Are all Autistics autodidacts? Is that just a thing we do?
@JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic
A thing I regularly faced in school was: Omitted steps in the explanation, creating large, gaping holes that only I seemed to notice.
Combined with my ADHD which resulted in having little patience with people who can't explain stuff properly.
Especially a lecture, where a person verbally omits stuff that make sense in their head. With no quality control ensuring that there is internal consistency and all the necessary preconditions are met.
A benefit of anything written down:
You can at least debug it. Find the position where the gap occurs. Try to derive the missing pieces from the context. Look up other sources etc.
@wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic Just because it's in YOUR head doesn’t mean it's in mine.
And they say we have that mind blindness thing. Yeah, right, she said in Brooklyn.
@brainpilgrim @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic
A thing I find very interesting with more "neurotypical" people is the tendency to "cover up" problems, including those in learning material.
Instead of improving a problem that is certainly there (all you need to find it is give it several honest people to read), people rather justify a sentence or phrasing or even start to blame the readers who "got it wrong".
Similar with e.g. usability: "The software is fine, the users are just too to use it."
@wakame @brainpilgrim @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic I find NTs fall victim to à sunk-cost way of handling systemic issues, where they don’t really integrate that a problem will reoccur. They half-ass (to use 50% of the Ron Swanson quote) a fix and are rewarded socially. Whereas NDs will see the systemic issue it right away and wince at the recurrence, so they whole-ass a solution. In doing so they experience a quasi artistic satisfaction as a reward.
@llPK @wakame @brainpilgrim @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic my job, as an analyst, is to be ignored by people when telling them that they're half assed solutions will not stick and that they should do it properly, then gloat when I'm inevitably proven right. People don't like talking to me.
@AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @brainpilgrim @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic the thing is, I’ve found working alongside other NDs that we usually don’t gloat but simply appreciate elegant solutions. It only when surrounded by non-systemic thinkers that we need to assert our difference with a bit of (in my view, feel free to disagree) toxic superiority. To complete the picture I’ve also been in situations with highly competitive NDs who didn’t hold humanistic views. They were the absolute worst.
@llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic Are you saying toxic superiority is necessary when asserting our difference? Because I can't agree with that.
@brainpilgrim @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic I’m (clumsily) trying to say the opposite. I think NDs surrounded by NTs might enjoy the ego boost of knowing they created better systems than their pragmatic counterparts. I’m also convinced that any human convinced he’s more worthy than another human is wasting a thought.
@llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic I'll come at it from a different angle.
Grew up surrounded by people who had never been taught to recognize or manage their emotions. Discouraged from using rational thought. While rarely being told the truth about anything.
I read early and given free run of the library by fourth grade. I was able to piece together hope in a world that made sense.
Is thinking that a form of superiority?
I don't think so. My life was much the same, in a small town in Utah. My haven was the public library, and I went where ever I wanted, and got books from every section (but lived in the Science Fiction section). It let me know there was a lot more out there than I ever saw in my little town, and gave me hope that I could be part of it.
@llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic
I used to tell people I bitterly resented being promised flying cars and didn't get one, but one day I was walking around someone's backyard, having a video chat with someone 3 states away on my tablet, and I stopped and realized "Oh, yeah, this is the future. This, right here."
🤣
@llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic
@ScottSoCal @llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic I must admit that what I know of life in Utah sounds like a combination of all the things I went through, only in one place.
I picked it all up from three different red states, so I had a more diverse experience, I guess.😁
My parents were (probably still are) fundamentalist wackjobs. It made things interesting.
@llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic
@ScottSoCal @llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic It did me a favor. I could never be the kind of woman they wanted, so I left.
@ScottSoCal @llPK @AlexTheAutisticArtist @wakame @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic And it turns out we're all still living in the science fiction section, aren't we?