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

the.scapegoat.dev

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

#231

Post by koonsolo »

I once worked with someone who was also different in that sense. I'm not sure if he was autistic, but he had a hard time understanding or wanting to understand the business or functional part. His explanations were sometimes hard to understand, especially for non technical people.

He would get really frustrated when he would get vague specs to implement.

He and I however, got along fine, because I'm also a developer.

I see the author of the article is here on HN, so here is my advice: try to set yourself up in an environment where you mainly communicate with technical people, and receive proper specs. You can let the other developers work more closely with functional and business people. I would guess try to program something that interfaces not with users, but with other systems.

The "hey I read a blog post that we should use this" would also frustrates me a lot :D. That is the kind of person that should be made clear about where the boundaries are of their and your expertise.

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

#232

Post by gnfargbl »

shlant wrote: post #220
engineeringwoke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a common trope, playing out the "manager" or "business person" as an idiot when in fact often times there are bigger things at play. Looking down on people who aren't like you is not generally a positive. Understanding them is the source of empathy.

to be fair I am seeing very little empathy for the author in a lot of these comments

That's really fair criticism.

OP, if you're still reading, please don't take anything I wrote here as an attack on you. Instead, it was meant to be a reflection on your situation from someone who struggles with many of the same communication issues, in many of the same ways.

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

#233

Post by larve »

jart wrote: post #167
morelisp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I was going to say but phrased better. The issue isn't autistic vs. allistic, the issue is that you've decided you don't want to devote any brainpower to questions which are not directly technical. Sometimes that's fine, but it also means you are probably at the apex of your professional development. So do it, but also realize it means you're unlikely to get promoted further, and your opinion about techn…

I thought it was. The alistic manager wanted to plug into the social gravity of React and the autistic employee wanted an explanation for his labor he could understand. All people regardless of autistic or allistic are usually self-interested and not consciously aware of what motivates their desires. For example, I doubt the manager was capable of explaining what attracted him to React any more than the OP could unde…

Thank you for commenting. I love working at the intersection of business/product/technology, and as much as I love new frameworks and shiny ideas, the best technology is usually the one that is already there. If you ask me about exactly that intersection, I do need to understand the bigger context. Otherwise my answer would just be “yes we can rewrite the checkout in React” which doesn’t really help anybody.

As for motivation, it is of course very hard to understand one’s own motivations, and even more so other people’s motivations. It took me (please don’t laugh) 30 years to realize that I could get paid being an engineer (because I just assumed I would never be worth anything seeing how much I didn’t know about software). And only at age 40 did it dawn on me that most people are not motivated by building the best product they can, but instead do care about money, career, social prestige.

It’s ironic that this is then framed as a one-sided “can’t understand other people”, when really many people don’t understand my motivations either. And seeing how carelessly dismissive some of the comments here are, don’t even care to.

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

#234

Post by knaik94 »

shlant wrote: post #226
cainxinth wrote: post #154

His thesis is that autistic people are unfairly characterized as not being able to admit when they wrong… and then he proceeds to explain that he’s almost never wrong.

I don't understand why so many people are saying this. The article specifically says at the begging: "When these conflicts arise, here are some things that might be happening" SOME and MIGHT are being completely ignored and replaced with absolutes by many commenters. At no point does it claim to be an exhaustive list of every possible single interaction, nor does it say that there are no other explanations. If anythi…

Most commenters are saying this based on the conclusion the author ends with. The lines that stood out to me is "I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong." They decided that everyone around them needs to change.

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

#235

Post by larve »

gnfargbl wrote: post #25

> 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…

Thank you for reading. Of course, this is a highly edited hypothetical situation, and not what happened. I try very hard to understand how I can phrase differently so that we can answer these questions and work together. I think in other comments it became clear that the intent of the questions are not the problem. In fact, I am asking them because I trust the manager to have good answers.

Now, if I come across as patronizing and this leads to a negative outcome (as in, no progress is made in advancing the company’s goals), two things can happen:

- I can work at getting better at communication. The last 2 years, better writing has been my main focus, and this article is part of that. Writing good documents has been tremendously effective. It also only goes so far if someone doesn’t want to engage. In this particular situation, I spent the next week studying React (it wasn’t React in the actual situation) reading 3 books on the chapter and building a toy React prototype, and then wrote up what I thought was a concise report on what was good about it, and what was not so good. I don’t think this document was read.

