My little brother is autistic and admits he's wrong all the time. The title of this is trash.
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“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
141–150 of 521 posts
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion For someone having autism, this may be impossible. If they are open about their autism, one could argue that the manager should be the one trying to see the topic from two sides. One may also need to come up with a shared understanding where the manager has a way to inform the autistic perso…
I’m all for accommodating disability. But in this case an obvious solution might be to do what your manager suggests simply because he is your manager. As a non-autistic person I don’t find it difficult to voice my concerns about a particular course of action and then do it anyway if that’s what the boss wants. (I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns” — doing that in a manner that doesn’t come off as conf…
> I realize the sticking point is “voice my concerns”
But in an interaction between an engineer and a manager, anything less than voicing your concerns is an abdication of responsibility. If the manager switches off at the first expression of concern from an engineer, then I imagine that's a team that's bound to failure.
Jump ship.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#143> 1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying
We are often hearing a lot of unspecific waffle at great expense. The author goes on to say they are spending a few minutes setting the context. I have to deal with this a lot, and in reality, without cutting you off, it often goes on for 30 minutes to answer a simple question poorly.
How this looks in reality. The worker wants to move some cables to another switch to install a server but prefers to waffle for 30 minutes instead of drawing a diagram. Typically this consumes the whole team meeting and nobody gets to discuss their items.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#144> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved; I explained that technology choices made no difference to the user. However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea. That's an exceptionally patronising position to take. The manager almost certainly isn't a fool, and likely understands the author's point already. It's much more likely that the manager was actually asking if the…
Yep. If my manager asks a question like that, there are three appropriate responses:
(1) Unfortunately that would be challenging for us because X.
(2) We've been talking about that for ages, because X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could make time for a rewrite next quarter.
(3) Hmm, interesting. Can you share the blog post? (Buys me time to think and follow up later).
What neither of us have time for is for me to walk him through my thought process via the Socratic method.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#145It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in. I'm not saying it is fair. Life is never fair. The only one who has the ability to influence those situations is oneself. You can't rely on other to change - it won't work anyways. You have to be the one that improves those interactions. For your own good.
> It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in.
Is it not exactly what allistic people are doing?
Autistic people communicate just fine with other autistic people. It's allistic people that don't fit in and want to change everybody around them because they can't suffer a bit of diversity in thinking and communication.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the person you responded to, but the quantity for which half are below and half are above (+-1) is called "median".
Which is one of three forms of averaging ... ? Mean, median and mode. Though it's true that people usually mean 'mean' when they say 'average'.
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Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions. These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and mov…
The biggest insight I have had in my personal life is that relationships are more important than facts. Building and keeping long-term relationships at work and in my family is, by far, more important than being right every time (even if I can verify being right). Verifying it just makes the abrasion to the relationship worse.
Important caveat, for me, is that I want to be able to share my perspective, and believe that, over time, they will consider it, and it will impact their thinking. I think this is the case more often than people think.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the blame is with the other party. An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1] The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average. An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above…
>> An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1] >> [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in. I don't know why more than half. Can you explain?
Medians, averages, and the peak of a probability distribution are all distinct in the general case.
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#149I read this as being strongly opinionated and egocentric.. I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified. I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or disco…
Wow. The sheer level of disrespect in this comment... You can't appreciate that this person have spent 10h per day for last 23 years at dealing with computer issues. Instead you think it would be better spent learning some office politics. I'm not even sure how to comment on that.
There’s a difference between engaging in petty office politics and endeavoring to grow your soft skills. And everyone, including hard core techies, can benefit from learning how to better interact with other people.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest insight I have had in my personal life is that relationships are more important than facts. Building and keeping long-term relationships at work and in my family is, by far, more important than being right every time (even if I can verify being right). Verifying it just makes the abrasion to the relationship worse.
Important caveat, for me, is that I want to be able to share my perspective, and believe that, over time, they will consider it, and it will impact their thinking. I think this is the case more often than people think.
Yes, I was more referring to insisting on being right and being dismissive of other viewpoints. I have caused incalculable damage to my personal relationships because of this pattern of behavior in myself.