RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (Full Version)

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Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 9:29:08 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

I was this absolute when I was younger. However, as I've aged, I've come to the conclusion that all moral decisions are situational. For each of the wrongs you list, I can construct a situation in which I would take that action, do so willingly and without hesitation.


~nod~

I underwent some rapid transitions, starting in my teens, following pretty much the standard pattern outlined in Kohlberg's model, going from "stage" 4 to "stage" 6, and from moral absolutism to moral relativism, in a few years. Later, I changed to a different system, which may or may not be a subset of "stage" 6, which I have remained at.

quote:

Mine has a logic loop too. If I would do it, then I can't allow myself to conclude that it is "wrong". That's part of how I, personally, deal with shame and guilt.


Shame and guilt are redundant.
Morals are an optimization problem.
And some things will happen, regardless.
Harmonious morals account for these issues.
Or, at least, that is my view, and how mine work.
If morals prevent life and happiness, they are unnatural.
If they do not accord the same to others, they are destructive.
Neither works for me, so I devised a middle path that satisfies both.
On a more local scale, though, compassion could probably replace morals.
Of course, that doesn't work when I am ceaselessly thinking about non-local things.
Hence, I stick to the harmonious middle path, with a fine-grained rigid system of morals.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 9:49:01 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

This isn't strictly true. In the DSM-IV, aspergers is listed as a type of autism. And adult aspies generally consider themseives to be autistic or autists.


As I recall, it is listed as a pervasive developmental disorder on the autism spectrum, which is different from being listed as a form of autism. (Did you know autism pretty much means "I-ism" or "selfishness", depending on how you interpret it, by the way? Not very flattering.) Properly, you could say that Kanner's Syndrome and Asperger's Syndrome, along with Rett's and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, are the Autism Spectrum Disorders, and joined by Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

As for adult aspies considering themselves autists or autistic, that varies a lot from community to community. Considering oneself autistic seems more common than considering oneself an autist. Both are rare in my circles, at least. YMMV.

quote:

And parents of autistic children are often quick to point that out that since adult aspies CAN speak coherently, they are clearly in a different kettle of fish than their children, who cannot.


~nod~

Though, some of these actually could not, when they themselves were children.

quote:

They often use the aspergers/autism division to describe that difference, although it's a misnomer by DSM standards.


If you look at the kids originally studied, Kanner and Asperger worked with different populations, although there was some overlap. Both ended up putting them all in the same category, while in truth, there is a difference. Yes, the two are quite similar, but there are still differences. Language development is just one of them.

quote:

That aspergers is typically a form of HFA is not a minority opinion at all, but essentially a consensus of both autistic people and professionals.


Perhaps a North-American consensus, then. Around here, the consensus is different. Also, WP specifically lists it as a minority opinion, which may not carry all that much weight, except that WP, by its nature, has consensus content. Kind of how the Google test doesn't prove notability, but gives a pretty good indication.

Back when I wondered if I might be an aspie, I lurked in some aspie communities, and there did not appear to be a consensus that Asperger's is the same as HFA. This may have changed, but from what I have read, it appears to be more a matter of diagnoses being increasingly conflated. The foremost researcher on it up here, who was the one that noted I would be better served by a PDD-NOS label, was very explicit that some things that work well with HFA does not work well with Asperger's, and vice versa.

quote:

There's a good overview on this in wikipedia, as I recall.


"Good" is not how I would describe most articles on WP, particularly those in the psychiatric fields, though they often do closely represent a consensus, which (as BDSM people should know) does not translate to an accurate picture of reality. That said, the WP articles on the topic have a few gold nuggets, but they are not giving a balanced view, IMHO.

quote:

The language distinction is one of the bogus requirements. This has essentially been discarded now with respect to adults because this history is generally not available for them.


Quite possibly. With children, though, it remains a criterion. And most aspies I know, including adult aspies, had no clinically significant delays in language development, while most autists I know, including adults, did have such delays. Both groups, however, had delays in communication, and some parts of communication are never learned, mostly because nobody teaches it (as you say, the bit about osmosis vs formal instruction).

Interesting to see where it's headed, in any case.



CitizenCane -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:01:59 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

quote:

ORIGINAL: CitizenCane

I think we're in pretty solid agreement, although I actually make an effort to be less precise than you about many things.


Solid agreement? I think I lost another cherry. [sm=biggrin.gif]
(Please pardon the language, and the coarseness of the joke, I'm feeling a bit bubbly today.)

