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Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

Weird may be a simple emotional feeling people get because they sense you will mistreat them. (likely based on previous experience)

What I have found dealing with people that are Aspie/ADD (father and brother) is they expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior to adapt to others. (even when directly told their behavior is not acceptable)

This means that many social problems (like work interactions) only have a one sided solution, and this turns into a simple form of abuse acceptance.

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they expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior

That is something that is always overlooked. What about the mental health of the rest of the team who are expected to just smile when someone is obnoxiously rude to them over and over and over again? With no recourse to report it to HR?

Every “aspie” probably actively harms the mental health of a dozen ordinary people, but that’s invisible.

>the rest of the team who are expected to just smile when someone is obnoxiously rude to them over and over and over again

Is that really a thing that happens?

It's not always that extreme, since aspies can learn to improve their behaviour. But in my experience, even after some improvement there are still cases where they get away with behaviour that would cause more trouble to other people.

>Every “aspie” probably actively harms the mental health of a dozen ordinary people, but that’s invisible

Replace "aspie" with "black man" and your entire response is blatantly prejudiced. In my experience this is a boogieman people fear will crawl out from under their bed at night. All but one of the autistic ("aspie" is outdated) people I know understand their shortcomings and adapt as best as they can. There will always be assholes in every group; if you're not prejudiced, you judge the asshole rather than stereotyping the entire group.

Nearly all autistic people know they act weird and would like to act normal but don't know how. You have to weigh the costs and benefits. What's worse: you are occasionally made uncomfortable, or an autistic person gets fired? Are you willing to make no compromise in this conflict with coworkers? If so, it would be hypocritical.

Replace "aspie" with "black man" and your entire response is blatantly prejudiced.

Not remotely comparable unless you are implying that black people “expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior” which by the way is pretty racist.

They’re comparable because neither autistic people nor black people “expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior.”

It’s still not comparable because blackness is not a behavior at all.

There are accents and colloquialisms spoken mostly by black people. Does that not count?

No it doesn’t

There is nothing inherent to the pseudoscientific divisions of people by race. Autism is a medical diagnosis. The OP was in the wrong to say "Every Aspie", but let's not dig this hole deeper.

Definitely. As someone with a father on the spectrum the current trend of "Autism acceptance" drives me nuts.

I have worked with a lot of people with Asperger's over several years, I don't recall anyone but neurotypicals being rude to me.

While I'm sure there are rude people with Asperger's out there, rude neurotypicals can potentially be damaging in a far more efficient manner by knowing how to twist the social norms to give the pretence of staying within their boundaries.

What I have found dealing with people that are Aspie/ADD (father and brother)

How transparent you are in the fact that you are applying a completely anecdotal and personal experience to the largest possible generalization of ADD/Asperger's.

That is very unscientific, and to people like me who deal with ADHD and a few other mental illnesses, downright offensive and prejudiced.

Aspie/ADD affected people often times accuse others, through technical language, how someone's feelings aren't important.

Yes, it is unscientific. It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.

How do you know it's not a symmetric relationship?

It always seemed inherently weird and self-contradictory to me to accuse someone of lacking empathy. How can failure to understand another person's feelings be other than mutual?

Everybody ignores the feelings of others on occasion due to lack of understanding, but also when their own feelings are powerful enough to take precedence. I think it's best to assume that any time someone is causing pain, or even awkwardness, it's due to one of those situations or maybe a combination. I'm doubtful that there are really any other kinds of people.

The fact that you are even conflating Asperger's and ADD like this betray how little you know about the disorders. It's not just unscientific, it's insensitive.

It's my own personal experience that Aspie/ADD people often can't understand how much pain they can cause other people.

You listed your father and brother as evidence. Add maybe half a dozen more and that's your entire sample pool. It's amazing that you think this enough for your generalizations to be valid enough to share with others publicly before doing real research about these disorders.

My personal experience is valid to share. And it's not insensitive to share it.

