It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party.
I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.
Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.
thanks for reading, author here! the article is very much a response to a blame already expressed. People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
These are my thoughts on why differences of opinions get phrased as “autistic people just can’t admit when they are wrong”, when myself and most autistic people I know in fact readily admit when we are wrong and move on all the time. I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it. I just need explanations and strategies to handle these situations.
> People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
This attitude is exactly what [neurotypical] people generally mean when they say "[some] autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong".
Not that autistic people are so convinced of their own rightness that they stare at the compiler saying "my code is flawless, the compiler must be bugged" because there is literally no circumstance in which they will ever update their worldview. But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion or status games which can't be learned from (but nevertheless, the difference of opinion probably results from misreading by the other party)
> But that when it comes to cases where [multiple] people suggest that the question they asked or the tone they asked it in might have been suboptimal for the situation, they are likely to rationalise it as just unverifiable opinion
I mean, that judgment is literally a matter of opinion. If they had behaved the same in an office full of autistic people like them, or with people of another culture, the outcome would have been totally different. That said, sometimes opinions matter, like say, the legal rights of fetuses when it comes to abortion, to pick a recent example.
So concluding something is a "difference of opinions" is not the end of the story, sometimes such differences need to be resolved.
I fail to grasp what "acknowledge when they're wrong" is supposed to mean. From what I can tell the author insists on deductive reasoning to determine whether something is right or wrong and any wrong conclusions are quickly discarded. Hence, there are only two options, right, not disproven (opinion).
If somebody has a goal to communicate a certain thing, and does not succeed in communicating that because [nearly] everybody interprets them as being rude or obtuse instead, deductive reasoning would point to the conclusion that their approach to communication was the wrong one for the situation, and to the conclusion they should probably attempt to modify their communication if they wish to achieve a different result. (I appreciate that for autistic people, it might be particularly difficult to discern how or why their attempts to communicate a point do not succeed. I also appreciate that failed communication applies both ways, and that a neurotypical person telling an autist that they "never admit they're wrong" is a failure on the part of the neurotypical person to appreciate that this statement will most likely be interpreted hyper-literally)
Alternative, one can avoid that reasoning and rationalise not discarding consistently failing conversational stratagems because the cause of the failed outcome of a conversation is a person's opinion which lacks the same consistency as mathematics (and therefore more effective conversational stratagems can - at best - only be supported evidentially by inductive reasoning). But that just leads to the wrong outcome more often.
People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified.
We need to be careful, though, to not adopt black and white thinking even around "facts." Often, multiple contradictory factual things can be true at the same time and all pass verification.
Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
So when I say it's Yanni, and you say it's Laurel, which of us is supposed to admit we're wrong? Neither of us are wrong, it's just a difference of opinions.
In this case, the recording was of a person saying the word laurel as part of a collection of reference pronunciations. If you don't hear the word laurel, you're the one in the wrong, having been deceived by an audio illusion.
> Illusions are a lighthearted example of this that helped me appreciate this point. For example, the Yanni/Laurel audio illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) where people on both sides argue, in good faith, that the sound is one or the other. And even if you analyze the underlying audio in depth, neither side is factually wrong because that is how they experience it and isn't merely based around an opinion :-)
This example does not add much. If it is how people experience, then the only fact they can derive is, that they personally experienced it that way. There is no point in fighting about "what it really is", when all you have is a personal exerience. Anyone saying it objectively is this one or that one, only based on personal experience, is not accounting for the fact, that others can experience differently, which is silly.
In this light I assume, that you put quotes around "facts" as a means of saying, that they are not really facts, because if they were, then there would truly only be black and white.
The biggest insight I have had in my personal life is that relationships are more important than facts. Building and keeping long-term relationships at work and in my family is, by far, more important than being right every time (even if I can verify being right). Verifying it just makes the abrasion to the relationship worse.
A thing I have learned is that sometimes relationships rely upon facts -- or at least a shared view of facts. If the relationship includes you bearing responsibility for something, being factually correct about details within that sphere of responsibility does matter.
Important caveat, for me, is that I want to be able to share my perspective, and believe that, over time, they will consider it, and it will impact their thinking. I think this is the case more often than people think.
Yes, I was more referring to insisting on being right and being dismissive of other viewpoints. I have caused incalculable damage to my personal relationships because of this pattern of behavior in myself.
What follows is not really directed at you but rather reflecting on this whole comment section, I hope you forgive me :)
IN the article, the only case where I insist on being right is in scenario #4, where I can actually demonstrate that a fact is true. In fact, it's not me being right, it's the result of the experiments I propose. Otherwise, I'm either asking questions, trying to actually state my opinion in the first place, or not willing to say something I don't agree with because it goes against my values.
Agreeing or defusing the situation is necessary for personal relationships, but this is the workplace, and while it's good to be nice, it has to go both ways. The easiest way to deal with conflicting opinions in personal relationships is just to be curious, a good listener, and not (or rarely) state any opinions of your own. That might sound a bit sad, but I have plenty of fun debating opinions on my own, no need to involve other people.
