John, I think you’re onto something, at least in that you’ve accurately perceived “something’s not right here” and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I’m not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to “what should be done about it” suggests you’re missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan’s post is closely related to stuff I’ve been mulling over lately, and I can’t tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don’t have any clear answers yet, just questions that I’m still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it’s helpful to think of a well defined class of people with a specific straightforward way of being weird, such as people who are mobility impaired and mainly get around using wheelchairs or scooters. (I imagine it would also be really helpful to talk to people from within such a class, rather than acting like I’m confined to analyzing my own imagination, and while I’m not going to do that in this particular comment, I think it would be pretty cool if somebody piped up who actually knows what the world’s like from the perspective of a wheelchair or scooter.)
What would it be like if I had a really hard time walking or couldn’t do it at all, and even my close friends who are hearing went around saying things like “everybody loves hiking” right in front of me? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond?
What if most of the buildings I wanted to enter were only navigable by stairs? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond? How does my answer to that change if there are one billion people like me, or ten million, or one thousand or ten, or if I’m literally the only one?
And what are the similarities and difference between “everybody loves hiking” and “the bathroom at the theater is up a flight of stairs and there’s no elevator”? What about when the bathroom’s upstairs at a friend’s house party?
If there were a sovereign island populated mainly by people who were substantially weird in some way related to their physical or sensory abilities (with respect to genpop on the continent)—people with mobility challenges, Deaf people, people with low vision, people who are 6′5″ or taller, people with super smell who vomit when there’s body odor, etc.—what would the built environment of that island look like by default? How would things be designed, and what design principles would seem obvious there that are at best afterthoughts right now? And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well? What paradigms is continental architecture unnecessarily stuck in, to its detriment?
What about all of these things, but for far less visible cognitive and perceptual variance?
My overall point here is that I think Duncan’s sharing first-person information about a kind of problem that is in fact quite deep and complex, and that figuring out the right thing for someone in his position to do is correspondingly difficult. Imagine suggesting to a Deaf person that the lack of closed captioning on a popular TV show shouldn’t feel significant to them once they’ve fully understood that most people can hear. Yes, they are probably not having the best-for-them possible response if they’re deeply emotionally hurt every time they’re reminded of how almost nobody considers people like them when determining the social or physical environment. But in the absence of a much better suggestion than “grieve and move on”, pointing out that they are somehow causing themselves to suffer beyond what the reality of the situation strictly requires seems like… not quite the right move, to me.
Some thoughts I had while reading the post, which seem even more relevant to your comment: insofar as we want to think about “how to handle weird people”, wheelchairs or deafness are the wrong analogy. Those are disabilities, but they’re disabilities which lots of people have, and therefore which most people already know about. Society has “standard APIs” for interfacing to wheelchairs/deafness/blindness/etc. They’re not really “weird” in the sense that society just doesn’t have APIs for them at all (though perhaps they are “weird” enough that those APIs aren’t implemented everywhere).
One of the things which makes weirdness specifically unusual/interesting is that we’re in a very-high-dimensional space, so there’s surprisingly many people who are very weird in ways which society simply does not have conceptual buckets for, at all. People who don’t fit the standard ontology of society. And what makes that weirdness uniquely interesting from a design standpoint is that, because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that. In other words, adopt a persona, something which matches some standard archetype which most people recognize, and play that role. For instance, I aim to give vague vibes of cartoon villainy, and that actually works remarkably well at getting people to interact with me the way I prefer.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that.
I note that you seem to be arguing from a position of “make it work as best you can within the broken system” and that there is a separate mode of “try to fix the system,” and evaluating actions taken under one mode as if they are being taken under the other mode is a recipe for (wrongly) seeing someone as being silly or naive.
I do agree that your advice is pretty solid under the “make it work as best you can” strategy.
I am not quite sold on that being the right strategy.
Separately, it’s quite hard to do both at once but part of what you’re seeing is me trying to do both at once.
