The article touches on this a bit, but I do think lumping straight up disorders like depression together with more “neurodiverse” ones like ASD is the wrong approach. Maybe other people feel differently, but for me personally I think there’s a pretty clear difference. If I could take a magic pill that permanently cured my depression/anxiety/ADHD, I would. But my feelings toward autism are a lot more complicated. Despite making my life more difficult in some ways, it feels much more a part of who I am than the other conditions. If it suddenly disappeared it would completely change my personality and way of thinking, to the degree that I basically wouldn’t be the same person anymore.
Is that a difference of kind or of degree? Take away my depression/anxiety and I would be quite different and act quite differently, if not to the same degree you're describing. Many things driven by my anxiety have been good for my career in some ways; many other things driven by it have been bad for my career; all I can say for sure is that without it I'd be in a VERY different place.
How would we separate various mental differences into "disorder" vs "diversity"?
a) Your condition prevents you from being a functioning adult in society. You have to be in someone's care in order to function at a basic level.
b) You're a functioning adult in society but you (or others, or both) perceive your condition as a handicap that hurts areas of your life and needs to be fixed.
c) Your condition is a mixed bag and you perceive it as beneficial in many ways.
I'd say (a) is definite "disorder" territory, (c) is leaning into "diversity", and (b) is a gray area. It could be "diversity" if you choose to embrace it and live with it, or a "disorder" if you're set on keeping it at bay.
You're basically saying you think depression/anxiety/ADHD are disorders but autism is "part of who you are". Is a personality change indicative of whether something is a disorder or not? Is it only when the change is perceived to negative?
Autism shapes personality and worldview, meaning it shapes the person and their sense of self. It doesn't cause suffering in a vacuum the same way other disorders do. The biggest "issues" attributed to autism come from lack of accomodations and the tendency to falsely attribute comorbidities as being part of autism.
A huge difference between autism and the other listed things is that autism is not (and never will be) legitimately treatable, while depression, anxiety, and ADHD are treatable and have been for a long time. Amphetamine targets dopamine dysregulation and it's highly effective at improving quality of life.
Autism has no equivalent. No drug has ever shown efficacy in improving the quality of life of autistic people, nor has any therapy. They've all been damaging, and the mainstream autism junk-science treatment today is ineffective according to meta-analyses[1], is based on gay conversion therapy, has been shown to cause PTSD[2].
Treating autism stops making sense (and thinking of it as important to identity starts making sense) when you realize that having an autistic brain means using a different but equally-effective social model[3], mode of thinking, and algorithms for processing information, that in many cases has tangible advantages.
I agree completely (as someone with ADHD). But, compared to how far behind other psychiatric treatments are...
* Antidepressants are barely better than placebo.
* Benzos are a short-term bandaid, best reserved for panic attacks.
* Antipsychotics have truly horrifying permanent side effects.
Amphetamines are a borderline miracle. Again, comparatively. Nothing else available today comes close in effectiveness at treating any psychiatric disorder. They definitely have their shortcomings, but for people with ADHD they're such a huge boost to quality of life and lead to better overall life outcomes.
There's a chance pharmacological depression treatment will catch up to where ADHD is at if/when ketamine become commonly available. Same with PTSD and MDMA. The future of anxiety treatment looks a bit more bleak... but there's experimental stuff out there with HDAC inhibitors and I think some other stuff causing fear extinction.
Psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, DMT) have some efficacy as well, and need to be studied more in the context of ADHD. A particularly powerful DMT experience gave me about six months of focus control.
The issue with LSD/psilocybin and ADHD is you can't take it everyday or even every other day because tolerance builds extremely quickly. I don't think there's a way you can time the doses where you'll have the focus benefits daily, but I could be wrong.
Honestly, I believe (at least for my brain), the path is a strong DMT experience, followed up with a regular microdosing regimen (two to three times a week, sub-threshold dosing). I can say that one time, I quartered a tab of acid and took the quarters over four consecutive days, and each experience "felt" the same in terms of intensity (which was very little) and focus control.
As far as I know, LSD and psilocybin both have a roughly two week tolerance curve.
On average, the acceptable "separated from placebo" margin doesn't have to be that high, but the range of effect is absolutely enormous, even within close relatives.
Antidepressants that did nothing positive or negative for me or some family members were either extremely helpful or extremely harmful to other family members of mine. (Almost never vice-versa; my biochemistry appears to be quite stubborn about responding to a great many classes of treatment, well _or_ poorly, but at least one medication just made me feel completely numb while being extremely helpful to another relative.)