However, I'm not at work to read your mind and guess how you might interpret my words. I am at work to be an engineer and produce results, and I am an engineer because I love technology, not to make money and have a career. I also really don't want to antagonize people or prove my superiority or brag or retaliate, I legitimately just like solving problems to the best of the team's capabilities.
Because I don't have an intuitive sense of how to react in a given situation, extending some empathy my way helps a lot. And for that, it's worth communicating my point of view: that I am not being patronizing; I am just asking questions I think are necessary.
It's like asking a blind person to navigate around potholes. They might be able to do it, but it's also nice to understand they're not tripping on them on purpose.
The tricky piece of this is that people can be right about the facts and still be wrong, or at least in complete disagreement with each other. This is because there is a latent opinion in each fact, which is that the fact matters and is relevant for the conversation at hand.
If you start from your own set of priors and are getting nowhere, you probably want to consider there might be a more relevant fact (for that person, opinion alert!) that you don't know about and aren't considering.
One time I was in an argument about whether something could be done within a six month timeframe, and when a manager dropped in and asked a few clarifying questions it became clear that the other guy was working from the underlying opinion that nobody cared at all about the deadline and they were really just arguing about whether they wanted to do it. The timeline was clearly literally impossible, but he did want to do it.
Ended up that he told manager we could do it, manager was nuts and so signed us up, I left the team, they missed it by about two years. But he had fun, apparently.
I feel like the article isn't actually directly addressing its title. It could be stronger with some situations to when you were wrong, with examples of how that was swiftly resolved, as you mentioned in the intro paragraph.
At the moment it feels like it takes for granted that you're good at resolving situations where you're objectively wrong, so it's only addressing situations where there was a difference of opinions.
I'm not implying that you're bad at the former, of course. However, it's entirely possible for people to have trouble engaging you when there's a difference of opinion and for you not to be able to acknowledge when you're objectively wrong - i.e. that all of the issues you've identified in the article are happening, but that the title quote is still actually true.
I think the point of the article is to express the ways in which it can feel like those on the spectrum are unwilling to admit they were wrong when it might not be what is happening by providing the perspective of the neurodivergent.
I don't think an article providing a couple examples of how one individual was willing to admit they were wrong is providing much in terms of discussion or new perspectives. "See, I can admit I'm wrong!" would be a pretty shallow way of addressing what could often be a misunderstanding. Instead, the post is attempting to offer some insight into the different opinions people might have about interactions with an autistic and explanations for what is going on behind the scenes.
Yep, I understood that, but I disagree :) But I do realise that that could also have made the article longer and less focused. I think the gain in clarity and context would be worth it, but that is definitely my opinion, and I'm no writer.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I think you are right.
For every “you can’t admit you are wrong” discussion, I must have a 1000 discussions where I just go “oh you’re right” and move on. My default operating mode is being wrong and knowing I am, or knowing that alternative approaches are just as valid, or sometimes less valid but still bring value to the table. This was not easily learnt, but it just leads to better engineering so it’s a no brainer. I brush over it in a single sentence, and this is not enough, as evidenced in some comments here.
I had a much longer first draft, much less focused, and edited it down to crystalline precision. The next article I write about the topic, I will chose the other approach, and see how that resonates.
Yeah, the rebuttal to "you never admit that you are wrong" is "here's a bunch of situations where I admitted I was wrong", not "I actually was just never wrong in the first place".
I've run into the same issues constantly throughout my life, especially when it comes to asking clarifying questions to get a grip on the situation. Something I'm going to do moving forward is first stating that I have a few questions that I need to ask to better understand the other's statement or question.
I think this sharing of my perspective may help the conversation to move forward in a more productive manner.
Thank you for putting this information out there! I hope it helps other people understand autistic communication and intentions a little bit better.
> I don’t think of blaming anybody here, that is you reading things into it.
Alright, thanks for responding directly to that.
In my personal experience, people don't typically conclude that I would refuse to admit I'm wrong. The only conclusion drawn in my experience (usually) is that we're unable to get our points across, in both ways, and we should probably try to come back to the same topic again later and maybe prepare a little bit better.
That’s what I think is happening indeed, and I’m almost never the one shutting the conversation down. I didn’t go into “strategies” to address the issue in this article, mostly because I just don’t have enough experience to back it up, but I think recognizing that something is spiraling, saying “let’s continue in writing/retable this/i will try to understand your point of view” is something to try.
There are two different things being discussed here, and it's creating a disconnect.
The first is, "Can autistic people admit they are wrong when they themselves know deep down that they are?"
The second is, "Can autistic people be easily convinced that they are wrong?"
I'd say most commenters are expressing a "no" to #2, but your replies retreat to #1. I.e. you say that once you know you are wrong, you find it easy to admit it. However, given the content of your article, I'd speculate that it is very difficult to actually convince you that you are wrong in the first place.
