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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

This article is a bit maddening. I find the beginning encouraging....

    I’ve written before about how autistic people often 
    struggle to know how to act around authority figures. 
    Actually, that’s not true– we don’t seem to *care* how 
    we act around authority.

I like the distinction between unknowing and uncaring. I like the level of personal responsibility that this suggests and I wish the rest of the article continued in this vein.

    It makes us *really weird* to neurotypical people, 
    who seem to accept authority happily.

This is not correct at all in my experience. I don't think anybody loves submitting to authority just for the fun of it.

Certainly there is a lot of personal calculus that goes into whether or not we accept a given authority. Cost vs. benefit. Whether we see a reason to respect the authority. Whether we see value in it. Social pressure. Of course this calculus will be different from person to person and from situation to situation, and of course neurotypicals and folks on the spectrum will tend to have a different view.

But, "seem to accept authority happily?" Yeesh. It seems to imply an absence of thought rather than different criteria weights.

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I think that "seem to accept authority happily" is exactly how it looks to a neuroatypical person. With emphasis on "SEEM".

Autism and ADHD both bring a lack of executive control. A lack of executive control limits our ability to comply with demands, including the demands of authority. The demands of authority generally include following the dictates of authority, while convincing authority that you're happy to do so.

People with poor executive control can only act this way out of desire. We have to really, really want to. And so a neurotypical person's ability to do what they should (regardless of how they feel) looks to us like something you're doing because you want to. No matter what the truth might be.

Yes, your internal experience may be entirely different. But, particularly with autism, neuroatypical people are often not very good at judging internal experience from external appearance. And so we may be fooled by the appearance.

> Autism and ADHD both bring a lack of executive control

It’s not this but what I’ve heard labeled as ‘integrity as an obstacle’^. Many neurodivergent people (myself included) are governed less by social norms and more by authenticity. Conforming is counter to their very beings, and grotesquely undesirable

^ I’d call it a strength, but it’s a matter of perspective

I’ve had the experience of being a neurotypical partnered to someone with (well concealed) asd.

That experience has left me instinctively wincing at the notions of integrity and authenticity. I now associate them with interpersonal and legal conflicts, professional upheaval, inappropriate “real talk”, putting out one fire after another. And every fire is accompanied by, “yes you were in the right, but tact, but choose your battles, but can we really afford the consequences?” I was always the one who was unprincipled, and exhausted.

Yeah. I sometimes feel like those with ASD seemingly feel that they shouldn’t have to give a crap about others at all, since empathy is hard for them.

It’s at least as toxic and harmful as neurotypicals expecting those on the ASD to magically “get it” and confirm to neurotypical expectations.

As a parent of two now adult special-needs kids: Most neurotypical people don't really care either and are frequently extremely abusive as a group to anyone different, a la Mean Girls.

The best thing I did to prevent my kids from turning into awful people was pulled them out of school so they could not be roundly abused by dozens of people daily and blamed for it because of "being weird."

Superficial empathy and actually being good and kind are not the same thing and plenty of people who can perform superficial empathy are horrible people who use their social skills abusively.

Empathy isn't hard for autistic people. Understanding allistic people is. As it is hard for you to understand them.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Well, I certainly support the idea of the autistic as differently-abled rather than fundamentally broken, and I think there's just a shortage of empathy in general.

I think marital conflict of this intensity arises in absence of ASD too.

And the usual caution goes when speaking about ASD, the individual differences are great. Even though many ASD find conforming antithetical to their will, there are also many high-maskers who make a sport of conforming. Many unwittingly as a survival instinct. Underneath, they're treading water.

> And every fire is accompanied by, “yes you were in the right, but tact, but choose your battles, but can we really afford the consequences?”

From as much as I've witnessed, this is a feature (and common plaint) of many relationships.

Not sure it's an ADHD(confirmed) thing myself or some mild form of the above(has been suggested to me)

I always found following some instructions hard, not because I disliked it but because I would genuinely misinterpret them, miss a word or get stuck at a point where a part of an instruction could be interpreted multiple ways, this was always awkward because then ruminate on if I should make a decision or ask for clarification.

Biggest one I noticed last year in a temp retail job is when people asked me "have you done X?". I'd hear "are you working on X?" or "will you do x?"

From the outside it didn't look great that I was apparently saying I finished X, when clearly X wasn't done yet or I was clearly in the middle of doing X.

From the outside it just looked like I was blatantly lying, and sometimes it was easier to lean into that. Than try to explain there might issue related to condition some people don't believe is real, and that it wasn't at all in my interest to disclose.

Once I made enough mistakes to know what was expected though I had no trouble.

I wouldn't hazard a guess. But it is absolutely true that ADHD can go along with inattention when people are talking to you, which can cause misunderstandings.

My daughter particularly struggles with that when she reads, and will often have to re-read a passage several times until she can pay enough attention to understand it. (The more boring the passage, the harder she finds it.)

