General Autism Discussion

The sexual harassment article is here. The comment I quoted is from the comments section. As for the context, I'm guessing that the person was saying that some harassers are simply clueless men, and the person appeared to be implying without realizing it that some of the clueless men are clueless because they have autism. I mean, look how the individual was saying it - nowhere was autism mentioned, but men having body language that gives off "false tells", and who only understand direct language... that's autism right there! That's not just being an "awkward guy" or a "nerd" - those are autism symptoms!

I've noticed some of the comments after the one you mentioned come to the same conclusion you have. However, something about the context of this comment doesn’t sit well with me, given a lot of the other comments on that post trying to defend or victimize men who do this kind of thing.

While it’s a good consideration to wonder about a common presence of autistics in the science field, I feel like this comment isn’t a good indicator of that and there are probably better anecdotal observations for that. Especially considering this is a comment on a very loaded issue.

That being said. What do I think of this comment then, since others have also come to the conclusion that it refers to autistics(within the comments section)? Well…

Is this allowing for any accountability for the guy who made the mistake then? Let's say we have a guy who committed sexual harassment in the workplace and is being called out for his actions. Is it okay to allow him to say "I have autism! I don't know better!" and let him go with minimal repercussions?

It brings to mind when edgy online posters say "I'm aspie therefore I'm an asshole" and use that as an excuse to not, you know, try and be less of an asshole. In general, I'm someone of the opinion that mental conditions or illnesses do not excuse a person from doing bad things; if someone is in that situation, they should own up to their actions and look to try and not repeat those bad actions.

So what would holding someone accountable look like? To me, it would look like after you are called out, there usually is some amount of effort to try and understand that you were in the wrong. It might take time, yes, but the point is that this guy will try and hold himself accountable.

What I want to get at here is that while the comment in question may be referring to autistics in the sciences…I feel the context can really imply some problematic behaviors among men who think this kind of thing is okay or isn’t as big of an issue. I apologize for focusing on this aspect of it more than what you were probably originally asking, but I really felt it was important to bring up.

I actually didn't read that many of the comments to the article. In fact, I stopped shortly after reading the one that I quoted. So I missed all the people trying to exist bad behavior by using disability as an excuse.

And I agree, it's not an excuse. If it's honestly there, and directly related to the reason the person did what they did, then it's an explanation, but not knowing the social rules is not an excuse for breaking them and not trying to learn better; it's an explanation for not realizing they were doing something wrong, and they need to learn from that.

While I'm at it, I got a quote to share from Quora from someone asked what it's like to have high functioning autism.

Here’s the thing, we know we have a weakness in this area, that means we have a duty to self educate, we have a duty to say to people “I appear to have screwed up here, can you explain to me how so that I can avoid doing it in the future?” we have to trust that others know the social rules better than us and learn from them.

Effectively, being autistic isn't an excuse to not try to make amends and efforts towards better interaction !
Once I harassed a skybloger with overly complimentary comments, and she responded to my last comment by brutally snapping at me. That was the moment when I understood the "do not do unto others what shouldn't be done unto you" rule and figured out how to feel her point of view, suddenly feeling how shameful and wrong my lavishly tender words were.

I also have an autistic friend who tries to work as a photograph, and he was sued twice for harassment as he tried to get words from his clients by calling and messaging them day by day. He specifically said that he couldn't put himself into others' shoes.
Since that traumatizing chain of events in his life, not only is he much less prone to make too much calls and messages, but he has become way more sympathetic and considerate of others. Now he can put himself into others' shoes (though only a little, but still) !

What we were both doing was involuntary harassment, which is different from voluntary harassment as we really loved and cared about the subjects of our desires, and wished to learn and become better for their sake, while harassers have no such impetus to atone and improve.
It's difficult for us to learn such a lesson, and often, a little force is needed to awaken and stimulate empathy. We needed to be proven wrong to the bottom of our hearts in order to change and fight that passionate feeling dwelling inside them, enslaving us into hormone-laced, delusional perverts.

I myself skirt around the issue by limiting social contact to only when absolutely necessary. Interaction with another person is unavoidable when ordering food or buying foods in sores with no self-checkout aisle, but I do not attempt to make conversation with anyone unless they decide to make conversation with me first, and that's only in the interest of politeness.

