A different point of view (shamelessly stolen from an imgur dump)
A different point of view (shamelessly stolen from an imgur dump)
I like this approach. "funny meme" aside, I think it is a good way of showing how much a certain language can affect how other people think and feel about a subject. Just read it THAT way and "being neurotypical" suddenly sounds like a disorder that isn't fully compatible with the public, doesn't it?
We live in a world that isn't exactly kind to people on the spectrum. It is loud, flashy, hectic, overwhelming, unrewarding but you're still expected to work like a cog in a machine, despite having fewer and fewer places where you'd actually "fit in" without grinding gears, and whenever there is some sort of public talk about that topic, it always, always sounds like the affected person is the problem and personally responsible for fixing themselves, when a no small part of "not fitting in" is due to society itself. Maybe a change in language is due to remove that stigma.
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You read into phrases past their actual meanings
Instead of saying what you think, you expect others to infer it based on subjective social rules
I see these as legitimately bad things that people should not do. The fact that society considers this normal is horrible!
I think of it as a dialect difference. Allistic people aren't "not saying what they think" they are saying exactly what they think. That combination of words just has a specific meaning to other Allistic people outside of their Webster definition. It's gibberish/meaningless if you speak a different dialect though.
Iâm not so sure. Letâs say your boss says âI want you to make a spreadsheet that compares these sets of numbersâ, and then you do that and turn it in. But then your boss says you didnât do what he asked. He says he wanted you to separate each section with a black line and each section to have a different color, and these particular columns should be hidden, and these parts should be in a different order. There was no way to know he wanted all those specific details based on the original request. Now, Iâm not saying people shouldnât make their spreadsheets look nice and presentable, but if there were very specific things they wanted, they should have said those things up front. I donât know how anyone would be able to interpret something like that.
Now, this was a hypothetical situation, but this is very similar to something I have experienced quite often at my jobs. I am expected to know certain specific things without ever having any realistic way of knowing them, unless I just assumed those things and got lucky that what I assumed just happened to be what they wanted. It doesnât seem like merely a different dialect, but people refusing to be clear in what they say.
I'm gonna be upfront with you, Im ND but Allistic. Your boss asking you to make a spreadsheet automatically told me he wanted you to make it look presentable because it was a work enviornment. The context of who was asking you and where made that clear to me, I understand that it wasn't clear to you. But that's what I mean by dialect.
I didnt get all the layout details that he might specifically want but if my boss asked me to make a spreadsheet comparing some numbers 9 out of 10 times I'll have outlines and colors and I'll hide messy cells. He wouldn't have to tell me that and I'd bet most Allistic people would hear those instructions as well. In fact most Allistic people would probably be insulted by the level of specific instruction your asking for if they hadnt specifically requested it. So your boss may think he's being polite and not realizing that he's instead using poor communication. It may help to specifically tell him you want specific, detailed, instructions like that, otherwise he's likely to resist giving that level of instruction for fear of insulting you.
I'm sorry that your boss hasn't figured out that you need more specific guidance in those situations because that's got to be frustrating and I hope that you and he can figure out a better mutual communication style.
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Such things can also be a domineering strategy.
What my boss wanted was some very specific formatting that they didnât tell me about until after I turned the spreadsheet in. I donât understand how I was ever supposed to know those specific details beforehand.
So based on the info you just provided your example isn't what I was referring to by differences in dialect. If your boss didn't tell you the very specific formatting he wanted beforehand then there was no way for you to know and no Allistic person would have been able to figure that out either. Thats not a subtext dialect difference which is what I was talking about. An allistic person would be just as frustrated with that example and your boss is just a dick. No subtext was going to tell anyone the correct color hash that he wanted.
because it was a work enviornment.
Infers to me practicality over presentability.
Unfortunately that is largely not how the corporate world works.
Which is why more hierarchies = more bullshit work.
I remember, once in a nice small company with flat hierarchy, the office guys did a survey for the works outing (sounds weird, "Betriebsausflug"); it was an excel sheet with not-working checkboxes sent via mail, you had to send it back. Now scale that up.