The thing is, at least in the first example, the way I read it isn't "autistic people can't admit when they are wrong". From your own telling of the story it seems like a manager asked you "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?", and you responded with "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React?". You failed to realize that all of the questions you asked them are the question they were asking YOU. They've been reading articles about technical teams gaining things they don't really understand from switching to React. Maybe increased velocity (they know what velocity is but don't know how React increases it), reduced bundle sizes (what's a bundle? why do I care?), faster rendering times (faster is a good thing, right?), etc. But they don't have the knowledge to judge if React will do this for them.
Answers to this question might be "No, we already use Angular which provides similar benefits to React", "Yes, switching to React from MooTools (I'm old) would simplify the design, increasing our velocity and probably resolve some annoying rendering bugs", or even "I'm not sure. Perhaps we should meet and discuss the weaknesses of that page and figure out if React is the right tool to resolve them".
Instead they got back the questions they were hoping you'd answer for them.
Many long years ago the CIO at a company I worked for asked if we could use machine learning to improve our data analytics. I responded with "I don't know, what kinds of questions are you hoping to answer?". We went back and forth on this several times, with me insisting you couldn't just throw machine learning at data without some idea of what your hoping to get back. This wasn't resolved until they brought in a vendor claiming to provide turnkey machine learning solutions, they ran it against our data and came up with the stunning insight that the biggest predictor of dollars sold was.... units sold. To be fair they did provide other data points, but it was all things we either already knew, or didn't care about and if we ever did could find out quickly.
I failed to recognize that the question I was asking was a big part of what I was being asked. If I had realized this and provided some insight into the kinds of questions machine learning could answer, and why we didn't need sophisticated machine learning algorithms for the ones the business cared about I could have saved everyone some time. Instead I kept rephrasing the question back at him, with neither of us having the insight to realize we were actually asking the same question.
The questions you bring up are really the questions I am asking?
What do they think the weaknesses of the page are? Do they think rewriting the checkout will solve these problems? How much of the technical tradeoffs do they understand or care about?
To recap:
Is our checkout page not performing well?
Will a new checkout solve our problem?
Why do they think a technology change is a solution?
Do they understand the implications of such a switch?
Otherwise I won't be able to assess if react makes sense or not. It makes sense for some reasons, not for others. If I don't know why they think we should consider it, I can't provide a valuable answer. These are exactly the points you are bringing up as well: I don't know, and I need your input to clarify what we are trying to do.
I understand there is a communication problem, but I'm most definitely not refusing to accept I am wrong.
I haven't even stated anything that could be wrong. And because I have fully put the blame on myself, after this particular interaction, the fact that I am able to work perfectly fine at a very strategic level with other stakeholders in my new job shows me that it's not just about me.
Obviously I wasn't there and am going by your accounting of the conversation, but from the way you laid it out, the questions I brought up are the questions your manager thought they were asking you. Hence the confusion, followed by frustration.
From my interpretation of the conversation, you thought the question was: "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React, yes or no?"
And responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?" (paraphrasing)
Meanwhile the manager thought they were asking: "Please discuss the reasons why we should and should not rewrite the checkout page in React, including your recommendation on a course of action"
And you responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?"
Spelled out like that it's hopefully a little clearer that the "why React" was part of the question. They don't know if the page is performing "well" or whatever that means (even from an engineering standpoint it's hard to define, render time? bandwidth? server CPU?). They might know if users are complaining about checkout being slow, but even then users tend to leave rather than complain. If you were to tell them that the checkout page was performing "poorly" and React could fix it, that's the kind of information they were hoping to obtain from this conversation.
Similarly in my machine learning question, my CIO was actually asking me "how do you think machine learning can benefit this business?" And I responded with "how do you think machine learning can benefit the business?" He didn't know, he was asking me. He had just heard about the wonders of machine learning and was fishing for how it could benefit this business. Just like your manager had heard about React and was fishing for how it could benefit the business.
If your manager were here replying to comments I'd advise them to remember that engineers in general (spectrum or not), tend to be the literal sort, and if you aren't getting the answers your looking for it's often useful to examine the words you used and ask if you are actually asking the question your hoping to get answered or relying on subtext. But for the engineer's side of this conversation, it's important to ask if the question your answering is actually what they are asking, or if you failed to parse their intentions.
Thanks for the response. I do agree to all of these suggestions, and honestly we can't just make up hypothetical scenario after hypothetical scenario of what the best way to phrase things are. It depends so much on me, the manager, the time of day, the team culture.
I think my point in the article is to say:
I am autistic, and I might not communicate the way you are expecting. If I am asking questions, it is for what I think is a good reason. What I am not doing is rejecting your question and not acknowledging I am wrong. If I wanted to reject your opinion, I would reject it, not mess around asking oblique questions.
It's great that everybody seems to think this is my problem alone to solve, and I'm somehow doing this on purpose. I am not, I am trying very hard to get better, part of which is to share my experiences. Yet, that also seems to be criticized ("who puts so much effort into analyzing these situations?").