That is probably what is happening . Before I knew what it was , friends , family and myself just called it zoning out. Made for very awkward work meetings when asked what I thought on something.

I wish I could give some useful advice. But all I can really say STAY ON TOP IT. My big issues have been.

What's interesting today is often boring tomorrow.

Lateness.

Anything even slightly bad will keep getting genuinely put off until "tomorrow"

That goes for all aspects of life, bills, car maintenance. It doesn't matter that I have they money sitting there to pay a bill , I'll still sit on it until I'm told it's overdue.

Or in the cars case the gear that's dodgy for year will no longer work.

edit: i'll also mention avoid short form social media video. I think all the anti-tiktok stuff is overblown. But (just my opinion) it's ADHD kryptonyte.

> A lack of executive control limits our ability to comply with demands, including the demands of authority. The demands of authority generally include following the dictates of authority

I'd say this framing is upside down. Lots of people can "demand" lots of things. The only thing that gives the demands of "authorities" any import is their possible consequences - they're only privileged pragmatically. Furthermore I wouldn't say that a brain that grants priority to someone else barking orders has "executive control" - in fact I'd say it lacks executive control, likely due to sustained abuse of being forced to act (comply) first and think later.

I would say what makes "seem to accept authority happily" ring true is not the fact that most people straightforwardly comply. Rather it's that when someone does not comply, most people line up in support of the authority even when the authority is clearly wrong. This points to a dynamic of not merely pragmatically following authorities, but rather seemingly being in support of authorities for authority's sake.

Look, if I have to give up my shit to get where I want I’ll damn well make sure you will too. If there is anything I hate more than following arbitrary rules it’s dealing with people that think they are above them.

I think it’s less “supporting the paradigm” and more “if I am going down we are all going down here”.

My original comment was going to reference the "crab bucket" phenomenon but I toned it down a bit. Whether such support is reasonable or not is highly dependent on the specific rule/topic under discussion, and some of them are certainly not reasonable. And often such times such discussions don't even center around rules per se, but rather whether someone was "respectful" enough to said authority figure on a personal level.

Your reference to "barking orders" shows a major misunderstanding. The demands we face may not be simply barked orders. They may instead be reasonable requests to work on the tasks assigned in the sprint, rather than helping out a random coworker whenever the whim strikes. Or to work on a test during the allotted time so you can get a good grade. Both are demands, and both are problems for a person with poor executive control.

You may well be right that a neurotypical person who simply follows barked orders is doing damage to their executive control. I have no opinion on that. I just know that doing so consistently requires more executive control than I have.

That said, you have a point that I find it outrageous when people fall into ranks behind stupid authority. Particularly when I know that the people doing so should know better. I intellectually know what's going on. But my natural emotional response against it is pretty strong.

I was talking about "hard" authority that one cannot really avoid, because at this point in my life that's what I think of when I hear the word authority. By adulthood it feels "soft" authority relationships are much more opt-in (even if calling them full choices is somewhat fallacious). So I'm not respecting soft authorities simply because they're "authority" but rather because I've personally decided that their direction is reasonable in service of some larger goal.

I didn't mean to say that someone following barked orders is actively damaging their executive control, but rather saying that if the barked orders are directly affecting the prioritization of their executive control, then in a sense that control has already been damaged. Executive control and obedience to authority should really be seen as orthogonal aspects, and I'd say conflating the two is a shortcut preferred by those seeking the easy route of authoritarianism (eg a schoolteacher wondering why a "problem kid" doesn't "behave" when attempting to make them sit still for hours on end)

Those are two clarifications. I feel there is definitely some constructive synthesis here but can't quite wrap my head around it right now.

Ruminating on this today - I think it runs even deeper than what I've said, even for "soft" authority. We're all familiar with the archetype of the person who had overbearing parents giving them strong direction, and then has a harder time in the real world without this direction. That's a case where over-reliance on deferring to authority ends up destroying independent executive function.

It's also a little weird to me to assert a dichotomy between "executive control" and "want to", when the two seem quite tied. Sure, we all use the rhetorical device of saying we have to do something that we "don't want to", but fundamentally we generally do actually want to do those things, but based on larger non-immediate concerns as opposed to immediate enjoyment.

I'm not sure "clearly wrong" is so clear.

Consider a police officer detaining two people who were fighting in public, when one of them was acting in self-defence. This is the kind of thing I imagine when I hear "clearly wrong", but the authority figure is acting on the higher principle of maintaining public order, and may not have the necessary proof to let one person go. It could be more important to prioritise the immediate safety of everyone involved and sort out the details later, even at the cost of detaining the victim for a short time. There's not always time to explain what's going on, and an explanation would be a distraction from calming down the main conflict.