You are wrong if you think neurotypical harassers and stalkers aren’t just as convinced as autistic ones that what they’re doing is right and okay. They are, they belive that they are in love and that that makes what they’re doing appropriate and okay. I know so many abusers who would say with total honesty that they “really loved and cared about the subject of their desires”.

We actully have an advantage over most of them, because we know that there are gaps in our knowledge of social conduct, most people don’t realise that there are things they don’t know.

edited 18th Jun '18 2:30:40 PM by Silasw

Not just a sense of it being appropriate and okay, but an overall sense of entitlement to love/sex/attention/etc. A key aspect of people who do this kind of thing.

You bring up a good point because it also means that NTs are not a perfect standard of social interactions. Autistic and allistic people are both capable of doing bad things because they believe it the be the right thing, and are unwilling to have their morals challenged or improve from their faults.

edited 18th Jun '18 2:57:09 PM by WendytheCreeper

I've noticed that I sometimes learn a lot about why people do the things they do, but that doesn't translate into actual social skills when it comes to interaction. And I think I know the reason why. It's because there's a massive difference between observing a culture from the outside, and actually understanding people's subtle, tiny microexpressions, intents, and reading between the lines of the things they say.

For example, I once visited a stock market advice website. In the forums, in addition to the usual guessing and "this will totally take off, you guys!" stuff, there was, seemingly out of nowhere, a photo of a woman in a cage, followed by a comment by the site's founder (who was an elderly man) about how money won't give a person a meaningful relationship.

What was that all about? I've noticed that stock trading and cryptocurrency trading You Tube videos and things sometimes feature random photos of women, nearly all male presenters, and random misogyny in the comments section.

I came to a conclusion, based on things I'd read and things I'd seen, and that's basically this:

• High testosterone increases a person's desire to do risky, dangerous things.
• Stock trading is risky and dangerous (you could lose a ton of money or gain a ton).
• High testosterone is also linked to misogyny (indirectly: basically men with high testosterone often have more sex but fewer genuine relationships of high quality).
• Ergo, stock trading and cryptocurrency trading attracts high testosterone misogynists.

If I'm autistic, and I have a disability that makes it harder for me to form human connections of even a basic friendship level, and makes it very difficult to "read between the lines" of regular communication, then how on earth would I figure out something this complex about human nature (assuming it's true)?

Because I learned things, read things, and noticed things, and combined what I'd observed or read about together to form an original conclusion.

But that does not mean I have good skills in forming actual human connections or instinctively "getting" people. Instead, I happen to be able to learn things about human nature in a sort of "anthropologist studying a foreign culture" kind of way, where studying patterns leads to coming up with ideas about how the culture works.

There's also the far simpler explanation that finance is stereotypically a male profession and one of those that hasn't exactly embraced gender equality. Assuming that a notable proportion of people on stock trading websites are actually financial professionals, at least far higher than represented in the general public, you'd get a gender discrepancy that way. Bigotry just shows up wherever it can.

In this case, I think they were just regular people trying to figure out how to make lots of money, rather than professional men.

I see what you're saying though, and you're probably right in that sense as well.

Maybe with those two different conclusions in mind, I wonder how much we overanalyze social interactions anyway? After all, we're taught so much to learn social skills that we just kinda go ahead and try to figure it out ourselves.

Though...maybe an alternate theory as to why it doesn't work: generally accepted social skills just 'are'. We analyze, it doesn't work in practice. Feels like the goalposts are being moved then?

Who determines good social skills then? The other person, I assume? Or the therapist telling us what to say and do? Society?

Since stuff about sexism has been cropping up in the thread a lot lately, how much is morality woven into social skills anyway? And how much of commonly accepted social skills is really just arbitrary anyway? Is it a problem if it doesn't hurt anyone?

Realistically, it could be a problem, with jobs and stuff like that. But what about just socializing in general?

Good question. I'm thinking "good social skills" has two definitions: one being whatever works (like if you're trying to sell a product, good social skills are whatever convinces people to buy the product), and the other being whatever's considered normal by society.

