*explains concept normally*
“Why are you being so vague?”
*explains concept thoroughly and precisely*
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot!”Oh my fucking god, this. Why are people like this?
“I have no idea what you’re talking about”
to
“Why are you mansplaining??” In 6 seconds…
People can, and will be dicks, who get embarrassed about not understanding shit and try to find blame elsewhere for their embarrassment.
Still, there is an important skill when teaching someone something, of understanding approximately how much they know, and telling them approximately the parts they don’t, leaving them to ask you questions to fill the gaps afterwards. Makes teaching really fast when done right.
Well now you tell me… ;)
Not to get meta, but I don’t understand the implied joke 🙃
I always try to ask people if they’re familiar with X. Then, if they lie to me, they can only come clean or nod along
Or if I really want to talk about the topic, I ask how much they know about X
I had something like this when I was working retail during the pandemic.
Customer: Why are you wearing a mask???
M: It’s policy. And I like having my face covered because I’m trans.
C: *visibly confused* …what? Nobody else is wearing one.
M: Right, but I’m trans, so I like having the masculine parts of my face obscured by a mask.
C: …wha- I don’t care!?
##then why did you ask 🙂
Also the “I think A”
“Oh so you think B?”
…no?
Had a whole argument once about capitalism v/s socialism only because I stated that, while neither is desireable, if I HAD to choose, I would rather live in the States than in Russia. Somehow that must have meant that I love the US and it is doing nothing wrong in my view but they are wrong because capitalism etc etc and I was just standing there like “…I literally did NOT say anything to do with that.” And then they had the gall to claim that I am the one blowing up arguments. Yeah right.
I had a lot of that interaction with my mother before I figured out her algorithm. She’d ask about her cooking, “do you prefer food-A or food-B?” and if I gave a straight answer, I wouldn’t see the other option for years. Then when someone brought it up later, she’d go “I thought you didn’t like it”.
Later on I learned to explain my preference as a ratio between A and B. I know she meant well, but bless her heart, she’s neurotypical.
“How dare you teach me things against my will.”
Explicit meaning gang.
All my homies hate the astral hidden meaning shenanigans gang.
I still have difficulty accepting this concept from time to time. It’s a real relationship issue, I’m talking in the bedroom. I’m trying to be a gentleman and my wife is telling me please just be straightforward and boring. Be literal. Do not be suggestive. Do not imply. I don’t want to imagine I don’t want creativity. Now, every relationship is different, but I can’t help but feel it unceremonious when she uses the example of ordering at a drive-through as her ideal vision for how the evening should go.
Makes me a bit paranoid but does genuinely seem to be what makes her happy in our case.
If just telling her what you want isn’t enough for you to feel like you’re communicating effectively, try asking her if you could add to it by telling her how you want it, and then maybe expand to how you’re desiring to feel about it.
E.g. not just “I would like oral” but instead, “I would like oral, and I’d love to hear that you’re enjoying it, however you want to express it.” <- This is a request that is direct and specific but doesn’t feel robotic or unceremonious IMHO.
I have ASD and my wife doesn’t, so we’ve established that it often makes the most sense when we just explicitly just ask one another, “what can I do for you tonight?” Which leads to very specific answers about what we’re wanting to get out of it and how we can best achieve that together. “I’ve been thinking about you in this way” or “I’d like to know what it looks/feels/tastes/sounds like when you …” Followed by describing whatever action would best fulfill the desire, followed by any specifics and how we’re feeling about it now. “Now that we’ve talked about it I’m definitely excited to see that” and such.
Dunno if that’s helpful but there might be ways to make it feel more special while still being explicit and direct! Just talk about the how and why and how you feel about it.
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfas
Which, funny enough, is exactly what she doesn’t want to do 😄
Given how she wants direct and straight forward communication, he should probably ask her instead of making any inference in this case.
This is, ironically, a very esoteric post.
Verbose gang 😎
Concise gang is where it’s at, 100% best top #1 gang. Why use many words when one word does the trick‽ The concise gang is the best gang.
