I do think that a purely technical or literal-minded meaning would have just used “autistic special interest”. Given that you identify to be on the spectrum that might in fact be the case. Differentiating between pseudo-autistic and actually autistic could be done for the motive of avoiding negative connotations. I hold it in high probability that your mind is doing a mini-dodge of negative connotation and you are suffering from a very mild case of internalized ablism.
I do not think that “pseudo-autistic” is a very technically expressive term. You could have people that are on the lighter end of the spectrum. However using the word “pseudo” would have tones and implications that those persons are not “really” autistic (as in false rather than shallow). I would be interesting to hear the case about using “autistic” vs “pseudo-autistic” and I would find it surprising if the case that there would be a constructive literal use for “pseudo-autistic” could be made.
I do think that the mechanism how “literal actual autistic ten-year-old” is a good proof of high quality of understanding if the autism aspect represents additional challenges to communication. Having an autistic audience can have the advatages that literal statements sink in more easily and impact of details doesn’t get glossed out. These could make “literal actual autistic ten-year-old” easier to pass than “ten-year-old” to pass. If the problem or standard doesn’t have to do with literalness or any other associated autistic trait then invoking that is improper.
For example having a statement like “have rules that a 10 year-old foreigner would understand” would be insulting if the rule is not expected to be heavily culture depedent and could be proper and non-insulting if the danger is cultural misunderstandings.
My reading of this parent comment reinforces and confirms the impression that you are using “autistic” here as an improper weakness indicator which in the mental realm makes it into the constellations of synonyms for stupid. In this kind of context “stupid” itself might not be a irrelevant characteristic to draw and even if it was it would only dip to the rudeness introduced in “I spend a lot of time around people who are not as smart as me.”
Working with autistic people is not a very stellar statistical guarantee of respectful attitudes towards autistic people. Yes, they do better than average and yes it directly benefits them in their activities. However there are structural reason why they are sometimes worse. And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism I don’t care about your autistic friends when dealing with harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.
I am not the author of the original post, and as such I am rather freer in my ability to express pushback to criticism of said post, without invoking social friction-costs like “But you might only be saying that to defend yourself”, etc.
So, to wit: I think you are mostly-to-entirely mistaken in your construal of the sentences in question. I do not believe the sentences in question carry even the slightest implication that the word “autistic” is synonymous with, evocative of, or otherwise associated with the word “stupid”. Moreover, since I am not the post’s author, I don’t have to hedge my judgement for fear of double-counting evidence; as such I will state outright that I consider your interpretation of the quoted sentences, not just mistaken, but unreasonable.
Let’s take a look at the sentences in question. The first:
I spend a lot of time around people who are not as smart as me, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart as me (or smarter), but who are not as conscientious, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart or smarter and as conscientious or conscientiouser, but who do not have my particular pseudo-autistic special interest and have therefore not spent the better part of the past two decades enthusiastically gathering observations and spinning up models of what happens when you collide a bunch of monkey brains under various conditions.
There is no way to replace the word “autistic” here (without or without the “pseudo-” prefix) in a way that makes sense; doing so irrevocably modifies the sentence’s meaning in a way that simply does not at all parse in the context of everything else the article is arguing for. “[People] who do not share my [stupid/pseudo-stupid] special interest” is nonsensical; there is little-to-no wiggle room for interpretation here, and certainly not for interpretations like “I believe you are using ‘autistic’ as a synonym for ‘stupid’”.
The remaining two sentences use the word in question as part of the same noun phrase, so I will group them and their treatment together:
If there are Special Cool People™ who are above the law, be explicit about that fact in a way that could be made clear to an autistic ten-year-old.
Give up, and admit that we’re kinda sorta nominally about clear thinking and good discourse, but not actually/only to the extent that it’s convenient and easy, because either “the community” or “some model of effectiveness” takes priority, and put that admission somewhere that an autistic ten-year-old would see it before getting the wrong idea.
And again, in neither of these two sentences is can the phrase “autistic ten-year-old” be substituted with the phrase “stupid ten-year-old” without entirely and irrevocably modifying the meaning of the sentences in question. The qualifier “autistic” is performing actual semantic work in those sentences; in particular it is requesting that certain pieces of social information be conveyed in a way that is meets a particular standard of legibility, and using the hypothetical autistic ten-year-old as a measuring stick for that standard. Conversely, there is no corresponding standard for the phrase “stupid ten-year-old”, and given this I again consider it unreasonable to suppose that the word “autistic”—which, again, is doing real semantic work in those sentences—is being used as a synonym for a word that cannot do the same work even in principle.
