My theory is that in autism the “response feelings” in story (2) are so strong that they’re aversive, and people with classic autism adopt the coping strategy of avoiding invoking them altogether, by avoiding the specific type of mental operation that I call “empathetic simulation”.
This is interesting because it does square with my experience if I understand correctly. Like as an example, as a child my mother explained how she had gotten a teacher’s education because she had wanted to be a psychologist and the government had some thing where you could get a brief psychologist education on top of the teacher’s education, but then they eliminated that and now she had to be a teacher. And I got really sad about that. I guess one difference from your story is that I less suppressed it because of direct unpleasantness and more because of social conformity.
Does the “neurotypical way of relating” develop by practicing a lot as a child? I think some practice is important—completely isolated children have severe issues, for example. But leaving aside extreme cases, I think I’m less inclined to emphasize practice than you do. My impression is that it’s possible for kids to be awfully introverted, antisocial, and oblivious to pop-culture, while being clearly not autistic. Also, the guy from the previous paragraph also seems to be a point against “lack of practice” being central. Another example: when adults immigrate to a different culture, the social norms and conversational norms and cultural references are all unknown-to-them, and they certainly have issues getting by for a while, but I don’t think those transient enculturation issues look anything like autism. I’m open to changing my mind though. And sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
Admittedly feels kind of hard to square with Against Against Autism Cures, e.g. “One study investigated how many autistics have at least one friend and found it was just under 50%.”. Not sure what makes the difference here; I’d be inclined to say that maybe a lot of autistic dysfunction is for nonsocial reasons (e.g. “locked in a sensory hell without the ability to explain their problems verbally, and maybe having seizures all the time to boot”?) and my method filters away the cases that are this severe, and autistic people can basically function fine socially if neither oppressed (which I’d conjecture goes together with being an adult in practice?) nor disabled by sensory sensitivities? Possibly it’s also just that my measurement is too bad.
This comment inspired me to collect data on autistic social functioning, and I was surprised at how basically similarly good it appeared to be to allistic social functioning.[1] Probably worth investigating in greater detailed, but yes very good to take into account.
This is interesting because it does square with my experience if I understand correctly. Like as an example, as a child my mother explained how she had gotten a teacher’s education because she had wanted to be a psychologist and the government had some thing where you could get a brief psychologist education on top of the teacher’s education, but then they eliminated that and now she had to be a teacher. And I got really sad about that. I guess one difference from your story is that I less suppressed it because of direct unpleasantness and more because of social conformity.
Good arguments, I’m convinced.
Admittedly feels kind of hard to square with Against Against Autism Cures, e.g. “One study investigated how many autistics have at least one friend and found it was just under 50%.”. Not sure what makes the difference here; I’d be inclined to say that maybe a lot of autistic dysfunction is for nonsocial reasons (e.g. “locked in a sensory hell without the ability to explain their problems verbally, and maybe having seizures all the time to boot”?) and my method filters away the cases that are this severe, and autistic people can basically function fine socially if neither oppressed (which I’d conjecture goes together with being an adult in practice?) nor disabled by sensory sensitivities? Possibly it’s also just that my measurement is too bad.