On the software side, consider a presentation given by a co-worker who recently got off bereavement leave, where there's a significant error in one of the slides that makes it seem like the design of the whole component is fatally flawed. Your boss tries to move on from the slide without giving you time to criticise it, because she knows your co-worker is emotionally vulnerable right now and wants to address the flaw in private. Your boss can't necessarily explain this in public because doing so would cause the same problem she's seeking to avoid.

When people talk in the abstract about authority being clearly wrong, I'm never sure whether it's a case like these ones where higher moral principles are at stake.

> It could be more important to prioritise the immediate safety of everyone involved and sort out the details later

I'd say there is a higher principle involved, and per your justification the authority's action is not clearly wrong. I deliberately avoided specific examples due to the inevitable lines of people that will jump in to justify authorities' actions, but surely you can imagine some of what you consider to be clearly unjust by authorities that people will nevertheless defend?

> even at the cost of detaining the victim for a short time.

I'd say this is where things start to go wrong, as people start to defer to unjust authority and just accept its collateral damage, rather than demanding eventual justice. In this situation, the victim has been harmed by the officer and the state, regardless of the officer's actions being the most prudent from their perspective. Justice would be that victim being made whole, rather than externalizing the true cost of policing in a perverse reverse lottery.

Yeah, it's an interesting moral quandary and you run into questions of who, exactly, is responsible for making a victim whole again. I was talking more about the immediate issue of the arrest rather than the follow-up, though.

An impression I have from some autistic former co-workers is that, when faced with a situation where there was a surface-level injustice and a more abstract justification for the injustice, that they would often not see the justification. This was particularly bad if it involved social cues like "that crowd of drunk people looks unpredictable and the police need to stop the fight so nobody else gets involved, so I shouldn't argue with them now", or "Bob looks like he's about to cry and is getting defensive, so we should back off this line of questioning". If you miss the murky social details then you're going to read those examples as clearly unjust.

People can certainly be wrong, and following authorities will actually get you the right answer most of the time. Like I've gone somewhat critical of police in a sibling comment (and very critical elsewhere), and yet I still recognize that the large majority of what police do is prudent, proper, and justified. IMO it's important to hold both of these perspectives in one's head.

So your common imagined autistic case doesn't really speak to my general point - cases where authority is actually wrong and yet people line up behind it anyway with all sorts of justifications. These topics tend to get highly politicized as one tribe lines up behind the injustice and the other lines up behind the authority, but surely regardless of your latent tribe you can see that the phenomenon exists.

There are a lot of situations in which I'd argue in favor of what you're saying.

Breaking up a fight isn't one of them. Not sure how many fights you've seen in real life but they are not professional boxing matches with relatively evenly trained matched opponents. Somebody is usually losing and losing badly. Somebody could be hurt or killed with even a moment's hesitation. Should firefighters have to pay restitution for trampling your garden while preventing your house from burning down? Or paramedics for slicing off your clothing while attempting to save your life?

Do you think that paying restitution for these sorts of situations would have unintended negative consequences such as making emergency situations more expensive or even thwarting them entirely by making them unsustainable?

We should aggressively police our police, and the whole system is kind of broken in general, but I think we should save the restorative and punitive action for situations in which police or emergency services have actually done something wrong.

In the examples you've given, no. But let's say those firefighters got the address wrong, or are responding to a less-than-truthful 911 call made by someone else, then seemingly yes. Or paramedics slice off your clothing because you were sleeping on a park bench and they imagined you might need medical intervention.

I'm talking about the entity running the services being responsible, and not the individual firefighters/paramedics/cops/etc, assuming they are following department policies in good faith and all that. These things are true costs of providing the services, and should be correctly attributed to avoid perverse incentives. Should we allow firefighters to roll up to a gas station, fill up with diesel, and then declare it's just part of responding to an emergency and not pay?

Of course, examples involving firefighters and paramedics are somewhat limited, as their actions are generally helping rather than interpersonal aggression. In the original example, there is the immediate response of breaking up the fight, which I don't take issue with (assuming it's not a staged fight on a movie set). The victim of the attack being arrested/detained while the police sort things out is where the anti-justice starts to happen - from the victim's informed perspective it is clearly wrong. Only from a limited-information perspective is it necessary. The authorities have limited information at the time, and thus choosing that course is reasonable. But that choice still causes harm that is apparent after all the details are known. And post facto it's not reasonable for authorities to shrug off their responsibility for that.

Furthermore the situation is fraught with perverse incentives and properly assigning responsibility is necessary to minimize them. For example, cops casually resenting the victim for some interpersonal reason and keeping them in jail overnight as extra-judicial punishment.

> "seem to accept authority happily?"

I don't know much about autism. I can say though, that while I might appear to "accept authority", that's not really true. In each case, I'm weighing the benefits and drawbacks of that, and choosing what to do.

Often, if I disagree with an authority figure's position on something, there's more efficient ways to get what I want than public disagreement.

I find this to be snake-like behaviour.

Which part? Sometimes the right thing to do is to speak up in public and offer a different opinion, sometimes the right thing is to have a private conversation.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, which part do you feel is snake-like?

