I think you're looking at it backwards. The problem is people with authority who think that it makes them better than you. The autistic person rejects that idea completely.
You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.
At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.
As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.
To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.
Certainly, people on power trips are odious and we should all reject that behavior. Let's set that aside because I think it's uncontroversial and we all agree.
The problem is people with authority who think
that it makes them better than you.
To summarize: we've got people who (by definition) have a hard time understanding the motives of others, and they have made some pretty assertive decisions about the motives of those in authority ("they must think they're better than me!") and have decided that they don't like those motives that they, the people who are bad at ascribing others' motives, have ascribed to others.
That is not great or accurate thinking in my opinion. I'm saying this as somebody likely on the spectrum to some extent himself, for whatever that's worth.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the
idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to
play along with it, for some reason.
I don't think this "some reason" should be very mysterious. What are some of the defining traits of autism? A lack of awareness/valuation of social intangibles such as peer or societal pressure. Another typical one is a discomfort with change from one's desired routines. Another typical one is sensory overload. Three common things off the top of my head that can make it tough to jive with authority.
Neurotypicals therefore don't typically have these barriers to successful interactions with authority. I realize that this is difficult or even impossible for those on the spectrum to intuit, but when seemingly intelligent people on the spectrum who seem very well versed on how autism relates to neurotypicalism declare this to be some super mystery, and proclaim that neurotypicals seemingly just looooooooove themselves some authority, my eyes roll so hard that I'm afraid they're about to fall out of my skull. It's insulting, and just incorrect, and just not very good thinking. And again, I'm not even particularly neurotypical myself.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's
notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An
autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about
the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something
that they feel is wrong.
I think you nailed this, hard. More succinctly than me, and certainly better than the linked author. Amen.
> I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger
You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".
Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.
> for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly
This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.
Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.
And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is
and is not appropriate is one big stochastic
experiment that lasts your entire life
This is heartbreakingly true.
But for the specific case of this hypothetical example, and the slightly more generalized example of "what kind of humor might appeal to strangers to whom I've just introduced myself" it's actually kind of an easy lesson.
The answer is that you have to know somebody before you know what kind of humor is going to be cool with them.
And the answer is also that interrupting strangers to tell them jokes or even to simply say "hello" is likely to be rude, unless it's an social situation as opposed to just like, stopping your CEO in the hallway at 2PM on a Tuesday.
Those are the sorts of lessons everybody has to learn, autism or no. As somebody who's probably a bit on the spectrum himself I understand the struggle to an extent, but also it feels like the actually relevant lessons here in this specific case are pretty learnable even if we might learn them the hard way at first.
Why are you so unwilling to accept the extensively documented phenomenon of an autistic person being more intelligent than average?
Some autistic people are genuinely ahead of the curve. Some individuals develop extreme talent/intelligence in certain areas. There is no question of whether this happens or not, it's a demonstrable fact.
Your quote illustrates something that self-aware and reasonable people do: recognize their limitations and yield to someone with more expertise.
If you think that's somehow a bad thing, you should have a really long think about what that says about you.
Yup, the "because I said so" type really isn't worth respect in the first place.
Authority figures are fine when they act with reason and respect. When they don't, that's when we have a problem. I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures. They don't even question it most of the time!
As I've gotten older, my level of tolerance for disrespectful people in general has dropped off dramatically. If you disrespect me while demanding I respect you, I'm just gonna ignore you entirely. You are literally not worth the brainpower it takes just to hear you.
> I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures.
Neurotypical people tend to pick their battles. Especially in the workplace, incompetence is quite often not your problem. I’ve seen autistic coworkers raise hell over perceived incompetence, eventuating in a lot of stress and ultimately losing their job. I tried to explain “who cares if they are making a bad decision that could affect the company. You don’t have any exposure to that risk, it’s not your problem if something goes wrong”.
