people I've spoken with. We tend to spiral quickly into a defensive argument that won't help other involved parties and it tends to escalate into a "mudfight" instead of a debate quickly.
I just wish that a lot of therapy would help prepare you for these situations of misunderstood (or misagreed upon) situations more. You can compensate for them for a small degree, but they put a lot of burden on us because it's quite a big deal if the state of assumptions changes.
Additionally, talking in conversations about the assumed outcome first before you get into detail would help a lot. Do you need emotional support? Do you want to feel that we are together in this? Do you need a practical solution? Do you need a change in what we agreed upon?
This way we can prepare much easier for what's about to come.
Also don't use sayings like "you always do X" in those conversations when it is not always, because autistic people intend to interpret these as accusations very quickly because they sound excessive and are huge trigger points for us, because they are essentially lies. If you say instead something like "I feel like you do never X" we can realize that it's more about the perception and how to improve our contributions, because we can keep the discussion about how to balance each party's contributions to the task at hand.
Tangentially, I hate that people express hollow intentions, like “We should definitely hang out some time.” Why would you say that, when it's not your intention? Of course, I understand that people say such things because of social conditioning. But, such language tends to upset people regardless of neurotype. One could simply say “It was nice to see you. Goodbye.” It would be all right.
This is how much of the world works. Johnny doesn't have autism, he's just really into trains. It would be incredibly rude to say much more.
I'd like to draw a parallel with disability. I don't think anyone in their right mind would express that they actively work against people with disabilities, and I'm sure most people would express support if asked directly. But this doesn't translate to actually accessible infrastructure and culture. That takes a lot of special work - and regulation actually, without which the work wouldn't have happened.
All this to say that intentions and expressions are a great first step, but there is much more to acceptance than that.
Of course, what you point out is universal, so there are limits to this perspective. But in more collectivist cultures, I suspect that the burden of adjusting to people who struggle to conform can be more easily shouldered by more than just the nuclear family, or even celebrated more, erm, naturally.
For those who don't know the term "atomized culture": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism_(social)
well off educated people looking to rationalize whatever they think about society, interactions, etc. lotta people here living in a bubble.
great tech discussions sometimes, tho.
This is to say that everyone is slightly different and a healthy dose of tolerance goes a long way. After all, some of your behaviour is probably annoying to others and you do not even realize it.
Also, at extreem low body fat you start to loose the pad of fat behind the eyes, resulting in that sunken look of many supermodels. This of course can reshape the back of the eye and impact vision.
A French actor (Christophe Lambert) has a special expression when he looks at the camera. It is because he is short-sighted and does not look exactly in the typical spot other would look at. He could not use contact lenses so there was no way to change that. The people who fought with him in the Highlander series (with swords) said that it was always an adventure because he was not really sure where he was hitting.
Earlier in my career during interviews I'd always tell the interviewer "I'm listening, keep talking, I just need to look at the floor or wall to concentrate or I get too distracted by your animated-ness" and this was in the days before autism entered the zeitgeist. Nobody cared or thought it was particularly odd as far as I could tell. We were accustomed to nerds who sat alone thinking at computers most of the time being quirky, and appreciated the need to concentrate (private offices with doors that close!).
But as I get older it's become more necessary to look at something else while listening to anyone tell me anything I intend to grok. And I'm pretty certain ~everyone now assumes I'm autistic because of it. Never been diagnosed as such.
My interpretation and internal modeling of things is highly visual and genuine visual input is a sort of noise that interferes with my mental reconstruction of what I'm hearing. I have no idea if that overlaps with autism.
I have to make a special effort to make eye contact, and when I do I feel like my “trying to see better” habits and postures make others uncomfortable. I’ve no idea what “normal eye contact” feels like.
I might also have some autism traits (I’m a coder, after all), so that feeds into it.. but even if I wasn’t coder/austistic, I’d be struggling in this domain.
I offer this as anecdata for your “everyone is different” suggestion.
As somebody who occasionally struggles to fit in socially, I have come to understand that I might come across in ways that do not reflect my inner feelings and that I need to add a bit more context and explanation, and just be more careful in general. You sort of have to help people to see where you're coming from to help them tune their social barometer somewhat sort of speaking.