Sometimes it’s one of the only ways to deal with difficult people in authority if you don’t want to just blindly accept their authority…

As the saying goes, “don’t hate the players, hate the game”

What do you consider to be the alternative?

Fighting authority is (by definition) an asymmetric battle.

There are "honorable" ways to fight authority. Frontal assault, or just plain old disobedience. Sometimes those are the best ways. Sometimes not.

Consider that forcing people to hear, consider, react and "vote" on something in public might be the "snake like" behavior.

Some topics require quiet reflection. Some topics do better with a secret ballot. Some objections are heard better in private, etc.

Or, sometimes, it's just poker, and revealing your hand too early puts you at a disadvantage to someone else that's also manipulating the circumstances to benefit themselves.

It's all regrettable, but that's the human condition.

Yeah, that might be the best way to come to an agreement with the statement - I feel I’m very much the same. Plenty of non-spectrum people are ‘playing the game’ in a way that I imagine someone on the spectrum may not even realise is happening.

Of course, different people are better or worse at picking up on this, but I find often the people who want to wield arbitrary power are usually worse at picking up subtle manipulation (a pretty strong correlation), and those who aren’t as arbitrary you can be more direct with!

I suspect the author meant something more like, "neurotypical people live contented lives holding the belief that arbitrary authority actually exists." But I can't truly speak for them.

Even before I fully reasoned it out, growing up I always knew that arbitrary authority doesn't exist for me. Sure a SME should be given more weight discussing their subject, and a parent understands dangers of the world that their young child literally can't comprehend. But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong, perhaps because their brains aren't wired a way to unconsciously detect those red flags.

I don’t understand how to interpret this comment. Are you neurotypical or not?

I don't like this trend of using the label "neurotypical" to describe one's idea of the most boring, unimaginative person one can think of, and then applying it to pretty much everyone that isn't on the spectrum. "Neurotypical" people range from absolute rebels who reject any kind of authority to people happily working for and supporting a fascist regime, and then everything in-between. There is no less of a variety of opinion and thought in them than in "neurodivergent" people.

Well, ok, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm using neurotypical to describe people who don't have neurodivergent brains. I think there's arguments that there is no "neurotypical" at all, but it should be clear that when we're discussing autistic people, everyone who's not autistic is in the "other" group.

Either way, there are many other ways to "handle with" authority, notice also my quotes. These are even on different axes: understanding or not there's something going on, accepting or not what's going on, agreeing or not with what's going on, acting or not on what's going on... anything you simplify there between the two groups, will be wrong.

I don't know if I'm being argued with/downvoted because I said "all neurotypical people are this way" (which I did not, explicitly) or for some other reason. None of this thread makes sense to me.

Isn’t it called a spectrum for a reason?

What?

If the autism spectrum were represented as an input paradigm it would be a color picker rather than a number range.

It is not from 0 autism to 100 autism, it's more like a combination of sensory processing, language, social communication and executive functioning differences.

Context: I've never been formally diagnosed, but based on informally discussing things with therapists and various self-assessments it seems pretty likely to me that I'm somewhat on the spectrum, probably on the shallow end. Maybe this means I understand both the neurotypical and neurodivergent worlds a bit, or maybe it means I understand neither.

    But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, 
    and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the 
    workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice 
    that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong, perhaps because their brains 
    aren't wired a way to unconsciously detect those red flags.

I feel extremely confident in saying that everybody hates this. Honestly, it might be the first thing I've been certain of all day long.

I'm less confident in this, but: I certainly also think it's possible that many on the spectrum underrate how much literally everybody hates because-I-said-so's.

I know one other thing.

If a person is in the upper N% of intelligence, "gifted" if you will, they will have a natural curiosity about how things work, and have probably improved many things in the past, and will naturally tend to chafe at doing things in sub-optimal ways for unexplained reasons, and will therefore tend to hate "because I said so's" even more than most people.

Does autism sort of act like a force multiplier when combined with that trait? Maybe. Probably? I mean, one of the traits of autism is that we tend to need our own ways of doing things.

    growing up I always knew that arbitrary authority doesn't exist for me

I think one possible issue is that neurodivergents can't understand the reasons why neurotypicals (sometimes) like authority, or seem to like it.

Imagine Bubba, a guy with USA and police and military stickers all over his pickup truck. This guy just loves the imaginary absolute authority of the USA, right?

It's probably more complicated than that. In the micro sense of things, he probably hates being told what to do just like the rest of us. He probably grumbles when paying taxes just like the rest of us.

But he probably likes to imagine the USA as a superpower that will crush its/his perceived enemies. But maybe Bob just kind of wants an identity to cling to. Also maybe he and/or many of his friends and relatives are in the military, possibly because it's one of the few stable career paths for people without higher education, and he would like to think there is some kind of positive thing being done. Maybe he's sending a dog-whistle signal to "liberals" or immigrants. Or hell, maybe he does just have pride in the cool things that do happen in America. Maybe he's an American history buff! But for all of the complex factors in Bubba's enthusiasm for America, actually doing what America tells him to do probably isn't the part that delights him.