- The manager can actually put some effort into hearing me out, and understand that I am trying my best here. Maybe I don’t know intuitively what words they want me to use for the questions, but it is also not rocket science to take words literally and not look for subtext.

If anything, it is easy because I really don’t care about subtext, or patronizing people. Where is the fun in that, compared to the fun of solving problems.

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

#236

Post by jjk166 »

petercooper wrote: post #44
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…

People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification. Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann…

So when I say it's Yanni, and you say it's Laurel, which of us is supposed to admit we're wrong? Neither of us are wrong, it's just a difference of opinions.

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

#237

Post by rendall »

larve wrote: post #194
rendall wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for reading. I agree, this article is about the times when things escalated, and I didn’t think I was wrong, or more precisely, didn’t even get to the point where I could be wrong. When I’m wrong I just say “oh you’re right, good point” and move on. It’s very easy to do.

I have a girlfriend who believes herself to be on the autism spectrum, and I cannot over years ever recall her admitting that she was wrong or apologizing at any time for anything. We do get along despite that, but I was kind of hoping for insight.

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

#238

Post by larve »

Hayarotle wrote: post #134
dghf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a manager comes over and suggests something to you, you need to understand their perspective for coming to that discussion Isn't that exactly what the author did, at least in the React discussion? They tried to establish what potential benefits the manager hoped to get from the React rewrite. It was the manager who immediately gave up on the discussion, not the author.

The problem is with the (interpreted) subtext of the question. The question "Is our checkout page not performing well?" might be just a question, but in the context the author was put in, it usually has different implications. Many people would ask such question in order to imply that changing the framework was unnecessary and that the checkout page is already performing well enough. This seems to be how the manager…

Thank you for reading. I think this is a salient point. How do I know how the manager is going to perceive the question based on what order I put the words in? My intent is to get the information I need, because I trust the manager to know it when I don’t. This of course is an edited example of a conversation in real life, and in fact my first draft had the question phrased as “we should analyze our performance and need metrics”. This honestly could have just as easily been perceived as patronizing.

If anything, and I probably glossed over it too quickly, I do spend a lot of effort being very candid and open and agreeable when having these discussions, because it is so hard to make sure our intents and definitions are aligned. We can be talking about checkout and react and then after 2 h realize that we actually both care about better conversion of mobile users, and now we are talking and can put the react decision into context.

I wrote this article about these situations: when my approach breaks down and I get blamed for not accepting being wrong, yet I’m actually trying my best to avoid exactly that.

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

#239

Post by shlant »

knaik94 wrote: post #234
shlant wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many people are saying this. The article specifically says at the begging: "When these conflicts arise, here are some things that might be happening" SOME and MIGHT are being completely ignored and replaced with absolutes by many commenters. At no point does it claim to be an exhaustive list of every possible single interaction, nor does it say that there are no other explanations. If anythi…

Most commenters are saying this based on the conclusion the author ends with. The lines that stood out to me is "I don't care much for saying false things to appease someone's ego. In cases like this, I'm not the one who can't acknowledge being wrong." They decided that everyone around them needs to change.

1. that isn't the conclusion the author ends with. That quote is addressing example #4. The overall conclusion is under the header "Conclusion"

2. That quote also is not saying "everyone needs to change". It's says they are not going to lie about being wrong just because someone else knows less than them (see the title of example #4). Why should anyone be expected to do this? Why should experts in their field pretend to not know something because of the ignorance of someone else? What does that get us?

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

#240

Post by shakna »

survirtual wrote: post #130
shakna wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum (aren’t we all?). That, right there, is one of the least helpful things that can ever be said in these kinds of circumstances. It's understandable, and it's common, so this doesn't lay blame on you, but on the underlying cultural assumption. "Aren't we all?" Those who have truly neuro-atypical behaviours, to where it can be assessed as placing them somewhere else on the…

That poster was just trying to be inclusive, not trivialize. You are still part of a society composed of other humans. I think less division and more inclusivity in spite of differences is a good place to be, while still acknowledging the struggles / addressing problems of minorities without making them “special” aka outcasts. Ultimately, you choose how you react to something. You can choose to be offended and look a…

Would you tell a war veteran you understand them because you don't like loud noises? An amputee that you comprehend their pain because your knees feel old? Those are obviously not acceptable, and incredibly insensitive things to state. That is what this attempt at inclusivity does.
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