“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
The interesting thing to me is that the statement &quot;autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong&quot; actually holds some truth in my experience, but it&#x27;s not from some flaw of character, but the result of the more underlying issue &quot;autistic people can’t endure to accept or reason with statements they don&#x27;t see as bivalent true&quot;.<p>For people on the spectrum fuzzy, hypothetical, conjectured, and underspecified statements are physically painful.
Bad when uttered by others, hence the need to correct them, unbearable when forced to reason with or produce them oneself.<p>I&#x27;m aware that people on the spectrum have a really hard time doing this, but viewing the points from the others viewpoint is still illustrative.<p>1. The allistic (non-autistic) person is not hearing what I&#x27;m saying.<p>They are hearing, but they didn&#x27;t come for a perfect lecture&#x2F;monologue with the beauty of a mathematical proof, they came for a conversation where truth crystallises from the exchange of half truths and fuzzy concepts.<p>When they come to you with a question on X, they don&#x27;t come for your train of thought about X, every fact you&#x27;ve accumulated on X and every bit of reasoning tangential to X, showing the full validity and self consistency of X.<p>They need a conversation where they pose a vague question, get a vague reply with follow-up questions, to which they provide more information, and so on and so forth, until the concepts are crips and bivalent truth can be attained.<p>Because they do a top down breadth first fuzzy search their brain starts filtering out the very information that your brain deems essential to bottom up depth first process of establishing truth.
So while you create &quot;context&quot; they are just zoning out, making affirmative noises and nods for you to continue, and hope that you&#x27;ll eventually divulge information relevant to what they came for.<p>2. I need to ask questions before forming an opinion.<p>The issue is very similar to 1. People don&#x27;t come to you in need of a solution, with all conclusions laid out and wrapped up.
They might have their own half-finished ideas and opinions that they are in the process of forming, and they are coming to you asking a question to form that opinion. You then attempting to form the same opinion by asking more questions just creates a deadlock.<p>The conversation could have gone like this:<p>&quot;No, that would be way to expensive.&quot; - &quot;Ok thanks, then nevermind.&quot;<p>&quot;We could, but isn&#x27;t our current website fast enough?&quot; - &quot;Yeah, but we were hoping to attract some additional talent by incorporating interesting technology into our product.&quot;<p>&quot;I guess, but why?&quot; - &quot;I&#x27;ve heard a lot of things about React lately and am not sure what to think of it, but if it&#x27;s potentially usable for us I should look up on it a bit more.&quot;<p>But that requires acceptance that no opinion or truth might be formed at all.<p>3. I care more about doing good work than office politics.<p>Heres the bummer for people on the spectrum, the world is not made of platonic logic, there are sometimes no rights or wrongs, even with Bayesian reasoning given two different priors the same observation can move those priors in contradictory directions.
The world is fuzzy, half truths are everywhere and sometimes a tiebreaker is needed, or the answer to a question is not worth exploring. 
Giving in acknowledges these simple property of math and the universe, but for a person on the spectrum this is like acknowledging a Lovecraftian horror:<p>“The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”<p>4. The person underestimates how much I know about the topic.<p>While people in IT have a general tendency to underestimate others, I&#x27;m certain that a lot of them do know. It&#x27;s just a combination of 1. and 3. They don&#x27;t require the convex knowledge hull of the topic, because either <i>they</i> know already, because it&#x27;s not relevant, or because there is no clear cut answer. Sometimes they know that their position is a gross oversimplification, or that their metaphor is actually contradictory, but it helps them think in the context of their self inconsistent reasoning process which, unlike classical logic, might actually come to valid conclusions from inconsistent assumptions.<p>The take away from this is that I can probably help myself and my spectrum colleagues by writing questions and requests more appropriate to them, with clearer mental paths, more crisp concepts, preferably by e-mail with a very explicit description of what response I need. Maybe I should also use the phrase &quot;humor me&quot; a lot more to acknowledge that what I&#x27;m asking is inconsistent and doesn&#x27;t necessarily make sense from their perspective.<p>I&#x27;d hope that the author would take away from this, that they don&#x27;t have to be factually wrong in order to respond in the wrong way. Sometimes giving in and kindness just means having the same non-judgmental understanding for the needs and thought patterns of others, that they expect for themselves.<p>Edit:<p>There&#x27;s actually research that quantifies this
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0028393208004508?via=ihub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S00283...</a>