Some non autistic people chose not to acknowledge when they're wrong, as part of their sociopathic dominance behaviour. If you have control, it can be a mode of operation which "works for you"
“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
391–400 of 521 posts
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#392Earlier 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.
The problem is that you come across as the very stereotype of a person who is so focused on arguing about an irrelevant detail that there is no point in having the conversation with it. From my experiences with people on the spectrum, I would bet that you are arguing based on YOUR misunderstanding of the situation. And so your blog post can be summarized as, "Person who is convinced that they are right refuses to admit that they could have been wrong."
Let's take the React checkout example that you gave. Your self-illusion is that you were engaged in holistic thinking. And, in fact, you couldn't even see the whole for the first irrelevant detail that caught your attention. This is the opposite of holistic thinking!
First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job. Your job is to make sure that your manager is well-informed. You failed at that job.
If you believe otherwise, then you're wrong. You probably believe you are better equipped to make that decision than your manager. You may well be right about that. (Though, as a rule, we tend to think that we are smarter than we are, and our managers are stupider than they are. But that is a side point.) But you are still wrong about the important point. Which is that it is still your manager's responsibility to make that decision.
You wanted to frame the entire conversation around, "Does this checkout form have a concrete problem that needs fixing?" Your manager's thinking is going to be about very different looking questions. Such as:
- Will switching to React make hiring and training future developers easier?
- Do my existing programmers have the necessary skills to test this technology out?
- Will this technology choice make future projects faster to develop? (For example, do we get wins from a better toolchain, etc.)
- Will this be an interesting project that helps me keep existing employees motivated?
- Are the other claimed wins in the blog post actually going to work out that way?
Your manager needs to think about these things. You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not. Companies live and die on such considerations.
Your manager learned absolutely nothing about these things. Your manager may have come away with the impression that you have no idea if there is a problem with the checkout page. But by misunderstanding your role and responsibility, you failed to carry out your actual responsibility within the team. And wound up so upset about it that you wrote a blog post with a strong undertone of, "Here is the kind of stupid I have to deal with at work."
And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong. It literally takes under a minute to go from your blog to your name to where you work. Any coworker who recognizes the blog now knows you're unhappy. Which poisons your work atmosphere. And if this comes to your manager's attention, your manager has to now deal with the fallout from THAT.
Yes, yes. You consider it bullshit. But it is bullshit that can easily get you fired. For good cause. And the fact that you do this AGAIN puts you in the wrong. And your considering it bullshit DOESN'T STOP YOU FROM BEING WRONG. It just means you won't admit it was a mistake.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#393Earlier 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…
It is arrogance though. For example, let's say you're smarter than someone who has authority over you, i.e. their social status is higher than yours. In that case it wouldn't be smart to make that person feel inferior. Since if you were truly smart you'd think of a way to be right in a way that makes people like you.
I mean I’m autistic and on intelligence testing I’m all over the map. How smart I am depends on what you’re talking about. Just because I’m both more able and more trained to understand something than some senior manager, and I’m bad at the politics, doesn’t secretly unveil I’m not TRULY smart. In fact if we go back to OPs actual point, it was over people taking offence to his great confidence in specific subdomains of technology, something I have seen autistic people understand to a level of genius more than once.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#394> However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing. > There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace tox…
In work environment, "trying things your way" is seldom harmless to success of the product or one's personal ethics, career, reputation, work life balance... Who will fix things if they go wrong and how much effort is such a fix going to require? How is my performance going to be evaluated if I accept a bad call? If the answers are clear and acceptable to me, I have no problem being flexible. Making things clear often involves talking to our common manager, although I might also decide that I am willing to put in the extra effort to fix things if needed if the other person is not being obnoxious.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is that you come across as the very stereotype of a person who is so focused on arguing about an irrelevant detail that there is no point in having the conversation with it. From my experiences with people on the spectrum, I would bet that you are arguing based on YOUR misunderstanding of the situation. And so your blog post can be summarized as, "Person who is convinced that they are right refuses to adm…
Thank you for posting this.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn’t anything “most” autistic people have. The disorder is defined by having at least three of twelve major symptoms so it’s possible for two people with autism to not even overlap in their symptoms. There is also a huge range of severity and many people with the disorder are high-functioning. High-functioning autism is significantly correlated with high IQs. This dismissal amounts to “this can’t be hard for y…
That's kind of my point. The traits that characterize the disorder are so varied, it's hard to believe its just one disorder. I think most people can identify with many of the symptons. I know I can, even though I'm not autistic. Personally, I think the economy seems to encourage that kind of productivity in many ways, so it shouldn't be such a mystery as to why some who are hyperfocused on succeeding should be ident…
>is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles?
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#397Wow, I am floored at so many comments painting an egocentric view of the author. I find it highly ironic that supposedly high EQ neurotypicals would not be able to take one small step back and evaluate what is written with a modicum of assumed good intent. Take this example: > 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 a…
Thank you, it's very nice to read this.
I actually love "office politics" when people engage in it in good faith. I love crossing team boundaries, figuring out who is not talking to whom, who works well with certain kind of people. I love running good meetings and making sure everybody is heard. I love writing and editing documents, cleaning up meeting notes, I am happy writing whatever shitty glue I need to to make other people's work smoother.
I think office politics is just a derisive name for the very important work of having lots of people of different backgrounds work with each other towards a same goal. I've come to understand that my biggest technical capability as an engineer is to play office politics well. Organizing a single meeting between two people (or conversely, making sure two people never have to code review each other) can be the difference between a dead project and a successful one.
The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind. I am fine doing things I can't stand behind, because I'd rather get something janky shipped than nothing at all, and I will do so without complaining, in fact I enjoy it. But don't expect me to say something I don't mean, I'd rather say nothing at all. I have two anecdotes come to mind. One is a colleague not wanting to use the API I provided to store configuration files (an API I provided so they wouldn't have to deal with the versioning, saving to flash safely, validation and encryption), instead repeatedly bringing up in the public slack channel how I should KISS and that writing a file is really not a complicated thing (it kind of is, especially in an embedded system). I don't really care too much about engaging with people calling me stupid in public, and I'm certainly not going to say that writing a file is simple.
I also care very much about other more junior engineers not getting bullied by older engineers. Junior engineers might not be very nuanced in their opinions, or might need to learn a few lessons the hard way, but that is not done by playing the authority card, that is done by providing a safe space for them to discover these things on their own (be it by mentoring, by watching more experienced people do it, or by giving them enough ownership to be able to make a few mistakes without impacting the business).
Thanks again for your comment.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#398> However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing. > There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace tox…
> let's try it your way this time I've never understood why people go along with things they disagree about. It seems people often beat a good argument with the threat of retribution if we dont play along. Doesnt sound like a recipe for well thought out actions or incentives.
> I've never understood why people go along with things they disagree about.
As an Engineering manager this happens to me a lot. The first (perhaps most important reason) is that I realise that I might have things wrong and welcome the opportunity to grown and learning. Second, I want to show my appreciation to my report by supporting her/his idea. And third, I always take to opportunity to keep my ego out of the game. I might need to manage the risk and interests, but that's just part of the job.
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#399> However, "giving in" is not the same as acknowledging when you are wrong: it is simply playing mind games—games I am not interested in playing. > There is more to life: I am an engineer; I like solving problems. I embrace fairness and open intellectual exchange. This matters to me a whole lot more than getting promoted. Plus, "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace tox…
If you can't convince the other person through evidence or logic, atleast in technical matters, what are the odds you are actually right?
Re: “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same for neurotypical girlfriends
Haha, indeed. The wife is never wrong.