It feels like John came to the “make it work within a broken system” position because of his belief that “because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance”. I think I mostly believe this too, which is a bottleneck to me thinking that “try to fix the system” is a good strategy here.
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it—maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
I think this comment is pointing in the right direction. But I disagree with
E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached
There are buckets, but I don’t know what the draft APIs would be. Unless you count “finding your own tribe and stay away from the neurotypicals” as an API.
In Europe at least, this is beginning to lead to accommodations like letting you work more from home, spend more time offline, getting a low sensory stimulation space for work and exams, skip excessive meetings, being allowed to move during meetings and work, being excused from social events, specialised tutoring, medication, therapy, etc.
Well, maybe I should have said “API in a drafting stage”, rather that an actual “draft API”, but I’d think today people tend to know these categories exist, and tend to at least to know enough to have some expectations of neuroatypical people having a [much?] wider range of possible reactions to certain things, compared to how a neuroatypical person would be expected to react, and many (most?) have at least a theoretical willingness to try to accommodate it. And then, maybe at least as importantly, given a name for the bucket and Google, people who are actually willing, can find more advice—not necessarily all equally helpful, but still.
Separately, I note that it doesn’t really feel like the above comment is an actual response to Logan? That’s sort of headlined by “some thoughts I had while reading” but I am in fact curious what you would say in direct response to Logan’s reply.
what would the built environment of that island look like by default?
A big part of how I try to structure my brain and my life and my discourse is to make more Nevilles Longbottom feel able to exist by default.
And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well?
We get a LOT of tech that millions of “normal people” find useful from designs intended to help people who are struggling or weird. Snuggies are a bit of a punchline, but they were wildly popular, and they were invented specifically for people with mobility issues who have a hard time putting on coats/sweaters and who would have been trapped/impeded by just being buried in a blanket.
Right, and yet it seems clearly wrong to me for there to be eg regulations requiring all coat manufacturers to also make snuggies, or something. I haven’t worked out what the right take-away is from this kind of thing.
John, I think you’re onto something, at least in that you’ve accurately perceived “something’s not right here” and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I’m not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to “what should be done about it” suggests you’re missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan’s post is closely related to stuff I’ve been mulling over lately, and I can’t tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don’t have any clear answers yet, just questions that I’m still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it’s helpful to think of a well defined class of people with a specific straightforward way of being weird, such as people who are mobility impaired and mainly get around using wheelchairs or scooters. (I imagine it would also be really helpful to talk to people from within such a class, rather than acting like I’m confined to analyzing my own imagination, and while I’m not going to do that in this particular comment, I think it would be pretty cool if somebody piped up who actually knows what the world’s like from the perspective of a wheelchair or scooter.)
What would it be like if I had a really hard time walking or couldn’t do it at all, and even my close friends who are hearing went around saying things like “everybody loves hiking” right in front of me? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond?
What if most of the buildings I wanted to enter were only navigable by stairs? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond? How does my answer to that change if there are one billion people like me, or ten million, or one thousand or ten, or if I’m literally the only one?
And what are the similarities and difference between “everybody loves hiking” and “the bathroom at the theater is up a flight of stairs and there’s no elevator”? What about when the bathroom’s upstairs at a friend’s house party?
If there were a sovereign island populated mainly by people who were substantially weird in some way related to their physical or sensory abilities (with respect to genpop on the continent)—people with mobility challenges, Deaf people, people with low vision, people who are 6′5″ or taller, people with super smell who vomit when there’s body odor, etc.—what would the built environment of that island look like by default? How would things be designed, and what design principles would seem obvious there that are at best afterthoughts right now? And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well? What paradigms is continental architecture unnecessarily stuck in, to its detriment?
What about all of these things, but for far less visible cognitive and perceptual variance?