I have very productive relationships with other engineers and product managers and business owners, so clearly this can work out just well, but that's not what I wanted to cover here. I will in the future however, and I covered a tiny aspect of "digging deep into business questions, as an engineer" here: https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-th...
Many autistic people prefer to say they are autistic. Hopefully it's become clear that I think this way, and I can't just not think this way. Thinking is my main way of interacting with the world, it's not just "a trait".
You can ignore the parent comment. It's become fashionable these days to not use certain descriptive labels in a traditional manner because a certain class of people feel it's dehumanizing by "reducing one to one's condition". For instance, someone isn't "diabetic" they're a "person with diabetes", because the diabetes is just something they have it's not who they are. You're not "autistic", you're a "person with autism", and so on.
It's just a semantic game that is only making communication more verbose for no meaningful gain, as if everyone didn't already understand "autistic" to mean "person with autism".
You are working with him to create a solution and should ask questions from a shared point of view. Your questions instead sound like you are doubting him.
"How can this make our checkout page better?"
"What benefits do other companies get from using React?"
"Is it feasible to change technology at this time?"
"There might be implications if we switch, like..."
You are not understanding why they should consider it; you are subtly asking them to justify why they are bothering you.
> Your questions instead sound like you are doubting him.
Respectfully, I disagree: _to you_, the "questions instead sound like you are doubting him".
Maybe it even sounds that way to most people. It doesn't to me.
I have been in very similar situations, and having experienced the frustration of communications failure, I've tried to take other approaches.
A few times I've prefaced my questions with something along the lines of: "In order to answer your question I'm going to have to ask some questions; a few of them may not make sense to you, but it's just the way I function".
It has not helped. One time it was met with a kind of "gee, here you go again, giving a lecture on how special you are."
The crux of the matter is that I _need_ to do that if I am going to give a helpful answer to the question that I was asked. Either the manager's question is important and warrants a thoughtful reply, or it's unimportant, in which case almost any kind of reply is ok.
I think the problem, in a nutshell, is neurotypical people's absolute refusal to acknowledge when they're wrong -- for example about what a normal way for an employee to respond to the question: "should we switch to React?" is.
There _is_ no normal way. But neurotypical people, stereotypically, labor under the incorrect assupmtion that there is one. And the discussion in this thread has, in my opionion, made that extremely evident.
To clarify: sure, I'm wrong in the sense that there is a normal way if we by 'normal' mean 'most people do it like this'. Unfortunately, 'normal' almost always also carries a meaning of 'the proper way'.
Also, something that's normal (in the sense of 'most common') in, say, the US is not necessarily normal in, say Norway or Thailand or Zambia.
I'm hesitant to reply further in this thread because I get the feeling I've made some people feel attacked and criticized which is not my intent, but I really don't think the issue here is the neurotypical manager's inability to admit they are wrong. Everyone in this conversation is wrong. Everyone believes that both sides of this conversation are having the same conversation, when instead each side is having a different conversation.
To the engineer, they've been asked a specific question "should we rewrite in React?". They assume the manager's has a specific motivation for asking, because the engineer would have a specific motivation for asking, and are asking questions to try to get at that motivation and determine if React will fill the manager's needs. The engineer is having a reasonable conversation.
To the manager, they've asked an open ended question "should we rewrite int React? What are the reasons why and why not? What issues could it address? What are the drawbacks? Any guess on time-frame? Cost?". The question "what issues is the site having that React could address?" is contained in the manager's question. The manager is also having a reasonable conversation.
The breakdown happened when both sides fail to realize that the other person is having a completely different conversation than they are. To the manager turning around and asking them "what issues are you hoping to address with React?" is the same as if someone asked "does this truck have a lot of horsepower?" and I replied "I don't know, how much horsepower does this truck have?" I'm echoing the question back at them. It's confusing and they don't understand why I'm doing it, and it's naturally going to make them feel uncomfortable and agitated. Meanwhile the engineer doesn't understand why they someone is getting agitated over their reasonable fact-finding questions and start getting... well confused and agitated.
In general, I actually blame the manager more for this breakdown in communication, and that's where I'd put the majority of my coaching efforts. After all, probably 95% of a manager's job is communication, and I view understanding how to change your communication to establish a rapport with other people working outside your framework to be part of the job (this kind of breakdown can happen a hundred different ways, it's not just neurotypical vs non). Sadly, most managers never getting any kind of training on this, and many (most?) are abysmal at it.
But the fact is both sides of this conversation failed to understand the conversation the other person was having. No one is "wrong" or everyone is.
I brought this example up because clearly there is a problem here. But, no one is wrong, and shutting down the conversation as "you just can't admit when you are wrong" is not productive for anyone (since no one is wrong). Maybe the conversation will go nowhere, and because I might be completely oblivious to that fact (I try to be, but it's a lot of work), it helps if the manager, whose job it is to facilitate communication, becomes aware of what is going on, and says "I know you are trying to establish context, but it sounds like you are just echoing my questions back at me. I actually want a list of reasons why YOU think it is a good or bad idea. I won't mind if you assume things; we can clarify that later". I have absolutely no problem being interrupted that way; that makes a lot of sense and helps everybody. Once I know people won't mind me riffing without making absolutely sure we are talking about the same thing, I can go with that just fine.
