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> People with Asperger's or otherwise on the autism spectrum can be huge "assholes" by the definitions here. Does autism make you unemployable?

Those "smart assholes" with Asperger I know can be very nice people if being nice is rewarded. But it requires a conscious effort on their side (and fair feedback from those around them). If being an asshole is tolerated, they take the easy route of not caring.

> It is good to be pushed out of your comfort zone in both needing to develop thicker skin AND showing empathy to others' sensibilities but within bounds.

Maybe. But in my experience, most of the "victims" usually don't speak up. It is those with an already much thicker skin, the ones that don't shy away from a confrontation, who bring up the topic.

EDIT: I overall object to the label of "asshole". Insulting people with toxic behavior is toxic in itself.

wrt your edit - we can all be assholes, not-so-benevolent dictators of this and that. recognizing it as such is not toxic.

Oh and the other thing I didn't see anyone address is teaching "victims" the right Ju-Jitsu for dealing with (intentional) assholes / bullying - the mindset of don't let anyone make you a victim.

I had the "good fortune" of having an internship years ago with a tyrant. This person loved publicly shaming the interns, among a whole bunch of other toxic behaviour, continual needling etc. etc. Their life was a mess, marriage falling apart and alcoholic but beating up the interns was this person's way of boosting their ego up again. They were also a master of ducking and deflecting any possible blame.

Being on the receiving end of this for a year, I was so upset and frustrated that I vowed never to let it happen to me again.

After trying various strategies I found the most effective solution is very simple: get a group of people laugh at the asshole, ideally as a direct response to bullying from them in a group setting. Typically you only need to pull that off once and they will leave you alone from that point on - most bullys are cowards in the face of real resistance. Actually you don't even need to be funny - you just need to do something that can't missed by the group or the bully and creates awkwardness, e.g. a loud, slow clap in response to their comment then if they quiz you on it, you just say "Just giving you a round of applause"

I could write a lot more on this, and much of it would be easy to misinterpret in today's PC culture so I won't but, in essence: don't fall into a victim mindset - stand up for yourself.

In 2010, Dieter Zapf and Claudia Gross took 149 victims of self-described bullying at work and taught them various conflict resolution techniques and studied the results. The effect? Victims tried various strategies and even altered their strategies several times before realizing nothing worked. Many resorted to frequently skipping work, but even more resorted to fighting back with the same kind of behaviors. Eventually, most victims left the company.

-- from the second section of the article.

Not refuting this but I just remembered something that inspired me way back when I was an intern - the book of five rings - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings

I guess the essence of what I got from it, was if someone is attacking you, you want to observe how they’re doing it and what you think is driving them to do it. The idea I got from the Book of Five Rings is that for any type of attack there is a response that can stop the attack in a single strike. That response varies depending on the attack. But that’s how I came to group laughter being the “strike” that will usually stop the intentional asshole / office bully type.

And yes that may sound like childish, school playground stuff but often the reason someone behaves badly in an office hs it’s roots in their childhood

    > ...the most effective solution is very simple...

No, definitely not simple.

These people have intrinsic deep-seated personality defects.

Sure, personality changes do occur in life but they take A LONG TIME, and barring trauma, aren't precipitated by any single event, especially something as as simple as people creating humiliation in a workplace. In other words, you can't "change" an assh*le or force them to curb their personality to the point where it's not noticeable.

You either grow a thick skin, avoid them, force them out, or what most orgs do, nothing-- just wait for their behavior/value ratio to cross a line that precipitates expulsion from the group.

to be fair he said at least in this case(i could see it working in more cases and is very group psychology but a bit passive agressive)they left him alone not that they were not assholes anymore.

I like this. Recently, I semi-seriously recommended BJJ for a bullying situation. In adolescents, I see BJJ working to help kids calm down and for boys and girls to get along in a time fraught with drama. I followed my boys into BJJ and think it has something to teach adults too. When you are the victim it will make you less intimidated. When you are the asshole it gives a constructive outlet for aggression which when misdirected is a good definition of bullying. I think there are a .1% of us who are unredeemable assholoes. The rest of us are all potential assholes and we need to watch out for the conditions which make such behavior happen. And BJJ, we all need some BJJ...

I have been doing BJJ for a few years and while it's not the perfect "ego filter" that some people claim, I have found it extremely effective in teaching coping skills. It's almost been too effective, in the sense that workplace behavior (when directed at me) that is 100% unacceptable often doesn't bother me enough to say anything.