You may note that this comment is rather strong in its pushback. This is intended. I believe that your comment, separately and in addition to the object-level misunderstandings it presents, is an instance of a more general trend that I strongly dislike, and would prefer to see less of. The trend in question is imputing intention to others where there is none; the moment you claim to have the ability to read the mind of your interlocutor (and moreover to do so with enough precision to identify subconscious, harmful intentions) is the moment you introduce a dimension to the conversation that, in my view, should not be there. I believe both of your initial comments fall afoul of this, but especially your second one, which contains allegations such as
Differentiating between pseudo-autistic and actually autistic could be done for the motive of avoiding negative connotations.
and
I hold it in high probability that your mind is doing a mini-dodge of negative connotation and you are suffering from a very mild case of internalized ablism.
I consider both of these examples of epistemically corrosive behavior—and in this particular case that impression is amplified by the fact that you then proceed to inject at least mildly political undertones (“And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism”) based on your imagined interlocutor’s implicit intentions. I am very strongly against the notion that people should take offense to the meaning they project onto someone else’s sentences, and on that front I think your comment scores terribly. Strong downvote.
Thank you for explaining your vote, I have upvoted it.
Your analysis that trying to reword “pseudo-autistic” to stupid is indeed correct that it can’t really be done.
I have a different bone to pick about it and that I need to separately tell what the bone is speaks of my communication being inadequate. Fine expressions to me would be “autistic special interest” or “intense special interest”. The danger there is not to dilute the meaning anything near a “hobby”, special interests are a separate thing and the latter is what is went after.
The bone is more with the use of “pseudo”. If you are a bit homosexual you are not “pseudohomosexual” or “pseudoheterosexual”. You can be bisexual or homocurious, those are nearer to being actual things. But “pseudohomosexuality” is not a thing but a weird adhoc construction attempt. You don’t do weird “its not gay if the balls are not touching” games is gay is something non-negative. You can be neurotypical, you can be autistic, but rather than being “pseudo-autistic” you have aspergers or you are a high functioning autist or you are a person on the autism spectrum.
Anyway on the other thread it has surfaced that the main motivation was to avoid self-identification.
I do take note that I did incorrectly fail to read that the rules contain social information rather that they are especially clear. Flavourings like “10-year-old with ADHD would bother to read” or “10-year-old with dyslexia would not misconstrue” would be fine and relevant. “10-year-old girl would get” would be improper. And the sensible rephasing would be “even those that do not intuitively get social situations would heed and employ”.
For those that are I tried to figure out what was happening and I found that the phrase happening at an emphasis, the topic being about exclusion and shooting down excuses pattern made the categories cross over. Hate words are said in a particular kickful way and the text was going for that kind of “sink in” tempo. Now that I could locate and particularise it provides a accident account even if does not provide excuses. I also noticed a kind of sense that “I should speak up” even if it is hard and even if it is a bit inaccurate, that there was a looming danger that the impulse was too diffuse and had too much inferential distance that if I explained it at full length I would get lost assembling too big of a entity. Thus it felt as say something or hold your peace and holding my peace felt really bad. I notice this triggers a kind of excuse to skip over steps which is probably dangerous in the same sense as “going for the win” but “getting the hint out there” seems less terrible of a beast.
I would like my carrots for sticking my neck out there and aknowledging that since its only a probabilty I might not actually be telepathic. I thought also that being open what my “game” is would make it less hidden, manageable and not be in the shadow if implications and connotations.
If the fallacy that I am invoking via which I express why I reject the thing can be done without summoning the spectre of politics I am all ears. Like does it have a name?
Carrot awarded; I strong upvoted dxu’s defense of the norms but I also have strong upvoted your post here (and reiterate once more that I like and agree with the underlying thing that was motivating you).
Thank you for your response. After reading it, I’m much more sympathetic to your cause, and in particular it has caused me to strongly update against the hypothesis that you were speaking in bad faith. I have upvoted accordingly.
(To be clear, this was not my dominant hypothesis at the time I wrote my initial reply to you, but it did possess non-trivial probability mass, and I think it’s safe to say it no longer does.)
Do you mean that you roled back the strong downvote? Or do you mean you upvoted the revelation of the background?
Do you think “inject at least mildly political undertones” took place and do you still think it is epistemically corrosive? Does “inject at least mildly political undertones” impute intention to others?n (I am trying to understand under what theory I did wrong by finding instances of the theory trying to understand what parts of the rule phrase “imputing intention to others where there is none” mean (I am “revealing my game” because I want to emphasise dealing with confusion over demands for consistency))
There is intensifier cross-talk confusion going on but that was not the whole reason or the main reason I was acting. I made on error reflecting on it that I latched on to the first error that came to mind and thought “of thats what happened and that is why it went wrong”. I am still wrong in those parts but there were contributions from things I was also actually seeing (aka still believe in (even if I didn’t have awareness of them before)).