> I'm less confident in this, but: I certainly also think it's possible that many on the spectrum underrate how much literally everybody hates because-I-said-so's.

Maybe. I've always been surprised at how little other people (mostly NT) will actually say that they don't like the situation they're in, especially if they have the ability to change it by doing so.

> Reasons to stan the USA

Oh, I understand all of those reasons. What I struggle to understand is why people-who-hate-being-bossed-around by people-with-no-business-bossing-them-around still do it and often never say "This is bullshit." That's why I said "contented" was probably a better word than "happy."

> I've never been formally diagnosed, but based on informally discussing things with therapists and various self-assessments it seems pretty likely to me that I'm somewhat on the spectrum

One of the most helpful things I ever heard was "If you think you might be autistic, it's likely you are." Even if you get a formal diagnosis and it turns out you're not, you can have many traits of autism. (Technically, you have to have at least 1 trait from an array of specific categories to be diagnosed, so you can have many traits and still fail the test.)

    Maybe. I've always been surprised at how little other 
    people (mostly NT) will actually say that they don't 
    like the situation they're in, especially if they have 
    the ability to change it by doing so.

Hmmm. I'm tempted to say that NTs maybe tend to express things in more subtle and less literal ways, but I think the limiting factor here is that I certainly don't have a complete catalog of which people in my life were NT and which were ND, so I can't really make that guesstimate with any confidence!

    One of the most helpful things I ever heard was "If you think 
    you might be autistic, it's likely you are." Even if you get a 
    formal diagnosis and it turns out you're not, you can have 
    many traits of autism.

Hah! I think I like that statement.

Question.... I would welcome and be grateful for your advice!

I guess my thinking has always been that whether I get the a spectrum diagnosis or not, it's going to come down to working with those little individual traits anyway, so from a practical standpoint I haven't focused on whether or not an overarching "autism" label makes sense. (I'm also dealing with some other things in life, and therapy hours have been limited, so a spectrum diagnosis hasn't been a priority)

So my question (finally, lol) is: did you find value in that diagnosis? Practical value, and/or more intangible values?

> I certainly don't have a complete catalog of which people in my life were NT and which were ND

Ok you're definitely not autistic then, that's basic stuff! (I kid - I only have assumptions about most people in my life)

Personally, yes, I found a formal diagnosis extremely valuable for two reasons:

1. All of my nagging worries about "not really being autistic" and taking up space reserved for "real" autistic people vanished. This also "allowed" me to talk about being autistic more openly. You may not have the same anxieties at all though - I specifically had a really big setback years ago when an ex said they didn't believe I was autistic.

2. I found it much easier to deal with the individual traits, both because I learned about some I wasn't aware of during diagnosis, and because I now have the ability to identify anything that's upsetting me and ask, "In what way is my autism affecting this situation?" At the very least it's a useful framework or jumping-off point for introspection that might have been difficult otherwise, because it isn't always true that some autistic trait or another is involved.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for a wonderful and personal (and funny) answer. That is really helpful and appreciated, stranger.

> One of the most helpful things I ever heard was "If you think you might be autistic, it's likely you are." Even if you get a formal diagnosis and it turns out you're not, you can have many traits of autism. (Technically, you have to have at least 1 trait from an array of specific categories to be diagnosed, so you can have many traits and still fail the test.)

Maybe. But that can be easily abused. You can barely throw a stone on Discord without seeing PluralKit and others, bots ostensibly aimed at helping people with DID effectively communicate their alters.

Perhaps it started that way, but there's an entire generation who seem to have decided something similar with DID, and it has become much more "every mood or feeling is an identity". One general Discord server I saw recently had easily 20 people who claimed to have 40-50 distinct identities (numbers which would place them in the very upper echelons of DID, and quite likely having articles written about them in Psychology Today). "John is my angry alter, and Sam is my quiet alter, and ..."

I'd say if anything, "if you think you might be autistic, maybe you should find out".

As it is, I think the neurodivergent label is becoming almost "cool", and there is certainly a subset that sniffs a little at the concept of neurotypical.

> It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong,

That’s a very bold claim and I don’t think it’s that accurate. Rather maybe “neurotipical” are less willing to challenge “authority” when they have nothing to gain from that.

You know, that may be true. In my experience most NT friends/colleagues don't seem to think about it all but it may be they're simply brushing it off, whereas instead it's unignorable to me.

Or they realize its not a productive strategy.

I'm usually the first to notice and verbalize that someone with authority is a useless sociopath and things are going to turn out badly.

This is never a remotely optimal strategy.

