The other side of this is that some of us do end up trying to fit in, hiding it but not well enough... Just come off as assholes or socially inept and hurting peoples feelings a lot more than if you were obviously on the spectrum,
Of course, there are very sensitive people, and you can't please everyone, but in my experience people will try to be accommodating if you tell them your situation.
On the other hand, society should try to be more tolerant and understanding of people who find doing so significantly more challenging than the average person does.
I worry that this conversation seems to be focusing on the first point and not paying as much attention to the second.
Was Felleisen's behaviour a "deliberate misuse of power... that intends to cause physical, social and/or psychological harm"? I don't know this guy personally and all I've read is some stories about him on these blog posts, but I'm not sure if he was deliberately intending to hurt other people, or merely doing so inadvertently out of social incompetence, deficits in cognitive empathy, emotional dysregulation, theory of mind deficits, difficulties in perspective-taking, etc? Individuals with neurodevelopmental and other psychiatric disorders can sometimes exhibit all of those inadvertent sources of interpersonal harm. (I'm not saying Felleisen has any such disorder – maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, I have no idea, so I must assume he might.)
[0] https://www.ncab.org.au/bullying-advice/bullying-for-parents...
Ultimately even if you actually could not act any differently because of a disorder, others would still not be required to tolerate you. This is a consequence of being social animals, we set expectations for behavior and we enforce them. If you can’t play the game, you can’t exactly expect people who can to stop playing for your sake.
If a person bullies because they have some kind of social ineptitude that makes them not realize they were bullying. That person is still a bully. However, its important to recognize if this was the case because the alternative is that he knew better and did it anyways because he knew he could get away with it.
Why are intentions irrelevant? If someone is hurting me (or others), I do consider the question of whether they are doing so intentionally or inadvertently to be highly relevant to my judgement of their behaviour and how I am going to respond to it.
I agree completely. It took me a while to find a place where people didn't just treat me like I'm weird. Kindness, patience, and forgiveness are important things for everyone to work on.
Its possible that if he has social issues like some of us do that he didn't realize how bad his behavior was because everyone was afraid to tell him. But now that he knows I hope going forward he tries to get his anger under control a little more.
Kindness and understanding works both ways. We should also expect people that are naturally good at stuff like empathy and social skills to be patient and forgiving if they see that we try and fail.
Its a realistic and common possibility in this industry and there's nothing wrong with mentioning it. My parent comment that yours falls under specifically mentions that even if he does have such issues, its no excuse to spend the rest of his life being toxic to people.
I think its probably more likely that he knew what he was doing and did it because he could get away with it as the leader of that project. However, I can't entirely dismiss the possibility that he has social issues because as I mentioned its a common problem.