Autism and Mind Blindness

[Jarhyn]

Although I am a loner, my social skills aren't too bad. Sometimes I'm better than typical at perceiving another's status or emotions.

I should say: My social skills aren't too bad if I avoid excessive oration. (And avoid politics with Americans or Brits.) Otherwise I'm liable to veer into some useless topic -- Shakespeare authorship anyone? -- then segue consecutively into some other topic in science or history, then politics, then an amusing fact about the Thai language, and so on; the topics all connected mootly. I often wrest myself from this abyss with "What were we talking about?"

Is that a symptom of Autism? Or is it more Attention Deficit Disorder? Schizophrenia?

The most common differences in thought process for autistic people drive towards the schizoid and schitzotypal disorders.

As I was describing to Barbos, and based on some discussions you and I have had together about how neural nodes interact, and further on the reality of how autistic people are often more "reflected", I would imagine this is caused by the fact that even processes in our own heads can be differentiated as "self" and "other" more readily, and can even have their idea streams mirrored through the Wernicke's area so as to "come off" as external speech, or full blown schitzophrenia.

To the medieval mind, I suppose these might be seen as demons or angels or fairies or whatever the fuck they called them back then, particularly when the separation was driven upon and pushed by ill-informed religious practices.

The point is that all of this is a reflection of "magical thinking", the idea that there are "spiritual" realities in addition to "physical" ones, albeit I typify these as purely mental, neurological phenomena.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

 

[rousseau]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Why get up from your chair when a bunch of internet infrastructure can do it for you.

 

[Swammerdami]

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Yes, but much traditional communication is knowingly useless. "Is it hot enough for you?"; "Pretty house"; "I like Chang beer better than Singh." The conversation is like affectionate grooming, and is NOT for information transfer.

I noticed this as a rural hermit. Expats were so rare where I lived that Germans would dine with Anglophones despite having no real common language. People enjoyed the useless small talk. That small talk bored me: In extreme cases I might pick a political squabble with one of the Anglophones just to liven things up. . . . . . . (It was at such a German's birthday party that an Irishman informed me Tesla was smarter than Einstein. This soon segued into "There must be something wrong with the Jews. Why else have they been hated for 2000 years?")

 

[steve_bank]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

It can make things more tome efficient and it helps with documetng statements. One tactic icwas to email a group saying 'Joe and I had a discussion and he said this and I said that..". The CYI cover your ass email.

We all learned early the hard way never say something in email you would not say publcally.

Email chains can lead to confusion and make easily resolved situations complicated.

I sat in meetings where two people threw (metaphrcally)hard copies of emails at each other.

 

[rousseau]

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Yes, but much traditional communication is knowingly useless. "Is it hot enough for you?"; "Pretty house"; "I like Chang beer better than Singh." The conversation is like affectionate grooming, and is NOT for information transfer.

I noticed this as a rural hermit. Expats were so rare where I lived that Germans would dine with Anglophones despite having no real common language. People enjoyed the useless small talk. That small talk bored me: In extreme cases I might pick a political squabble with one of the Anglophones just to liven things up. . . . . . . (It was at such a German's birthday party that an Irishman informed me Tesla was smarter than Einstein. This soon segued into "There must be something wrong with the Jews. Why else have they been hated for 2000 years?")

The socializing I did in the office pre-pandemic worked for me. Unplanned, spontaneous conversations that didn't lock you into an entire afternoon or meal together.

Over the five years with my employer pre-pandemic I had a number of great friendships develop this way. With some women, too, which isn't really available outside of work or online when you're married.

 

[bilby]

(It was at such a German's birthday party that an Irishman informed me Tesla was smarter than Einstein. This soon segued into "There must be something wrong with the Jews. Why else have they been hated for 2000 years?")

One could make the exact same argument to show that there must be something wrong with the Irish.

 

[Jarhyn]

On the topic of in-person socialization, I think my repertoire of conversational topics ends up way more fun in person, especially since I come to such novel conclusions about things, like the compatibility of esoteric practices with naturalistic materialism from a neural perspective.

In some ways this sort of "small" talk ("big" talk?) Is a lot more fun, but it doesn't generally accomplish anything more than normal small talk, I find, unless I have my stick with me.

