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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”

#281

Post by larve »

prometheus76 wrote: post #150
darkerside wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, this is very much about the workplace.

What follows is not really directed at you but rather reflecting on this whole comment section, I hope you forgive me :)

IN the article, the only case where I insist on being right is in scenario #4, where I can actually demonstrate that a fact is true. In fact, it's not me being right, it's the result of the experiments I propose. Otherwise, I'm either asking questions, trying to actually state my opinion in the first place, or not willing to say something I don't agree with because it goes against my values.

Agreeing or defusing the situation is necessary for personal relationships, but this is the workplace, and while it's good to be nice, it has to go both ways. The easiest way to deal with conflicting opinions in personal relationships is just to be curious, a good listener, and not (or rarely) state any opinions of your own. That might sound a bit sad, but I have plenty of fun debating opinions on my own, no need to involve other people.

However, I'm not at work to read your mind and guess how you might interpret my words. I am at work to be an engineer and produce results, and I am an engineer because I love technology, not to make money and have a career. I also really don't want to antagonize people or prove my superiority or brag or retaliate, I legitimately just like solving problems to the best of the team's capabilities.

Because I don't have an intuitive sense of how to react in a given situation, extending some empathy my way helps a lot. And for that, it's worth communicating my point of view: that I am not being patronizing; I am just asking questions I think are necessary.

It's like asking a blind person to navigate around potholes. They might be able to do it, but it's also nice to understand they're not tripping on them on purpose.

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

#282

Post by larve »

jart wrote: post #277
larve wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

It wouldn't matter if a person just cares about status if the environment incentivizes them getting it by building a better product. Also understanding is power. If Person A can peer into the motivations of Person B and predict what they'll do, while Person B thinks Person A is a mysterious and enigmatic black box, then which one would you say is more senior?

Indeed. If anything, the point of the article is that this goes both ways.

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

#283

Post by JackFr »

denton-scratch wrote: post #142
JackFr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one says the manager switches off. They may have a host of reasons, possibly non-technical, why they don't agree with you. It's certainly fair to ask what they, but the point is it's not a debating society. There needs to be some amount of trust that a manager is operating in good faith, on a rational basis, and while perhaps not an expert some degree of competence in the area.

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

#284

Post by drewcoo »

knaik94 wrote: post #166
Spooky23 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t read it as egocentric. The author cares a lot about correctness and delivering high quality work, but the definition of quality or good is very limited in scope. I don’t doubt the veracity of what the author wrote, but I would guess that if we spoke to the counter-parties, their recollection of certain things would be very different. How people perceive the world and express themselves vary, and some people…

I believe it is unintentionally egocentric to assume a single individual's perspective is enough to guarantee correctness. I imagine most of the time that individual makes the best call, but that's not less egocentric. It's easy for an individual to qualify the correctness of technical material, but not easy to do the same for soft skills like communication. As a senior developer or leader, you need some egocentricit…

> I know better than to argue intangibles such as coding style or software architecture, but some things in Computer Science are just facts: we can verify them. 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.

Yes, there's some ego in that. Author won't back down.

But clearly, the author isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth. Some things are objectively true.

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

#285

Post by larve »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #161
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 also be objectively wrong when it comes to social interactions as well though. To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relat…

Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do. I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.

I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.

I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.

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

#286

Post by denton-scratch »

shlant wrote: post #214
denton-scratch wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They happen to me too. And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either. I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss. There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if…

what is the point of dismissing someones Autism purely based on a single blog post and one person you knew? Are you actually trying to convey something helpful here?

I'm not dismissing anyone's anything. I believe autism exists.

> one person you knew?

I've only known one person who was diagnosed autistic. It's a rare condition; I've known a dozen people with bipolar, and half-a-dozen diagnosed schizophrenics (either I'm attracted to psychotics, or they're attracted to me!)

My point was simply that author's account could be anyone's account, apart from the author's self-identification as autistic. Without that, this entire thread would just be about how to deal with a crap boss.

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

#287

Post by engineeringwoke »

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

I am sympathetic towards OP's situation and made similar mistakes when I was younger, but telling people what they want to hear is not helping them and isn't actually empathetic. I've spent most of my life around non-neurotypical people, and this does seem pretty self-inflicted. People like this don't need to read any more technical books or learn any more about software engineering.