Can't tell if other people see it, but realize they can't do anything about it and that talking about it is only going to be negative, or if they're really unaware (or just keep it in a "subconscious" unexamined box because they know that opening it up won't be useful).

I'm generally shit at politics, although from time to time I've been able to figure out how to fake it.

> This is never a remotely optimal strategy.

I'm sorry that's been your experience, but I can't relate.

You've... had lots of positive experiences promptly deciding that your leaders are "useless sociopaths" before anybody else has, and being very verbal about it?

> But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong

This would not be perhaps the most-universal example of arbitrary authority, played with in countless pieces of mainstream media, if neurotypicals were as you suppose they are.

I think you need to go back to the drawing board on this one.

Ok, somebody else explain why neurotypical people are content to obey arbitrary authority when they don't have to.

I surely shouldn't have included that bit of speculation because all the replies to my comment have nothing to do with the actual point of the comment.

> are content to obey arbitrary authority when they don't have to.

There’s two assumptions in this sentence that are frequently unwarranted.

Additionally, sometimes it’s both easier and less costly to let certain things go. This is may be one of the areas of, well, neurodivergence: “it’s going to be a pain in the ass to fight whatever the hell this is, and I don’t care enough to do it.”

The most likely explanation, I think, is that they dole out their fucks-given very differently than you.

Consider the possibility that, as someone who is not neurotypical, you may not be accurately reading the contentment level of people who are neurotypical.

"Content" is an assumption on your part. Higher tolerance for bullshit is also a plausible explanation. Or a difference in emotional intelligence and the corresponding understanding of (and willingness to play) the political game to get through the day. I'm not "content" with my management, but I know it's temporary and that I don't want to be unemployed in the interim and my pay is good enough that I'm not ready to nope out of here (if the pay was worse, or my fu funds weren't spent a couple years ago and not yet recovered, it would be a different situation).

One problem have with your statements is that blind subservience to arbitrary authority is something I see more of in “on the spectrum” types than “normies”.

I see it in both groups, and I don’t think being “on the spectrum” or not has anything to do with this trait.

Take that up with the author then! My mistake is only that I tried to understand their writing.

> Ok, somebody else explain why neurotypical people are content to obey arbitrary authority when they don't have to.

Are you able to explain why some neurodivergent people are content to obey arbitrary authority when they don't have to?

I feel like it's almost a little gatekeeping there. If they are content, are they "sufficiently" neurodivergent?

> Ok, somebody else explain why neurotypical people are content to obey arbitrary authority when they don't have to.

Here you are:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

> and a parent understands dangers of the world that their young child literally can't comprehend

As an adult I find that my perception of danger was actually much more correct as a child than the adults around me.

They were, and are, paranoid and driven by moral panics. For some reason they were unable to comprehend that me walking a mile across an upper middle class suburb at 12 years old was perfectly safe, but I was. They feared edge case dangers like pedophiles and school shootings while us children made jokes about them.

When there were a handful of shark attacks on the east coast and it made the news, the school banned students from swimming in the ocean on school trips. Driving for hours on the interstate was, of course, deemed safe as always.

To me, this sometimes seems like a first order response to a 2nd (or higher) order problem. Some neurodivergent people I've worked through this with have definitely unconsciously/consciously detected "red flags" and responded to them, but their modelling of what was going on was clearly reductive and sometimes obviously incorrect.

I'm in no way suggesting it's universally true, but it's happened enough times to feel like it's likely, if that makes sense? Sometimes neurotypical people are seeing exactly the same data, but interpreting it differently.

This article should probably be read through a more emotional lens than one of hard facts. Articles like this are littered with very specific details that don't accurately apply to many of the people in the group being described, but are perhaps accurate in spirit. It's also a common pitfall to advocate for ones own group at the expense of another group.

It is unfortunate that the neurodivergent/neurotypical us vs them argument is happening.

Well the inherent framing of neurodivergent/neurotypical really lends itself well to those kind of arguments. If it's a spectrum and we are all on it with only two words to describe it then we are bound to get that kind of low-quality discussion.

You'd be surprised. "All men are created equal" was a radical statement, almost blasphemous, when penned; the idea that authority and hierarchy were inherent was just something about the world that was accepted, like the sun or even the existence of God, because how could the state of things be otherwise? And post hoc, we rationalized this implicit assumption by inventing the theory that differences in authority were not arbitrary, but based on the quality of the individual. More powerful people were better somehow. The word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best".

> More powerful people were better somehow.

This is still the case in modern society as well. We've just substituted noble blood for money.

The historical context for this was the belief that those in positions of authority were put there by God's will. And so to question the rightness of them being placed over you was to question God.

With the most extreme form of this being the idea of divine right of kings. Because kings were given the most extreme authority, they must have the strongest sanction of God supporting them.