I reaffirm, as I have tried to a couple of times, that I think the thing you’re pulling for is good. And as I note in the OP, if I or other readers are unable to see the importance of the distinctions you’re making: that might mean that there’s nothing there, but it’s also a real possibility that you see things we don’t.
I feel like you’re missing me with “And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism I don’t care about your autistic friends when dealing with harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.”
I think you perceived me mentioning my autistic students and partner, and my autistic character, as an attempt to persuade you of something? In particular, it seems like you read me as saying “this impact can’t be harmful, because my intentions are good” or “this impact can’t be harmful, because these people would have noticed.”
Which is not what I was attempting to convey. Obviously those things are orthogonal to questions of harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.
I do note, though, that just because someone has declared something to have a certain harmful impact, or just because someone has claimed that something is tantamount to enforcement of neurotypical values, doesn’t mean it is. People are highly trustworthy when speaking to their own direct experiences but not particularly trustworthy when extrapolating out to “therefore, this impacts the population thusly.”
You’re raising valid hypotheses, and as I noted above, the very existence of your reaction is evidence that something could be improved.
But I still don’t buy that the [harmful impact] (to the extent that it exists) has its roots in my actions versus having its roots in other people’s preconceptions and projections. And I simply disagree that I’m enforcing neurotypical values, except I guess insofar as I’m validating that there is a difference between autists and non-autists (a fuzzy, population-level statistical one, not one that allows particularly accurate predictions on the level of individuals).
i.e. this raises my sense that I ought to change something, to see more of the impact I’d like to see in the world. It doesn’t nearly as much raise my sense that I have done something wrong, and need to change my attitudes or fundamental policies.
I’m open to arguments on that, though. And I reiterate appreciation for the thing you’re standing in defense of—it is good and worth defending.
As for things I’ll be changing immediately—I buy your argument that “pseudo” is not the right term to use, here, but I don’t yet have a replacement that avoids signaling greater confidence in my own being-on-the-spectrum nature than I actually have. There’s something in the vein of appropriation that I was trying to dodge by not claiming that my [thing] is in the set of autistic special interests.
So I guess at the moment I’ll have to use a longer sentence rather than a short phrase.
I do know that asked about it and since I asked I should wait for answer to that. I thought about it and elsewhere the balance of having to do the cognitive work gets lobsided so for the interest of getting things done sharing on what brain cycles already have been sacrificed for pushes thins easier forward.
Hypothesis A: You think that I am seeing things that are not there and therefore semi-randomly opening random facts. “See nothing under the jacket, nothing up the sleeves”. I am annoyed as my specific worry doesn’t get addressed as I have trouble expressing/pinpointing it.
Making long-reaching speculations on info that is available: Why the bar was expressed as smashing 10-year old and autistic together isn’t an abstract conceptual one but it is abstracted from many particular students. Getting an autism diagnosis can get tricky and while autism doesn’t have a onset or offset, identifiability or diagnoasability varies. So a 10 year-old that is know to be an autist at the time they are 10-year-old is likely to be obviously and strikingly autistic and is likely to be high support needs. (For the reference one can think of taking all the 25 or 80 year olds with diagnosis (or whatever boundary one wants to use for “actually being”) and ask were they were and what they were doing when they were 10). Working for a long time with such people might make the challenges very concrete. This leads to this being a very stark image and memory.
So when communicating that stark image can seem very simple and likely the word delineates a very delicate pattern. But not everybody is a support provider, or particularly knows about neurotypes. Would LW be an environment that would be expected to have autism conccepts generally known?
I know that a communication option I am about to use is not near anywhere near the one used. One way of expressing a very demanding accessibility requirement would be to say “So that every goddamn retard gets it”. To not be needlessly hostile we can drop a pure intensifier cursy words and we can replace a technical synonym to get “So that everyone even with a learning disability gets it”. (There is some cross agitation in my brain going on with italics and being at a punchline place favouring message intention to be intense). We can think that learning disability people are valuable and respectable and all. And that is the condition you get labeled with if you are clinically stupid.
If nothing we wanted to communicate was a demanding standard for the understandability the previous paragraph would be towards that direction. So either there is additional aspects or there is incorrect borrowing of meaning. There is the possibility that the information is social in nature and the bar is meant to be set especially on the social front. Examples of things of pure legibility would be phrases like “in no uncertain terms”,”black on white in big letters”. However there is the shadow side if we mean “struggling in life”, “struggling in social circles” to mean “less socially able” the way “less wrong” is supposed to point to being correct. (So does that make Less Wrong a peer-support group for people that are incorrect?)