Could you elaborate on the bit about making an effort to be less precise?
I do try to avoid excessive precision sometimes, but I'd like to compare notes.




No pardon needed.  As for avoiding excessive precision, it's just something that obviously irks a lot of people and isn't usually required, so I try to start off 'softer' until circumstances show that precision is actually needed.  I also actually enjoy the process of conversation, and short exchanges to clarify brief statements are usually more socially acceptable than a single, long, clear statement, even though that might be net shorter and more efficient.  For my own part, being pretty quick on the up-take and reasonably well informed, it chafes my butt when I have to listen to someone tell me things I already know at great length, so I try not to inflict this on others. For me, it's usually more efficient if someones gives me the gist and lets me ask about anything I don't quite get, or need more info about, but I've found that most people, NT or AS, tend to go on and on about the obvious when it's something that concerns them personally.  Similarly, most people have a hard time believing that anyone else knows anything that they themselves haven't told them. In fact, much of my own social friction has come from belieiving that people know more and can think more clearly than is generally the case, but I still prefer to err on the side of concision.  Probably an emotional decision- I'd rather be seen as cryptic than boring.  Probably many people hold both impressions of me at once, but you can't please everyone.



teamnoir -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:19:24 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad
Related, when me and nephandi see people, we sometimes point out to each other things like people whose body dynamics indicate a specific kind of martial art. When an NT friend of ours, with longer MA experience than ourselves, is with us, he doesn't spot it without help, and it takes him longer to analyze.


I have a similar experience. Mine is a v/k synaesthesia of something that I usually refer to as "grace". The walkers in the last star wars movie weren't believable because their sense of motion and balance was off to the laws of physics. It's a problem in most visual animation, although with the body tracking computer stuff, it's getting better.

I can also often peg gymnasts, dancers, and former gymnasts and dancers. And sometimes musicians.

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quote:

But I can learn it. And that counters the "deaf" analogy.


In theory, yes. In practice, no.

In practice, it's more like your deafness has spontaneously remitted. See, you can learn it, yes. As can most aspies. But until and unless someone teaches them, they well and truly are deaf. It's like putting wax buds in someone's ears while they are a baby. For all practical purposes, they are deaf until someone removes the wax buds.


I find this statement offensive for two reasons. First, you are suggesting, rather strongly, that I cannot learn these skills. And I've just told you that I can. Which means that you're calling me a liar, about my own experience.

Secondly, your terminology suggests that aspies are incapable of helping themselves. This is also patently false as I've just explained and for similar reasons. I can initiate this "wax removal" process. The entire wax analogy is a bad one because we're not talking about a magic bullet here, no pill to cure autism, no wave of a magic wand, but rather the development of skills which can exist at any number of levels.

Yes, it requires work and it requires effort. It requires these things for NT's also and it almost certainly requires more work and effort for aspies than it does for NT's. (I've never been NT and I can't think of any objective way to measure this so I can't be sure). Even though it requires work, it is possible. And the choice to decline that work is a choice available to aspies. Aspies who decline to put in the effort are making a choice.

Granted, the amount of effort is also going to vary by person. And I don't blame some people for deciding that it's too much effort. But that is still their choice to make.

The "deafness" analogy suggests that this choice is out of our hands and disempowers us. In that way it is both false and misguided. I am not deaf. I can learn and I have learned these skills. Other aspies can learn them too.

If you insist on an audio analogy, then a more apt analogy would be one of distinction. I learned long ago how to distinguish the various instruments I was hearing in an audio recording. My father, my music teachers, all participated in that learning process. And I'm pretty good at it today. OTOH, most people, NT, AS, or otherwise, aren't. They typically hear lyrics, though, and I do not. These are learned skills.

Beer, or coffee, tend to taste bad to people when they first try them. Both are, I believe, learned tastes. And I have learned them.

I've taken wine tasting classes. I've learned some of the language for describing the experience of wine. I've spent time comparing my experience with that of others and with people who have significant amounts of experience tasting and describing the experience of wine. I've learned to make some modest distinctions - far more distinctions than most people would make with respect to fermented grape juice. But I've learned some of them. This ability to discriminate is a skill and it's a skill which is learned and developed over time.

Learning to distinguish and discriminate nonverbal cues is a skill. NT's learn it primarily subconsciously and primarily when they are younger. Aspies often lack much of this learning and/or socialization. It's not that we're incapable, though. It's only that we need to learn it differently than most NT's do.