It would be a mistake to think of this as a purely Christian notion, either. Divine right very closely parallels the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven for the emperor. And Christian notions owe a lot to Plato. In particularly the Neoplatonic idea of the Great Chain of Being. Which (though the phrase has a separate history) can be summed up with, "As above, so below." So we are reflections of our rulers. If our rulers are just, we will be. If our rulers are unjust, we will also be unjust. If we upset the natural order by overthrowing our rulers, chaos will descend upon the land. Shakespeare did a great job of capturing the mindset in The Tempest.

> I’ve written before about how autistic people often struggle to know how to act around authority figures. Actually, that’s not true– we don’t seem to care how we act around authority.

I call bullshit. Autistic people can figure out how to operate around authority figures just fine when it MATTERS.

If some autistic person is fucking around with an ATM in front of a cop that they know is there, but don't care, that's being stupid, not being autistic.

I don't have to give a shit about how authority and power is granted to certain individuals, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that insulting the CEO in front of the company is not a good way to keep your job..

Insulting the CEO is rude, because insulting anyone is rude. There's nothing special about the CEO that makes it rude only to insult him.

The article even gives a better example here: casually introducing yourself to the CEO and making a joke. If the CEO feels insulted by this, it's because he has "Authority" and you are "not respecting it" - but wait, the other CEO I met really appreciated this! Suddenly it makes no sense. There's a special rule that this CEO insists I should know, but it's not even consistent with other CEOs. How am I supposed to know which authorities it's okay to make jokes with?

> How am I supposed to know which authorities it's okay to make jokes with?

With experience over time.

I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger (don’t take that as a value judgement, just a statement). The way this looks to the rest of us is “how would I know which predator will attack me and which will not?” - and for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly.

> I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger

You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".

Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.

> for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly

This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.

Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.

    And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is 
    and is not appropriate is one big stochastic 
    experiment that lasts your entire life

This is heartbreakingly true.

But for the specific case of this hypothetical example, and the slightly more generalized example of "what kind of humor might appeal to strangers to whom I've just introduced myself" it's actually kind of an easy lesson.

The answer is that you have to know somebody before you know what kind of humor is going to be cool with them.

And the answer is also that interrupting strangers to tell them jokes or even to simply say "hello" is likely to be rude, unless it's an social situation as opposed to just like, stopping your CEO in the hallway at 2PM on a Tuesday.

Those are the sorts of lessons everybody has to learn, autism or no. As somebody who's probably a bit on the spectrum himself I understand the struggle to an extent, but also it feels like the actually relevant lessons here in this specific case are pretty learnable even if we might learn them the hard way at first.

Oh, goodness, you hit the nail on the head.

I use pattern matching in my head to develop patterns for specific people!

Sometimes, that's not worth it, so I just don't care, and that's what people notice.

I am likely a bit "on the spectrum myself" but have also had pretty good success socially in general. I was a super awkward kid and then worked hard on it. Maybe my self-assessment is off, I dunno.

But anyway....

    I use pattern matching in my head to develop patterns for specific people!

I don't know if this is, in principle, that different from what neurotypicals do? I think it's typically harder for those on the spectrum, perhaps especially so when it comes to initial encounters. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying?

I'm not sure what you're asking, so I'll go into detail.

With initial encounters, I use patterns learned in the military: be excessively polite, speak only when spoken to, listen and observe.

It's a pattern set that is designed to offend as few people as possible.

(I do have different starting pattern sets for different things, such as one for church where the military one would seem weird, but point being, I use carefully-crafted starting sets.)

If I don't interact with a person much, I'll keep using the same pattern set with them.

But if I interact with a person enough, I get an idea of what they want, and I start developing a custom pattern set for that person.

Example: I'll call people "sir" or "ma'am" by default. But my wife...hates that. So I never call her that. Ever. Not even when she's mad at me, and I fall back on excessive politeness.

Having custom pattern sets can help me deal with a boss, or a difficult neighbor.

The neighbor is a good example. She and I have different politics. So I will only make small talk and will not engage in controversial conversation topics with her. And I will end conversations quickly.

    The article even gives a better example here: casually 
    introducing yourself to the CEO and making a joke. 

    [...] How am I supposed to know which authorities it's 
    okay to make jokes with?

Well, it's a good example.... but not in the way you or the author necessarily intend.

The answer is right there in front of you: you don't fucking know!

You -- spectrum or no spectrum -- don't know who you can joke around with until you actually know them. Humor is hard, even for comedians, and successful humor relies on some kind of rapport or shared sensibility between parties.

Walking up to a stranger, CEO or otherwise, and cracking a joke immediately is actually fairly bizarre behavior and there's a good chance the joke is going to fall flat. Also sometimes you'll get lucky and make a friend for life or something, but it's a total dice roll and it is frankly an idiot move to risk your professional standing on it. I think that's a thing you can just learn and memorize whether you're on the spectrum or not.

That said, I as a lowly engineer have successfully joked around with a lot of C-level types at large-ish companies.

