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

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

#451

Post by catchnear4321 »

strken wrote: post #419
maerF0x0 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Let's say you're deciding on a washing machine. You're arguing about washing machine A ($500) vs B ($600), and you think B will last twice as long as A. Your partner would prefer to save $100 now even if the machine breaks later on, and doesn't want to back down either. The cost of choosing washing machine A is that it breaks at some distant time. The cost of arguing about washing machines is wasting an hour every we…

Cool, that seems fair. As you describe it, either washer should work. I still hate the avocado one, but I hate the laundromat even more. I can build alignment around this.

If only they were all that way.

If someone tells me their blender is the best washing machine, this may turn into a painful conversation. A long one. Possibly an embarrassing one. But I’m here for it. That’s a fucking blender, and I’m not going to call it a washing machine even if that’s the last decision I make here.

It would be great if all of these situations were as sane as picking between two valid options. Sometimes there’s a valid one, and, well, pick your expletives for the other one.

In software this happens a lot. Entire teams spinning plates because someone confused authority with experience.

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

#452

Post by Beltalowda »

bruce343434 wrote: post #448
Beltalowda wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case. Furthermore everyone has to adjust to the people around them, often causing untold stress for everyone . This is one of the aspects of the neurodivergency movement I am less impressed by because I feel it's just handwaving away any issues as "suck it up, not my problem, deal with it". I've worked with a few people like this over…

"is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" Could you explain why? I don't see it that way and would like to learn your perspective.

It's hard to explain, but as a first response it implies "the current code is fine", or "we don't need to do this". That is, you risk it being perceived as a challenge to the idea ("rewrite it in React"), rather than a question to explore the goals.

Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a perfectly valid engineering question for rewriting or refactoring anything, but not everyone has this kind of engineering mindset.

I would phrase it more open-ended, such as "Okay! What goals would you like to achieve?"

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

#453

Post by larve »

KronisLV wrote: post #436
a_puppy wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people can mean either one by "giving in", I am wondering whether the OP, in rejecting "pretending I agree when I don't" is accidentally being the person who "always insists on getting their way every time". Yes, it's possible that the OP is accidentally being a bully by insisting on getting their way every time. But it's also possible that everything the OP is saying is true, and the other party really is…

> I personally have encountered a situation where a tech lead repeatedly doubled down on idea that was objectively deeply flawed, but they had a lot of political capital, so management told me I just needed to "give in". Other engineers agreed with my assessment in private, but weren't willing to say so publicly. That that point you need to choose, which you value more highly: correctness and finding the best technic…

ADRs / RFCs are great. Compromise is a necessity for anything where there is no right or wrong answer, only unknoowns with more or less certainty and more or less strongly held opinions. Getting everybody's opinion and insight into a question, documenting it, searching for the best way forward, and then reaching and documenting a compromise, that to me is good engineering. I fully support building things in a way that I didn't suggest, that's what the team agreed on and gets the project going.

That's not what my point was about, however. I am not going to state "python is better than C++" just because someone wants me to say it, or back down from something I know is a fact, like "writing a file to disk is a complicated process." And I'm ready to quit over that.

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

#454

Post by larve »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #441
larve wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You sound like the "asperger's" person who we are in the process of offboarding from our team. One can have asperger's and still be nice to people. These things are not mutually exclusive. I see too many people who find it convenient to be a toxic, rude bully, and don't know that they are, and use their condition as an excuse to be a jerk.

It could also be in between: Their actions are interpreted as way more of a rude behaviour than they intend them to be, and they don't know how to come across in a better manner.

From my experience, it's usually not a problem to be pretty forward with people on the spectrum, if you are meaning well. My wife told me there is absolutely no problem with telling me to stop going on about a topic bluntly, and it is something I quite often do with my friends too. Same for pointing out that a certain way of phrasing something didn't come across well, in fact I really appreciate receiving these pieces of advice. What hurts is the "NT" way of communicating these things, hoping that I'd catch up on them. I don't.

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

#455

Post by notahacker »

imtringued wrote: post #447
notahacker wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions. This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong". Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there…

I fail to grasp what "acknowledge when they're wrong" is supposed to mean. From what I can tell the author insists on deductive reasoning to determine whether something is right or wrong and any wrong conclusions are quickly discarded. Hence, there are only two options, right, not disproven (opinion).

If somebody has a goal to communicate a certain thing, and does not succeed in communicating that because [nearly] everybody interprets them as being rude or obtuse instead, deductive reasoning would point to the conclusion that their approach to communication was the wrong one for the situation, and to the conclusion they should probably attempt to modify their communication if they wish to achieve a different result. (I appreciate that for autistic people, it might be particularly difficult to discern how or why their attempts to communicate a point do not succeed. I also appreciate that failed communication applies both ways, and that a neurotypical person telling an autist that they "never admit they're wrong" is a failure on the part of the neurotypical person to appreciate that this statement will most likely be interpreted hyper-literally)

Alternative, one can avoid that reasoning and rationalise not discarding consistently failing conversational stratagems because the cause of the failed outcome of a conversation is a person's opinion which lacks the same consistency as mathematics (and therefore more effective conversational stratagems can - at best - only be supported evidentially by inductive reasoning). But that just leads to the wrong outcome more often.