It can also be a weird multidimensional variable in ways many people don't expect - one medication I'm currently taking for depression is 4 pills twice a day (very short half-life), because I was gradually tapering it up. We tried switching to the same manufacturer's single pill that was 4x the dose, twice a day, and immediately I started feeling extremely nauseous whenever in a moving vehicle, which has never happened before. Switch back, problem goes away.
(I know the above sort of outcome is not exclusive to mental health medications, but in my personal experience, I've never had any other medication type vary in outcome based on whether they gave me one or multiple pills adding to the same dosage.)
The concern presented by this author is a very valid one that I myself have been struggling with for over a decade now. I have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder since I was 13 years old. It however took me until last year to receive a diagnosis for autism and ADHD. My entire life I have fought and struggled against my brain in order to fit in, and actively harmed my own mental health by trying to change aspects of my personality that I categorized as maladaptive coping behaviors. I really thought that I could train myself out of being autistic, and one day when I was driving home having a breakdown I realized that I kept telling myself that I was going to "grow out" of my autistic behaviors. I think that it is valid to find pride in the way that I have overcome and learn to cope with my depression, but I'm not proud because I have depression and I certainly believe that it should be treated at all costs. However, I think that having pride in being autistic makes sense because it is a different way of being in the world. It still presents me with unique challenges that someone who is neurotypical may not face, but it isn't something that I can treat until it goes away and trying to do so has harmed me massively. It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction. Those will always be harmful to you and don't make sense to be proud about as I feel that implies that you don't feel they should be treated.
> It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me, as opposed to depression or struggling with an eating disorder or addiction.
I feel this so much when it comes to technology. I too was diagnosed with ADHD and I fight my technology addiction constantly. It's so easy for me to mindlessly descend into an internet or mobile app rabbit hole, and I'm acutely aware that this is intentional. I thank my higher powers every single day that I'm not into sports gambling or worse, because these companies make billions on people who are unable to say "no" and they know it.
Everything is becoming so complex in our world, I believe more and more that we should have a right to basic affordances that allow us to do what we need to (like easily pay taxes in the US). I fear that complexity in functioning within society to be the next wave of suppression against people, if it's not happening already. Where I live, it now takes 2-3 months to get a driver's license because the state legislature won't fund the DMV. That should be illegal.
> It's also something that is difficult for me because the world itself is not designed to be accessible to me
I don't understand what you mean by that. The world is not "designed" in any way for anyone, all beings from bacteria to animals and humans live as they can, so you probably want to say something else, can you please tell that with different words?
Not OP, but consider being 6 feet and 8 inches tall. In many buildings (especially older ones), you will have to dodge light fixtures regularly. Many doorways will actually be too short and you'll need to duck. Cooking in most kitchens will end up being quite uncomfortable since you'll be hunched over the entire time. You won't fit in a large number of cars. Flying in planes becomes physically painful unless you get an exit row or pay more. And so on.
You can still interact with the world, but being an outlier adds a whole lot of little bits of friction and discomfort that a more statistically average person doesn't experience.
I am tall. I have problems finding clothes. I cannot fit in the best light plane (in my opinion) and I am a pilot. My grandmother's house had the ceiling very low, it was about my shoulder (she was 5 ft tall). Never complained. Never complained the world is not built around me. I don't understand how that works. I am not entitled to anything.
You may not complain, but you do observe that your experiences are different in a way that can sometimes be unpleasant.
It appears that when another person recounted how their experiences are different in a way that can sometimes be unpleasant, you assumed that they were placing a burden on others to change for their benefit (or that they were entitled to it). I don't think that is a correct interpretation.
Nice job moving the goalposts. The original question was whether the world can be said to be "designed". What you, personally choose to complain about is irrelevant.
Isn’t the built world designed by humans with particular viewpoints for other humans with a certain set of perspectives, capabilities and capacities to adapt to those built realities? (But not necessarily all such capabilities…)
While I dislike the term "aphantasia" for being technically inaccurate, it is the closest label for the condition of my brain. My brain is completely free of any visual or auditory (or other sense) creations of any kind, other than what I'm perceiving in a given moment based on inputs from my eyes or ears (or nose, fingers, tongue, etc.) This is true whether I have ingested a "mind altering" substance, or not. I do apparently see and hear things in dreams, however. I cannot recall them later, other than by remembering facts and feelings about them.