Please stop describing me as less capable than I am. You aren't doing me any favors there. I already fight my own tendency to drift into thinking that my AS is terminal, that my situation is hopeless, and that I've reached a plateau beyond which I'll never pass. I fight this fatalism regularly. I don't need to fight you about it to. If you want to support aspies, then take up this new banner. Here it is again: Aspies are capable of learning to interpret nonverbal signals - we simply need to learn them in a different way than most NT's did. This is a more encouraging, supportive, and empowering frame of reference.

quote:

Deaf is an apt analogy, because one has grown up without any notion of what the "missing sense" can convey, and without building anything on top of that "sensory" input. When you suddenly start to get that input, because someone has taught you, there is already a lot of stuff "missing". Things that you would have built on top of the "social sense" from childhood, if you had been completely taught early on.


We're not missing this sense. The "sense" isn't physical. It's a complex equivalence composed of physical neurological input. The "sense" you speak of is an abstraction of those inputs. And we do have abstractions, even of those inputs.

Remember the monkey analogy we've been hearing so much about in this thread? Even the monkey analogy ascribes meaning to HUMAN behavior. It ascribes the meaning of power dynamics, pointless motion, and unnecessarily pointless frivolity, but it ascribes meaning to what the author portrays as scratches and grunts. Even describing human behavior in terms of scratches and grunts is a form of deriving abstract meaning from human behavior.

What we typically lack is the socially agreed upon lexicon of idioms.

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I would very much like to see what an adult aspie would be like if, as a child, s/he had been diagnosed using the eye-following test, and taught to notice all these little clues by someone who understands both sides of the divide pretty well. I suspect there would be major differences.


They're all over the aspergers forums. The children who were toddlers or early elementary school age in 1994 are now driving cars, voting, attending college, and becoming doctors. They aren't hard to find at all.

quote:


From the aspie mindset (strict), it counters the deaf analogy.
From the NT mindset (looser), it does not.
And aspies are explaining to NTs here.
Hence, the analogy is apt.


Please stop marginalizing my opinion because I'm an aspie. My opinion isn't worth less in this context. I'm just as capable of recognizing and speaking to both mind sets as you are and my opinion is just as valid. This is a human issue and a human perspective.

The deafness analogy has some minor value, I agree, but it's value is extremely limited and comes at a high cost. The cost is disempowerment and being misleading. There are analogies available which are even more illuminating, are empowering rather than disempowering, and which are far more apt.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:21:06 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

And I can assure you that the percentage of aspies here is significantly higher than it is in other parts of the country.


I did not dispute "higher" (relative). I disputed "very high" (absolute).

quote:

I can also assure you that the companies I work with and for typically contain 30-80% aspies or people I suspect of being aspies.


It depends on where you draw the line, to some extent. However, I can't comment on those people, or the companies you work for, since I neither live in that area, nor work in those companies, nor know those people. I will say that the good software engineers and such that I know are pretty universally either aspie-like or ADD-like.

There is some element of common aetiology there, and I think pulling out the aspie label is premature for people that are in the "suspected aspies" category, because those are usually close enough to NT that it is hard to differentiate Asperger's from ADD and PDD-NOS.

Perhaps we can agree that the percentage of people who are "aspie enough" to have clinically relevant problems isn't "very high" in terms of percentage of the local population, although it is "higher" than elsewhere?

quote:

Those of us who are different recognized each other long before aspergers hit the DSM.


~nod~

But I'd point out that there are three different recognition models involved. There is the instinctive "same-species" (if you will) recognition that pegs someone as an aspie. There is the conversational "same mental structure" recognition that pegs someone as either an aspie, an ADD'er, or a PDD-NOS'er. And there is the mostly conversational "same awareness" recognition that pegs someone as having had the "benefit" of being stuck on the outside of the NT in-group for a long time, typically due to mental illness (e.g. depression) or a different wiring. These three should not, IMO, be grouped as one, even though they all share some features (including long-term dopaminergic anomalies).

quote:

When I was in college, we simply talked about the engineers vs the people who were just there learning engineering to use as a 9 - 5 job.


~nod~

I've met people who have a degree in engineering, and people who are engineers. The difference is distinct. It is also not uniformly tied to aspies. However, I will gladly cede that I have not found any NT engineers yet, only many NT people with a degree and/or job in the engineering field who could advantageously have been replaced with actual engineers.