At the extreme, you'd just start any conversation with "hey, I'm autistic, so if I appear a bit weird..." to hard-reset people's expectations and sooth their inner alarms. That is assuming they're decent folks acting in good faith.
Then people will criticize you for making autism your whole identity.
Which is a silly point to make but people can be pricks. Not saying you gave bad advice, just saying, it a damned if you do, damned if you don't with some people. I think it is generally good to be open about it, if not just to filter out intolerant people faster.
Many sapiens like to believe they are good people, but they don't like to to think about what that really means. It seems we are talking about a filter that identifies such people very quickly.
Try making inappropriate eye contact with a human male. You'll probably live to make it to the next experiment, even if you do get punched. Now try it with a gorilla or chimp.
Sexual cues, hunger, aggression/submission postures and responses, whether calls (i.e. communication, speech) engenders trust and connection or mistrust and threat. These things can't be completely overcome, and if they could, our species would have lost the underlying structure and template that allows us to build the greater achievements of self-control and civilization.
The instinct is still there. Of course it is. We can override it in a way other creatures probably can't, but expecting people to not be influenced by instinct and such is a non-starter.
Everyone I knew then, even the "cool kids," thought high school was some bleak hell punctuated with moments of extraordinary joy. I have no idea whether that's due to hormones or school or what.
Edit: looks like white guy from Norway which explains why you'd think that.
The obsession with skin color and race seems to be a very US-American thing.
Concerning apple pie, I disagree: I know Russians who are similarly obsessed about шарлотка [transcription: sharlotka] (a Russian apple pie). :-)
Of course, these individuals are not at all active on social media so you very rarely see them represented.
For example, an allistic (meaning not autistic, but perhaps neurosivergent in some other way) person is more likely to keep their goal unstated and only known through subtle semi-involuntary signs that others evolved to pick up on due to the advantages that come from understanding such semi-involuntarily-shared information. Autistic people who can speak generally just say, with words alone, what they want to communicate, and are less inclined to make such subtle inferences and less likely to perform them in the way that allistic people do. For some people this manifests in an autism accent where the speech is completely well formed in a grammatical sense (not necessarily the same grammar that's in formal writing) but has no tonal information.
This difference is also reflected in conflict resolution: most autistic people will each say what their goals are and then try to find a way to satisfy everyone's goals. Allistic people I have observed are more likely to not want to put that effort in, and will this via the aforementioned subtle communication decide on some particular resolution or will play social status games to get their way.
There is also some scientific research in this area that provides support for this understanding of different modes of communication. For example this¹ provides evidence that there is a different mode of communication, although it doesn't explore what makes up those differences. It filtered for typical IQ scores, but not for support needs.
1: Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Jones, M., Adams, C., Pearson, A., Scott, F., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2019). Autistic people’s social camouflaging in daily life. Autism, 23(3), 606–613.
I think autistic people are better at dropping their egos and working towards goals.
As an autistic person, I fucking LOVE building a plan with a clear set of goals and then accomplishing em. It has nothing to do with me as an individual, it's all about the big picture. I run into problems with people who can't drop their ego and work together because I just don't want to tolerate it.
Give me a STEM team full of autistics folks any day. So much less ego to deal with.
Autistic are not collaborative - they frequently end up locked in own heads completely ignoring what other people openly directly say.
People are always looking for plausible deniability and weaponized vagueness in order to get away with things. They don't like it when others don't behave that way because it puts them in situations where they would have to assume the risks of their behaviors.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not the so-called autists that are in the wrong but everyone else that is basically engaged in deceptive behavior. I think this behavior is the most prevalent because of evolutionary pressure, in order to avoid conflict and potentially bad outcomes.
It makes sense in a violent world were looking at someone wrong may get you killed but is very unproductive in a society that is supposed to be orderly and high trust.
That being said it seems like the world is becoming much more low trust and autistic behavior can indeed become risky/problematic.