The Aphantasia definition quoted on Wikipedia states it is "the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind". But, there also exists an idea of a state in which an individual's brain NEVER creates mental representations of any kind, willful or not, other than what is being observed by the senses in that moment.
Thankfully, I still have an imagination. Thinking mind will always think, if allowed by the awareness. What makes it weird is whether or not things are seen in mind, or heard in mind when that thinking occurs.
There seems to be great variation in vividness and occurrence of involuntary mental images as well. I have to put effort in if I want to picture something, so most of the time I'm reading books I don't have any mental image of what is happening.
My wife, on the other hand, involuntarily forms rather vivid mental images of stories she is reading, to the point where she has to avoid violent literature in the same manner that she avoids gory movies.
Our subjective experience of reading any given book is so different that it sometimes feels like we read different books when discussing them afterwards.
So, for instance if you were supplied two weird shapes rotated strangely and then asked you if they would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle you can't rotate them and place them together? Man, I can't imagine how this works with assembling furniture.
When I assemble furniture I do a lot of "pick up this piece and look at it from different angles to see if it matches the piece in the diagram for this step" because yeah, it's generally VERY difficult for me to visualize the result of "look at this from 45 degrees below it" in my head.
It's similarly hard to hold onto a mental picture of a puzzle piece profile I'm missing or such.
I am, strangely enough, highly spatial and tested off the charts for it when I was younger. I can do exactly what you describe, with a high degree of precision. I do this mainly by elimination, which is likely due to the fact I can't consciously perceive the imagery, but only get a feeling if it is "right" or not.
One way I put it to a visualizer recently was that I am not conscious of seeing the map, but I am definitely operating on the mesh. The way he described it was that he was actively seeing the map, overlayed on the model, as if it were a screen in mind. He waved vaguely to "up here" where it "was".
Yeah sounds like you are subconciously doing the work 100%, it's just you operate with different subconcious/concious roles and limits. The mental visualization is off bounds for your concious mind.
That's unrelated to aphantasia, and is instead related to knowledge which doesn't require the ability to visualize to apply. Any common keyhole is going to be obviously smaller than a standard sized tennis ball to any person aware of both objects. An inability to answer your question would occur if someone lacked knowledge about one or both of the two objects, or had a fundamental inability to recall information about relative sizes and shapes of the two objects (perhaps generalized to more than just those two).
What do you mean by "obviously smaller"? How do you make that judgement without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?
> without ever being told one is smaller than the other and without being able to visualize both?
As opposed to never having seen or been told about a tennis ball or a keyhole, and expected to know which is smaller?
The idea of aphantasia doesn't imply being blind. Assuming someone is sighted, you can still see objects and internalize an order of "small to large" things without necessarily using mental imagery to make those connections. I'm not sure if I have some "kind of aphantasia" but I also don't generally visualize things in my head, instead remembering logical relations based on my (non-visual) memories.
By having experience or knowledge of both objects. If you've ever held a tennis ball and have ever seen a keyhole you know which one is bigger than the other, you have no need to visualize them in your mind in order to make a comparison. So long as you can recall these facts about them, you can make a comparison based on knowledge and not on visualization. Now if something prevents you from having this knowledge (somehow you have never seen a tennis ball or a keyhole, or something in your brain prevents you from having the ability to recall facts about the objects like their sizes) then that's something else, but it's not aphantasia.
Besides, visualizations aren't perfectly accurate, they are subject to your own knowledge and memories. And they can be distorted by poor recall or just the imagination itself. I'm capable of visualizing a tennis ball that is small enough to fit inside a typical keyhole, or a keyhole big enough to permit a standard size tennis ball. That doesn't make either scenario realistic just because I can visualize them.
A tetrafoo is four times the size of a barbaz. Tetrafoos are pretty big things, about the size of a washing machine.
Now I've said nothing specific about either these things, besides size.
Can you tell me if a barbaz fits through a door? Probably.
Can you see that you can reach that anwser without doing any math about how big doors and washing machines are, but just with implicit knowledge?
The source of truth here is not visualization, it's knowledge. In fact, whatever you visualized, I gave you too little details so that your visualization would have to make up extra things that aren't true. You don't even know if the shape of those things is square or circular.
So even if you can't do it without visualizing, you should see that visualization is really just pulling from some other source (abstract knowledge). You can bypass that step and just get to know the result, without visualizing it.
