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Comment by konjin | Hacker News Reader

So you want no one autistic to ever be in a position of leadership?

Not every autistic person is an asshole

but every person that falsely accuse an autistic of something he hasn't done, is.

Indeed autism poses a challenge for a person in a leadership position. One facet of autism is difficulty in certain social interactions and that difficulty can cause real harm to people. You shouldn't prejudge a person because of a diagnosis, nor should you pre-acquit.

You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things.

>You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things.

I find it astonishing that blatant abelism like yours is acceptable in polite society.

>You can embrace acceptance that genders are different and realize that differences make some genders better and worse for certain things.

>You can embrace acceptance that races are different and realize that differences make some races better and worse for certain things.

I thought that the parent post was diplomatic and well hedged, given the sensitivity of the subject material: "one facet [...] certain interactions [...] can cause [...]." Furthermore, the thesis that biology affects fitness is well established and is indeed essential to the process of evolution. Nature cannot be discounted, but, as I think you intend to emphasize, it's not the end of the discussion when humans can do so much at the application layer.

> [...] acceptance that genders are different [...]

Males are going to have a hard time being wet nurses.

> [...] races are different [...]

The San and Inuit people have some very useful adaptations for their respective extreme environments.

It's kind of challenging to take sweeping offense to a statement phrased using an existential quantifier.

Is it ableist to suggest that blind people don't make good air traffic controllers, that paralysed people don't make the best bicycle couriers or that a deaf person is perhaps not a suitable music critic? Everyone works within the limitations of our abilities, and some people are dealt difficult hands - but reality doesn't care about your feelings.

The key to not discriminating based on ability is to be sure you are endeavoring to enable a person to do something to the best of their abilities and not insisting that the only people allowed to do something are those who are best suited for it. But there is a separation between "not an ideal candidate for this job" and "not reasonably able to do this job".

Indeed, sometimes the person with the disability can be better at the job because of what they have learned in an effort to overcome - this is why you don't just slap a label on a person and declare them unfit because they match a description.

Being tolerant, respecting differences, however you want to put it does not mean being blind to outcomes.

People sometimes don't get this.

You should try to convince people Beethoven's music sucks because he was deaf. There's really no reason a deaf person can't be great with music.

Irrelevant to the topic, but he only went deaf at the end of his life.

I believe it is a reasonable assumption that someone would have a hard time composing music if he/she were born deaf.

The context isn't an autistic person being great at people but getting sidelined for the label of autistic so Beethoven seems a bit irrelevant.

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