Comment by drdaeman
5 days ago
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
The issue is that you've got to build shared context before people can follow an unstructured dump of everything in your brain. You have to tell a story that makes sense. Also, ideally you figure out how to filter out the stuff that other people simply don't need to know. It is not easy, but it is a skill you can learn.
How ND of you! There is a difference because the when the ND person misses the mark they get reactions of confusion. What you're talking about has a huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
You are also missing the point, being ND doesn't mean you are hyper verbose, always. This overall sour grapes about how NTs have social instincts is a typical development of autistic people over the years, which you are also exhibiting.
It's not an accusation, but a mirror to help them potentially realize something, so they don't suffer so much through life so. When you realize what is happening, it helps release a lot of suffering in a person's life. The sour grapes is not helpful, NT social instincts are not going away and it's better to understand and work with the world than to be upset that rain happens sometimes and it just should never exist!
NT social instincts does not mean the person is super effective socially and everything else, but it's a very useful tool if they decide to develop their social skills.
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