Possibly with numbers. Can you properly visualize a tennis ball next to a baseball and tell which is larger? I was never much of an athlete (in the sports ball sense, at least) and have insufficient experience with either to tell you definitively which is larger (I looked it up, my guess was baseball and that turned out to be correct). The fact is that a small but still standard sized baseball is only 5mm larger than a large but still standard sized tennis ball. That is near enough that my memory (I played baseball last as a kid) could not distinguish between the size of the two objects.
But now I know the fact, a standard baseball is larger than a standard tennis ball (now, don't ask me in a few weeks what the actual sizes are, I will probably forget, though I will probably remember that the baseball is larger).
Another way is just having knowledge of relative sizes and the ability to perform rudimentary logic. A tennis ball feels about the same in my hand as a door knob (in terms of size and ability to wrap my hand around it, bigger than most but not by too much). A keyhole fits into a doorknob. I'd have to be really drunk to not realize the logical implication of that: A tennis ball won't fit into a keyhole (assuming both are standard sized and we're not talking about a comedian's prop key and keyhole).
If you think of a bowling pin vs a baseball bat, do you have such a specific visual image in your mind that you could compare their sizes?
I'm particularly curious about a bowling pin because we often only see them from far away, so size is harder to gauge in the first place. I can't form detailed images of anything in my mind, but those images are also all "normalized" to an extent - e.g. in my head, both bowling pin and baseball bat seem to be similar in size. Even though that's very much not true. So to me, visualization and size comparison are totally different faculties.
Even though I've never held a bowling pin or been close to one, I know how big a bowling pin is because I've seen the ball hit the pin at the end of the lane and I've held the ball in my hand.
A bat is definitely longer than a bowling pin, but not by much. I don't see either in mind when doing this referencing.
These ideas are linked through memories of spatial relatedness, not imagery.
I once had an interesting discussion with someone who had participated in unique treatments for PTSD. The councilors advised the patients, when they saw disturbing imagery in mind, to place the imagery on a poster. They indicated that most patients could do this task. They then proceeded to have the patient put the poster on the wall "across the room". The image "shrunk" in mind by forcing it into spatial perspective. They then had the patient put the poster on a telephone pole "across the street". This shrunk it even more. A diminishment in the strong feelings (stress) related to the imagery was reported in some patients. So, the smaller something appears, the less some appear to react to the imagery. Small monsters vs. large ones, I guess.
When you do mental arithmetic, say 48 added to 73, do you visualize 48 objects and 73 objects and then count them? Do you visualize a page like a 1st grade arithmetic homework sheet and draw out the numbers with a mental pencil and do all the carrying by mental hand? Or do you “just” add them and end up with 121 in your head?
I don't assign numbers when mentally comparing things. I compare them relative to each other. I think that's why it's hard to compare things that have a large difference in size.
Knowledge of the mesh, and spacial awareness, both of which has nothing to do with seeing an image.
I thank you for your question, given it has given me a rather large dump of an idea into thinking mind that I will implement in my conscious AI project. Gratitude also goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr: https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_1/spatial-search.html
<flip>.com~> Should I use whomever or whoever in this sentence: Also, thanks goes out to whoever put spacial search into Solr?
system=> No training data found for that command. Consider revising. x
ambrosial-hound*> ...
ambrosial-hound*> There is no definitive answer to this question, as both forms are considered acceptable. However, many people prefer to use "whoever" in situations where the subject of the sentence is unknown or unclear.
I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination. There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head. Yeah, it doesn't overlay my visual field, and that doesn't mean I can draw it. I really think they are being pedantic/obtuse/silly.
I can't picture my mom in my head. I can sorta describe some basic features like hair shape and color, and I know she doesn't have any strong distinguishing characteristics like a big scar or something. No idea what color her eyes are, can't visualize ear or nose shape. Couldn't pick skin tone or eyebrow shape out of a set of possibilities. Couldn't describe her to a sketch artist if her life depended on it. If I see a photo I know it's her, but I have zero mental image.
I would recommend reading The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.
> There's no way someone can't picture their mom in their head.
No matter how limited your thinking of other's experiences, I don't consciously see an image of anyone or anything at anytime while awake, in mind. Period. I know exactly what my mom looks like, but I still love her with all my heart. She is aware that I can't see her in mind and has said that she always knew I was different, but loves me just the same! I guess she "makes up" for my lack of this ability, given she can take herself back anywhere at anytime and see anyone that was there in that place in excruciating detail. It's a bit odd, but she has reported she can't see people in mind she doesn't love. I view this as a "tag" on which she is able to recall the images...