^ Prime example of speaking a different dialect, if not language.
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I would be willing to bet actual money that they did not mean those exact specific lines and colours, and instead provided them as direction for the type of organisation and presentation of the data they were expecting. They wanted it presented in a manner that made the comparison easier to digest at a glance, and not just a trivially assembled side by side list of plain numbers.
Think about the reason behind the request, and how it changes the situation for the person making it. Could they have gotten a dump of unformatted data themselves? If so then that's almost certainly not what they're asking for.
I love how you just made up extra details to my experiences that you werenât there for.
You literally asked how a short instruction expands to include these seemingly expected additional formatting requirements. The answer is that it doesn't expand to exactly these arbitrary requirements, but that a certain style or level of aesthetics was implied by being a work environment. Unless your boss is hard to work with and actually demands a specific date format and color coding. Most likely though, they want any form of color coding to distinguish different parts of the spreadsheet at a glance and a reasonable date format that is used in everyday life.
a certain style or level of aesthetics was implied by being a work environment.
Are you just assuming I made no effort to make the data presentable? I used formatting and cleaned things up, I just didnât do the specific things I was told I needed to do only after I turned the spreadsheet in.
Unless your boss is hard to work with and actually demands a specific date format and color coding
Is this a hard thing to believe?
If you think about it as a dialect the only way to learn it is like any other language that doesnt have a textbook: exposure with the native speakers.
I think the point OP was trying to make is that most likely people who know this dialect (i. E. Are used to working with your bess) have an idea of how he wants things.
In this case, the dialect would have a very small subset of speakers (only the people used to working with your boss).
I can see the logic in this argument, but I don't think such a small subset of speakers qualifies as a dialect and I think your boss is just being difficult. Also I'm pretty sure this would have been an issue for many neurotypicals too, since the info wasnt communicated properly.
I think this is more an example of power play - your boss is in power and how dare you not know? It's the same treatment we get from NTs everywhere. They are "in power" in the sense that they can expect most people to pick up on their code and don't have to change. Your boss on the other hand just doesn't care if you had a chance to understand and that's why I think he's just power trippy.
So all of your bullshit in this thread is just the result of you having a shitty boss and throwing a temper tantrum, then blaming all other neurotypicals for the behavior of one person? Jesus christ, I feel like that guy that was arguing with someone about food only to learn that person was a pissdrinker and their opinions were worthless.
This explains so much about you.
Someone was just bringing in an example of a situation that is difficult for them and which repeatedly upsets them. Remembering all that might make them present their upsettedness, which may be welcome for a deeper understanding and further processing toward clarity on both sides. No need to mirror that. :-)
edit: Maybe i should tell about this afterthought here; it's a perspective that might be unknown to many here. I might still be off because of empathetic limits presented by the text-only medium, and I'm only a messenger who will be speaking an unknown language so don't hit on me ... :-)
Through the shamanic lens: This looks like an example of a "self-fulfilling prophecy", in the way of calling in the presence of a spirit (spiritual entity) by telling the story of having encountered that entity before. So, @CarlsIII@kbin.social in its essence told a story of how they repeatedly meet a spirit which seeks to take their energy by telling them they were doing things not as expected, with the implicate impression that something would be "wrong" with them not having understood some unspoken message, while CarlsIII was just doing things the way CarlsIII would find them fitting. Others probably have read the story and could relate to it or feel with it, thus amplifying the inadvertent call. ... Lo and behold, exactly such a spirit shows up. All it takes is someone who is susceptible to it and ready to serve for a demonstration. Invocations like this are common. Maybe this can help build awareness.
What people on the spectrum may not understand is that language is more than just the exchanging of raw information. It's culture, it's artistic, and it's a way to communicate intangible feelings and emotions.
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Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.