So when I am reading the article seeing that there is otherization in very near proximity to use autism circle concepts (pseudo-autistic special interest). I have a memory that this happened and things like that occasionally happening. I also at the time feel like the issue at hand doesn’t have to do with autism per se but comes as a off-topic dangling at a punchline time that feels it could be an intensifier. Those are things that others than me could also see.
This guessing game would provide that a very specific memory was being referenced. That memory reference is not very legible to the audience. It is being presented to an audience that sometimes gets harassed for being overtly pedantic.
I do think part of this phenomena might be that the hyperfocus makes the bearability of the social situations different. That is sensory and social overload in a situation which one percieves to be important and so rackets up attention could be especially draining. Like those that with special interest with Star Trek might find it too bothersome to discuss things with fans that can’t even quote every episode verbatim, there could be a conception and argument that is LW the forum for people with intense interest in rationality to deepen and endulge in that special interest. Then there could be a worrying current of neurotype discrimination where “you can’t try hard enough to become sufficiently interested. As neurotypicals you are not wired to have these conversations so you need not apply”. I personally think this doesn’t sound promising for LW. I do think that such an arrangement can pull some things off that more inclusive arrangements could not. And I think the frustration with “screwy people” might have a shade of “reverse ablism”, disablism? (and I am playing with fire here canvasing out emotional possiblities). Edit: thinks of the “brokenly disorganised” to be exhibiting a pathological neurotype and thinking that the autistic neurotype is healthy, so is just an instance of ablism,
I do note that it also works in mirror that just because someone has declared that they are not doing something doesn’t mean that they are not doing the thing.
So if not “this impact can’t be harmful, because my intentions are good” or “this impact can’t be harmful, because these people would have noticed.” was meant, what was meant? Outside of the frowned upon telepathy I am at a loss for relevance. So I am asking rather than assuming.
You seem to be convinced that “pseudo” is not communicating what it is supposed to communicate and that dropping the link to autism is not worth the damage it does in establishing the point. And you seem to think that should you find yourself in a situation where you have an impulse to use the short phrase you should just bother to write a longer sentence.
I also note you are not reworking to existing article to use a longer sentence instead.
Trying to read the article and take it seriosly/literally it does raise a question do you realise how extreme/harsh line it is doing.
This was in the list of terrible ideas
Publish a set of absolute user guidelines (not suggestions) and enforce them without exception instead of enforcing them like speed limits. e.g. any violation from a new user, or any violation from an established user not retracted immediately upon pushback = automatic three-day ban. If there are Special Cool People™ who are above the law, be explicit about that fact in a way that could be made clear to an autistic ten-year-old.
It doesn’t say “retracted after discussion” or “retracted fast”. And it also doesn’t say “upon establishing it happened” or “after credible claim” or “on balance of evidence”. Now this is a terrible idea and I guess part of it is to not rely on “suggestion guidelines”. It says “immediately upon pushback”. At the beginnig of this comment-thread that as of this writing stands at −10 karma I linked to an instance where a hospitality norm was non-centrally violated in a oneline comment and it was addressed by spelling out an assumtion of unfamliarity with norms, that it is unwanted and why it is unwanted. That user edited out the most eggrecious of the unhospitality maybe on the balance that it was not needed to convey the message. One would think that ideally atleast that line would extend for those that write longer messages and which are more central to the core userbase.
I do realise that I am sounding like some bad mechanics over at the mindkilly side. Maybe I actually am, but my goal is not to control productions/writings authored by others. I see that somebody wants to attain a high standard and wants help even in the small details. I would think that ideally when people make mistakes they would actively go hunt out tips that they are in the wrong “say oops” and correct on the their own accord. Not because they anticipate a social backlash. Not because there is a threat of a ban. “But sometimes there’s a mountain there, and it’s kind of wild that you can’t see it.”. Do you want help in climbing this particular mountain?
And I simply disagree that I’m enforcing neurotypical values, except I guess insofar as I’m validating that there is a difference between autists and non-autists (a fuzzy, population-level statistical one, not one that allows particularly accurate predictions on the level of individuals).
Is this relevantly different from calling autists stupid? I think I want to tease out and explicate taken very literally “that there is a difference between autists and non-autists” could be value neutral and the kind of “social information vs general information” kind of that is going on here. But it feels like taking it in the sense that there is a single linear axis where the two groups don’t have the same median and other statistical properties would also be justified (from able to not able, from competent to non-competent). Does this kind of distinction fall out of the scope of
I (extremely) agree with you that doing so is and would be rude, bad, unwelcoming, and a violation of basic hospitality norms.
I ended up still wanting to dumb a scenario even if it is a bit mindready. I am doing a dirty trick of making a separate comment of tanking negative karma.
In the movie Idiocrazy, the protagonist at one point is faced with the challenge of fixing farming. The population is using energy drinks to water the crops. The protagonist thinks they would be better served by using water for irrigation.
