Am I German or Autistic?
german.millermanschool.com
german.millermanschool.com
If your comment is an attempt to run the game directly in the HN comments, I'm going to guess "German" by the placement of your verb here. :)
What is "German"?
According to the website, being German is characterized by cultural patterns rather than neurological ones. It involves internalizing a specific set of values derived from the German philosophical tradition, including:
Precision and Order: A deep-seated need for systematic thought and structured environments.
Directness: A preference for clear, unambiguous communication.
The Moral Weight of Punctuality: Viewing being on time as a "basic moral obligation" and a sign of respect.
Kant's Categorical Imperative: The tendency to act only according to principles that one believes should be universal laws.
The site humorously notes that being "German" means you are "difficult to work with" in the way all serious, systematic people are, which it considers a compliment.
What is "Autistic"?
The website describes these patterns as neurological rather than cultural. Key features include:
Intensity of Focus: A high capacity for deep concentration on specific topics or tasks.
Difficulty with Ambiguity: Finding unclear instructions or vague social niceties (like "we should get coffee sometime") confusing or even distressing.
Literal Interpretation: A "literal relationship to what people say versus what they mean," leading to a refusal to accept confusion as a resting state.
Systematic Mind in a Non-Systematic World: Having a mind built for systems while living in a world where social rules are unwritten and constantly shifting.
The site notes that for these individuals, the gap between "how things are and how they ought to be" is a source of "constant, low-grade irritation". The test doesn't follow the correct procedures for diagnosing autism and after a thorough reading of the DSM-5-TR I could find no mention of German a mental illness being and I challenge anyone to me wrong prove.
It depends on context a bit obviously, but most Germans are sincere about it. You either propose coffee or you don't.
However, there's a subset of Germans who seem to propose coffee and then don't follow up themselves, but it's not just a phrase. If you are the one to follow up, they'd join you. Which, to say the least, is annoying, too.
From my German perspective, asking someone for grabbing coffee sometime and not meaning it is a completely stupid thing to say. Why would you suggest it? Why should the other person have to decode this as a "nice thing to say but not meant literally" if you could say a hundred other things that could be meant literally and are still nice, like "see you around" or something like that?
In that sense it does communicate something: I like and have enjoyed your company in this moment.
Flippant of course, but not too dastardly.
I get this. I don't want to be imposing myself, and I want to give the person an out if they don't want to meet me.
But I also want them to know that I would be up for having a coffee.
I generally mean social invitations sincerely, and expect that other people do too, but also my social anxiety leaves me somewhat relieved if we don't follow through.
Personally I thought the 6th question about the rules was the most German one, sticking to the rules no matter what (that would be actually the least Chinese one, where rules are made up just to exist, but not to enforce).
Struggled most with last two questions, too many correct options to answer.
German -33% Autistic -36%
Apparently: "You probably ended up here through social media, which means someone you follow scored either Both or German. They sent it to you as a question or a joke. You are their control group."
This gets mixed up with the whole dance "I want to measure how much you care about having a coffee with me". We're social creatures so negotiation of your position in the hierarchy is very fucking important. You invite to a coffee someone who's from the same or higher social class. You accept invitations from the same or higher social class. Stronger signal "I really want to have a coffee with you" corresponds with bigger difference in hierarchy. Your goal is to game the system so that you're at the top - everyone invites you for a coffee, you decline all invitations. Actually meeting for a coffee is basically failure of diplomacy. People are subconsciously, without any awareness at all, creating very elaborate strategies to this game.
has nothing to do with masochism but all with realizing that you live in a society and can't just force your preferred social norms unilaterally on other, even if you can nudge people in a direction, in hope society will change in the future
For instance (and maybe this is embarrassing ...), I was late to the airport because the day before I went a bit later to bed than planned, so I overslept my alarm a bit, but still had plenty of breathing room. So I proceed, with the car. As it happens, I live in a country, let's say NL, and the airport was in BE. It also happens that fuel is significantly cheaper in BE than in NL (over 25% cheaper at the time). I'm also quite precise about fuel consumption.