Being autistic is taking a normal interaction every human experiences and pretending it is unique to you and your autistic peers.
Trivializing is taking very real and major struggles that certain humans experience to much greater degree than others and pretending it has the same gravity as minor annoyances that a wide range of people experience.
If your comment is a joke or otherwise intended to be lighthearted, I apologize, but people saying in earnest what you said is a pretty major pet peeve of mine.
Real “Chronic depression doesn’t exist because everyone feels sad sometimes” energy.
Is getting bullied for walking a certain way and talking in a “funny way” for their whole lifetime every human experience? Cause I didn’t experience any of those yet I’ve seen my friends go through it. Are you suggesting autism is not real? You must be living in a whole new world.
No, he is obviously suggesting that this horribly generalistic shit take in the pic has nothing to do about autism
Charitably I am fairly certain they are making fun of this particular meme and not in general. This meme is certainly something many people experience autism or not, though there are reasons toys experience might stick out for those with autism.
I was, yeah. Thanks for not instantly assuming the worst of me. People like yourself make social media a better environment than it otherwise would be.
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Everyone has a different social perspective. Misunderstandings are very common in human discourse and they are often repeated. When this happens it is not solely because the speaker is autistic; there are many things that can contribute to our struggle to communicate with one another.
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Some people experience some things more than others. I believe that’s how they place you on the spectrum
I find it interesting that with ASD, there is (apparently, from this discussion), a tendency to be concise to the point of meaning being potentially lost but explains as quickly as possible, while with ADHD (which I have), there is a tendency to over-explain and be too verbose. With ADHD, we tend to worry that our thoughts aren’t clear enough for others and go to great lengths to make sure our meaning is understood, which has its own problems (like people getting exhausted with us for our long windedness).
I have diagnosed ADHD and maybe a little spicy hint of ASD but who knows. I end up somewhere in the middle, I explain things very quickly in lots of words and communicate almost nothing.
I get exhausted with my long-windedness while I am still talking. Still, a lot of my friends either don’t mind it, or use my explicitly given permission to just interrupt me if it’s an issue.
Yeah I am married to an autistic person and they think that they are being explicit and clear but are absolutely not. It harms their relationships all over the place and they are constantly thinking less of other people over it.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
If non-autistic people are constantly misunderstanding autistic people maybe there should be some meeting in the middle instead of broadly declaring neurodivergent people to be the problem.
They did not in any way “declare neuro divergent people to be the problem.”
If you go around your day and are constantly being misheard, it’s more likely that you’re mumbling than it is that every other person just has bad hearing.
Their comments are making broad statements about autistic people and putting the onus of understanding solely on them, when communication is a two way street.
“Everyone” doesn’t have trouble understanding autistic people; other autistic people are more able to socialize with autistic people than neurotypical people are. Being a minority just means the people who are able to socialize well with autistic people are outnumbered by people who can’t/don’t/won’t.
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Wow thank you for sharing. That’s a great starting resource
I don’t have a horse in this race, but this is untrue really, majority does not imply correctness, occam’s razor just does not apply to hundreds of individuals with their own possibly independent complex motivations and circumstances. There are plenty of things most people are just wrong about and a select few are correct about etc.
Yeah it’s super easy (autistic or not) to think you’re being very clear when you have the full idea in your head, but you’re actually not. It’s like if you’re trying to describe a purple elephant and say “the thing that moves around and is purple and has a trunk”. Those words clearly describe a purple elephant if you already have the concept at the forefront of your mind, but for somebody without a purple elephant in mind, you could just as well be describing a purple car or a guy from the purple equivalent of the blue man group carrying around a big chest of clothes or a purple tree that can move around.
You’ve just described the entire language of Toki Pona. The same string of words can mean “bear” or “elephant”, and I copied a phrase someone used to mean “tiger trap” and it was read as “bamboo arch”.