It shows up in everything they do.

Take fire, for instance. I've seen "engineers" fail to light a regular charcoal barbecue due to wind or whatever. And I've seen engineers burn wet garden rubbish (sorry, don't know the right word, and "compost" doesn't quite fit; English is a second language for me) while it was raining, with little more than a dry newspaper to start the fire. In the end, we were rid of the mass, and had cracked rock tiles and bent metal with the heat. (I will say nothing of the amount of smoke released by burning things that way, though.)

Engineers come up with the idea of picking apart a teacher's car and reassembling it inside a classroom, and manage to pull it off without anyone noticing. Regardless of whether they think it's funny, or acceptable, engineers also admire the feat, if nothing else. "Engineers", however, spend the year complaining that something is broken in their classroom, despite being at a school with full facilities for pretty much building the entire school and everything in it ground-up.

quote:

Ironically, when I started talking with an older coworker about it recently, that was his take as well. He said, "Oh, but all the good engineers are like that." And I had to defend the NT engineers.


I'd like to hear the defense at some point in time.

In my experience, most of those tend to make extra work for the others, though I have found some that can work well with the others, or can learn from the others. I have yet to be at a company with any significant number of employees where I could not honestly say that a significant percentage could stop coming to work without negatively impacting profits.

Of course, I could just have seen a bad selection so far.

quote:

We also have a significantly higher rate of autism in the local children than most areas of the country have. Autistics breeding with autistics produce more and even more strongly affected autistics. It's one of the anecdotal data points for the heredity of autism.


~nod~

Estimates vary, but the one me and nephandi were given, was that we'd have a 70% chance of getting a moderately to severely autistic child, and similarly discouraging percentages for a lot of comorbidities. My readings tend to support those figures. We're both looking for docs that don't see the eugenics spectre when asked about a tube-tying and vasectomy. Those are unfortunately rare around here.

quote:

Recent aspergers experts also claim that roughly 95% of self identified aspies really are AS.


Interesting. That is a lot higher accuracy than most professionals have in making the diagnosis.

quote:

Yes, there are people who attempt to claim AS as a causal agent, ("It wasn't me, it was my AS what dun it"), but this is a pretty transparent ruse used by people of all neurotypes. I've heard it used at least once on this thread already.


That's one of the differences I've observed between aspies and NTs. The NTs who claim AS, use it as an excuse. The aspies offer it as an explanation for something. Subtle distinction, but relevant IMO.

Reminds me of being back in school.

The teacher would ask "why did XYZ", and I would explain as I was asked to. Then the teacher would get mad, and go rambling about how there were no excuses. I never did quite manage to explain to them that I don't know what they mean by "excuse", that I was answering their question as directed, and that I was merely offering them the facts, not trying to disavow responsibility or claim that I had not failed at avoiding XYZ.

Very NT thing to ask why something went wrong, when they're really not interested in knowing.

I'd be a lot happier if people just stuck with "you fucked up, you POS bastard!"  [:D]



teamnoir -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:35:21 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad
quote:

That aspergers is typically a form of HFA is not a minority opinion at all, but essentially a consensus of both autistic people and professionals.


Perhaps a North-American consensus, then. Around here, the consensus is different. Also, WP specifically lists it as a minority opinion, which may not carry all that much weight, except that WP, by its nature, has consensus content. Kind of how the Google test doesn't prove notability, but gives a pretty good indication.

Back when I wondered if I might be an aspie, I lurked in some aspie communities, and there did not appear to be a consensus that Asperger's is the same as HFA. This may have changed, but from what I have read, it appears to be more a matter of diagnoses being increasingly conflated. The foremost researcher on it up here, who was the one that noted I would be better served by a PDD-NOS label, was very explicit that some things that work well with HFA does not work well with Asperger's, and vice versa.


HFA is not a medically precise term. It's not a DSM-IV diagnostic tool. There is no clear nor consensus definition for the term. My understanding of the term is simply "autistic yet functional" as distinct from "disabled due to autism". In the model where aspergers is a form of autism, people who are functional with aspergers would qualify as HFA. While not true of all AS folks, it is true of most of them. And the portion of the AS population for whom it is true is growing constantly as this population begins to recognize itself as autistic. This is essentially a new movement as there hasn't been any medical need to do so previously.

quote:

quote:

There's a good overview on this in wikipedia, as I recall.