A person with bad social skills is either different enough to be rejected and seen as weird, or is unable to accomplish whatever they're trying to do, be it make friends, convince someone of something, sell a product, etc.

My Five-years old cousing got diagnosed with High Functioning autism, her mother had taken the necessary measures to help him to cope with it, so far, things seems fine.

But my mother got worried because his behavior is pretty similar to mine, so she had finally agreed to send me to a especialist to see if I am in the spectrum.

I said this before, but dunno how to feel about it. Especially because my mother didnt wanted to know if I was on the spectrum or not because -in her own words- "I dont want you excusing yourself because it, if you really have autism, you would stop even trying to socialize".

That was insulting to both me and the Autist community, I am not gonna deny it.

I am quite nervious of how is gonna be, dunno if I am really in the Spectrum or I am just excentric.

edited 23rd Jun '18 8:57:20 PM by KazuyaProta

There's a lot of...weird icky stuffs parents will say to their autistic children. Or around them. Denial is a common sentiment, due to a pervasive belief that autism is a tragedy, or makes a person broken, or other related harmful beliefs. Autism doesn't make a person bad or good, it just makes them different. Which can be nice too.

Autism can look very different from person to person. Your mom may subscribe to the belief that all autistics look the same. Whatever the verdict is, I'm hoping you can find some comfort in it, but also know that whatever feelings you have about it are valid. A new diagnosis (or lack of it) can be a weird change, and it'll take time to adjust to that new knowledge.

My mother has never said this to me directly, but I have a strong suspicion that she thinks that both of us being on the spectrum means I should be as successful and independent as she was when she was my age and resents the fact that I'm not. Her resentment has pretty much damaged my relationship with her, and honestly I'm past the point where I care about repairing it. It's not like she's the worst parent ever or anything, she does work hard to support me and my sister, but I just avoid her as much as I can nowadays because she has a strong tendency of making me feel shitty.

edited 24th Jun '18 1:35:07 AM by Draghinazzo

Hopefully that'll pass her, like with my father and my stepmother. It's not really your fault. In the older days when society was in a more stable state employers were accepting of weirder people, because taking some risks in HR was almost always rewarded (as people seeking work were, like, seeking work and would work).

Now all they know is fear of anything not going exactly by their ideal profile because any risk they'd take would possibly get them fired or cause the company's decline, despite the risk being still (and even more^* because of democratization of higher studies and the population's increase in intelligence and self-learning ability) minimal .
Since even considering to hire a non-neurotypical person feels like a minimal additional risk (because the recruiter gets ticked off by the odd behavior, increasing its fear), some recruiters just ignore their application.

I was really competent as a statistician and had a really strong self-learning ability, but none of the 500-odd companies I applied to dared to even hire me for a test period. Only a handful even responded.
And that's in a country where companies can use special contracts to exonerate themselves from some of the charges while hiring handicapped people, and where companies are given fines for not meeting handicapped employees quota, so they would actually gain free money (and more than they would spend) from hiring me.
They didn't want to hire a promising and reliable worker, with three excellent internship recommandations^* two from a Masters' Institute where I, who was in my second year succeded where a PhD student-equivalent with 8 years of studying failed (to finish), and the last from a universitary research organism where my supervisor was so stumped he found my qualities difficult to judge but invaluable, for a negative amount of money, as they believed I was bad enough for them to make them lose more money than if I was doing nothing, like I was some Gaston Lagaffe expy.

Ok, he is one of my role models, but that is insanity right there.

Sigh, phew, slighted a little. So it cannot be helped, unless hiring happens by some miracle that may happen as you continue to pour precious motivation in the employment market. I've heard about successes, but I tried for five years and I'm not one of them, so mileage, etc..
And motivation is not an unlimited resource, so Know When to Fold 'Em before the System'll give^* (and by give, I'd say suggest, because the System is a deadbeat Miser Advisor which won't even give it for free most of the time, the jerk) you his rope.

After those five years and after roughly two years at the radio club for Hopeless with Tech mentally ill people I'm part of, the club once hired me as technical support (as in, "open the place and get computers somehow working") for a year.