In my experience, once you've spent a few hundred hours having physically larger people literally choke you at full intensity and practicing how to stay calm and methodically turn the tables, very little in the workplace impacts your calm.

This is just complete passive aggressiveness... just tell them to piss off (or some variation thereof), no need to do all this weird sarcastic stuff

I found that doesn't always work. Telling certain types of asshole directly telling them to piss off directly results in something like "I have _no idea_ what you're talking about? You're being too sensitive. And I find your rude/aggressive/whatever manner offensive...", all the while grinning slightly. Some even feed on the fact that they got you annoyed enough to confront them. With that comes exploiting the notion of qualifies as acceptable, professional behaviour such as getting emotional in response to bullying or threatening someone with "piss off or else..."

You might need to resort to this kind of childish stuff in grade school, but in the workplace, HR/management needs to step in and take care of it. The professional way to handle it is to directly address the person's behavior once, and then if it continues complain to HR/management in writing.

That's very nice in theory but in many situations ineffective or problematic for the person involving HR, e.g. if the person you're dealing with is your boss, if they're deliberately exploiting the system, if you're working as an external contractor, if HR is incompetent and many more.

Also it places the burden of effort on the target of the abuse vs. addressing the problem at its source, swiftly and quickly.

But anyway what I'm saying is a nuanced argument and comment threads are bad places for that. You already judged it "childish stuff" and I'm sure others think the same so I'll leave it there.

> People with Asperger's or otherwise on the autism spectrum can be huge "assholes" by the definitions here. Does autism make you unemployable?

It's my understanding that on average it's harder to get a job and some kind of jobs look out of reach.

Also, is the population ratio of Asperger/autism such that the definition of asshole should be reworded ?

The autism spectrum is wide and diagnosis isn't an exact science. ~1-3% or 1:30 to 1:100 rates are at the right scale.

Autism is easy to point at to make one think the response to "assholes" should be thought through more carefully. There are many others, not always as easy.

I see.

Yet, I am not ready to believe every asshole I met were undiagnosed people with autism or Asperger though.

It's way over 1:100 or even 1:30.

Also, I believe assholes have a different set of intentions than people with autism or Asperger but don't quote me on that.

I had a client who told me once he could head butt me without feeling bad about it, his doctor explained to him he was schizophrenic and that was why (yeah, right, I know). He was an asshole.

Also, I header years later he ended up shot in the head and his body was found in the forest.

Even so, one of my older bestie (whose mom was schizophrenic) told me schizophrenic people can be asshole too if they wish and play the game, beyond what could usually comes with the symptoms.

All of this is juste anecdotes though.

> Autism is easy to point at to make one think the response to "assholes" should be thought through more carefully. There are many others, not always as easy.

I believe that whether people are assholes because they are assholes or autism/asp. (and I don't believe every autistic person or asperger is automatically an asshole, quite the contrary) it's up the the other side to find the resilience/methods to deal with it in a respectful way (respect for oneself and the other). Don't put fire on it, whatever the origin.

> Sorting people into bins: assholes and victims, is problematic.

This is true of anything subjective. There are people (intentional assholes in this article) who absolutely _are_ assholes because it gives them pleasure - their ego or otherwise gains something from hurting others. Everyone in a company knows who they without needing to go through a labelling process. Ultimately it's a problem for leaders in a company, those that should be caring about the culture, to remove such people.

Paul Graham described this long ago here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UacbJ72dluU (starts at 4m20s) - a leader in YCombinator he makes the judgement calls.

Excellent reply. I make the joke ot myself "you are always the last to know that you are the asshole". I think there are systemic problems which can cause folks to be 'assholes' against their best attempts to do otherwise. The original article hugely oversimplifies this. (Not a big fan of the Aspbergers exclusion, though - I see this used a lot)

"Hello, my name is Cole and I can be an asshole. The definition posted of an asshole casts a very wide net making discussion difficult."

It sounds like you have made a decision to not examine the cases where you have been an asshole and make serious efforts to improve. And a smart organization might decide to get rid of someone like you.

> Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable.

This undermines the very concept of "law and order". There "must" be restrictions on behaviour if it is intrusive, offensive, inflamatory, indecent etc. I think it is okay to have an enforced "code of conduct" to prevent assholery.

I mostly like law and order, but:

1) Laws are supposed to be precise. If there was a law against "stirring shit and troublemaking" as the OP suggests, it would be applied mostly against those who are out of favor.

