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Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

“Autistic”, “we” - how the author can speak for everyone if there is no one single diagnosis. There is an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and people might have very, very different symptoms. He even mentions it, but still posts his own impressions to explain what feels and thinks every ASD person.

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You're right that there is a lot of differences in how autism expresses itself, but I would just add a counter-opinion that it is quite refreshing when people are confident to express a view on a topic like this and not adding "maybe", "sometimes", "with certain people" to every sentence. This does however require the reader to digest the content as anecdote and not fact.

I am in the process of getting diagnosed and I relate very much to wanting to understand the reason for things before doing them, and will only respect competence and good personality traits, not authority.

".. will only respect competence and good personality traits, not authority."

Thanks for this phrasing. Very much same here, I guess. For me, the added emphasis is really important, though. I tend to feel deep distrust towards competent people without good personality traits.

Even though... thinking about it (when they're not around!), I almost always conclude that they probably cant help being arrogant. It seems to be a generic lack of empathy of some sort. But I still tend to avoid them.

Demonstrating competence requires the ability to discuss and explain decisions. Otherwise someone's actions are indistinguishable from them following a simple flowchart or even a broken clock. So I'd say that arrogance is essentially directly opposed to competence. This however doesn't stop many people (techies included) from using arrogance or other bullshittery as a substitute for demonstrating competence, which seemingly fools enough people due to the authoritarian dynamic described in the original post.

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