-”you are killing the plants by poisoning them”
-”No but this has got electrolytes which is what plants crave” [points at massive billboard]
-”No, but if you would just try it...”
-”But we have always done it this way. Its common knowledge everybody knows that electrolytes are good for crops”
Being the head of agricultural sector in some sense makes that the most compent farmer around. But that is distinct from being right. I guess the current lingo fashion would be to say that instead of indirect arguments of reliablity talk about gear-level models on what is the impact exposing to water vs exposing to electrolytes. And in order to do this cleanly one needs to suppress the “knowledge” that electrolytes help plants.
Like working all your life around plants doesn’t guarantee good croppping working all your life with and towards autists doesn’t guarantee good attitude. The gear spinning doesn’t care where you have been lurking.
I do not think you intend malice.
I do think that a purely technical or literal-minded meaning would have just used “autistic special interest”. Given that you identify to be on the spectrum that might in fact be the case. Differentiating between pseudo-autistic and actually autistic could be done for the motive of avoiding negative connotations. I hold it in high probability that your mind is doing a mini-dodge of negative connotation and you are suffering from a very mild case of internalized ablism.
I do not think that “pseudo-autistic” is a very technically expressive term. You could have people that are on the lighter end of the spectrum. However using the word “pseudo” would have tones and implications that those persons are not “really” autistic (as in false rather than shallow). I would be interesting to hear the case about using “autistic” vs “pseudo-autistic” and I would find it surprising if the case that there would be a constructive literal use for “pseudo-autistic” could be made.
I do think that the mechanism how “literal actual autistic ten-year-old” is a good proof of high quality of understanding if the autism aspect represents additional challenges to communication. Having an autistic audience can have the advatages that literal statements sink in more easily and impact of details doesn’t get glossed out. These could make “literal actual autistic ten-year-old” easier to pass than “ten-year-old” to pass. If the problem or standard doesn’t have to do with literalness or any other associated autistic trait then invoking that is improper.
For example having a statement like “have rules that a 10 year-old foreigner would understand” would be insulting if the rule is not expected to be heavily culture depedent and could be proper and non-insulting if the danger is cultural misunderstandings.
My reading of this parent comment reinforces and confirms the impression that you are using “autistic” here as an improper weakness indicator which in the mental realm makes it into the constellations of synonyms for stupid. In this kind of context “stupid” itself might not be a irrelevant characteristic to draw and even if it was it would only dip to the rudeness introduced in “I spend a lot of time around people who are not as smart as me.”
Working with autistic people is not a very stellar statistical guarantee of respectful attitudes towards autistic people. Yes, they do better than average and yes it directly benefits them in their activities. However there are structural reason why they are sometimes worse. And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism I don’t care about your autistic friends when dealing with harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.
I am not the author of the original post, and as such I am rather freer in my ability to express pushback to criticism of said post, without invoking social friction-costs like “But you might only be saying that to defend yourself”, etc.
So, to wit: I think you are mostly-to-entirely mistaken in your construal of the sentences in question. I do not believe the sentences in question carry even the slightest implication that the word “autistic” is synonymous with, evocative of, or otherwise associated with the word “stupid”. Moreover, since I am not the post’s author, I don’t have to hedge my judgement for fear of double-counting evidence; as such I will state outright that I consider your interpretation of the quoted sentences, not just mistaken, but unreasonable.
Let’s take a look at the sentences in question. The first:
There is no way to replace the word “autistic” here (without or without the “pseudo-” prefix) in a way that makes sense; doing so irrevocably modifies the sentence’s meaning in a way that simply does not at all parse in the context of everything else the article is arguing for. “[People] who do not share my [stupid/pseudo-stupid] special interest” is nonsensical; there is little-to-no wiggle room for interpretation here, and certainly not for interpretations like “I believe you are using ‘autistic’ as a synonym for ‘stupid’”.
The remaining two sentences use the word in question as part of the same noun phrase, so I will group them and their treatment together:
And again, in neither of these two sentences is can the phrase “autistic ten-year-old” be substituted with the phrase “stupid ten-year-old” without entirely and irrevocably modifying the meaning of the sentences in question. The qualifier “autistic” is performing actual semantic work in those sentences; in particular it is requesting that certain pieces of social information be conveyed in a way that is meets a particular standard of legibility, and using the hypothetical autistic ten-year-old as a measuring stick for that standard. Conversely, there is no corresponding standard for the phrase “stupid ten-year-old”, and given this I again consider it unreasonable to suppose that the word “autistic”—which, again, is doing real semantic work in those sentences—is being used as a synonym for a word that cannot do the same work even in principle.
