What prevents one with (mid/high-functioning) Autism Spectrum Disorder from being accustomed to nuance and ambiguity?

[Zero Day Defense]

For example, they may not understand ambiguous instructions the likes of "take a few of those things", but everyone at some point faces these kinds of ambiguities, and most can learn from them and apply them in the future. What causes those with ASD to struggle in that learning process, and what distinguishes said difficulty with that of those without ASD? Alternatively, how is such a struggle best understood?

 

[Grub]

>What prevents one with (mid/high-functioning) Autism Spectrum Disorder from being accustomed to nuance and ambiguity?

Being autistic.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

Say there are five oranges and you say "get a few" and they will think endlessly about what will happen if they bring you between two and four of them, their brain will then go on a tangent about the definition of few and from there a tangent of if you actually ment "few" and then a tangent of if you wanted all or one you would have specified that

What stops them from settling on a definition for "a few" to generally observe?

oh and next to the oranges are ten screws, did you mean you wanted a few of those screws rather than the oranges and if so how many should I take?

I suppose there's a context that a non-autistic person could seize upon to intuitively understand whether it was screws or oranges that were being requested, but it would be understandable if they became confused about the request given these circumstances.

Then the autist has to decide why you wanted them to take either the screws or the oranges and what you possibly could want them to do with the objects

Do autists generally not have a sense of "what does it concern me" or otherwise a means to guess based on context in the absence of a proper explanation of an innocuous request?

 

[Positron]

Anime.

 

[Lurk McDurk]

Can confirm, you nailed it on the head. Especially the "no soul" part. I exist to make others seethe, it's a past-time of mine.

Our brains are wired differently, we are just more literal than others. It's actually taken me years to figure out how to understand the nuance behind words, and differentiate figurative speech and literal speech. It's something that takes us longer to learn, but we can still learn it.

Think of us is genies. Or fairies. You get three wishes, and you have to be very specific with how you word those wishes, because if not, you don't get what you want.

Well I got bad news for you, all these dipshit normies are precisely 0% different. I can count the number of people I see during my daily doom scroll who are capable of reading between any two lines on about two or three fingers on any given day.

 

[awoo]

HFA can just learn to recognize literary patterns or just memorize them. I am probably borderline autistic and I am telling you you can just memorize reasonable behaviors well enough to work in like 99% of situations. It is like playing a pattern recognition game.

 

[Wright]

Can confirm, you nailed it on the head. Especially the "no soul" part. I exist to make others seethe, it's a past-time of mine.

Our brains are wired differently, we are just more literal than others. It's actually taken me years to figure out how to understand the nuance behind words, and differentiate figurative speech and literal speech. It's something that takes us longer to learn, but we can still learn it.

Think of us is genies. Or fairies. You get three wishes, and you have to be very specific with how you word those wishes, because if not, you don't get what you want.

I think you might just be a plain idiot.

 

[glass_houses]

Okay, let me put it this way:

The neurotypical brain is a forest. The autistic brain is a mountain range.

In order to learn something, the NT must make a path in their brain. They have to pick their way through the trees, maybe even chop a few down. They can go around tree trunks, they can duck through branches, they can worm their way through the undergrowth. They need to make a path to learn something new but their path is a flexible, organic one. It can be changed, they can take detours, it can be infinitely expanded, hell, maybe even rerouted entirely. This is because their brain is malleable and flexible, like a forest. Thoughts and memories are like animals making tunnels through the undergrowth.

The autistic brain, on the other hand, is made of stone and it's mountain shaped. To form a neural pathway, a new routine, a habit, they have to dig a passage through the mountain, one agonising swing of the pick axe after the other, and it can take years. This is why autistics often have a 'thing' that they obsess over and are sometimes very good at; it's a passage that they've carved out of the rock that they're very comfortable traversing. Carving a passage out of stone is incredibly hard work, and unlike the forest, the path is not flexible at its edges. Up is rock, sideways is rock, down is rock. You've two options, forward and back. To learn a new thing takes a long time and ambiguities really fuck the whole process up.

So you have the NT with their forest brain, and you have the autistic with their mountain range brain. Does that make any sense to you?

 

[Transniglet]

reddit and social media prevent them from being accustomed to nuance and ambiguity

 

[Apochrypha]

The biggest tell for high functioning autism now is when people try too hard to be sarcastic.

The diagnostic criteria for autism state that autistic children often are "unable to recognize sarcasm and jokes", and a bunch of well-meaning psychiatrists taught the high functioning ones to mask by using super cringe-inducing sarcasm and inappropriate, unfunny jokes. So they infiltrate a social circle with their cringe humor and then *batman voice* nobody knows I'm autistic. Newsflash, everyone knew.