2) Laws presume that the accused person is innocent and give them a say in defense. Good luck with that if you're accused of a code of conduct violation.

Slight quibble. Laws can be broad and imprecise and some might argue, trivial.

e.g.

> To prove a breach of the peace, the most important things to prove are that someone was alarmed, annoyed or disturbed by the incident.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_the_peace

[edit]

These are probably bad laws, but are common enough.

Law and order is not equivalent to government enforced conformity.

I generally find law and order assholes the most disruptive of assholes.

Here we are getting work done and this asshole starts making a federal case out of someone wearing shorts on a Thursday?

Psychopath are by definition assholes. They account for 1%-3% of the population. Narcissists are another category of assholes that account for 1% of the population.

There is no ambiguity these people create toxic workplace.

There is no ambiguity in a harrasment situation.

This is why i really dislike the diversity-crowd (straw-man here...). The only result were some laws obligating people to explicitly name the minorities of the month. The only proponent of this is the HR department. Nah, not really, but they have to.

The diversity crowds achievement was to give corporations more power. If I were belong to a minority, I wouldn't dislike the diversity crowd, I would hate them with unrequited passion.

There is a difference between equality and equity. There is also a conflict between equity and freedom. But these are discussion that will never again surface in the next 10 years, because of the diversity crowd.

The straw-man I describe are giant assholes in my opinion. And I wouldn't want to have anything to do with them. Because they are also toxic.

edit: Further more, I think people defining an allegedly large and epidemic group of people as untenable, are probably assholes. Unbelievable...

It's easy to "imagine" what you would do if you were a minority. Especially when you haven't lived it.

Your asking for diversity of behavior, but you seem to expect everyone to respond like they had your experiences and background.

> It's easy to "imagine" what you would do if you were a minority. Especially when you haven't lived it.

A better way to run the argument would be to address the substance of raxxorrax's argument here, for example by pointing out any specific problem with the way he imagines what minorities feel. Instead, you doubted his ability to imagine it, despite you don't know him at all.

This is just an ad hominem attack.

From Wikipedia: "Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument"

I pointed out that he is complaining about the "diversity crowd" and at the time asking for us to embrace his diversity. I'm not sure how that's Ad Hominum? Furthermore, the parent comment states, "If I were belong to a minority", which implies he is not a minority. (leaving aside and grammatical issues)

I also wasn't sure about the exact meaning of ad hominem. But I found this definition (which is a bit more detailed than Wikipedia's) on Rational Wiki [1], and it seems to match our situation:

> Premise 1: Person A makes claim X

> Premise 2: There is something objectionable about person A

> Conclusion: Therefore, claim X is false

raxxorrax made a claim on what he would feel if he was a minority (probably implying that this is how some of the minorities might feel right now, I'm not sure if this was part of his point). My understanding is that you objected to his claim by saying that he can't imagine what minorities think because he isn't a minority.

[1]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_hominem

---

A couple of times I had similar arguments with my friends, when I said something about how I think minorities should think or act, and my friend would say that I can't understand minorities, because I'm not one. My friends had a reason to think I'm not a minority, because I'm a white male living in a country where my ethnicity is prevalent (> 80% of the population).

The thing they didn't know is that I grew up in a different place, where my ethnicity was a minority, and I went to a high school where > 90% percent of kids were of different ethnicity and religion. And this all happened in a provincial town in Central Asia, where people don't care much about diversity and tolerance, especially if they are your teenager classmates in a boys-only high school. So I think in some points of my life I did experience certain stress and discomfort because of being a minority, although right now I don't feel myself being a victim or anything of that sort.

This is why I got triggered by your first comment, and made that remark about ad hominem. Because of its resemblance to a situation I was in a few times. And actually, for me it isn't such a big deal to start a new argument about whether it's an instance of ad hominem or not.

Thank you for responding. Many of these threads end up being shouts in the dark.

I truly felt like the "you're not a minority" part of my comment was incidental. My larger point was that in asking people to accept an opinion that is outside the mainstream, or to consider how different your upbringing was, you're asking people to respect a diversity of opinions.

I tried to point out the a big part of the diversity movement is recognizing these diversities, which often come with different genders or different ethnicity.

Maybe I did a poor job of communicating this.

It is for anyone who has been an outsider in a social setting. This article describes methods to identify certain character traits and isolating them. This is pretty clear cut for anyone who actually has relevant experience.