It's bizarre, but I think people are somehow evolved to give more credence to people who have a really fancy stick.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Egads! It's as if everyone actually thinks there's a "normal" way to be a human being. I'm more the thought that we're not supposed to be anything in particular. What I do find is that lots of folks just want to go through life day to day and don't think about what they want for the collective human future. Find me a person who wants a peaceful healthy planet where we all get along, that's normal for me. And to be quite honest there ain't a lot of normal out there. We're largely a bunch of selfish, juvenile, uninformed, superstitious, frightened, woo-peddling, tribal fucks who haven't gotten beyond the thoughtless joy of demonizing.

What does that have to do with mind blindness? If you can't see yourself in others you are just another tribal fuck. If you don't have a wholesome vision of how you want things to be then you may be suffering mind blindness, just not blindness to someone else's mind but rather your own.

Honestly, wake up to the fact that there isn't any kind of "normal" out there and never has been. Just make it work, that's all. Be a little more accepting and tolerant.

Someone mentioned Shakespeare:

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

It really needn't be that way. I'm not sure the human tribe is moving in any particular direction, or whether it even matters.

Carry on. Rant over. (To hit "Post reply" or not to hit, That is the question.)

 

[Jarhyn]

It's as if everyone actually thinks there's a "normal" way to be a human being

Well, the point is that there are people with a particular trend towards an imbalanced connectivity of white matter, and another group of people without that.

This is a physiological difference, and as one of the people with the less common configuration, I have some curiousity about the people who have the more common one.

Barbos answered that question for me, though: some people at least lack the perception of topology in their heads, and lack the ability to listen to the music in their heads, and think that the experience of that is so bizarre and alien that it warrants treatment out of existence.

 

[Jarhyn]

I was in the car today discussing with my husband about something that people seem somehow blind to in a lot of ways which are apparent to both him and I.

One of those things was "fake people".

There have been folks who, for whatever reason, instantly trigger alarm bells for me, and which few other people in any case seem to be keyed to.

The conclusion we ended up agreeing on was that it probably has something to do with "masking" behaviors, and the fact that both him and I have to "mask" in order to interact in most social contexts, so we become more and more aware over time of when other people are doing it.

For me, I can usually tell when someone is masking to hide introversion, vs when they are masking to hide malignant character traits, though in the past this has generally translated less to a direct awareness and more to a like/dislike of the person.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Why get up from your chair when a bunch of internet infrastructure can do it for you.

I disagree. Things like text and e-mail are good for conveying information but not very good for things that require discussion.

 

[rousseau]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Why get up from your chair when a bunch of internet infrastructure can do it for you.

I disagree. Things like text and e-mail are good for conveying information but not very good for things that require discussion.

Right, but in the real world (not in the context of a business) most important communication only involves conveying information, and doesn't need extended discussion. So what happens is that people who know each other end up doing the very bare minimum of socializing to maintain their network. Most of it is just conveying information or checking in occasionally.

Actually leaving your house, driving across a city, spending multiple hours with a person takes a lot more effort than sending a series of texts. But now that the internet is a thing, people don't have to do that anymore, and they often don't.

Even within businesses there's going to be a tendency to rely on the least energy intensive route first. The result being that people don't interact.

So yes, being able to send information without interrupting people is a good thing in terms of effort and efficiency, but a bad thing in terms of actually speaking with another human being from time to time.

 

[Jarhyn]

When email was introduced into business people 10 feet away emailed instead of getting up and talking.

It led to communications problems and conflict. Without body language and tone of voice emails could be misinterpreted.

This actually makes sense in many situations--it lets you communicate without interrupting them. If you're conveying information rather than having a discussion it can be a good thing.

That's the exact problem vis-a-vis socializing. It almost always makes more sense to send an e-mail or have a quick chat via text.

Why get up from your chair when a bunch of internet infrastructure can do it for you.

I disagree. Things like text and e-mail are good for conveying information but not very good for things that require discussion.

Personally I like Slack a lot for immediate discussion, especially since it has a log, and as an autistic person, actually having a real log of things that were said is really important for me, especially seeing as I have a really hard time with disambiguation on word usage, have a disappointingly loud voice, and I HATE being forced to actually be "verbal" when I don't have to be.