My overall point here is that I think Duncan’s sharing first-person information about a kind of problem that is in fact quite deep and complex, and that figuring out the right thing for someone in his position to do is correspondingly difficult. Imagine suggesting to a Deaf person that the lack of closed captioning on a popular TV show shouldn’t feel significant to them once they’ve fully understood that most people can hear. Yes, they are probably not having the best-for-them possible response if they’re deeply emotionally hurt every time they’re reminded of how almost nobody considers people like them when determining the social or physical environment. But in the absence of a much better suggestion than “grieve and move on”, pointing out that they are somehow causing themselves to suffer beyond what the reality of the situation strictly requires seems like… not quite the right move, to me.
Some thoughts I had while reading the post, which seem even more relevant to your comment: insofar as we want to think about “how to handle weird people”, wheelchairs or deafness are the wrong analogy. Those are disabilities, but they’re disabilities which lots of people have, and therefore which most people already know about. Society has “standard APIs” for interfacing to wheelchairs/deafness/blindness/etc. They’re not really “weird” in the sense that society just doesn’t have APIs for them at all (though perhaps they are “weird” enough that those APIs aren’t implemented everywhere).
One of the things which makes weirdness specifically unusual/interesting is that we’re in a very-high-dimensional space, so there’s surprisingly many people who are very weird in ways which society simply does not have conceptual buckets for, at all. People who don’t fit the standard ontology of society. And what makes that weirdness uniquely interesting from a design standpoint is that, because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that. In other words, adopt a persona, something which matches some standard archetype which most people recognize, and play that role. For instance, I aim to give vague vibes of cartoon villainy, and that actually works remarkably well at getting people to interact with me the way I prefer.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.
I note that you seem to be arguing from a position of “make it work as best you can within the broken system” and that there is a separate mode of “try to fix the system,” and evaluating actions taken under one mode as if they are being taken under the other mode is a recipe for (wrongly) seeing someone as being silly or naive.
I do agree that your advice is pretty solid under the “make it work as best you can” strategy.
I am not quite sold on that being the right strategy.
Separately, it’s quite hard to do both at once but part of what you’re seeing is me trying to do both at once.
It feels like John came to the “make it work within a broken system” position because of his belief that “because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance”. I think I mostly believe this too, which is a bottleneck to me thinking that “try to fix the system” is a good strategy here.
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it—maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
I think this comment is pointing in the right direction. But I disagree with
There are buckets, but I don’t know what the draft APIs would be. Unless you count “finding your own tribe and stay away from the neurotypicals” as an API.
If you know something I don’t let me know!
In Europe at least, this is beginning to lead to accommodations like letting you work more from home, spend more time offline, getting a low sensory stimulation space for work and exams, skip excessive meetings, being allowed to move during meetings and work, being excused from social events, specialised tutoring, medication, therapy, etc.
I believe you that in some parts of Europe this is happening, witch is good.
Well, maybe I should have said “API in a drafting stage”, rather that an actual “draft API”, but I’d think today people tend to know these categories exist, and tend to at least to know enough to have some expectations of neuroatypical people having a [much?] wider range of possible reactions to certain things, compared to how a neuroatypical person would be expected to react, and many (most?) have at least a theoretical willingness to try to accommodate it. And then, maybe at least as importantly, given a name for the bucket and Google, people who are actually willing, can find more advice—not necessarily all equally helpful, but still.
Yes, that makes sense. Having a bucked is defiantly helpful for finding advise.
Separately, I note that it doesn’t really feel like the above comment is an actual response to Logan? That’s sort of headlined by “some thoughts I had while reading” but I am in fact curious what you would say in direct response to Logan’s reply.
Strong upvote.
A big part of how I try to structure my brain and my life and my discourse is to make more Nevilles Longbottom feel able to exist by default.
We get a LOT of tech that millions of “normal people” find useful from designs intended to help people who are struggling or weird. Snuggies are a bit of a punchline, but they were wildly popular, and they were invented specifically for people with mobility issues who have a hard time putting on coats/sweaters and who would have been trapped/impeded by just being buried in a blanket.
>Snuggies
Right, and yet it seems clearly wrong to me for there to be eg regulations requiring all coat manufacturers to also make snuggies, or something. I haven’t worked out what the right take-away is from this kind of thing.