You: "We actually do understand that"
You: proceeds to not understand that
Theres a difference between understanding the concept and understanding what the fuck your boss wants you to do when you have been given a conflicting set of orders and because of liability and politics you will never get an answer on how they want you to thread the line between the two
edit: and because you are autistic and your boss is not, how YOU would prioritize which rules to follow at the expense of ignoring the others is almost CERTAINLY going to be the wrong prioritization
Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.
And is it not rude to assume that everyone's mind works in the same way ... or that others would camouflage in a die-cut way as someone they are not truely; is it not kind of intellectually flat to assume self-similarity, given that this is so obviously not the case -- I mean divergent or not, everyone is just so engraved by their past experience that we have no true idea what mental process is going on inside another person unless we get to know them more closely.
e: or put in different words, what to do if the intangible feelings and emotions communicated by someone just don't match their verbal message? Or worse, what to do when we cearly see someones cognitive dissonance but we are expected to somehow follow that (it's an illness and following through would be self-denial)?
May read: The Double Empathy Problem;
more on affective vs. cognitive empathy: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence (part 1); (part 2)I think they understand that just fine.
That sounds as if a daltonic found it horrible that other people use and enjoy colours he cannot separate. I understand it makes your life harder, but you can't tell people not to use something that is extremely usefull just because you can't participate.
"You read into phrases past their actual meanings" "Instead of saying what you think, you expect others to infer it based on subjective social rules"
The main issues is that you have to do that because other people will use double meanings no matter what. For exemple to double cross you regarding something. So you have to be able to read them.
Meanwhile there's actually an other case when people use double meanings : when they can't foster the courage to tell you something really important that would change everything, or to which you could react badly. Like that they are in love with you. In that case infered double meanings will allow the other person to react by sending similar double meanings to signify that they are on the same page, creating a much reassuring envirronment to finally confess their feelings.
Our species is insanely bad at finding partner. Like wildly bad.
You'd rather everyone just immediately believed everything anyone else said without any thought into the motivation or intent behind the words?
You literally just did the thing I complained about.
Is there a best of Lemmy yet?
This was just đ€đŒ
I mean, it wasn't, though. I didn't actually do the thing they described, they just failed to understand their own point.
I mean, no, not really. What I said is still a part of what you proposed, just not specifically.
Like you can't suggest that everyone should jump off a high cliff without also suggesting that everyone should fall to the bottom. You can't say "I said jump, not fall! You're reading into my words beyond my intent!"
Have you never encountered symbolism? Poetry? Is your favorite book "See Spot Run" because every statement is entirely literal with no interpretation needed?
If you read the phrase "Upon seeing the knife in the strangers hand, she let out a scream." would you not infer that "she" is afraid of the knife person, or would you sit there scratching your head wondering "why did she scream? I don't understand, knives can be used for many purposes."
What I said is still a part of what you proposed, just not specifically.
Absolutely not. What you said had nothing to do with anything I said. I did not say we should âbelieve everything everyone says.â Thatâs not even a part of what I said.
You then proceeded to:
read into phrases past their actual meanings
The alternative to âreading into phrases past their actual meaningsâ is not to âbelieve everything everyone says.â Itâs simply not assuming someone intended to say something completely different than what they actually said, which is what you did.
And the alternative to âexpecting others to infer what you think based on subjective social rulesâ is to just say what you mean in the first place.
See the conflict weâre having right now? We could have avoided this if you simply didnât read into what I said past the actual meaning.
Ah I see the confusion. You said "reading into phrases past their actual meanings" but defined that as "assuming someone intended to say something completely different than what they actually said." This is not, in fact. "reading into phrases past their actual meanings" and is, in fact, called "assuming someone is lying". With that cleared up, I agree with you. People should definitely stop assuming others are lying without a good reason.
This is not, in fact. âreading into phrases past their actual meaningsâ and is, in fact, called âassuming someone is lyingâ.
You just did it again!!
No, I didn't! You have no idea what you're even trying to say! I'm sorry but you're just incorrect. At no point have I interpreted anything you've suggested to mean anything other than exactly that.
