Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids “see” emotions

An internet friend had a child diagnosed with "selective mutism." It's basically medicalese for "The kid gets tongue tied and can't manage to talk in some social situations."

Telling other people "She has selective mutism" turned out to make the child's social problems so much worse that she stopped doing that and began telling people "She's just shy." like her own parents had said about her when she was growing up.

I think people seek diagnoses when they are too impaired to cope on their own and they are in social settings where having a label is the only way other people will accommodate them.

My sons don't have a formal diagnosis because I homeschooled, so I didn't need it to get them accommodation. My oldest is so obviously not normally that I still have people just assume he's aspie without me ever saying anything about him having special needs. And he's better and more normal seeming than he used to be, which sometimes causes problem when people assume he's being intentionally difficult instead of assuming he's impaired in some way.

I always told him he just has to find his niche in life.

His dad was career military. I think he probably qualifies as on the spectrum. He will probably never be officially diagnosed. Being in the military worked for him.

It's recommended that you buy multiple copies of the same outfit for your aspie kid to accommodate their sensory issues. Einstein dressed that way and there are other people who have dressed that way without having a diagnosis of ASD.

The military expects you to wear a uniform. So you are required to have multiple copies of the same outfit to wear to work and you can't wear anything else.

Many people complain bitterly about things like school uniforms. I knew more than one military member whose attitude was more like "One less thing for me to worry about!"

We are all a sum of a bunch of different things, including social climate around us. It's much easier to blame the individual and double down on expecting them to fit in than to tell the rest of the world to get over its crap.

Please notice that human rights issues like racism, sexism, etc. are battles to tell the rest of the world to quit its crap. We aren't there yet for various types of people we have decided are "disabled."

I am medically handicapped. I have a compromised immune system. My life has been easier in many ways since the pandemic started because suddenly the rest of the world cares about germ control. Normally, it's just my personal problem that other people's nasty habits literally make me sick.

I hope we outlaw blowing your nose at restaurant tables and stuff like that because of the pandemic. That would permanently improve my quality of life and ability to participate regularly in normal society instead of hiding out at home most of the time.

>And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes.

A friend of mine once told me something that stuck with me, truly mastering something isn't the ability to do it well yourself, it's the ability to pass on the knowledge to others. Having taught before I agree. You never realize how little you understand the details of things until you try to teach someone else, and once you become cognizant of the details you forgot while learning enough to teach them to someone else, while retaining your skills and muscle memory, I feel like you can begin to call yourself a master.

I recognize the phenomenon. I once had a roommate who changed his major to communications and then bragged that it was his life's calling and he was the best at communication. He fought with us over stupid stuff and never learned to listen. Drove us totally insane. He used to say that we were going to be bad husbands in the future because we didn't mention things that bothered us as aggressively as he did. Another friend who studied communications very seriously said that many communications professors had marital issues because of their belief in their own abilities. Totally anecdotal, of course.

That you think a sad person needs consoling reveals your lack of understanding of the problem. It wouldn't occur to an autistic person to console someone who is sad. The ability to read emotion isn't useful on its own. You also need to know how to react to this emotion. Knowing someone is angry won't help you if you have no idea how to defuse this anger. Social interactions do not make sense for autistic people and need to be learned like a foreign language. It's like writing a computer program. You have to be very precise when telling a computer what to do and the same goes for autistic people. You can't just tell them someone is angry and expect them to know what to do. Or when someone is sad, even if you tell them that they have to console such a person, they'd have no idea what consoling even is and how to do it.