You may note that this comment is rather strong in its pushback. This is intended. I believe that your comment, separately and in addition to the object-level misunderstandings it presents, is an instance of a more general trend that I strongly dislike, and would prefer to see less of. The trend in question is imputing intention to others where there is none; the moment you claim to have the ability to read the mind of your interlocutor (and moreover to do so with enough precision to identify subconscious, harmful intentions) is the moment you introduce a dimension to the conversation that, in my view, should not be there. I believe both of your initial comments fall afoul of this, but especially your second one, which contains allegations such as
and
I consider both of these examples of epistemically corrosive behavior—and in this particular case that impression is amplified by the fact that you then proceed to inject at least mildly political undertones (“And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism”) based on your imagined interlocutor’s implicit intentions. I am very strongly against the notion that people should take offense to the meaning they project onto someone else’s sentences, and on that front I think your comment scores terribly. Strong downvote.
Thank you for explaining your vote, I have upvoted it.
Your analysis that trying to reword “pseudo-autistic” to stupid is indeed correct that it can’t really be done.
I have a different bone to pick about it and that I need to separately tell what the bone is speaks of my communication being inadequate. Fine expressions to me would be “autistic special interest” or “intense special interest”. The danger there is not to dilute the meaning anything near a “hobby”, special interests are a separate thing and the latter is what is went after.
The bone is more with the use of “pseudo”. If you are a bit homosexual you are not “pseudohomosexual” or “pseudoheterosexual”. You can be bisexual or homocurious, those are nearer to being actual things. But “pseudohomosexuality” is not a thing but a weird adhoc construction attempt. You don’t do weird “its not gay if the balls are not touching” games is gay is something non-negative. You can be neurotypical, you can be autistic, but rather than being “pseudo-autistic” you have aspergers or you are a high functioning autist or you are a person on the autism spectrum.
Anyway on the other thread it has surfaced that the main motivation was to avoid self-identification.
I do take note that I did incorrectly fail to read that the rules contain social information rather that they are especially clear. Flavourings like “10-year-old with ADHD would bother to read” or “10-year-old with dyslexia would not misconstrue” would be fine and relevant. “10-year-old girl would get” would be improper. And the sensible rephasing would be “even those that do not intuitively get social situations would heed and employ”.
For those that are I tried to figure out what was happening and I found that the phrase happening at an emphasis, the topic being about exclusion and shooting down excuses pattern made the categories cross over. Hate words are said in a particular kickful way and the text was going for that kind of “sink in” tempo. Now that I could locate and particularise it provides a accident account even if does not provide excuses. I also noticed a kind of sense that “I should speak up” even if it is hard and even if it is a bit inaccurate, that there was a looming danger that the impulse was too diffuse and had too much inferential distance that if I explained it at full length I would get lost assembling too big of a entity. Thus it felt as say something or hold your peace and holding my peace felt really bad. I notice this triggers a kind of excuse to skip over steps which is probably dangerous in the same sense as “going for the win” but “getting the hint out there” seems less terrible of a beast.
I would like my carrots for sticking my neck out there and aknowledging that since its only a probabilty I might not actually be telepathic. I thought also that being open what my “game” is would make it less hidden, manageable and not be in the shadow if implications and connotations.
If the fallacy that I am invoking via which I express why I reject the thing can be done without summoning the spectre of politics I am all ears. Like does it have a name?
Carrot awarded; I strong upvoted dxu’s defense of the norms but I also have strong upvoted your post here (and reiterate once more that I like and agree with the underlying thing that was motivating you).
Thank you for your response. After reading it, I’m much more sympathetic to your cause, and in particular it has caused me to strongly update against the hypothesis that you were speaking in bad faith. I have upvoted accordingly.
(To be clear, this was not my dominant hypothesis at the time I wrote my initial reply to you, but it did possess non-trivial probability mass, and I think it’s safe to say it no longer does.)
Do you mean that you roled back the strong downvote? Or do you mean you upvoted the revelation of the background?
Do you think “inject at least mildly political undertones” took place and do you still think it is epistemically corrosive? Does “inject at least mildly political undertones” impute intention to others?n (I am trying to understand under what theory I did wrong by finding instances of the theory trying to understand what parts of the rule phrase “imputing intention to others where there is none” mean (I am “revealing my game” because I want to emphasise dealing with confusion over demands for consistency))
I thought it a little more and I am going to get partially unrependant.
There is intensifier cross-talk confusion going on but that was not the whole reason or the main reason I was acting. I made on error reflecting on it that I latched on to the first error that came to mind and thought “of thats what happened and that is why it went wrong”. I am still wrong in those parts but there were contributions from things I was also actually seeing (aka still believe in (even if I didn’t have awareness of them before)).
