Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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> I wonder if Dan meant it that way?

I did not intend the comment to bully, it was an honest attempt to see if there's a disagreement beyond some specific wording.

I did mean it to specify that it's obvious to me that the author is not trying to speak for all autistic people, and that words like "ambassador" and language like "we"/"us" are being read in a very narrow way that doesn't line up with the the overall piece.

I do understand the author being defensive after multiple people have called them paternalistic and claimed that they are actually trying to be prescriptive or to group autistic communities together into a single voice. I also understand people being upset about seeing that viewpoint in the article, because it would be an upsetting viewpoint if the author actually held it. But... as far as I can tell, they don't.

I think it would be profitable to clarify what the actual issue is. Is the issue that the author is advocating for a harmful idea? Is the issue a specific kind of wording that rubs people the wrong way or that is ambiguous? Is the claim that the author is lying and that they do mean to paint everyone with same brush? Is that they're too rude and that they're unfamiliar with HN guidelines when they respond to people who say that they're trying to be paternalistic? What are people actually arguing about here?

There is a lot of fighting going on and there are a lot of rising tensions about an idea that the author doesn't hold. I don't know what people will hear or internalize if I use the phrase "call out", but I am doing whatever the respectful equivalent is of calling out that the author very clearly to me is not trying to force everyone into the same box or claim to speak for everyone. Past that, conversations about phrasing are fine, but at the point where you have the author themself on this page telling people that they don't speak for everyone who is autistic, why are we still arguing about whether they think they do? Can we move past that to whatever the grievance actually is?

Well for one thing, I didn’t see you use the phrase ‘call out’. That was the author.

I thought your comment was quite reasonable, but as soon as they jumped in to characterize it as a ‘call out’, it became something else. If they want to be defensive in a response to me, I can respond to that. If a group of people get together to ‘call something out’, that’s very different. We can move past it, but we can’t ignore the behavior, which is not typical for HN.

As for the use of the phrase “Ambassador of that culture”, I do still have strong objections to it. It comes way earlier in the document than the later qualification, and I am not of the view that the equivocation renders it moot.

The entire piece is about taking care with how one communicates about autism, and who gets to represent it. It’s not surprising that the way it does so is under scrutiny.

The word ambassador isn’t the only word in that phrase. The word ‘culture’ is also there. There is certainly an implication of two cultures in play.

The later part talks about a diversity of autistic voices of which the author is only one, but that doesn’t eliminate the ‘two cultures’ idea that has already been introduced.

The two cultures idea is definitely not universally held by autistic people. I suspect that this is at the root of a lot of the reactions.

"a call-out" is a very distinct entity from "being called out". Nobody was calling you out; rather, Dan made a particular point that the author appreciated being raised.

> a call-out" is a very distinct entity from "being called out".

Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends on the context. This is atypical behavior for HN.

> Nobody was calling you out; rather, Dan made a particular point that the author appreciated being raised.

You don’t actually know this. It’s one viewpoint on what was happening.

> You don’t actually know this.

Then we can be overly confident together, without acrimony, in our readings of somebody else's words.

Can we? Why did you feel the need to correct me on what was happening? Does it make the discussion more substantive?

It's painful to see such frustration between people who are all trying to make themselves understood. I hoped you would be relieved with the possibility that you weren't being personally attacked. I don't really care whether you're correct or not; I care that you are heard.

Ok - I appreciate that motivation and believe you. The impact however was the opposite, since it just seemed like an attempt to contradict my perceptions. I also felt less heard since most of my comment wasn’t even about the ‘call out’ part, and for me that was over once Dan clarified his intentions.

Note that Dan acknowledged that the author might be being defensive.

> I also feel less heard since most of my comment wasn’t even about the ‘call out’ part

I totally get that. Not to belabor the point, but I think the original author probably feels much the same about some of the other criticisms being shared on HN.

It's hard to engage with a whole work when there are particular highlights that hit you the wrong way. I'd like to hope that a shared understanding of what "call out" might mean will help everybody move past it to appreciate the rest of what you're trying to share.

> The impact however was the opposite, since it just seemed like an attempt to contradict my perceptions.

I'll take that on board; I'm still on my own personal journey of relating to people effectively.

Re: call out. I think part of the issue is that chiming in to voice support for someone who is arguing on your behalf without adding any content automatically creates a ‘ganging up’ situation, so even if they hadn’t used the phrase “call out”, it would still have been an issue.

Re: engaging with the whole work. The piece as a whole doesn’t contain anything I haven’t seen before in autistic advocacy. I agree with a bunch of it, although it’s hard to get a lot of people to understand the double empathy problem.

So, the parts that are going to be critiqued are the parts that have conceptual issues - e.g. the two cultures problem idea, which is not universally shared amongst autistic people.

For what it's worth, I meant "thank you for pointing out the arguments that I would have otherwise had to do the work of pointing out."

The phrase "call out" isn't a universal dog whistle for bogey men to come drag you to the gulag for wrongthink. Your reaction to it has been exhausting.

> The phrase "call out" isn't a universal dog whistle for bogey men to come drag you to the gulag for wrongthink. Your reaction to it has been exhausting.

Once again you are completely out of line with the site guidelines. There is a reason your comments are getting flagged. Please take a look at them. This isn’t twitter. HN has its own culture which you seem not to understand.

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