As it happens, speed limit in NL is 100km/h during the day, but 130 during the night. I was still well within the high speed section during those very early moments of dawn. But I normally only ride my car during the day. So I know intimately how much fuel I'm using. So I calculate things ,with a lot of safety margins, to optimize fueling costs, by reaching BE with not a lot of fuel. However, as I was a bit underslept. Normally I know exactly how many km I can do after the low fuel indicator comes on. I of course anticipated this would be lower at 130/h rather than 100/h, but somehow, my calculations were a bit off. I ran out of fuel on the highway, well inside BE, but some 2km short of the gas station.
Not the best of times, as you can imagine. I was starting to panic a bit, thinking of eventual costs, I don't know the exact law in BE, if I have to pay someone to tow me, it would cost probably hundreds of time more than the potential savings. But somehow, the place where the car stopped was in a location under a bridge, where I could actually get off the emergency lane, so in a very protected spot. Must have been 5AM at the time, I proceed to walk towards the first exit, grabbing a plastic bottle from the ground. After about 800m i manage to get off the highway, to that first settlement, and not long after, a very nice gentlemen takes me to the gas station. I discovered, stupefied, that the station only sells truck diesel. I walk a few minutes to the next one. Same story. I keep walking until I finally find one selling petrol, and a very nice lady, after explaining her my situation, agrees to take me to my car on the highway, which was 1-2km away. I do pay her for her trouble.
Now, this whole incident only took about an hour, so I'm still sort of on track. But now it's starting to be early morning, and some of the worst traffic jams I've encountered. Basically the trip takes over 90 minutes more than originally estimated. I buy another plane ticket for another plane later that day and still end up not that badly, but ... yeah.
And also, if we have a very long margin of time, then does the 0.01% you might be late somewhere really justify something like this.
Obviously it depends on the context, but personally, things just happen in life and its hard to take into factor how many things are and are not in my control.
But from my perspective, the added example story was somewhat in your control. You just optimized for the wrong things. Of course this is easier in hindsight too.
Had you not run out of fuel, would you have missed the traffic too?
My fuel tank is always full. I fill it when it gets about 1/2 empty so that I am not caught stranded because I never know what will happen. Sometimes I get fuel even though I can make it, because what if something goes wrong? Habits die hard. I have seen highways close for hours to days after an accident or snow storm. If you're stuck there is no where to go.
And yes, everything is under our control and nothing is. It's a matter of perspective. Everyone prioritizes, since we have limited time. We choose what we do with that time. Just that, some people, sometimes me included, have such a time debt that sucks their time that it spills into their "obligations".
As for optimizing for the wrong things, this is also to some degree outside control. I obviously realize on a rational level why it's "suboptimal", penny-wise and pound foolish. But change requires effort and time. Which are sometimes used up in other more urgent endeavours.
You appear to be past the point where it's beneficial, and should focus on reducing it to improve your life. Granted this is easily stated when I have no real context.
Same thing happens to my partner. They're just fundamentally bad at estimating time and constantly do things that maximize their probability of being late.
Your story for example, almost nothing was outside your control.
Which one is it?
There are people like that, and they are exhausting. It’s essentially a selfish use of a communal good, which is the shared environment.
There’s a limit to silent annoyance, of course. But my officemate noisily ate a smelly egg breakfast every day and I just bided my time until I could move.
Watch me not care
> Being early to an appointment is as rude as being late because you may be disturbing your host before they've taken all the efforts they require before your arrival
( VERY rough quote, the english translation is 100x more eloquent than my half-remembered version )
Edmond Dantès arrives exactly as the clock strikes the minute of his appointment no later and no earlier. I remember reading that when I was ~16 and it always seemed to make sense to me
"Being on time is rude because you may be disturbing your host before they’ve made all the preparations they need before your arrival. Being early would be an outrageous offense."
It always amazes me how Brazilians and Germans can be so different when it comes to punctuality and yet so similar when it comes to their love of bureaucracy (and devotion to soccer, for that matter).
It also depends on who my guests are. If I know they are consistently late, I give them an earlier time. If they are always early, I give them a later time.
My grandfather was overly punctual. He'd show up 30-60mins early for dinner and my mom hated it. My mom loves hosting people but she can't do that while she's blowdrying her hair or helping her children get ready. So she would tell him a different time than everyone else coming over so he'd show up when everyone and everything was ready.
