Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

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The query explicitly didn't include "Despite asking you about your preferences, I have no interest in why you prefer it so please refrain from commenting on that. Please don't waffle or ask me anything back, simply provide me with the title, and I will have all the information I need", so I don't think it's "disordered expectations" to assume that message wasn't conveyed by the question...

Neurotypical communication 101 is that a casual conversation question about your favourite things is probably a cue for you to be enthusiastic and effusive about things you care about rather than a prompt for you provide names only, especially if the interlocutor is unlikely be evaluating your preferences using their own expert knowledge of the field. Sure, if nobody else steps in to provide further context any [neurotypical] interlocutor ought to be able to continue/rescue the conversation by asking followup questions about what happened in an episode and what is it about that episode that you like, but staccato answers offering a bare minimum of information is a communication preference (occasionally appropriate, more often not) rather than something inherently demanded by the question.

(I'd agree that people probably judge responses slightly differently if they already know the person on the other side of the conversation is autistic, but in a situation like this it can work in their favour, since if I assume the person providing only names, titles and one word answers to my open and friendly questions is neurotypical, I'm going to assume they're subtly signalling that they dislike me...)

No, I do think this is still an example of disordered expectations. What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not."

Which is probably worse.

As the other reply mentioned, there is an empathy (double empathy) problem, but the answer is not for one party to have to assume responsibility for the other's comfort entirely by having to guess all of their unspoken emotional desires for the conversation. "The query explicitly didn't include [...]" is kind of a ridiculous thing to expect someone to respect or even predict.

Also, I don't mean to pick apart your comment, but:

>Neurotypical communication 101 is that a casual conversation question about your favourite things is probably a cue for you to be enthusiastic and effusive about things you care about rather than a prompt for you provide names only

I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves.

> What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not."

No, it changes it from "if you would be interested in hearing anything other than the briefest and least informative answer, it's your responsibility to explicitly state how much information you expect and in what form" to "of the vast set of theoretically possible answers, those which take into account what will be meaningful to the other person are generally better, although it's entirely understandable and expected that autistic people might not be able to do this".

And the article here wasn't insisting autistic people should make conversations flow or that neurotypical people shouldn't ever modify their expectations or followup questions, it made the simple observation that the high-functioning autistic twin has actually learned to do this, pattern matching well enough to provide additional context on behalf of his brother (who apparently regularly struggles to form sentences, presumably even when the question explicitly demands it). I think the conclusion that this is because one of the autistic identical twins has developed better communication skills than his brother (who quite possibly has other learning difficulties) is correct, and it definitely isn't an example of his brother being trapped in a world where all human communication except children's TV is just too imprecise for him.

> I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves.

There is a happy medium between staccato answers and relating the entire plot of the episode or insisting that all other shows pale in comparison with it, and a difference between bringing up $nichepursuit because someone asked and bringing it up because they were talking about something else. And yes, this happy medium is going to be more difficult for people on the autistic spectrum to recognise. But even excessive enthusiasm about something most people find extremely boring is more endearing than repeated one or three word responses that technically answer the question.

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