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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn on whether I like this parody.

It is quite funny and IMO in good taste (which is hard to do when diagnosing 9,625 out of every 10,000 as deficient). It probably works well as an in-joke for people who prefer critical thinking to social proof.

But it isn't really appropriate to fight fire with fire when it comes to calling people disordered and the people who need to hear the message won't understand it because they key off social proof. In fact, they may literally not understand the gentle ribbing and might respond poorly.

3/5 stars.

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>In fact, they may literally not understand the gentle ribbing and might respond poorly.

That, IMHO, is what makes it so delicious.

"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me." - Nathaniel Lee, playwright, on being confined to a madhouse for 5 years.

Taking jabs at the majoritarian viewpoints enough to get noticed rarely ends well.

> t probably works well as an in-joke for people who prefer critical thinking to social proof.

Autistic and neuroatypical are not better critical thinkers. Fairly often they just ... dont understand certain things.

And wont accept clear straightforward plain language explanation of what others want, because in their heads they should not.

> wont accept clear straightforward plain language explanation of what others want

From experience this feels to me like a very NT thing to say (apologies if you're not NT, no context to determine either way) - it comes across as written: "Why can't you just do what I ask you".

Often it feels atypical people require a logical understanding from first principles of why something should be done.

Then, once they have that they need to come to the same conclusion of what the course of action is.

If they're aligned, awesome.

If not, then the work is to try to make them understand why, given the current constraints and cultural context, their optimal approach is suboptimal in this situation.

Something as simple as "yes your idea is great, it will work better then theirs, but sometimes others need to fail so that they can learn from their failure" - exact quote.

I'm speaking to a very limited subset here based on quite a bit of exposure in many contexts.

"Neuroatypical" shows up in many, many ways.

What? You try reading the actual written policies of any large organisation. Then find the places where they aren't following their rules, then point out with reference to the written rules what they're doing wrong. Then see what happens.

Sorry, I don't understand. What do you think will happen?

Allistic and neurotypical people are not better critical thinkers either. Fairly often they just… don't understand certain things.

And wont accept clear straightforward plain language explanation of what others want, because in their heads they should not.

It’s probably worth noting it’s (2002) too. The internet was a different audience.

I don’t think it’s so much as fighting fire with fire, as just reframing and correcting the usual biased assumptions about what it means to be “typical”.

I like to call NTs Neuro boring. Or 'Nobs' for short...

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