I've had experience with this as well. It's almost like being in an "uncanney valley" of normalcy. You try your best to mask it, but if someone were to interact with you on a day-to-day basis they'd probably catch on.

 

[Retired Junta Member]

Strictly technically speaking, we don’t know exactly why people on the spectrum are the way they are.
Autism’s causes and origins are still mostly unclear.

 

[dreamworks face]

Okay, let me put it this way:

The neurotypical brain is a forest. The autistic brain is a mountain range.

In order to learn something, the NT must make a path in their brain. They have to pick their way through the trees, maybe even chop a few down. They can go around tree trunks, they can duck through branches, they can worm their way through the undergrowth. They need to make a path to learn something new but their path is a flexible, organic one. It can be changed, they can take detours, it can be infinitely expanded, hell, maybe even rerouted entirely. This is because their brain is malleable and flexible, like a forest. Thoughts and memories are like animals making tunnels through the undergrowth.

The autistic brain, on the other hand, is made of stone and it's mountain shaped. To form a neural pathway, a new routine, a habit, they have to dig a passage through the mountain, one agonising swing of the pick axe after the other, and it can take years. This is why autistics often have a 'thing' that they obsess over and are sometimes very good at; it's a passage that they've carved out of the rock that they're very comfortable traversing. Carving a passage out of stone is incredibly hard work, and unlike the forest, the path is not flexible at its edges. Up is rock, sideways is rock, down is rock. You've two options, forward and back. To learn a new thing takes a long time and ambiguities really fuck the whole process up.

So you have the NT with their forest brain, and you have the autistic with their mountain range brain. Does that make any sense to you?

This is giving the NT way too much credit. Most autistics are morons, but watching your average neurotypical trying to learn something new is like trying to gaze into the abyss. Neurotypicals clog up internet forums like stackoverflow with their inane questions about problems that have no reproduction steps or any useful details at all, almost as if they didn't spend six hours reading about smart pointer semantics or safe string operators or 1i8n caveats on the internet in their free time and actually had lives. The neurotypical looks at an electric outlet and thinks "why the fuck do we have hundreds of different kinds of electric outlets all that are incompatible with each other" whereas the autist sees a problem solved hundreds of different ways, all without without having to interact with other people. Meanwhile, NT clog HR and come up with terrible ideas like "trust exercises in the workspace" and "political correctness."

 

[awoo]

Okay, let me put it this way:

The neurotypical brain is a forest. The autistic brain is a mountain range.

In order to learn something, the NT must make a path in their brain. They have to pick their way through the trees, maybe even chop a few down. They can go around tree trunks, they can duck through branches, they can worm their way through the undergrowth. They need to make a path to learn something new but their path is a flexible, organic one. It can be changed, they can take detours, it can be infinitely expanded, hell, maybe even rerouted entirely. This is because their brain is malleable and flexible, like a forest. Thoughts and memories are like animals making tunnels through the undergrowth.

The autistic brain, on the other hand, is made of stone and it's mountain shaped. To form a neural pathway, a new routine, a habit, they have to dig a passage through the mountain, one agonising swing of the pick axe after the other, and it can take years. This is why autistics often have a 'thing' that they obsess over and are sometimes very good at; it's a passage that they've carved out of the rock that they're very comfortable traversing. Carving a passage out of stone is incredibly hard work, and unlike the forest, the path is not flexible at its edges. Up is rock, sideways is rock, down is rock. You've two options, forward and back. To learn a new thing takes a long time and ambiguities really fuck the whole process up.

So you have the NT with their forest brain, and you have the autistic with their mountain range brain. Does that make any sense to you?

idk if that analogy really holds. I think it's more like autistic brains are analytical and algorithmic while non autists are more intuitive and naturally social?

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

What stops them from settling on a definition for "a few" to generally observe?

Because for them there is no "general", every situation needs to be individually evaluated.

 

[Crunchy Oats]

Tell your dad I said hi.

Haha, I haven't lived with him for 10 years, but he's a little more than autistic; more along the lines of schizoid or something.

 

[mario if smoke weed]

Autistic people are like computers. Using very specific language you can teach them to do one particular task and they can even do very well at it, but if any problem does not exactly fit what they have been programmed to do they will shit themselves and do nothing. They can't give you "a few" things because that input expects an integer and you gave them a string. This happens because like computers, autists have no soul.

They also have random-access humor.