Comment by I_dream_of_Geni
2 days ago
...except that "snarky, rude, and tone-deaf" generally gets the downvoting (flagging?) mob to come in and "phoosh".
2 days ago
...except that "snarky, rude, and tone-deaf" generally gets the downvoting (flagging?) mob to come in and "phoosh".
That’s a life lesson worth learning, yes. Presentation matters, even if intent is genuinely positive, because patience is finite. Sometimes it will be awkward. If something gets flagged and it shouldn’t be, email the mods and ask if they would modify the flag so the comment remains visible. Learn, grow, try, fail, retry doesn’t work if you replace ‘try’ with ‘AI’.
This is what I’m talking about. “Why can’t you just communicate like a neurotypical person?” is like saying “why can’t you just take the stairs like a normal person” to someone wheelchair bound.
So thanks for confirming that, yes, I need to use AI because “life lesson”.
No, the lesson isn’t “do like the neurotypicals do”, the lesson is “neurotypicals have an instinctive response to things they perceive as rude, challenging, or atypical”.
It’s up to you what you do with that knowledge. Conforming is the most boring option. I studied human behavioral psych for two decades instead, and if I felt like it I could probably earn a degree in organizational therapy rather easily now. I don’t feel like it; can’t stand people enough! But at least I know how they tick, so I can plan for their nonsense and work around it. For example!
Linus Torvalds gets thrown around a lot as an example of this, but, like, he really is an excellent example of “subtract the harmful part about calling individuals bad people over bad work, and you still have an abrasive, decisive leader who calls ideas and work bad when he sees it”. You don’t have to curb who you are or how viciously you act if you don’t want to, but demonstrably you will be more welcome to be yourself in more places if you adopt that particular distinction of “hate the work, not the worker” when it’s the work you hate and the worker is just a nameless faceless irrelevance.
That doesn’t guarantee that neurotyps will comprehend, of course, since a lot of them — and us! — have an ego that’s wired to their work competence, but for example it helps managers defend you when you are consistent and clear about separating your criticism of the work and, if any, your criticism of the worker.
There’s a lot more things like that where you can voluntarily learn how those around you function and learn to push their buttons more skillfully in ways that benefit you both, rather than putting their typ as prime over your atyp or torturing them for your benefit alone. Sure, they probably won’t try as hard, and that really fucking sucks. But at the end of the day it’s your call how much energy you spend on protocol adapters to those around you, not theirs.
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