The brain is made up of a lot of regions, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the visual recognition and imagery parts aren’t communicating or indirectly communicating at a low bandwidth with the imagination parts in some individuals.
If you took a picture of your mom into photoshop and started to apply a blur filter, and reduced the contrast, how far would you have to push it before it resembled what you can call up in your head on demand?
In my case, that comparison doesn't really make sense. Whatever "image" I have in my head has no resolution, detail, or colour; it's just a feeling, and not at all like seeing.
I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.
> I literally can't imagine what it's like to have a vivid imagination because to me my perception of reality and whatever I can "imagine" are as obviously different as black is from white. I could never confuse one for the other, and I don't know how they can even be compared.
This gets back a bit to what alar44 was saying:
>> I'm still all in on these people thinking imagining something is a hallucination.
Having a vivid imagination is not the same as hallucinating. There is no confusion in my mind between what is real and what is imagined (visual or auditory imaginations, I can also imagine smell and taste, but to a much lesser extent). I don't "see" my mental images through my eyes, in the sense that if I want to imagine what a chair would look like in the corner of my loft, I see the real scene (loft without the chair) and imagine (in my mind) a separate scene, the same (to the accuracy of the imagination) but with the chair.
But it very much is an image in my head. It's not an abstract sense of what it would be like to have the chair there, it is the same as recalling a scene from the past to me. But deliberately altered, rather than accidentally altered based on faulty memory. In the same way, I can recall the visual image of pages I have read (this ability has declined with age) and read the words off that recalled image.
I wouldn't know what having a vivid imagination is like; hell, I don't exactly even know what a hallucination is like, so I would never try to claim that they must be the same.
I get more of a picture than `chousuke, but it's certainly not a scene or an image. The best way I can think of describing it is a very low-res/blurry/faded image. Like I sorta can picture my mom's hairstyle and sorta put it on top of a face and pull in a few other details from specific memories here and there. But things like color of eyes, or size of certain facial features vs other? No way.
If I asked you that question would you visualize a tennis ball next to a keyhole?
I would not. I'd answer based on what (to the best of my understanding of my own thought process) is something more like a rough tagging and comparison of "tennis balls are roughly this big" "keyholes are roughly this big" -> "the one is too big to fit."
Similarly with something like comparing an elephant to a train. I'm not picturing the two next to each other, I'm trying to remember roughly how big each is.
I couldn't be aware of seeing such an image, but factually I can say a normal tennis ball does not fit into a normal keyhole. Then again, there's Alice.
> When should I try to change or “treat” my mental differences, and when should I embrace them as naturally occurring diversity?
Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it.
It really depends on what you want in life, what you can be content with.
It is really hard knowing you could do much more, and want to do much more, but your own brain is in the way.
I mean, it's like having problems with any other part of your body. A limp is one thing, it can be managed. But would someone missing a leg or both not accept functional prostheses? The brain shouldn't be treated differently.
The number of times I heard "you're so lazy"... while every day is a fucking massive struggle just to live a normal life. There isn't much point to such a life, to be honest, but dying is much harder than one would think. It's like shoving your hand into a fire - most people can't do it.
> Imo, it's simple: the more negatively it affects your life, the more you should try and fix it.
I think you need to be careful with this advice, as I can imagine people reading this and trying to fix things that they can't, and then getting frustrated and/or depressed when they can't.
I imagine there are lots of younger people with ADHD/Autism who would feel that their neurological condition prevents them from fitting in, and so would feel that their brain needs to be fixed, when really what needs to change is acceptance of these sorts of conditions. That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement.
> That's my understanding of the whole "embracing neurodiversity" movement.
Your understanding is pretty much correct.
An unmentioned danger here (in addition to self-fixing) is e.g. the autism industrial complex trying to convince the parents their child needs to be "fixed" early on through their absurdly expensive, completely ineffective and pseudoscientific, horribly mentally damaging "therapies."
Certain kinds of "self-help" books targeted at neurodivergent people are the equivalent of that for teens/young adults who think they need to "fix" themselves.
Try and fix it. Some things can't be fixed, but many can. And I'm talking by any means necessary.
Of course, first and foremost, one must understand and accept the risks.
