I’ve got to admit, I look at most of these and say “you’re treating the social discomfort as something immutable to be routed around, rather than something to be fixed by establishing different norms”. Forgive me, but it strikes me (especially in this kind of community with high aspie proportion) that it’s probably easier to tutor the… insufficiently-assertive… in how to stand up for themselves in Ask Culture than it is to tutor the aspies in how to not set everything on fire in Guess Culture.
Por que no los dos? It’s a minority of people who have the ability and inclination to learn how to conform to a different mileu than thier natural state.
I think it’s a fair point. To maybe clarify a bit though, while potentially strawmanning your point a bit, my intention with the post was not so much to claim “the solution to all social problems is that sufficiently-assertive people should understand the weaknesses of insufficiently-assertive people and make sure to behave in ways that don’t cause them any discomfort”, but rather I wanted to try to shed some light on situations that for a long time I found confusing and frustrating, without being fully aware of what caused that perceived friction. So I certainly agree that one solution to these situations can be to “tutor the insufficiently-assertive”. But still, such people will always exist in this world, and if you’re, say, a community builder who frequently interacts with new people, then it can still be valuable to be aware of these traps.
I’ve got to admit, I look at most of these and say “you’re treating the social discomfort as something immutable to be routed around, rather than something to be fixed by establishing different norms”. Forgive me, but it strikes me (especially in this kind of community with high aspie proportion) that it’s probably easier to tutor the… insufficiently-assertive… in how to stand up for themselves in Ask Culture than it is to tutor the aspies in how to not set everything on fire in Guess Culture.
Por que no los dos? It’s a minority of people who have the ability and inclination to learn how to conform to a different mileu than thier natural state.
I think it’s a fair point. To maybe clarify a bit though, while potentially strawmanning your point a bit, my intention with the post was not so much to claim “the solution to all social problems is that sufficiently-assertive people should understand the weaknesses of insufficiently-assertive people and make sure to behave in ways that don’t cause them any discomfort”, but rather I wanted to try to shed some light on situations that for a long time I found confusing and frustrating, without being fully aware of what caused that perceived friction. So I certainly agree that one solution to these situations can be to “tutor the insufficiently-assertive”. But still, such people will always exist in this world, and if you’re, say, a community builder who frequently interacts with new people, then it can still be valuable to be aware of these traps.
The insufficiently-assertive and the aspies are, sadly, not a disjoint set.