If you feel you have data that counters my experience, it would be good to share. Then we can discuss both sides.

Lol, you can't wrap your naive opinions as "personal experience" and then apply them to a generality of millions of people. You passed off this claim as real. Just because you frame it as personal experience doesn't suddenly make it not a form of prejudice, and doesn't suddenly make it correct and valid.

I don't need data to counter your "personal experience" a.k.a. anecdotal evidence, because it was never valid to submit as a claim in the first place. There is no "both sides", there is one side: the objective truth: ADHD is too complex for you to make ridiculous unbacked claims like that.

I have quite advanced ADHD, OCD and bipolar II disorder and I don't have problems with empathy; in fact, in my circles I'm known as an especially attentive listener. I'm a walking contradiction to your baseless claims.

So please, try again, this time without insulting an entire class of people by claiming we all fit your incomplete behavioral model.

Are you saying your own personal experience is a counter to mine? I accept that. There are all kinds of people out there.

Sharing personal experiences is how normal humans learn about each other.

Are you saying your own personal experience is a counter to mine?

You keep trying to twist this situation with carefully crafted language into something that it isn't.

I'm not offering you "personal experience", you are attempting to equate our statements here in order to maintain a level playing field. Unfortunately, you are trying to pass off as a generalized fact something which my very existence disproves. You can study me independently to reach this conclusion. I am a data point. It has nothing to do with my own experiences, but the very real and measurable phenomenon that is my actions in the world.

There are exceptions to every rule. Are you claiming you are an exception or the rule? If so, how do you back up your claim?

Are you for real? How can you sit here and make such outrageously anecdotal and uncited claims and then turn around and say that any proof to the contrary needs to be backed up? Lol dude get the heck out of here.

The fact is, you are literally talking to someone who could help you better understand what life with ADD is like, and instead of taking the chance to learn and grow, you're trying to convince someone who literally has ADD that everyone with ADD behaves a certain way, and trying to make the claim that I am not qualified to talk about my own disorder.

How prejudiced and narcissistic can you be that you ignore what is right in front of you? How can you not understand how insulting this is to me? What if your dad was black, would you go around saying all black people are unempathetic, too? No, you wouldn't, because someone would put you in your place reaaaaaal quick.

Sharing personal experiences is how normal humans learn about each other.

I like how you try to go further and insinuate that I am "not normal" because I am not accepting your anecdotal nonsense as evidence. Do you treat everyone whom you argue with this way? That's just sad.

I didn't make a claim in my last comment, I just asked this:

>Are you claiming you are an exception or the rule?

This is a valid question to help me understand where you are coming from.

No, you are trying to be wily and ask a loaded question in order to shape the language of the conversation and position yourself as simply in search of the noble truth and I as someone who doesn't wish to see eye to eye, but it comes off as an obvious and hamfisted attempt.

Honestly, this kind of self-victimizing behavior leads me to question whether you are entirely self-aware of the nature of your interactions with your father and brother and can even trust in your own interpretation of them. You and I are not even able to have a meaningful conversation because you are bent on framing me as incapable of reasoning with you while ignoring everything I'm saying.

I know it's not intended, but this comment comes off as very mean. I don't know your father and brother, but that kind of assholish behavior is completely different orthogonal to having Aspergers or ADD.

This is the difficulty with Aspergers/ADD. They seem to not recognize that it's healthy and normal to call them on their bad behavior.

That is a narcissistic thing period. When I do it I am justified - when others do they are assholes.

That is more about entitlent and what they generally value. I knew both neurotypical and aspie like that. And you are right that it amounts to abuse acceptance

I knew also aspies (two) that did their best to listen and once we adjusted to his communication (e.g. learned to be extremely direct), it was not like that at all.

I agree that there are all kinds of people that act this way. But in my experience, aspies seem to have less ability to self reflect or alter behavior. Or more fundamentally admit they have anything to reflect on or alter. The very starting point of conflict resolution therefore is muted.