You should look up the double empathy problem. Its been shown that autistic people don’t struggle to communicate or be understood by other autistic people. Its only between autistic and non autistic people where the issues arise but only one side gets all the blame when the failure is both ways.
Isn’t that what the meme is saying but from the perspective of what it’s like to experience autism
Sounds like the person you’re married to is kind of a dick, honestly. Thinking less of other people for not understanding your own unclear language just shows a massive lack of introspection. As a local autism, though, I definitely disagree with the last point, as a significant difference between someone who has autism and someone who doesn’t is that language is understood differently (I would know), and that means you can both understand and be understood incorrectly very easily. This post is kind of deliberately divisive anyway, but I believe the point of saying something and being misunderstood, despite your best efforts (hopefully), still stands.
how’s this thing having so many upvotes when it clearly demonizes neurodivergent people from a generalized statement from a specific case?
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
Not really, when you’re in the minority of course you’re going to be outnumbered. But autistic people tend to have an easy time getting their point across to each other, compared to neurotypicals trying to have a mutual understanding. Neurotypicals tend to be very performative in conversation and don’t really say things they actually intend to contribute to the conversation half the time (small talk is a form of this that has gone way too far). They’re also usually evasive & implicitness-oriented, the cultural nuances/expectations/perceptions of the “right” and “wrong” way to convey something tend to get in the way of understanding very straightforward and mostly objective things. They’re generally pretty condescending when you don’t converse how they expect you to, and they judge a lot about your character, emotions, intentions, etc. based on how you speak, and will speak to you very differently based on outside factors. You can take 100 almost-strangers, and neurotypicals will speak in noticeably different ways with different amounts of honesty and indirection for each person in the otherwise same context.
Instead of just saying what they mean and listening to what you say, they throw in a bunch of random culture-dependent social cues and context irrelevant to the conversation that you’re supposed to subconsciously/naturally pick up on to interpret their speech in a different way. And you’re basically just supposed to guess whether something is socially significant indirection or not.
Neurotypicals basically just have the urge make simple conversation unnecessarily complex and care a lot about invisible or implied stuff affecting the conversation. It’s not their fault of course, they were just born that way.
I don’t have ASD but I can’t keep count of the amount of times I will say something very plainly and the other person will try to find some hidden meaning in it or make egregious misinterpretations/false dichotomies based on a statement (basically the “i like pancakes” “so you hate waffles”? tweet), so I can relate. Autistic people are usually far more direct in conversations in my experience, and don’t use nearly as much fluff/unnecessary performative conversation. Of course that’s not to say Autistic people are just flat out better socially than neurotypicals, there are many things I personally find difficult to understand about friends with ASD that can make conversation hard (mainly people who have both ASD and ADHD though, not a fun combo for having conversations, getting ultra-fixated on random irrelevant stuff and just flat out omitting important things frequently even worse than neurotypicals do), it’s just that they’re usually very straightforward.
This is why I learned to use metaphors. People love hearing about something if it was similar to something else. And not some dumb simile shit, like actual comparative metaphors.
“Why yes, the Internet IS a series of tubes. And the water pressure is bandwidth, the ability to move a volume of data in a set time. And each sprinkler is a user who may have individual restrictions but ultimately gets the same water as everyone else. That’s what the Internet is Grandpa.”
Exactly this. I hate metaphores because they easily corrupt a message, or make nonsense seem sensical. I only use it with NT’s because it helps getting something concise across…
all speech is metaphor.
and it’s abundantly clear from this thread that so many of you are acting like self-righteous, arrogant jerks who do not understand that. “so it must be wrong, if someone as smart as ME doesn’t understand it, with my perfectly accurate speech!”
Get off your high horse and tell me where I implied that.
What I stated was disliking the use of metaphores. That I use it because it helps fascillitate communication with NT people over what I personally prefer.
so apparently from this thread i’m figuring out that if i just repeat myself, i am communicating well and i can blame you for not understanding. let’s give it a go: All speech is metaphor.
Dude. A+
And it’s like they try to get mad at you :(
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This post is my lived experience.