It was the first time someone ever paid me to do work (even if it was a contract where the club paid 10% while public employment services paid the rest) and it felt exactly like how work should have been. Oh, and like justice .

edited 24th Jun '18 2:54:36 AM by acuddle

I remember reading about France having a problem with hiring disabled employees. And how companies would rather just pay a fine for not hiring disabled people, than to actually hire disabled people and learn why hiring them isn't a bad thing. Wtf. It's really screwed up.

Where Autistic Workers Thrive. The headline makes it sound like some kind of degrading sheltered workshop, but nope. It's about companies in the real world, including Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, etc. hiring autistics due to, well, autism coming with skills.

Hans Asperger (yes I know he's a flawed human, but bear with me) wasn't kidding when he called autism a "combination of intelligence and disability that can't be separated".

Yeah, I'd say that chatting tends to not be our thing. :P

Whaaaaaaaat? An autistic vice president?! That sounds too good to be true, but I can see an autistic person having the skills to be in that position should they reach it. Wow. This is a company that's truly trying to use genuine autistic talent. I'm impressed.

Now this needs to become more common. It's growing slowly, but it looks as if some companies have figured out how to do it right.

Edited by BonsaiForest on Jun 27th 2018 at 9:01:43 AM

Ended up explaining autism to a guy at work a few days ago, it’s difficult to explain when a person doesn’t have even the terms “special needs” or “mentally disabled” as reference points, I ended having to explain it in comparison to “retard”. The one thing he did get was my analogy about the mental work dealing with people takes, as I explained to him that it’s like how one has to think and manage when dealing with a customer, but with everyone I interact with.

Wow. That was possible? Not know what Special Needs or disabled mean? That is weird.

In other subject...

It turns out that I did got diagnosed years ago, is just that it was never confirmed (In Peru, the diagnosis need confirmation).

So...dunno how I feel. I really want that confirmation to be sure. That explain why my mother put me on extra curricular programs to develop a better speech and talk.

I mean, I dont feel confortable posting here without a full diagnosis but I really want to.

It certainly would explain the common conflict of "but mom, I am not screaming, I am just being serious"

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 28th 2018 at 10:06:51 AM

If you have good reason to think you have it, or you simply want to participate, then being here is totally fine.

I guess. So...Uh, Is nice to meet everyone. Albeit I already knew most of the people here, either way, Hi.

I am currently 18 years old and got into College. And I already have said, I got a diagnosis but is currently without confirmation. I had some special cares when I was a child, so I dont have many issues in public spaces despite my overall socialization issues.

I have issues practicating social "rules", so my presentation isnt perfect (But is actually functional, despite my mom worries. She cares more of the "what they think" than in the "what they did". I am actually quite respected in my community, but she acts like if everyone see me as a weirdo (they do, but I am the good weirdo, the one that is actually friendly).

Is weird.

I’ve been posting here since well before my formal diagnosis, I only got mine a year ago at 23, but I’ve been posting here since well before then.

With my work colleague part of it is a language barrier, he’s Eastern European so he’s not going to have picked up all the English phrases for something that aren’t relevant to his life. From what he said there isn’t much nuance in his home country about mental disability, there’s the visibility mentally disabled and everyone else, that’s it.

@Bonsai, I think beyond that article saying that autistic people can thrive in certain working conditions, I think it also says a much broader statement that I think is really important as well: That jobs and interviews really shouldn't be one-size fit all. Beyond autistic employees, I feel like a lot of people fall through the cracks because they don't know how to answer an interview question just right. Heck, there are lots of lists talking about the most difficult questions to answer! Not to mention, there are actual questions designed to solicit answers that allow employers to discriminate because you voluntarily gave them! (e.g. "reliable transportation", optional questions about gender identity if the company isn't known for being LGBTQA+ friendly, and those horrid personality questionnaires with vague answers usually meant to weed out mentally ill people.)

My diagnosis situation is a bit weird. For simplicity sake I just go with "autistic" but I think I got caught in the whole DSM revision thing to ASD. I was diagnosed young with PDD-NOS, but I had a re-evaluation in high school. Also, I had a switch from having an IEP to GIEP, tho they let me not having a high enough IQ slide because of disability. I'm thinking I should get re-evaluated again, but I have no idea where to start with that...