Well then, thank God youâre here to tell me what my own words mean.
Okay but should I interpret that comment literally like you suggest or should I "read into" it and determine you're being sarcastic?
Weren't you just saying people should "say exactly what they mean"?
Am I to interpret this as a sincere thank you, then? In which case. You're quite welcome. You seemed very confused and I'm happy to have provided some clarity in this matter. I hope what you learned today will be helpful to you going forward.
No.
When I someone asks if I want to eat at a particular restaurant and I say no, they frequently assume some kind of reason. For example, they might assume I didn't want that type of food, or that I am not hungry, or something else. That is reading into it, not lying.
Most people wouldn't just assume a random reason. They might assume there is a reason, and they would be correct even if that reason is "just dont feel like it", which is a perfectly valid reason.
Furthermore, what you're describing is not "reading into", its "drawing likely inferences based on evidence and observation" and it's literally the foundation of every piece of knowledge we currently possess.
What you're objecting to is called "thinking".
An example of what you're trying to describe would be if person A said "I can't hang out tonight, I'm busy" and the person B thinks "they're just saying that to be nice, they actually hate me" when really person A is actually just busy. Person B is "reading into" person A's response. Which ties back into my previous point about what you're actually objecting to, which is people assuming someone is lying when there's nothing to suggest dishonesty.
All your examples are exactly what I am talking about (assuming) but then you follow it up with telling me what I really mean.
No, my example had nothing for them to use for experience and context. On fact, they did not even need to assume those details in the first place because the reason is not really important or I would have volunteered it. I would have also provided it if they asked!
But overexplaining the reasoning for things being a common trait for autistic and ADHD people is likely caused by trying to head off misunderstandings by people who just assume things and not listening when told the real reason. Heck, I often feel defensive with some people because the whole conversation is just trying to correct their assumptions so we can focus on what was actually said.
"whole conversation is just trying to correct their assumptions so we can focus on what was actually said."
Please read this over and over until you understand why its so hilariously ironic that you just said that.
What was "actually said" is that inferring information from people's statements is a bad thing, which is ridiculous, and the exact statement I'm attempting to address. Everyone in this thread assumes I'm saying something else, and that I am somehow attacking them rather than engaging in a discussion.
Imagine if every conversation had to contain every single explicit detail of what's being discussed, imagine being completely unwilling and unable to form a conclusion based on information provided to you. That would be awful. This leads me to believe that this is not actually what OP intended, and upon further discussion they revealed what they actually have a problem with is people jumping to incorrect conclusions based on insufficient evidence. A sentiment with which I agree entirely, but which is not equivalent to the wording of what was, as you put it, actually said.
No, inferring the wrong assumptions and never letting them go is the problem. You are a prime example of someone who does that.
Most people wouldnât just assume a random reason.
And yet, Iâve experienced people doing exactly this quite often.
An example of what youâre trying to describe would be if person A said âI canât hang out tonight, Iâm busyâ and the person B thinks âtheyâre just saying that to be nice, they actually hate meâ when really person A is actually just busy. Person B is âreading intoâ person Aâs response.
Yes. Exactly. See, you get it.
Which ties back into my previous point about what youâre actually objecting to, which is people assuming someone is lying when thereâs nothing to suggest dishonesty.
Nope; I take it back. Youâre still lost.
Lmao you can't agree with the 2nd point and not with the 3rd, it's literally the same point. Once again you have demonstrated a complete failure to understand what's being discussed here.
Dude. Just look at the dictionary mening of the words. That's the actual meaning. If you want to say A, use words that mean A literally. Don't say A and B and expect us to know that you actually mean C.
You know exactly what you're doing because you proceed to complain about us wanting to not have poetry and metaphor.
No, there will always be people who lie and have bad intentions. This is something everyone needs to consider.
The problem is the honest people who aren't clear about what their expectations are. Then they get upset when those expectations aren't met. I don't think people do it intentionally, language is hard.