This assumes good faith and open-mindedness on both sides. Assuming I am being arrogant, dismissive, know-it-all, won't back off, can't admit I am wrong, when I am trying not to, helps nobody.
I hope you take this as constructive criticism, as it's not intended to offend:
Your post reads extremely arrogantly. It's a "I am very smart" type of communication style.
None of the points you bring up are specific to autistic individuals. I'm allistic (as you put it) and, realistically, not that intelligent, but I experience the first two of your points on a regular basis. But I've learned to modify my handling of these types of situations so that, most of the time, I get a positive/productive response.
Now I obviously can't know how you communicate outside your blog posts. But it may be prudent to think about it – if you come across as arrogant or a "know it all", then the "you don't acknowledge when you're wrong" is just a nicer way of saying it.
And when people get a “vibe” of arrogance/know-it-all-ness from a person, they will be much less willing to accept, well, anything. And for good reason. This especially applies to corrections, "let's play 20 questions" and long-winded explanations of context (especially if you explain something they already know, even partially).
I totally understand, and I knew it would be perceived this way. If I can trust my colleagues and friends, I come across as very humble. This article is the first time I ever mentioned publicly how much time I put into learning technology.
The question is, when and how do I communicate that best without coming across as arrogant.
It looks like you are overfitting a couple cases of individuals mistreating you into a set of rules which are not true to reality. The reality of sociology and group psychology is a rich, vast tapestry of anthropological progression that numbers over 7B individuals today and countless others of their ancestors over the past 500M years; from when we began as apes and progressed into hominids and then sapiens.
"The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I'm saying."
"I care more about doing good work than office politics."
"The person underestimates how much I know about the topic."
These are statements that, when read on their face, seem to apply to disagreements that you have had with individuals. None of them seem to complain about (or even address) the ways clusters of people behave as a group.
I don't think this blog post is actually about autistic people, or allistic people, at all. I think this post is about one person, and some other people that the person had conflict with. If the author is reading this, I think it would do you well to slightly reframe things in that light.
People can also be objectively wrong when it comes to social interactions as well though.
To give an example, if someone who is less technical asks you a question that does not give enough background information to give a precise technical answer on, the wrong thing to do is respond by first simply asking questions back at them. Particularly if the questions could be difficult for them to immediately see how it relates to answering their initial question. It doesn't matter that it's because you think holistically or they don't have as deep an understanding, or anything else. The right thing to do is try to stay with people in conversation. Explain your thinking, make sure they understand why you need to ask these questions before you can answer, or give them a range of possibilities that are dependent on these unknowns.
And asking somebody to explain their reasoning and justification for their question before you begin to answer it is very rude, so that's wrong too. It's reasonable to expect more justification as requests become more time-intensive, but an initial response to a question should have some degree of good faith and politeness. Clearly they don't understand all the implications, which is why they asked for your opinion. So asking whether they understand all the implications of what they are asking is a rhetorical question and is basically calling them a moron.
"Should we rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React?"
This question might sound like your manager is expecting a yes or no answer, but they aren't. They want some "conversation". They want your opinion, some explanation for it, an opening to continue the conversation. Even if you could answer with an unqualified "no" without further clarification and be correct on a technical basis, that response is wrong in this social interaction.
"It's possible react could help with performance but it would be quite a lot of work. I don't think we should at this point unless we're seeing performance problems."
If that's what the manager wanted, they could have clarified as much in response to the author's first answer, or at least recognized there was a disconnect, and worked backwards from that to the point that their expectations were aligned. If they can't do that, then it's not clear their goals are well-defined enough to have a productive conversation on the matter in the first place, or that they are capable of correcting a misconception in the first place. That's a pretty low level of communication skill.
I can definitely imagine a manager who might (unhelpfully) say "Should we rewrite in React?" to mean "I want the team to move to React for reasons I can't [or don't feel I have to] rigorously justify, I expect you to defer to me here, and now is your chance to alert me of big gotchas that we'll have to handle in the process".
Such a manager has failed to communicate what they actually want, and unless they can "correct" the listener to the desired interpretation, they're going to be frustrated when said listener takes their surface level meaning seriously. It sounds like that's what the OP was doing here (as the listener).
Yeah they could have. I'm talking about responding to what they actually said though. If the manager was here I might also have some advice for them too, and it wouldn't involve telling them they're right and the other guy is wrong because he just doesn't understand you.
He was responding to what the manager actually said; your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit. But in any case, the author's response revealed what he understood the ask to be, allowing the manager to redirect. So if the interpretation is bad, the error is correctable.
In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
> He was responding to what the manager actually said;
And that's what I was responding to. I'm not going to respond to the manager because he's not reading this.
> your advice was that he should have replied to one "correct" interpretation that was not explicit.