I reaffirm, as I have tried to a couple of times, that I think the thing you’re pulling for is good. And as I note in the OP, if I or other readers are unable to see the importance of the distinctions you’re making: that might mean that there’s nothing there, but it’s also a real possibility that you see things we don’t.
I feel like you’re missing me with “And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism I don’t care about your autistic friends when dealing with harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.”
I think you perceived me mentioning my autistic students and partner, and my autistic character, as an attempt to persuade you of something? In particular, it seems like you read me as saying “this impact can’t be harmful, because my intentions are good” or “this impact can’t be harmful, because these people would have noticed.”
Which is not what I was attempting to convey. Obviously those things are orthogonal to questions of harmful impact and enforcement of neurotypical values.
I do note, though, that just because someone has declared something to have a certain harmful impact, or just because someone has claimed that something is tantamount to enforcement of neurotypical values, doesn’t mean it is. People are highly trustworthy when speaking to their own direct experiences but not particularly trustworthy when extrapolating out to “therefore, this impacts the population thusly.”
You’re raising valid hypotheses, and as I noted above, the very existence of your reaction is evidence that something could be improved.
But I still don’t buy that the [harmful impact] (to the extent that it exists) has its roots in my actions versus having its roots in other people’s preconceptions and projections. And I simply disagree that I’m enforcing neurotypical values, except I guess insofar as I’m validating that there is a difference between autists and non-autists (a fuzzy, population-level statistical one, not one that allows particularly accurate predictions on the level of individuals).
i.e. this raises my sense that I ought to change something, to see more of the impact I’d like to see in the world. It doesn’t nearly as much raise my sense that I have done something wrong, and need to change my attitudes or fundamental policies.
I’m open to arguments on that, though. And I reiterate appreciation for the thing you’re standing in defense of—it is good and worth defending.
As for things I’ll be changing immediately—I buy your argument that “pseudo” is not the right term to use, here, but I don’t yet have a replacement that avoids signaling greater confidence in my own being-on-the-spectrum nature than I actually have. There’s something in the vein of appropriation that I was trying to dodge by not claiming that my [thing] is in the set of autistic special interests.
So I guess at the moment I’ll have to use a longer sentence rather than a short phrase.
I do know that asked about it and since I asked I should wait for answer to that. I thought about it and elsewhere the balance of having to do the cognitive work gets lobsided so for the interest of getting things done sharing on what brain cycles already have been sacrificed for pushes thins easier forward.
Hypothesis A: You think that I am seeing things that are not there and therefore semi-randomly opening random facts. “See nothing under the jacket, nothing up the sleeves”. I am annoyed as my specific worry doesn’t get addressed as I have trouble expressing/pinpointing it.
Making long-reaching speculations on info that is available: Why the bar was expressed as smashing 10-year old and autistic together isn’t an abstract conceptual one but it is abstracted from many particular students. Getting an autism diagnosis can get tricky and while autism doesn’t have a onset or offset, identifiability or diagnoasability varies. So a 10 year-old that is know to be an autist at the time they are 10-year-old is likely to be obviously and strikingly autistic and is likely to be high support needs. (For the reference one can think of taking all the 25 or 80 year olds with diagnosis (or whatever boundary one wants to use for “actually being”) and ask were they were and what they were doing when they were 10). Working for a long time with such people might make the challenges very concrete. This leads to this being a very stark image and memory.
So when communicating that stark image can seem very simple and likely the word delineates a very delicate pattern. But not everybody is a support provider, or particularly knows about neurotypes. Would LW be an environment that would be expected to have autism conccepts generally known?
I know that a communication option I am about to use is not near anywhere near the one used. One way of expressing a very demanding accessibility requirement would be to say “So that every goddamn retard gets it”. To not be needlessly hostile we can drop a pure intensifier cursy words and we can replace a technical synonym to get “So that everyone even with a learning disability gets it”. (There is some cross agitation in my brain going on with italics and being at a punchline place favouring message intention to be intense). We can think that learning disability people are valuable and respectable and all. And that is the condition you get labeled with if you are clinically stupid.
If nothing we wanted to communicate was a demanding standard for the understandability the previous paragraph would be towards that direction. So either there is additional aspects or there is incorrect borrowing of meaning. There is the possibility that the information is social in nature and the bar is meant to be set especially on the social front. Examples of things of pure legibility would be phrases like “in no uncertain terms”,”black on white in big letters”. However there is the shadow side if we mean “struggling in life”, “struggling in social circles” to mean “less socially able” the way “less wrong” is supposed to point to being correct. (So does that make Less Wrong a peer-support group for people that are incorrect?)
So when I am reading the article seeing that there is otherization in very near proximity to use autism circle concepts (pseudo-autistic special interest). I have a memory that this happened and things like that occasionally happening. I also at the time feel like the issue at hand doesn’t have to do with autism per se but comes as a off-topic dangling at a punchline time that feels it could be an intensifier. Those are things that others than me could also see.