If we are to meet in public - like restaurant - I don't want to awkwardly wait 15 minutes or more. At the very least, early notice is an obligation.
If I invite you to my house, I don't really care unless you're too early or _very_ late.
However, his woeful time-keeping is so poor that we began to suspect that he was indeed simply from another planet... with a longer day.
If you spend any time on the big rez, you hear it said
There's "in time…"
"on time…"
and "Navajo time."This confuses me as I have never been to Germany and do not speak German.
But rules are rules.
I got 38% german, 58% autistic btw.
German 47% - Autistic 47%
Wittgenstein was Austrian, which is close enough. He was also, by most accounts, someone whose relationship to social convention was at best functional and at worst a source of significant suffering to himself and everyone around him.
He rewrote philosophy twice. The first time by establishing what could be said with precision. The second time by dismantling the assumption that precision was the right goal in the first place. Both versions emerged from the same source: an absolute refusal to accept confusion as a resting state.
You have, apparently, both the cultural formation that produces systematic people and the neurological substrate that makes systematic thinking feel like breathing. This is either a significant advantage or an explanation for certain recurring difficulties in your life. Probably both.
Schopenhauer also fits here. So does Ramanujan, though he wasn't German. The category isn't German or autistic — it's people for whom the gap between how things are and how they ought to be is not an abstraction but a constant, low-grade irritation.
I took the German or Autistic diagnostic. Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. I don't know whether to be proud or concerned. https://german.millermanschool.com/Might just be that a lot of people on HN skew that way. Kinda makes sense.
I got 47/62.
I assume that the 10% is I dont really care.
German 29%, Autistic 22%
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> the gap between how things are and how they ought to be is not an abstraction but a constant, low-grade irritation
This is relative. In Germany, people complain when the train is late. Everywhere else, the train is just late.
You think people don't complain when the train is late in other countries? That's hardly a uniquely German thing
And outside of trains, my german friends run the gamut of being always on time to systematically being 30 minutes late. Don't really see much of a correlation between being German and punctual.
Japan on the other hand I do associate with punctuality, when I worked there I was made to sit in the seiza postion for the m9rniny meeting if I was late by even 3 minutes. My friends there were overwhelmingly ontime except (and proving my point) for a German coworker I had there :)
Obvious in many ways once you've lived there
The reason that a late train can sometimes be cancelled is to try and stop a cascade of delays from happening. Tracks only have so much capacity, and if train gets delayed into a time-frame that is highly congested, trying to fit the delayed train into that time-frame will result in delaying other trains, which could then cause further problems down the lines and throw the entire network out of order.
They accept a certain number of cascading delays like this, but sometimes it's just known that a certain delayed train will just be too disruptive to the network, so they're forced to just cancel a train to try and save the network's stability.
I can see the cancellations as a means of stopping a cascade of delays, but it's also true that doing so means the train won't count in the delay statistics for the remaining stops. If DB doesn't want people to accuse them of gaming the statistics, perhaps they should calculate said statistics in a way that doesn't directly benefit them when they inconvenience their delayed passengers even more?
If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please?
We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
> We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps.
Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects.
That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.
As an Austrian I am not sure how to feel about that
My understanding is that Austria was the Germans who ended up running a multi ethnic empire ruling over Slavs also, while Germany was the Germans who didn’t do that.
Then once the Austrian empire fell apart only the German part was left in “Austria” and it basically has no reason to be separate from Germany anymore because the Slavs are no longer part of the same territory and there is no “top of the caste system” benefit anymore to the Germans there.
Feel free to chime in if I’m wrong. I’ve found topics related to Germany to be hard to actually figure out due to a lot of morality noise that gets injected into those topics (the Nazis wanted to unify and Nazis bad etc stuff like that).
„ Your patterns are cultural, not neurological.” - that’s for sure. My neurological ones were so terrible I had to resort outer sources.
> The Wittgenstein Result … Wittgenstein was Austrian, which is close enough.
Clearly I should have scored 100.