No that was not my advice. I gave an example of a response which acknowledges the question, provides an answer "no", and gives the opportunity for the manager to come back with something if they really did have some valid case it might help. All in fewer words flailing about with a bunch of questions that still didn't answer the original.
My example remains valid even if the interpretation of the question and whether it matched the manager's intention was wrong, it still works.
The correctness I'm talking about is not in the answer to the technical question, it is how to go about having a polite interaction with others, which is what the author's stated goal was and what they got wrong.
> In contrast, the manager just seems to be flailing around, unable to clarify. That is not correctable.
I don't know what you mean by "not correctable". Correcting the behavior corrects it.
> Only one of these people was ruining the interaction and thus needed advice.
No, both do, and the manager isn't here, hence my comment.
Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do. I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.
> Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do.
You are wrong about that though. In the way you are asking, anyway.
> I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
It wasn't making up an answer or presupposing his intention. He asked whether you should switch, giving an answer that's essentially "no" but colored with a possible reason for switching is not making anything up.
How do I even know we should switch or not though? A good reason could be "we are moving the office to the UK, and we were only able to find react developers there". That's a pretty good reason to switch, if not an easy one.
I do think this is a strategy to try, although I'm pretty sure it's really not about the words, but about body language, timing, whatever... But it is really puzzling to me that you shouldn't ask questions because people will think you are asserting something, while making random assertions in order to probe for answers is the accepted way. I know it's probably how it works, but it will never really make sense to me, and I wish these games were just a little bit easier to play if people did see things from the other side more often, instead of throwing words like "asshole" around (as you can see in comments around here).
You can give him some information along with your questions, just like any social interaction. "It could help with performance if we are having issues there, but I personally hate the React ecosystem. Why do you ask?" That way you're both getting information as you go, rather than you making him wait until you've fully understood the question to get any response. That makes the conversation way more efficient too - if his underlying thought was "you seem bored, maybe this would be fun for you", then you've answered it completely already.
If efficiency was what he was after, he could have just said, "hey you look bored, would you feel more engaged if you were working on a migration to react?" Failing that, he could have clarified what he was going for after noticing the author missed it. Either way, it seems like the communication failures are more on the manager, for not having the awareness to appropriately direct the conversation and understand his needs, rather than the author, for failing to appropriate guess what the manager was obscuring.
This remains true even if allistics are generally better at such guessing.
If he's happy with the results of his efforts, then he doesn't need to take any advice. If he's not, then perhaps he will be interested in suggestions that he can implement, rather than "make your manager better".
I don't know if I go so far as to say objectively wrong but definitely felt off. And other approaches would probably have been better.
If it is a question: "Should we do X?" They are asking for an opinion about if it should be done or at least some sort of conversation. Not asking for you to make a decision. Just state an opinion based on what you know and follow up. "I doubt it, it would be a large investment of resources that may not lead to noticeable improvements. Why?"
Is it rude to ask why someone is asking though? Understanding context can be good. It might be fine to ask something like "Why do you ask?" to get it started, before answering. Then, if relevant, follow up with those in depth questions. But just jumping into technical details feels like they are meant to shut the initiator down.
If they come to you and say: "I think we should do X." Then those questions make more sense. "Why?" is still probably enough though. Let them elaborate on their thought process. And if it really is just they say something about it in a blog. You can explain the trade offs and guide them with your knowledge.
>People can be wrong about factual things, which can be verified. Otherwise it’s a difference of opinions.
What doesn't come across in your article is that you can be wrong about factual things. It is unclear or unmentioned that you actually can be wrong sometimes.
These communication patterns make sense with what I know about people. I don't doubt that they happen relatively frequently, and can result in a situation where it seems like you can't accept the wrong answer. But I would ask you to re-read the piece and find a single part where you admit that you can be wrong. I can only find one, and it's in the first paragraph. It also barely qualifies as admitting you can be wrong.
None of this is to detract from the content of the piece. I just wish that it had been framed differently so that people could appreciate the insight without it coming across as egotistical.
Author here, thanks for the feedback. This article is indeed edited down heavily. I had more conversational drafts.
Your remark is something I have been thinking about. For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts. In fact, “truth” is one of my core values, and the only way I can honor that (and be a good engineer) is to question my every statement. That’s why I write unit tests, run experiments, read so many books, etc…
When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
These articles are in themselves a series of experiments to see how I can convey these thoughts.
>When I know something is true, I tend to only state it once, because why would I need to repeat it. I am starting to realize this doesn’t work out that well :)
The point I'm making is that you didn't state this once. You kind of stated it in the first paragraph, but not in a way that implies that you can be wrong for reasons that aren't miscommunications.
>For me, it’s patently evident that I’m wrong about 90% of the time when discussing facts.
I think that's the part that wasn't clear from the article. When you title an article "Autistic people can't acknowledge when they're wrong," then spend an article talking about how this is due to misunderstandings, it comes across like the exact rationalizations that your article strikes back against.