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

#456

Post by atq2119 »

musingsole wrote: post #315
denton-scratch wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the author explicitly stated they were autistic in the piece "I have read similar experiences by other autistic people" suggests that the author considers themself to be autistic. > You very much are dismissing someone's something. ...And that's that, I guess. Can you please clarify what I am dismissing, and how? I don't want to dismiss anyone's anything.

>>I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism

This doesn't read to me as dismissing the author's autism. It reads to me as observing that a non-autist could have written substantially the same article (minus making it about autism), and they then went off to observe that this comment section would likely have looked very different in that case.

It's an interesting thought experiment, and at least to me it feels like you're the one who is reading dismissal into it for no good reason.

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

#457

Post by larve »

Beltalowda wrote: post #452
bruce343434 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"is our checkout page not performing well?" to the React rewrite manager comes off as a rather dismissive "why would you want to do that?" Could you explain why? I don't see it that way and would like to learn your perspective.

It's hard to explain, but as a first response it implies "the current code is fine", or "we don't need to do this". That is, you risk it being perceived as a challenge to the idea ("rewrite it in React"), rather than a question to explore the goals. Note that I wouldn't mind such a question at all myself, but others can be more sensitive to such things. Actually, I think "Why? Is the current code not working?" is a p…

Making these kinds of judgments is exactly why autism is a disability.

I understand from the comments and my life experience that there is something there, I learned to smile, be engaging, mirror body posture, ask questions instead of going into statements too quickly, but what are you describing just makes no sense to me. How is "what goals would you like to achieve?" not dismissive, but "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" is?

One is a pretty vague question about something they already stated (they want to ask me my opinion about rewriting the checkout in react because company X improved their checkout), the other one is something I need input on to be able to do that. It's literally the most efficient question I can think of so that I can avoid wasting their time.

I described in another comment how it never "really" occurred to me that a question could be perceived as dismissive. If I wanted to dismissive I would... just say so?

The thing is, saying it is dismissive, getting upset, and shutting me down helps exactly no one here. What could help is to realize I am not actually trying to be dismissive, point out that my question might be interpreted as such, and then move on. Trust me that I don't let this kind of advice go to waste.

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

#458

Post by larve »

ebjaas_2022 wrote: post #445
larve wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognize myself quite well in those words. Thank god I didn't have to encounter an actively hostile person yet, but my big discovery last year was indeed that not everyone at work is motivated by doing a good job. It obviously sounds obvious when put like this, but it is something I wasn't able to put together in my own life. I have since left this job (my immediate colleagues and most people I worked with were gr…

> What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot. I think the thing to understand, is that non-autistics are very, very particular about the difference between what's inside their own mi…

thanks for the comment. for what it's worth, I absolutely don't recognize myself in either description.

If anything, I am a pretty good software engineer because I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).

There are many different ways of thinking, and they are right there in front of me, and some people are aware of certain patterns, certain people tend to consistently not realize this approach exists, others just can't back down from rewriting everything in a functional style, when others in the team don't do well with it. When I see programmers argue about style or programming language or framework I am often confused because I don't understand why they can't see that other people don't think like them :)

This same kind of behaviour can be observed all around us every day. I never understood how people get upset at staff at a restaurant, or get angry when someone bumps into them. Don't they realize that the other person didn't do it on purpose, and didn't mean harm? Why do people argue about politics so much? Don't they realize that other people have different values, and that we have a government in place to channel disagreement about them? Why yell at each other on facebook, don't you realize none of this is going to change the other person's mind?

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

#459

Post by larve »

hzhou321 wrote: post #317

The author's view is very relatable (to me). I am going to bookmark it since it verbalize my feeling so fittingly. I am not sure I am autistic, but I have to be to some extent. I can see where the essay goes partial. The author focuses on explaining self, but neglect in analyzing why others are having issues understanding the author. And I think I understand the reason -- the author is simply (much) more interested i…

I actually really enjoy the "politics" part of it. I think it's just a loaded word for "get many people to align and work together productively," and it's absolutely fascinating from a technical point of view. So many "technical" problems can be solved by just communicating, the best feature is the one that doesn't need to be written.

What I don't enjoy is when politics turns into bullying, where one has to give in to someone without proper reasons. This is for example a manager pushing through a technical decision the team doesn't agree with "because they're the manager", or a senior engineer dismissing a junior engineer "because you're just a kid". Expecting people to go along with that is what I would just walk away from.

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

#460

Post by corobo »

> people can become impatient and cut me off or interject with a snap interpretation of what I have said so far.

A phrase I've noticed zoomers using recently is "let me land!" if you interrupt them. It's probably not zoomer specific but that's where I've heard it.

It conveys that you still have more to say, mildly points out the rudeness of being interrupted, and people seem to understand exactly what you mean without further explanation so you can get back to your thought.

Whether it works in the workplace I'm not sure, probably depends on the tone of voice. I would throw a please in there too.

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