As well as the fact that quite often it isn’t even incompetence from leadership but a failure to recognise that these leaders are often operating with more information or different incentives. They don’t to let you rewrite the product from php to rust because their incentive is to make the most money, not to build the most technically impressive program.
"Your problem is being such a punchable face and you can stop being autistic and get 99% of your problem solved instantly"
^ process this in warm peroxide for 15 minutes to obtain an analogue for GP.
That said, software engineering had moved away from praising "autism", towards a model of warm and communal, wall-free workplace, over the past decade or so. That had supposedly improved (averaged)throughput, overall productivity, and turned software field into a more mature and modern space. It should be generally a good thing that innocent regular people are less likely to be psychologically, or sometimes physically, harmed engaging in software work.
At the same time, it seems that it shifted power held by independent kind dictators to monopolistic corporations amplifying power by herding those people, accelerating techno-feudalism. And as such, maybe it's just me but, I'm not sure "autist go away" attitude is good for the future of computing, and also future of the human society by extension.
It was said that the person has the “disagreable” personality trait. Not that the comment itself is disagreeable. (But maybe that’s what you mean by “disagreeable” in this context.)
Bluetooth link negotiation happens in a few dozens of milliseconds. Any perceptible delay is down to the host operating system setting up audio drivers. The headset can't know what the host is doing or even that there is a delay.
MP3 decoding is just math. If you have enough CPU to decode a compressed audio stream, it doesn't cost anything to also have it decode MP3.
Sure, you could store those clips in a more appropriate codec, but what do you gain? It's dead simple to encode an MP3, every audio editor from the last couple decades can do it. How common is SBC support?
If MP3 decoding is free, and MP3 encoding is free, why bother spending any effort at all on anything else? Sometimes good enough is good enough and cheap and easy wins over correct every time.
This is the precise reason I prefer embedded development. The challenge of fitting my entire application into a handful of kilobytes with just a KB or two of RAM is a lot of fun. I get to build a program that runs really fast on a very slow system.
It's a point of personal pride for me to really understand what the machine is and what it's doing. Programming this way is working with the machine rather than trying to beat it into submission like you do with high level languages.
It seems a lot of programmers just see the CPU as a black box, if they even think about it at all. I don't expect more than a couple percent of programmers would truly grok the modern x86 architecture, but if you stop to consider how the CPU actually executes your code, you might make better decisions.
In the same vein, very high level languages are a big part of the problem. It's so far abstracted from the hardware that you can't reason about how it will actually behave on any real machine. And then you also have an invisible iceberg of layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction and indirection and unknowable, unreadable code that there's no reasonable way to know that your line of code does what you think and nothing else.
Modern software practices are bad and we should all throw away our computers and go back to the 8086. Just throw away the entire field of programming and start again.
I love embedded as a hobby but God is it a silly statement to imply we should go back to low level asm/C bs for everything, we would get so little done. Oh, but it would run fast at least.
Problem isn't high level dev, it's companies skimping out on the optimisation process.
I recently switched to a local pharmacy after getting berated by a CVS pharmacist for standing in the "wrong" line. CVS in general has been absolutely awful in the last few years.
What really turned me against them was "CVS Caremark" insurance.
CVS runs a prescription insurance company that only allows you to buy your meds at CVS or Walgreens. How that's even legal is beyond me. They also have absolutely insane policies, and will NOT pay for anything unless it's prescribed as a 90 day supply. If your doctor is adjusting your dose or you're trying a new medication, fuck you, pay up.
I also once tried CVS's free prepack services where they divide your doses into individual AM and PM plastic pouches on a big reel. Super convenient for someone with severe ADHD, as the pouches are dated, so I always know if I missed a dose.
Caremark wouldn't pay for my proscriptions filled this way. Again, a free service offered by CVS. The Caremark rep I talked to had never even heard of it before.
Slightly OT, but what the hell is going on with these massive persistent popups on every website imploring me to sign in with my google account lately? After the first dozen I just added a uBlock filter for it, but it's ridiculous now.
You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.
At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.
As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.
To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.