So you want them to prepend every paragraph with "I know I'm wrong sometimes"? What does that achieve? The article is nice, concise, and gets the point across beautifully. Everybody's wrong sometimes, but some people are genuinely very rarely wrong in their area of expertise, and I'm willing to believe this guy is one of them. I'm glad he doesn't give in to the petty workplace politics, and I wish more people would.
The frustrating part was that this was framed as "any time I'm wrong, it's simply a miscommunication." The author barely acknowledges that they can be wrong in the first paragraph, and it's phrased in a way that makes it seem like a legal disclaimer. It's not phrased in a way that implies the author ever believes that they're wrong. Because of this, the entire article is colored by the attitude that any time an autistic person is wrong, it's miscommunication.
I don't need it repeated over and over. That's overkill, not concise, and adds nothing of value to the conversation. Based on the comments I've seen in this thread, it seems clear that this point never made it across, or barely made it across.
This is unfortunate because the actual content of the piece is great. It highlights the ways that people with autism and people without autism can miscommunicate.
If anything, the reactions to this article highlight how embarrassingly bad the average person is at interpreting communicating that is written in an (arguably) slightly unusual way. I feel bad for the author for having to withstand this barrage of hopelessly nitpicky readers. I dearly hope this doesn't discourage them, because it definitely would discourage me.
Or maybe the specific scenario presented in the article triggers some sort of a "it's not me, it's them autists!" reflex in people who visualized themselves on the other side of these interactions; I honestly don't know any more. I'm not (diagnosed to be) autistic, but fucking hell, I'm having a ridiculously hard time empathizing with these reactions, so maybe I should get that checked out...
You are telling me I shouldn't miscommunicate in an article where I try to explain what it feels like when you have a disability that leads people to think you miscommunicate. I understand that I probably should have somehow expanded on the "I am wrong daily" part, but to me, I wrote a clear sentence: "I am wrong daily, it's absolutely no big deal, in fact, I enjoy it and seek it out."
This is the problem I am trying to highlight. I think I state something as clearly as I can, then people think I am lying, or wrong, or deceiving, or arrogant, or not clear enough, or overexplaining, or not explaining enough, and frame the rest of the article in that light. If i say "I am not trying to be arrogant", people will take that as even more evidence, so I don't even try. This is literally what I try to explain in this article.
So many people in this comment section apparently being blessed with the infinite power of nuance, mind theory, social grace, empathy and linguistic intuition could maybe try to be charitable in light of this.
Thanks for reading. That is a very good point I have taken away from publishing this. I stated in the first sentence that I have no problem being wrong, in fact, I want to be wrong because it means I can do an even better job and learn new stuff.
If anything, the ratio of “you can’t acknowledge you’re wrong” to “oh i’m wrong” situations is about 1:1000. In future articles, I will spread and repeat things out a bit more, instead of editing an article like I would a strategy document.
I've never been diagnosed with autism, but I'm certain I'm on the spectrum.
I hate repeating myself. But I had to learn to write in such a way to do so because if I don't I end up with 4 sentences when a person further off the spectrum will write an entire page on the subject... or maybe that's my subjective opinion.
You can make all the personal inferences you want but I don't agree; I repeat myself because if I don't I received lower grades and downvotes.
I didn't ask for any of that. I'm explaining why the article came off badly to me. I'm assuming that was not the author's intention. I provided this feedback in my comment so that they may reflect on why this is so.
There's nothing else in my comment. You are reading too much into my comment.
This was my take too. The break-down in communication might not be WHAT is being said but HOW it's being said. This is certainly my experience of being a dev and a manager, sometimes people just seem a bit rude and it's hard to get past.
Is the rudeness excusable? I guess. Especially if I understand where it's coming from. Otherwise it's just rudeness.
And I guess that the point of the article, but you need to get to know people before you can make the judgement of why someone is how they are. That takes time.
This reminds me of a time, many years ago now, another engineer and myself ended up in a debate with one of the executives. We seemed to be in a very strong disagreement with them. After well over an hour of getting nowhere we ended up going back and essentially starting over breaking everything down into little pieces and ensuring our definitions of everything lined up. Turns out we agreed the whole time, but how each side was saying it made us think we did not. I believe it provided me a valuable lesson in this but it was so frustrating at the time and that certainly didn't help the cause. Sometimes I have to remember back to it and to take that step back take a breath and reframe things. How things are being said can really affect the conversation.
Yes, it’s a hard skill to learn, and … it’s why I ask so many questions / make sure we have the same context.
Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
I realize I was too quick to edit this down into a single sentence in the first paragraph, but my standard MO is to go “oh you’re right” if someone points out an error in my thinking. And if I can’t realize I’m wrong, but I also can’t explain why in precise terms, I make a note and go study the heck out of the topic in the next few days.
Interestingly, as I’ve grown more experienced, it has become much easier to realize that I don’t know jack about anything really, and that it is so easy to go out and look for answers with the resources we have nowadays.
