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Comment by callesgg | Hacker News Reader

That is commonly what people with high functioning autism says in response to that hypothesis. My assumption is that when you develop good enough of a theory of mind later in life. You are in a situation where you can see how bad you where before and how much better you became after. So you think you are now good at it.

It’s like a dunning Kruger effect.

It is also important to note that good does not necessarily mean correct or accurate (even if that certainly can be a part of it)it means useful for guiding proper behavior.

With that said, the hypothesis is not that bad mentalization abilities is equal to autism. It is that bad mentalization causes you to adopt/learn unconscious behavioral patterns and those patterns are what we classify as autism. This means that even when you “fix” the bad mentalization ability. The person still has all of those behavioral patterns ingrained in them.

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Ok lol I'm not sure how "autistic people always say that tho" is a useful counter to my description of my experiences. You can't really get an insight into other people's mind, so it's impossible for either of us to say how our theory of mind stacks up against anyone else's.

Mine is generally useful for acting with care and grace towards other people, which is how I want to act as much as possible. I don't know if that's Proper Behavior, a term I feel like you should be willing to define if you're going to use.

And mostly unrelated but I explicitly reject the label of high functioning for myself, and the model that groups autistic people into high and low functioning. I can't exist in the contemporary world and meet my obligations without my supports. Autism is fully disabling for me without accommodations that I am by no means guaranteed. In this I have more in common with your "low functioning" autists than I do with most people in this forum, and I don't accept this language that distances me from them.

> You can't really get an insight into other people's mind, so it's impossible for either of us to say how our theory of mind stacks up against anyone else's.

The idea of finding a way to test our various theories of mind is both amusing and fascinating. There should be a way to do scientific tests. :D

It was not a counter argument, we are not having an argument. It was just an observation. Also you are mis quoting me I did not say “always”.

I am not here to tell you who you are or how you are like. I am here explaining a hypothesis.

Labels are what they are. Some are useful some are not, some are emotionally coupled some are not.

If you look at what a person does you can make hypothesis's about what is in their mind. It is what the field of psychology is all about.

Proper behavior, like not being mean, answering people when they talk to you, not bashing your head in to walls when you are upset and so on.

You fell awfully quickly into deriding autistic people with a negative stereotype for someone who's not here to argue.

Not my intent, there was a question about what does and what does not constitute proper behavior.

I gave a description that clarified that to a certain extent. The description is just a description, an answer to a question.

Your answer really wasn't that neutral, unfortunately. For example both autistic and non-autistic people are capable of meanness, it doesn't really indicate anything either way. In fact neurotypical society is tolerant of cruelty to a degree that causes me an incredible amount of pain and distress.

And what are we even to infer from "and so on." Basically that "proper behavior" is what non-autistic people do, and that when we deviate from that it is inherently disruptive and improper. Which, we know that, a big part of our lives are spent managing the consequences imposed on us for not acting in the ways other people expect or demand.

It didn't clarify much for me except your ignorance or lack of depth of introspection on this subject, which is why I didn't engage with it further. But this "oh shucks I was just answering the question" response is also bad so here we are. I can't read your intent but I certainly received that response as a dismissive stereotype. If you didn't want it read that way you should rephrase it next time this comes up.

"and so on" was meant too mean "and other stereotypical autistic behaviours".

It seams a key difference between us here is that you think stereotypes are dismissive. I just think of them as things that are more common statistically on average in the group of people vs in some other group of other people.

Well, i do hope you back that assumption with some actual statistics, otherwise you're just using what is "common sense" or your experience with "x people" as a proxy for data.

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