Yes, I agree. But when the situation is at abuse acceptance level, then we are beyond that. I brought entitlement because absent that, it is possible to directly say to aspie that this or that crosses the line. We are not talking about making him not awkward, just not abusive.

At that point not just aspie failed to listen, but also neurotypical people around failed to protect whoever is victim of that abuse and set proper boundaries.

At the abuse level, improvement should not be dependent at the self reflection of the one doing the abuse.

An ancient torture method was small water dripping on the forehead.

Persistent small events over time can be abuse.

The small drips are possible only because victim is tied and unable to move of shield head. A water dripping in the same room is not torture assuming you have option to move own head or put hat on it.

So it is pretty good analogy. When people both peraon with asperger and working with one having asperger can talk back, reorganize work tasks, move tables, prevent the one having asperger from doing juniors code reviews, torture don't have to happen.

It is when having asperger is treated as license to abuse or sign of "being the one that is more logical/technical and therefore right" when it becomes abuse acceptance. It is the "he has asperger therefore it is ok for him to do it and you have to be subjected to that" that makes it so.

The problem is that if you are aspie not being awkward and rude takes 100% of your brain for conscious analysis, whereas for neurotyoical people it’s the opposite it takes a conscious decision to be rude. So it’s impossible for an aspie to change permanently while working.

Which totally explains why some teams dont want them.

This is a pretty important thing for neurotypicals to understand.

Socially, having Asperger's is an uphill battle. When I'm around people, I spend about 75% of my cognitive ability trying to appear to not have Asperger's. I've gotten pretty good at it. Great! One problem: whenever I slip up, it comes across as unbelievably rude. Probably worse than if I were just a "weirdo."

The right answer is a combination of people who are forgiving, but also a work environment that doesn't require constant socializing. That way I can minimize the negative mental health impacts I have on my peers that are a natural byproduct of my existence.

But asking someone with Asperger's to be "less rude" is like watching a short guy struggle to reach a high shelf and then telling him to just be taller.

Well, that's why the "reasonable accommodation" standard exists in the U.S. Simply demandimg all of his colleagues to passively accept speech and behavior that is rude, abusive, or caustic to team building, or paying monthly consultants come in to analyze the new work frictions and host workshops isn't likely going to pass muster. These people need and should get help, but they aren't entitled to a workplace that disproportionately revolves around their quirks.

There are many jobs that require certain mental characteristics to be employable. A person can't be acrophobic and work as a high-rise construction worker.

> Weird may be a simple emotional feeling people get because they sense you will mistreat them. (likely based on previous experience) What I have found dealing with people that are Aspie/ADD (father and brother) is they expect others to change behavior to adapt to themselves, but refuse to change their own behavior to adapt to others. (even when directly told their behavior is not acceptable)

I would say the exact same thing applies to the neurotypicals but they are completely oblivious because it is "normal". I have no doubt that if proportions of population were reversed being neurotypical would have its own syndrome.

Do something that better coping autistic people do and apply empathy manually and look at it from their perspective.

They flip out at violations of the most trivial norms and exclude over irrelevancies without a thought to the feelings of others.

Accepting the abuse is the standard "desired outcome" for those with autism. They are often accused of lacking empathy by people who do things like depict an autistic child as a puppet and considered only a burden.

Having empathy goes both ways. If one party has empathy and the other does not, it makes the relationship difficult.

If 'difficult' is the cut off point for a working relationship for a person, team or business, then that is ok. There are plenty of working environments where difficult relationships can work. But certainly not all of them.

That is completely lacking in selfawareness, showing no empathy while insisting others lack it while giving only a weak rationalization furiously insisted upon. That is peak neurotypical denying that /they/ are the problem because that is impossible - they're the "normal" ones.

I will concede that everyone _can_ lack empathy at times. But "normal" people (if that is the phrase you prefer) don't lack empathy towards everyone at all times.

It's almost as if an inability to just "change" their behaviour is a part of being on the spectrum, or something...

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