More than anything else, circumstances matter. Is this a social situation? Are you interrupting them? Are you introducing yourself out of the blue and expecting them to laugh at a joke like a total weirdo? These things matter.

Assuming you're actually interacting in a social situation...

As a general rule they love to laugh and pal around like normal humans. Getting along with people and being personable is actually a pretty big asset when it comes to climbing the ladder and more often than not these people have it. If you're skilled at humor you'll know how to feel out what kind of humor they're gonna laugh at and which kinds of humor are safe. If you're not good at humor and intuiting things, just fucking know that and play it safe.

There's a high correlation between smart people and being on the spectrum.

You can likely replace the word "autistic people" with smart people. Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?

Especially when I see you making what seem to be plain mistakes, which not only hurt yourselves, but create a society where your kids will be less satisfied.

Its not like I have the ability to make people do things, that would be a position of authority. Me not accepting me not being responsible for actions with plain evidence I was not in control. Not only proves the point those individuals are responsible for what happened to me, but their inability to accept they should be listening to me makes me most concerned.

There are many high IQ people who are not able to proverbially tie their shoelaces. Or, more literally, shower. So yes, please do listen to your not so smart colleagues. Thanks.

Yeah, I actually live near ones of the finest establishments for studying the human brain and there are structural reasons why. Plenty of techniques to get those people working. Problem being it's pretty experimental.

> Why should I listen to you

a) because other people listen to that person, and one person's smarts only outstrips the strength multiplier of followers in extraordinary circumstances

b) because they're part of the tribe, and like it or not you're gonna be working with them. More useful to everyone to invest resources into figuring out what makes them tick than tuning them out.

c) because responsibility is rarely as divestable as one might hope. If my team lead doesn't listen to me and then sets up the team to shit the bed, I can certainly document "I wasn't involved in this decision; I would have done it differently," but the response upper management's gonna give me is "If you knew a better approach, why didn't you coach the team lead to take it?"

a) cant argue with you there.

b) maximum doubt, it seems most of the people I've met are very agreeable. Especially when introduced to additional information. The problem being the ones who bully people into getting more information instead of asking. It's just rude.

C) You are rights, easy to fire the new guy instead of owning up to your own mistakes.

> Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?

Off the top of my head:

- I may know a fact that you do not. Your IQ does not make you aware of things you do not know.

- I may have a relationship with someone that you do not.

- I may have past experience that you do not.

- I may have different values than you. Your higher IQ does not dictate that we should make decisions according to your values.

- I may have access to resources (money, engineering teams) that you do not.

A meta comment is: If despite your higher IQ you were unable to consider these possibilities then IQ may not be a good proxy for the kind of intelligence a business may value.

"A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay

He said that in a video "nornal considered harmful" that you can find on Youtube[1]. He talks about it at 34:29

[1] https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?si=gp3k_6-OrE8yLBnx

Doubt. IQ gives meaning to gaining access to additional information. If each individual piece of information reaffirms my previous claims then you were in the wrong from the start.

>Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?

Because we don't live in Gattaca

Maximum doubt after I got an IQ test you wouldn't believe the doors that opened for me. Kind of feel like I got left out of a club I should have been the owner of.

It's more complicated than that. Autistic people are spread more widely, they are more likely to have very high or very low IQs, and it's not all that useful to generalise.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.8560...

It's a little strange to me that everyone accepted the premise of this claim since it's really, really obvious that the situation isn't a straightforward jump in IQ.

    Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 
    and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?

A few possible reasons, some overlapping to various extents, not applicable to all situations.

- The person with 120 IQ is a subject matter expert in this particular matter and you are not.

- IQ is an approximation. It is probably the best one we have, but it is a very blunt and generalized metric. It is not evenly distributed across all areas of reasoning and functioning. A person with a 155 IQ or even a 200 IQ is going to be great at many things and awful at others. A person with 120 or even 80 IQ may be better in specific areas.

- Both you and the 120 IQ person might be overqualified for the matter at hand, so your "extra" intelligence is irrelevant.

- The person with 120 IQ is representing something larger than themselves, the accumulated wisdom of which dwarfs yours (imagine, I don't know, a 120 IQ forest ranger telling you how you should/shouldn't interact with particular flora and fauna)

- It may be a situation where it is impractical to have individualized rules for highly intelligent or highly capable individuals.

When you have exposures to different fields most of the high level ideas transfer pretty effectively.

It would be stupid to not get people on the same platform.

>I don't think anybody loves submitting to authority just for the fun of it.

I can think of some counter-examples

We don't even need rule 34 for that

It's hard to talk about anything sometimes, because with 8 billion people on the planet there are always some counter-examples.

But to the point of the linked article, I think the author misses the point and insults neurotypicals and neurodivergents alike with the his assertion that normals just love them some blind submission as a default way of being, and autists just can't do that

I think you may be underestimating the size of the population who are into control and submission. but I don't disagree, see my comment from yesterday where I say something similar[1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075017

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