This guessing game would provide that a very specific memory was being referenced. That memory reference is not very legible to the audience. It is being presented to an audience that sometimes gets harassed for being overtly pedantic.
I do think part of this phenomena might be that the hyperfocus makes the bearability of the social situations different. That is sensory and social overload in a situation which one percieves to be important and so rackets up attention could be especially draining. Like those that with special interest with Star Trek might find it too bothersome to discuss things with fans that can’t even quote every episode verbatim, there could be a conception and argument that is LW the forum for people with intense interest in rationality to deepen and endulge in that special interest. Then there could be a worrying current of neurotype discrimination where “you can’t try hard enough to become sufficiently interested. As neurotypicals you are not wired to have these conversations so you need not apply”. I personally think this doesn’t sound promising for LW. I do think that such an arrangement can pull some things off that more inclusive arrangements could not. And I think the frustration with “screwy people”
might have a shade of “reverse ablism”, disablism?(and I am playing with fire here canvasing out emotional possiblities).Edit: thinks of the “brokenly disorganised” to be exhibiting a pathological neurotype and thinking that the autistic neurotype is healthy, so is just an instance of ablism,I do note that it also works in mirror that just because someone has declared that they are not doing something doesn’t mean that they are not doing the thing.
So if not “this impact can’t be harmful, because my intentions are good” or “this impact can’t be harmful, because these people would have noticed.” was meant, what was meant? Outside of the frowned upon telepathy I am at a loss for relevance. So I am asking rather than assuming.
You seem to be convinced that “pseudo” is not communicating what it is supposed to communicate and that dropping the link to autism is not worth the damage it does in establishing the point. And you seem to think that should you find yourself in a situation where you have an impulse to use the short phrase you should just bother to write a longer sentence.
I also note you are not reworking to existing article to use a longer sentence instead.
Trying to read the article and take it seriosly/literally it does raise a question do you realise how extreme/harsh line it is doing.
This was in the list of terrible ideas
It doesn’t say “retracted after discussion” or “retracted fast”. And it also doesn’t say “upon establishing it happened” or “after credible claim” or “on balance of evidence”. Now this is a terrible idea and I guess part of it is to not rely on “suggestion guidelines”. It says “immediately upon pushback”. At the beginnig of this comment-thread that as of this writing stands at −10 karma I linked to an instance where a hospitality norm was non-centrally violated in a oneline comment and it was addressed by spelling out an assumtion of unfamliarity with norms, that it is unwanted and why it is unwanted. That user edited out the most eggrecious of the unhospitality maybe on the balance that it was not needed to convey the message. One would think that ideally atleast that line would extend for those that write longer messages and which are more central to the core userbase.
I do realise that I am sounding like some bad mechanics over at the mindkilly side. Maybe I actually am, but my goal is not to control productions/writings authored by others. I see that somebody wants to attain a high standard and wants help even in the small details. I would think that ideally when people make mistakes they would actively go hunt out tips that they are in the wrong “say oops” and correct on the their own accord. Not because they anticipate a social backlash. Not because there is a threat of a ban. “But sometimes there’s a mountain there, and it’s kind of wild that you can’t see it.”. Do you want help in climbing this particular mountain?
Is this relevantly different from calling autists stupid? I think I want to tease out and explicate taken very literally “that there is a difference between autists and non-autists” could be value neutral and the kind of “social information vs general information” kind of that is going on here. But it feels like taking it in the sense that there is a single linear axis where the two groups don’t have the same median and other statistical properties would also be justified (from able to not able, from competent to non-competent). Does this kind of distinction fall out of the scope of
I ended up still wanting to dumb a scenario even if it is a bit mindready. I am doing a dirty trick of making a separate comment of tanking negative karma.
In the movie Idiocrazy, the protagonist at one point is faced with the challenge of fixing farming. The population is using energy drinks to water the crops. The protagonist thinks they would be better served by using water for irrigation.
-”you are killing the plants by poisoning them”
-”No but this has got electrolytes which is what plants crave” [points at massive billboard]
-”No, but if you would just try it...”
-”But we have always done it this way. Its common knowledge everybody knows that electrolytes are good for crops”
Being the head of agricultural sector in some sense makes that the most compent farmer around. But that is distinct from being right. I guess the current lingo fashion would be to say that instead of indirect arguments of reliablity talk about gear-level models on what is the impact exposing to water vs exposing to electrolytes. And in order to do this cleanly one needs to suppress the “knowledge” that electrolytes help plants.
Like working all your life around plants doesn’t guarantee good croppping working all your life with and towards autists doesn’t guarantee good attitude. The gear spinning doesn’t care where you have been lurking.