In the case of autism, "social awkwardness" used to fall under aspergers, a diagnosis that was removed over the protestations of many aspergers advocacy organizations in the DSM-V. See, the DSM-V was massively influenced by a lobbying effort or "intelligence" operation. They were hugely focused on things like eradicating any mention of "sub-clinical" autism or recovery criteria. The abolition of aspergers was a concerted effort to essentially force people with aspergers to fight the stigma suffered by "somebody who might have to wear adult diapers and maybe a head-restraining device." As the committee representatives claimed, "it was our belief that the best way to address stigma was to confront it across the spectrum. Why did we deserve protection that other autistic people did not receive?"
"This was... reflective of our commitment to 'cross-spectrum solidarity'." To be clear, this was an effort towards imposed "solidarity", where people with one disorder that often presented mildly enough they could make an attempt at passing for normal were forced to identify as and engage in activism on behalf of said adult-diaper-wearers if they wanted recognition, destigmatization, or access to services. It was an effort I can see only as malign to re-stigmatize or explicitly block "normalization" for those who could enjoy it.
Really, the consolidation of autism into one "spectrum" diagnosis involving a massively diverse constellation of systems was a political mistake not a scientific choice. It's one based fundamentally on presentation, not on etiology, despite dealing with a massively polygenic disease that appears to have many different potential causes. It only served to slow down efforts towards management and a cure (no surprise, given many "advocate" types continue to assert it is simply wrong that the world has norms in a tone similar to those deaf people who oppose cochlear implants.)
You can see this intellectual thread carried forward to recent times. A piece from 2023 reflects very similar sentiments, essentially saying that the consolidation of diagnoses is good because it "[protects] the most vulnerable": https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/weaponized-heterogen...
Those who have a shot at a "normal" life passing as "normal" are, naturally, not considered. You can see this pretty easily in the basic framing of the issue as "access to services", services which Asperger's patients required and used much less. This was a transparent and explicit effort to lower chances of "normalcy" in an attempt to benefit those who didn't have a shot at it; the "solidarity" framing was, in that sense, completely honest. I see it as nothing less than ascientific and contemptible.
(Much of this information is drawn from a paper the two men who liased with the DSM-V committee wrote some years later and which may be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337112539_Lobbying_...)
I think a lot of people confuse neurodivergent with autistic as well.
The whole field needs a reorganization anyway. I've talked to dozens of therapists about this and I've received wildly different answers on what autism even is.
And conversely, autistic as a savant was a thing 25 years ago. Long before the social media.
John, 38 yo virgin, spending 50% of his income on Gundam figurines while living with his aging mother and having no IRL friends is supposedly not "autistic enough" for you if he can hold a job, walk and talk normally? What about that one girl you went to high school with who couldn't stop talking about Supernatural and had a full-on meltdown in front of the whole class on more than one occasion, to the point where she had no friends by junior year and got severely depressed?
These characters were seen as "just weird" until actual scientists started figuring out they were autistic, and now they might have a better life with treatment and the necessary disability benefits
Anyway, I suspect "in the past" is further in the past than you think: the distinction between Asperger's and ASD has been officially ditched by the medical community for 12 years now, at least insofar as the DSM represents consensus.
I'm gonna push back on this. There isn't an objective way to diagnose someone with autism like there is with, say, a vitamin B deficiency.
What we do know is the medical community continues to diagnose boys with this condition at a much higher rate than girls.
This would not appear to imply a "false" belief.
People forget that apsergers and autism as a subject were born from the eugenics movement. Asperger’s work on autism was shaped by the Nazi regime’s eugenics and race hygiene policies, which influenced his definitions and categorizations of autistic children.
These classifications serve only to justify atrocities.
There are folks out in the world today being repressed because they don't fit into some cultural ideal set in place by the totalitarian-authoritarian doctrine of eugenics, which has been used for nefarious purposes for over a century now.
He also says "These weren’t overweight or sedentary individuals" which makes me think he didn't thoroughly read the abstract, which says the main finding is that sedentary people have decreased markers of mitochondrial respiration relative to moderately active people.
I'm all for making sure that effective treatments are made available to anyone they might help, but couldn't a lot of this be addressed society just...being tolerant of diversity in people?
Gating everyone through "thrives in American High School" as a measure of normalcy selects for some pretty weird shit, and you can see that in the composition of the leadership today. American high school is about the nastiest thing you could get away with doing at scale in peacetime (go watch Euphoria sometime, no one I know has said it's anything but the uncomfortable truth).