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Comment by ForrestN | Hacker News Reader

It’s regrettable that our culture has decided that neurological diversity should be understood in terms of abnormality = deficiency. It would be nice to have a more inclusive society that adapted its norms to the way people really are rather than always trying to adapt people to somewhat arbitrary norms.

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"...neurological diversity should be understood in terms of abnormality = deficiency..."

Diversity becomes deficiency (or a diagnosable illness, or whatever) when it interferes with ones' path through life or enjoyment of life. In other words, when it becomes a problem.

If everyone around you is happy behaving socially and you are not, you have a problem.

For sake of argument, if everyone around you is a sociopath and you are not and are feeling empathy and compassion, you'll have problems too, but it's not you who's deficient.

Having a problem doesn't mean your condition need be considered pathological.

By "everyone around you", I meant the majority of everyone else in the world.

The majority is always sane.

If everyone's got the plague does that mean they're all in tip top health? Nope. Festering, bulbous pustules are what they are, and don't magically transform by force of numbers.

The same goes for the tendency to mechanically pigeonhole others - it is what it is, a mania for rigidly organizing the (supposedly) rigidly organizing. It sees its own whimsical image in the mirror and explodes with delight.

That's a naked (and unconvincing) appeal to total-relativism.

I don't find that attitude to be helpful at all in my case. Everything in the official adult world encouraged me to think there was nothing wrong with me. I had the best grades, my teachers loved how good I was at following rules and completing assignments, I did well at sports, and my parents always told me I was great. I was still miserable. My parents did their best to get me to just see myself as "different," even better, but it never changed how frustrating it was that people just looked baffled or creeped out when I talked, and the other kids laughed, or they avoided me. By the time I was in second grade, I was already wondering what the hell was wrong with me, how to fix it, whether it was even possible to fix it. I was not very socially oriented, but I was painfully aware that when I tried to interact with other people, I did not do it like other people did, and I did not get the reactions that other people got. None of that came from a preconceived notion that different is bad. In fact, I grew up in a household with a counterculture ethic and a strong presumption that different is better. It didn't help. It just prevented my parents from figuring out that I had a real issue that needed addressing.

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