I do suffer from ADHD (which has been getting more severe over the years), which leads to anxiety and depression (I call it the ADHD->anxiety->depression circle, vicious thing).
It doesn't have to be accepted. It needs to be fucking fixed.
I am in Europe, where it's "accepted" as laziness. So I can't get proper medication and recently started my own mini lab risking years in prison. I realized I am absolutely, undoubtedly fucked without medication, and that's the only solution I came up with, judge me lol. Chemistry is fun, though.
I interviewed at a quant hedge fund. They hire some of the top programmers in the world at 1-2M+ comp. The head of recruiting told me that even if someone passes all of the coding interviews, if he is too slick and social in the behavioral they will reject him. They specifically wanted aspergers/slightly autistic personality types, and believed that a disheveled look with poor behavioral interviewing was a legitimate signal to hiring the best.
Worked in HFT and we had a “SpergBoard” - new hires were encouraged but not required to undertake an ASD diagnostic exam and put their score on the leaderboard.
The heavyweights at the firm all scored in the “definitely see a clinician” range.
My personal opinion of it was the “pretty boys” were in it for the dough and the prestige and not the love of the game. Personally, I joined for wanting to work and hone my skills. I could see it being a viable recruiting strategy.
Yeah i think this is accurate, this was actually an HFT firm, and was a prop shop not a hedge fund. They need to weed out people who are there purely for the money. He was kind of describing how the CTO's brain never stops thinking about coding, and when hes in bed at night, hes imagining how to apply a design pattern to a problem at hand. In some ways, they wanted people who would not stop working and were obsessed with the problem space
In a hedge fund, that probably reflects management fear that if someone is both a good quant and has social skills, they will take over, or start their own fund.
> But something about the name of this award rubbed me the wrong way
I totally get this. Sure, it may be a compliment in many ways, but the fact that other people decided to give you a "weirdest brain award" also gives the sense that "you ain't part of our normal people club".
Maybe it comes down to there being something inherently insulting about being told who you are by someone who can never fully understand you. I suspect it's similar to how any minority feels when the majority culture tries to tell them how things are without having experienced it themselves.
I think you can't just erase cultural conditioning to value certain things by recognizing differences, especially if otherwise the culture or organization doesn't demonstrate that it values those differences.
You have to actually value it, not just say crap or make empty gestures. People can tell.
For instance, "most improved" or "participation" trophies: Boomers gave these to their kids, then later wrote articles about how entitled, etc, millennials had turned out to be as a result, but the truth is that we all knew those were the consolation prizes for those of us who sucked.
"neurodiversity" is another case of hyper-pathologization . Everyone has quirks. Moreover, its enabling antisocial behavior. If someone is impolite we call them "on the spectrum" and accept it.
Not everything is a disease. Human behavior is very diverse and there's a broad spectrum of perfectly normal individuals.
The "broad spectrum" idea is precisely what people are trying to communicate by using the term "neurodiversity". The alternative perspective, which used to be very common in my circles (and frankly is poking through a bit in your sentence about impoliteness), is that human behavior is not diverse and "normal" refers to a narrow, universal standard of behavior that everyone knows and is obligated to follow. A decade or two ago, I would constantly hear people complaining about others who don't listen to "normal" music or have "normal" hobbies.
Have you ever considered that to an autistic person, a neurotypicsl person might be the impolite one?
People who are actually antisocial will be impolite on purpose, and it's usually pretty obvious. Meanwhile, actually autistic people will get labelled as jerks or whatever because everyone assumes that the "rudeness" is intentional even if they just miss some cue or happen to be too distracted to respond in an "appropriate" manner.
You're right. Autism isn't a disease and its traits should be normalized and treated as normal human social diversity. We should proooobably stop that whole dog-training-but-worse thing called ABA.
This is one of the worst 5000-word essay attempts I've seen in a long time. It's trying to describe and prescribe for an important topic but meanders aimlessly through a forest of ill-defined abstractions, and falls into an conceptual swamp.
Just one example, what does'The Age of Neurodiversity' mean? Definition please? In a world in which, for most of human history, shamans (about as weird as you can get) majorly figured in cultures around the world for thousands and thousands of years? A world which most of us find ourselves struggling to understand so we can build, then built structures which have mostly been abandoned? While we struggle to understand the meanings and/or purposes of our lives? Not to mention our personal emotions and limitations?
Our attempts to clutch out some concept of normality are hilarious.
Le Guin: " Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption, and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all."