Back in the 1990s I was in Hong Kong. The city was epic, cool and alien. Today I feel I could live there even without speaking cantonese (I understand the top-down control via Beijing being a huge problem; I refer to what a city may look like in 2026 and beyond though from a theoretical point of view. Naturally knowing the language helps insanely, but english works as a substitute in many modern areas, even in non-english speaking countries).
The German way is to plan something very meticulously and the to follow through with the plan no matter what.
I am however of the persuasion of not planning too much beforehand especially when the input is lacking. But also to be flexible and reactive during execution.
It was 47% 47%. AMA!! I've got stories man, just give me a specific prompt. I can also tell stories about my PhD advisor (100% german, 70% autistic).
The test is broken, if you ask me.
To express it conversely: Unless you're totally oblivious wrt social interaction some of these answers seem rather stupid.
So: This does not really test anything but knowledge.
I chuckled twice, though.
Dentist is included but not all procedures.
> Scores are independent — they don't need to add up to 100%.
You are, as far as this diagnostic can establish, neither specifically German in your cognitive habits nor particularly autistic in your neurological profile. You are something rarer in the context of people who take quizzes like this: apparently normal about it.
“The category isn't German or autistic — it's people for whom the gap between how things are and how they ought to be is not an abstraction but a constant, low-grade irritation.”
> You are difficult to work with in the ways all serious people are difficult to work with. This is not a diagnosis. It is a compliment.
I am convinced that the majority of Germans are on the spectrum. What other country builds viewing platforms for construction sites?
I somehow got a perfect 40%/40% balance, don't know if that's the most rare or the most common
Update: I scrolled down. Your share button is pretty good!
Both
The Wittgenstein Result
GERMAN 49%
AUTISTIC 40%
Been once to Germany, maybe twice. Can't vouch the other.
Being German isn't communicable, you won't catch it on a business trip or holiday.
Completely wrong! I am neither German nor Autistic!
As a German the first part I can follow. Autistic was a bit of a surprise.
I didn't think I was that normal, but here we are.
You know how many conversations I have with people who are mad about a problem, and I tell them that's the reason we have a policy they didn't follow, and then they say they should tell people that that's the reason for the policy, and then I tell them they do explain it, right where the policy is written. Oh my God, you didn't read the policies before you did this, did you!? What else did you miss!?
Will be gone a while while I look for the other 20%.
You are 60% non-German and 60% non-Autistic.
The site is exposing the reality that you can come to the same place from different directions. For example, if you are more "German", your sense of fairness, adherence to rules, regard for punctuality comes from a place of moral obligation. You act in ways you hope others will also act because you believe that if everyone acts that way, we'd all get along better.
However, if you do these things because those are the arbitrary rules set forth and they must be followed because that's the definition of a rule, something you follow, then you're likely Autistic because that kind of rigid thinking that is a hallmark of the condition.
This man is gay and European!
This is extremely relatable. I'm pretty confident that this physical sensation is related to my (rather severely) limited working memory, which I have to carefully manage at maximum capacity and which is catastrophically overwhelmed by some interruptions. A token interruption ("hey, do you have a sec"?) Doesn't tend to cause the sensation, but an interruption that contains data ("I called Greg about the plan for Wednesday and he said that Susan said...") is psychologically painful and even enraging in an oddly visceral sort of way.
Plato (like every philosophy discussion in the western world, nothing too bad yet...)
Nietzsche (thanks to his sister, very associated with the Nazis)
Heidegger (literally a Nazi, as in, card-carrying member of the Nazi party)
Strauss (close ties to the Nazi party, acting as their head of the Reich Music Chamber)
Schmitt (literally a Nazi, as in, card-carrying member of the Nazi party, and part of the government at the time)
Dugin (Nazi sympathizer, extreme far right asshole, in bed with Putin)
That's the entire list. If it was 1 or 2 of those, mixed in with a bunch of other philosophers who weren't Nazis, I wouldn't be so confident in calling it fascist. But it's not. The list of philosophers that Millerman espouses are basically a complete list of literal Nazi-aligned philosophers.
Btw I tested neither, 30% each; "the controll group". So I am formally authorized to criticise the page as a perfectly normal person.
disappointed