“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#171

Post by peteradio » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #67

larve wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is per…

Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better. However, that isn't quite what…

> I needed to understand why our checkout had to be improved

Is that not an invitation to explain the business goal? What is so patronizing about a direct statement of need?

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#172

Post by samatman » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

starkd wrote: post #91

jiggawatts wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

I think you might be confusing autistism with high intelligence. The two are very different. I'm not sure it's even remotely comparable. Most autistic truly autistic people have a severe deficit to the point they have a problem with basic navigation of the world. Not just inconvencies. There's a tendency to turn every difficulty into a syndrome. While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not…

There was a time when the term Asperger's existed to distinguish this particular sort of autistic person from other forms of autism, which as you allude to, can involve severe mental disability and require a lifetime of care by others.

Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.

Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.

If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#173

Post by mort96 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #165

mort96 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you hear throughout your life that you can't admit you're wrong or that your _kind of person_ can't admit they're wrong. Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct? And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wr…

> Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct? I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.

Hmm, that sort of assumes that there's essentially no undiagnosed autism. After some very quick googling, it seems like undiagnosed autism is very common, and it seems more common the farther back in time you go. It doesn't surprise me one bit that someone with a milder form of autism born in the 70s/80s might not get diagnosed.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#174

Post by peteradio » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

bluesign wrote: post #65

CoastalCoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on why you see the OP's position as patronizing? AFAICT, the OP identified a minimal set of questions he thought needed to be asked to give a good answer, and tried to ask them. Are you taking exception to how he sought that information, or something else?

Problem is communication there. > A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it All questions can be reflected easily. > Is our checkout page not performing well? > Will a new checkout solve our problem? Will React make our checkout page performing better / improve checkout ? > Why do they think a t…

If the manager has no clue then why are they bringing the ideas? They could spend all day long pitching dog shit that engineering has to bat away, is that the managers job to be the ideas guy?

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#175

Post by starkd » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

shlant wrote: post #164

starkd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He openly admits his default way of dealing with the miscommunication was to quietly walk out of the room. Looks like he could consider some of his own advice. Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot.

> Also, referring to "allistic communication patterns" might also be another impediment here. Normal people don't talk like that. It's like talking to a robot. why are you assuming they are talking to people IRL like they would write a blog post? Very few people talk in person like they type or behave differently in professional environments vs casual. Seems like a weird critique.

Fair point. He did not explicitly quote his conversations with his colleagues. Still, you have to admit "allistic communication patterns" is an awkward phrase to use for a blog post talking about his personal struggles. It might be something you find in a psychology research text, but he was trying to relate his personal experience.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#176

Post by rendall » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

larve wrote: post #68

dusted wrote: post #19

I 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…

Author here, thanks for reading. I didn’t give much information about my life, but I am pretty adept at playing all these games. So much so that I thought there was no way I could be autistic because of how many friends and business relationships I had. Until it hit me that I spent my 20ies doing what you suggest, which is studying the heck out of these things. But it stops at engineering, where I try to be very open…

Given the headline, I thought it would be an article about what it looks like when you acknowledge that you are wrong and why people might not understand that you are, in fact, acknowledging when you are wrong.

Instead, it was an entire article that not once acknowledged that you could be wrong, nor what it looks like when you do acknowledge it. It detailed about how, actually, you're not usually wrong.

This article appears to underscore the accusation.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#177

Post by mason55 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

moreira wrote: post #34

> "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic. This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to…

What I’ve found useful is to dig until we understand why we disagree. Assuming the other person reasoned their self into a reasonable position, then if we have different answers then we probably came from different starting points.

Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#178

Post by shlant » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

camtarn wrote: post #157

larve wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

I feel like the article isn't actually directly addressing its title. It could be stronger with some situations to when you were wrong, with examples of how that was swiftly resolved, as you mentioned in the intro paragraph. At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinio…

I think the point of the article is to express the ways in which it can feel like those on the spectrum are unwilling to admit they were wrong when it might not be what is happening by providing the perspective of the neurodivergent.

I don't think an article providing a couple examples of how one individual was willing to admit they were wrong is providing much in terms of discussion or new perspectives. "See, I can admit I'm wrong!" would be a pretty shallow way of addressing what could often be a misunderstanding. Instead, the post is attempting to offer some insight into the different opinions people might have about interactions with an autistic and explanations for what is going on behind the scenes.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#179

Post by samatman » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #148

injb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence

I assure you this does not seem to be the case.

There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.

(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).

Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.

Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

#180

Post by motohagiography » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

Not autistic at all, just not actuated by submission. I have compassion for my socially awkward brethren, but sometimes we just need a push. If most self-diagnosed "on the spectrum" people would self-accept instead, it would reduce their neuroticism and agreeableness, and most of their social issues would disappear. The anxiety comes from the double bind of having compromised ourselves into relationships where we can't maintain the dissonance between the agreeable way of relating with "good behaviour" to others that we have structured our personal relationships around - and the self we have diverted and often hidden thinking that's what we needed to do to have healthy relationships and jobs. Chances are they (we) lack personal boundaries because our ability to develop and set them was hampered by early life experiences and parents with poor personal boundaries. If you learned get things by "being good," your idea of "good" may be a transaction, where you expect others to give you things because you are good, and the compromises you make to do it pile up as resentment and soul debt. When you don't have tools to navigate the world without pretending to be "good," (whatever that means), we don't even know we're misrepresenting anymore. Internet pop psychology, but carrying around these self-diagnoses like talismans to ward off disapproval and maintain our perfectionism needs to stop. Be imperfect and accept that you are going suck at anything you haven't actively practiced with intention, particularly something like self acceptance. Anything that looks easy is almost always the effect of a huge amount of invisible work, and by starting with respect for that, it's possible to maybe walk back these protective self-diagnoses and use the same decision power to self-identify as responsible for your own feelings, and self-accept as having a quite complex experience where the journey isn't to mitigate it, but to really fully explore it. It goes so fast. Don't forget to enjoy it.