Or maybe people have varying degrees of how they take interest in something and semantics are just semantics according to interest.
For example: I have three relatives who are obsessed with the things they are interested in. One is into hoses…like really into hoses. and they have a computer and a car they use but they don’t like these two things nearly as much as they like their hoses. The other, while they use hoses and computers are really into cars. And a third who is super into computers while they have a hose and a car, they just don’t find the same interest in these other two things as they do with their computer.
None of them like each other.
Guess why.
Cuz like Fine. Go be a ‘fanboy’ about your one thing but people aren’t just dumb because they aren’t as obsessed as you are about your one thing. And they aren’t the problem here when you feel you’ve expressed your obsession language to their ordinary language about it. Cuz They get it. You like the thing. They just aren’t wanting to go deep like you do about it. But it gets annoying and old real fast if you’re so obsessed you’re pushing it on them. Their time and energy is worthwhile too.
…hoses? Like the kind you use outside with a water spigot?
I definitely read “horses” until I got to the part where all three of them have “horses” even though only one of them was interested in them, and that’s when I realized my brain had added in the “r” because horse people obviously exist, but hose people?
Hose guy named Hosea
… I will fuck myself off
Yup. Hose people exist. They usually refer to themselves as ‘gardeners’ though.
What exactly does this have to do with Autism? I might be misinterpreting what you mean, but Autism isn’t just having an interest or talking about an interest in great detail, and this Twitter post is DEFINITELY not about that situation. The way you say this definitely makes me think you’re seeing “Autism” as “hyperfixation with an object” since the OP didn’t even mention anything you just said…
being autistic is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result???
This is why learning how to write/speak for your audience is so helpful. People literally perceive what they expect rather than what exists. If the ideas aren’t presented in the way they expect or are beyond the sort of ideas they’re used to dealing with, they’ll apply their preconceived notions of what they think you would say.
Even if you do make sense to someone with the right expertise or experience, people will apply their worldview to everything. Neurotypical people intuitively pick up on cultural ways of thinking and communicating, while autistic people have to consciously think about it more.
The most useful fixation of mine has been understanding how people think so I can speak to be understood. I’m probably better than average at talking to people with different worldviews as a result.
OK but you’ll have to forgive me if the idea of playing the douchebag genie game every time I say something on the Internet doesn’t really appeal
Not just every time you talk on the internet, but every time you communicate in general. It becomes more intuitive over time, but it is something I always need to do. I often understand what I’m trying to describe better as a result of trying to translate it. There’s satisfaction in challenging myself as well as finally being understood.
However, I sometimes start typing a comment only to give up on the original idea in favor of something short and easy. Sometimes I give up on the comment entirely if it seems like too much effort. Having to explain a second time is more work than trying to get it right the first time. I rarely see info dumping as an option. If I don’t care enough to put in effort, then it can’t be that important in the first place.
If all else fails, I tell them that they aren’t understanding me correctly, but make it clear that I don’t feel like talking about it anymore. If a conversation isn’t going anywhere, ending it is the best option.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I would laugh if it wasn’t so painfully true.
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Both things can be true at the same time. E.g. people sometimes are worked up thinking about some strawman they are discussing against in their head. So when I don’t virtue signal enough that I’m on their team or at least not against entirely against every single thing they stand for, those people sometimes take a very clear and to the point thing I say or ask and misconstrue it into meaning some horrific, morally objectionable thing.
Like, when people say that burning kittens on BBQs is a huge problem that we need to band together against, and I reply that I doubt that this is a widespread enough or well enough organized phenomenon that banding together would be effective, they take it as me admitting that I’m pro kitten-burning.
Sure, I failed to coddle them and front my opinion with how abhorrent those kitten burners are, but also nothing I said implied that in the slightest. I just thought that didn’t need mentioning, why say something so obvious?
God I feel this, especially felt it when I was a kid, where I would say the most innocent things and it was somehow interpreted as the most horrific insult. I was considered a “Demon Child” and I never understand why