They would be more effective in every facet of their life if they spent some time reading history, philosophy, and psychology... or just talking to people. No one exists on an island, and the issue is almost always that they don't find things external to the self "interesting" because they are self-centered. Notice that all three subjects I mentioned above are about other people.

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

#288

Post by ebjaas_2022 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #200
ebjaas_2022 wrote: post #195

Repost of an earlier comment I made, on a different thread: I think the difference is that an autistic person will see reality like this: | O O | | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- | | | | | | / \ / \ | While the non-autistic person will see it like this: | O O | | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- | | | | | | / \ / \ | The non-autistic person will always assume that there are tw…

What makes you think autistic people are more inclined to have the first view, and the neurotypical people the latter?

It's my personal experience from interacting with people who are on the spectrum. I generally find it very difficult to make sense of the communication that I have with people who are autistic, especially socially, and especially if I'm close to them. To me it's as if everything is backwards, sort of. But I've come to realize that they also see it in the same way. They also perceive their own communication with non-autistic persons as being backwards. They perceive it as if there's something important that the non-autistic person "does not get". And I perceive it as if there's something important that the autistic person "does not get". The model that I've described above is the only way that I can make sense of it all.

I also note that the author of the original post describes himself as being more "holistic" in his approach to problem solving, than his non-autistic co-workers. He has the belief that he "sees the whole picture", while the other non-autistic person "sees only half of it".

What autistic people fail to recognize, in my mind, is that it does not matter if you've read 50 books about a topic. Even if you have, you still only own "half of the reality" in a meeting with another person about a topic. You still have to take his world view into account, even if you've read 50 books. You cannot "own" or "control" the reality, or the facts, of a situation, no matter how much you know about it. In a meeting with another person you always own only half of the reality.

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

#289

Post by zamalek »

knaik94 wrote: post #225
zamalek wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who has a hard time who has a hard time seeing from other people's perspective You're blaming someone for their disability - this is basically the equivalent of blaming a paraplegic for not being able to walk. Social skills are almost entirely an intellectual process (as opposed to an instinctual process) for many autistic people. It's not like learning to ride a bike (as it is for neurotypical people), it'…

I apologize if that came off as something with a negative connotation, it wasn't meant to. That article was not as helpful as you probably intended. I also didn't realize how gender norms are inherently tied to the theory and diagnosis of autism according to certain frameworks in the article you linked. I don't this it's fair to argue that difficulty understanding other perspectives/lack of empathy is something you s…

> I don't this it's fair to argue that difficulty understanding other perspectives/lack of empathy is something you should accept the same way you do a disability.

Just because something is not visible does not make it less real. This is one of the largest hurdles for experiencing acceptance for many people who have a mental disability. Your perspective is also perfectly typical, expected, and human. Neurodiversity gets almost no attention, and it easily follow that innocent ignorance is rampant.

And it's not that we don't try, and shouldn't try, it's that we get put into several buckets (as-per the scare quotes in the title) when we inevitably fail. We will never master social skills like a neurotypical person can.

Many of us also don't categorize it as a strict disability (depending on the nature and severity of our particular case), there are immense upsides to the condition (depending, again, on the individual). That certainly doesn't mean that we should be expected to (anagolously) grow appendages that we weren't born with.

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

#290

Post by denton-scratch »

kderbyma wrote: post #218
denton-scratch wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They happen to me too. And me. I'm not autistic. I don't think I have any kind of Asperger's either. I didn't see anything in author's prose that suggested autism; it just sounded like a normie, perhaps with an autism diagnosis, who is fretting about communication with their boss. There seems to be quite a few commenters here making critical comments, as if author is failing to communicate effectively. I wonder if…

spectrum......

I find the term "spectrum" problematic. Is Asperger's part of the spectrum? Wikipedia says it's an invalid diagnosis. So did all those people with Asperger's just get dumped in the "Autistic Spectrum" bucket?

DSoes the spectrum run from ultra-violet to infra-red? Is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot? Does that mean we're all "on the spectrum"?

If that's what it means, then that seems like dismissing Autism as just being one extreme of being an awkward person.

I think a lot of devs wind up working with people who are awkward. They don't like it (who would?) Some of those awkward people self-identify as autistic. So the devs decide they don't care much for autistic people. I think that's a kind of bigotry; they should really dislike working with awkward people, whatever the reason for their awkwardness.

[Awkward: apparently this is related to upward, downward, northward, etc. "Awk-" signifies "at an unusual angle". I know of no other word that starts with "awk-"]

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