Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

the.scapegoat.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 521 posts

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

#401

Post by paraknight »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #365
jrochkind1 wrote: post #359

> 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.

Sometimes it's also better to lose a battle in order to win a war. For example, I once thought a certain feature was useless and not worth the effort to implement. I knew however that if I chose that hill to die on, it would lead to a lot of resentment -- "if only we had built that feature, we would have X". I decided to concede as this was not a big feature but, like I predicted, the feature was useless. This now put me in a better position for the future where I could draw on this as a lesson for when it truly mattered. Whenever we would be at risk of getting distracted by some much bigger useless feature, I was able to point back to that experience to bolster my dissent with more credibility in a way I might not have been able to if I didn't pick my battles.

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

#402

Post by selcuka »

btilly wrote: post #392
larve wrote: post #194

Earlier 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…

> First, it is not your job to make that kind of technology decision. You can offer advice, but it is your manager's job.

Err, no: "A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React [...]"

> 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.

This is literally their first question: "Is our checkout page not performing well?". The manager should have simply said "the problem is not performance, but X" instead of assuming that the developer is rejecting their idea.

> You may dismiss them as bullshit, but they are not.

It is interesting that you, like the manager, assume that they dismissed the idea.

> And that AGAIN puts you in the wrong.

I disagree. If the manager is not able to clarify the specifics of their question (remember, it was a question of whether they should do X) they are in the wrong.

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

#404

Post by faeriechangling »

brainwipe wrote: post #54
W4ldi wrote: post #12

It's called narcissistic entitlement to expect the whole world to change their behaviour because of ones own inability to fit in. I'm not saying it is fair. Life is never fair. The only one who has the ability to influence those situations is oneself. You can't rely on other to change - it won't work anyways. You have to be the one that improves those interactions. For your own good.

Neuro diverse people can't necessarily change their behaviour because it's how their brain is wired. It's like asking a visually impaired person to just see better. Many neuro diverse people have to force themselves to "fit in" causing untold stress and trauma. That's not for their own good, it's forcing their brains to work in a way that they don't.

The thing about the autistic masking causing trauma thing is that I haven’t really seen high quality evidence for the theory. It just sounds intuitively correct.

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

#405

Post by faeriechangling »

Beltalowda wrote: post #254
brainwipe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neuro diverse people can't necessarily change their behaviour because it's how their brain is wired. It's like asking a visually impaired person to just see better. Many neuro diverse people have to force themselves to "fit in" causing untold stress and trauma. That's not for their own good, it's forcing their brains to work in a way that they don't.

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…

It wouldn’t be much of a disability if autistic people could just learn to stop being disabled.

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

#406

Post by throwawayblah54 »

What I expected: an article about the common ways in which autistic people don't realize they're wrong and therefore refuse to admit it. For example, autistic people will often optimize their engineering decisions around a performance metric (speed, memory usage, etc) that doesn't matter much, rather than a business metric (ease of use, maintainability) that does. When you push back, they will accuse you of not valuing "good engineering", just like this author does.

What I got: an article lecturing neurotypicals about how, whenever they think an autistic person may be wrong, it's actually just because autistic people are more holistic thinkers and know more than them.

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

#407

Post by cookiengineer »

sleightofmind wrote: post #369
cookiengineer wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: ausplaining I've learned the hard way that caring too much about work related topics doesn't contribute to your happiness. Company men will replace you if they can do their business math for justification, because they cannot see the technical complexities of the things they are "wanting to be built" for the company. Even when you can see dependencies of complexities that will break the plan a year ahead of time,…

"... strategival disadvantage... " I thought at first you had invented a clever new word combining strategy and survival. Then I realized that v is just very close to c on a qwerty keyboard. Oh well.

Haha, time for an urban dict entry :D

Yeah I was typing on mobile and didn't catch it while proofreading. The textarea is so annoyingly small :(

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

#408

Post by larve »

puffoflogic wrote: post #383
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…

> That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case. Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.

Seeing how many people object to this first question that I think is just... perfectly fine (I talked a lot about it to my wife) unlocked something. I wasn't aware that a question like "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" can be construed as dismissive while another question like "what are you looking to achieve?" wouldn't.

In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."

I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.

Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.

For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:

- say hi - ask where they come from and what they do - say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X" - listen and ask follow-up questions - try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds - mimic their posture - when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do - then continue asking questions about them and listen - go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves. - don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever - don't forget to mimic their posture - and eye contact! - don't rock on your chair! - rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.

That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.

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

#409

Post by faeriechangling »

denton-scratch wrote: post #290
kderbyma wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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?

This is explicitly what happened. The DSM-V explicitly automatically gives you an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis if you had an Asperger’s diagnosis. I think it’s hilariously how blatantly political this criteria is.

As for the legitimacy of spectrum disorders, the only thing I have to say about the subject is the parable of Chesterson’s fence. Think about the problems people were trying to solve with the concept of autism spectrum disorder.

>is this a spectrum for which every behaviour pattern has a slot

You aren’t far off but are missing th forest for the trees. It’s part of a diagnostic system where every disorder is meant to be discrete and non-overlapping and you either have it or you don’t and other good traits you would want in a diagnostic nosology. The spectrum is an artifact of it having to bend to describe what are actually several distinct similarly presenting conditions. It doesn’t have to describe EVERYTHING, it has to fit a hole in the nosology. Asperger’s was depreciated in large part because of the overlap with autism.

If you want something to criticize take a few steps back and look at mental health and psychiatry as a whole. A lot of the assumptions underpinning autism underpin more of mental health.

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

#410

Post by cat_plus_plus »

btilly wrote: post #392
larve wrote: post #194

Earlier 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…

No competent manager would undertake a rewrite without new functional requirements at hand. Feature parity may well be the first milestone, but without an idea of what future projects might be, it's impossible to choose the best tools to facilitate them. Commercial companies are there to serve customers, make a living for employees and generate returns for owners/shareholders, not for funsies, save that for a hobby github project. Any managers not willing to listen to engineering concerns / articulate their own and any coworkers who expect others at work to be happy about every single aspect of their employment need help.
Post reply on HN