That could be your ego talking? Always re-interpreting reality to put yourself on a pedestal? It is a bit silly talking in circles with people that have theory of mind deficits. You just have to avoid the "correctness conversation" and try to point them in the right direction, but it's honestly like pulling teeth.
An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]
The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.
An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.
Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!
Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.
Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.
The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.
[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.
[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.
It is arrogance though. For example, let's say you're smarter than someone who has authority over you, i.e. their social status is higher than yours. In that case it wouldn't be smart to make that person feel inferior. Since if you were truly smart you'd think of a way to be right in a way that makes people like you.
I mean I’m autistic and on intelligence testing I’m all over the map. How smart I am depends on what you’re talking about. Just because I’m both more able and more trained to understand something than some senior manager, and I’m bad at the politics, doesn’t secretly unveil I’m not TRULY smart. In fact if we go back to OPs actual point, it was over people taking offence to his great confidence in specific subdomains of technology, something I have seen autistic people understand to a level of genius more than once.
Medians, averages, and the peak of a probability distribution are all distinct in the general case.
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
> but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence
I assure you this does not seem to be the case.
There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.
(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).
Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.
>> You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
But to conclude from this that most are below average, wouldn't you have to know that the high IQs pull the average up more than the low IQs pull it down? I don't see how the mere assumption that there's no upper limit gets you there (not to mention that this assumption is bound to be wrong anyway). But as you say, maybe there's a reason I'm in the big half...
The analogy to power-law distributed wealth where some people clearly tangibly do have a billion times more than other people feels stretchy. To the extent that standardised IQ tests adequately quantify intelligence, Marilyn vos Savant might have busted out of the constructed Gaussian distribution by registering 2.28x the average score, but she's comfortably outnumbered by people lacking the ability to register a score in cognitive ability tests. And if anything, the score range probably inflates the differences in overall capability given the respective quantifiable intellectual achievements of people on the upper side of the bell curve seem to be more about specialism and motivation than dozens of point differences in test scores...
That's the median. The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
> The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.
I wouldn't say that. Most population statistics--think "average" wages and the like--tend to use median. And when we're talking about intelligence, this isn't something that is readily quantifiable with a number. IQ is explicitly normalized so that 100 is median, and 110 is one standard deviation above median. "mean IQ" isn't a meaningful concept. Given that we can't even measure "mean intelligence", average intelligence tends to mean median intelligence in practice.
I think you might be confusing autistism with high intelligence. The two are very different. I'm not sure it's even remotely comparable. Most autistic truly autistic people have a severe deficit to the point they have a problem with basic navigation of the world. Not just inconvencies. There's a tendency to turn every difficulty into a syndrome.
While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.
There isn’t anything “most” autistic people have. The disorder is defined by having at least three of twelve major symptoms so it’s possible for two people with autism to not even overlap in their symptoms. There is also a huge range of severity and many people with the disorder are high-functioning. High-functioning autism is significantly correlated with high IQs. This dismissal amounts to “this can’t be hard for you, you’re just choosing not to practice” which is a rather offensive way to deal with someone’s disability.
That's kind of my point. The traits that characterize the disorder are so varied, it's hard to believe its just one disorder. I think most people can identify with many of the symptons. I know I can, even though I'm not autistic. Personally, I think the economy seems to encourage that kind of productivity in many ways, so it shouldn't be such a mystery as to why some who are hyperfocused on succeeding should be identifying with it.
I dont think I was being dismissive of anyone, but is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles? I don't think so.
>is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles?
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
I think you should probably do some more reading into Autism Spectrum Disorder. Your comment echos cliched and harmful ideas of what Autism is.
The reason "Spectrum" is in the name is because there is a wide range of ways it can manifest - from very severe on one end to less impactful (and in some ways beneficial depending on context) on the other. People who used to be referred to as having Asperger Syndrome for example are normally highly intelligent and capable individuals, many of whom you'd have no idea had Autism if you met them.
Please do not continue to spread this kind of thinking - it is very antiquated. I also don't know why you would doubt someone is Autistic based on a single blog post.
the idea of a spectrum is still relatively new. Medicine goes through these fads all the time. There's also a natural tendency to define syndromes broader than they actually are. It still seems a very loose definition of the term, as they still, as far as I know, have yet to identify the underlying biological mechanism.
This is not to diminish anyone's suffering. There's also a danger of taking false refuge in a syndrome that can be equally demoralizing and even paralyzing. No one should be defined by their diseases or medical conditions.
There was a time when the term Asperger's existed to distinguish this particular sort of autistic person from other forms of autism, which as you allude to, can involve severe mental disability and require a lifetime of care by others.
Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.
Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.
If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.
Yeah it is either a fantastic bit of art or hilarious lack of awareness of the irony. The guy actually reminds me of a coworker that I like a lot who is on the spectrum. Once in a meeting a manager was describing why we needed to do some task. Autistic coworker: “oh so we need to do it for political reasons”. and manager starts to freak out and backpedal trying to say its more than just political reasons. Autistic coworker, calmly: “oh no its ok, political reasons is fine!”
I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it.
Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.