"Good" is not how I would describe most articles on WP, particularly those in the psychiatric fields, though they often do closely represent a consensus, which (as BDSM people should know) does not translate to an accurate picture of reality. That said, the WP articles on the topic have a few gold nuggets, but they are not giving a balanced view, IMHO.


I've actually found wikipedia to be a remarkably balanced perspective on most of the things I've looked up there. I also find it invaluable that the degree of consensus is essentially portrayed along with the entry.

quote:

quote:

The language distinction is one of the bogus requirements. This has essentially been discarded now with respect to adults because this history is generally not available for them.


Quite possibly. With children, though, it remains a criterion. And most aspies I know, including adult aspies, had no clinically significant delays in language development, while most autists I know, including adults, did have such delays. Both groups, however, had delays in communication, and some parts of communication are never learned, mostly because nobody teaches it (as you say, the bit about osmosis vs formal instruction)


You must be either from a very different culture than I am or considerably younger than I am. Most of the people my age in my culture don't have that information available. The simple fact that no one recognized subtle delays back then means that even if such delays were present, they would have needed to be particularly aggregious to have even been noticed, much less recorded or remembered.

Rather, a more common experience among adult aspies is that of having been either hospitalized for emotional difficulties or been through the justice system for socially inappropriate behavior as a child. Neither of these are part of the DSM diagnostic criterion and the stories I've heard all represent considerably more pervasive and more redical impairment than what I've experienced.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:45:21 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: CitizenCane

As for avoiding excessive precision, it's just something that obviously irks a lot of people and isn't usually required, so I try to start off 'softer' until circumstances show that precision is actually needed.


Ah, yes. I do that in my professional life. [:D]

Basically, with friends, I try to stick to the level of precision that appears convenient, but I pick friends that I'm comfortable with, and that I can be myself around. She does pretty much the same thing. That makes for slow going in making friends, but it also means you get to keep the ones you find for life. By now, we have enough to be fairly comfortable with it.

Around others, I try to stick with what will pass the buck back to the other person as soon as possible without costing me a lot of time fixing a misunderstanding that could have been avoided with a tiny bit of extra precision in the first place. I do have to be more verbose for it, sometimes, though, as NTs do not appear to be quite as aware of the content-wise subtleties of language, even if they are hyperaware of response-wise subtleties.

quote:

I also actually enjoy the process of conversation, and short exchanges to clarify brief statements are usually more socially acceptable than a single, long, clear statement, even though that might be net shorter and more efficient.


~nod~

I only do braindumps on engineers. [:D]

Basically, I like "playing ball", and I agree that it's a lot easier to incrementally approximate what one is trying to convey than to pack it all into one statement. Lets me gauge their responses (including body language) along the way- particularly the bits that indicate that they don't understand something, but don't want to admit that to me, and are hoping it will make sense later on- and it lets me adapt what I'm saying to where they are at, mentally. Plus, exchanges help me clarify my own thoughts, as well as approach them from different angles, and allows input along the way. It enriches the experience, quite simply.

With engineers, I'm more apt to dump larger chunks on them, because it's their job to be able to assimilate a lot of complicated and interrelated information in a brief amount of time, organize it, and then apply it. If they cannot do their job, I cannot use them for that job, and have to come up with something else for them to do; I can always find a less challenging task that would otherwise take up time for someone who can do the complicated bits.

With some engineers- one in particular, whose mental structure is very close to my own, and whose fact topology is also very close- I can do very compact and efficient communication, with small chunks and rapid exchanges. I can invent terms on the spot, and they know exactly what I mean. I can make a statement, and they can trace the exact path I followed through my mental landscape to arrive at the content of that statement. And either one can grab the bits the other is missing, sort them in topological order, and just "dump" them on the other, stream-of-consciousness style, and then the mental maps are perfectly synced, usually without needing to clarify anything at all. It's a bit like connecting two minds into a larger whole; in software terms, "cluster computing".

Communication needs to be adapted to the target, which is why I usually say I'm the one who didn't communicate well enough, rather than saying the other party didn't get what I was communicating. I might have been saying what I meant, but unless the recipient discerns the meaning, I wasn't communicating it.

quote:

For my own part [...] it chafes [...] things I already know [...] I've found that most people, NT or AS, tend to go on and on about the obvious when it's something that concerns them personally.


~nod~

I've probably done that more than a little bit on these forums, but while my posts are addressed to one person at a time, they are also intended for the benefit of other readers as well.

quote:

In fact, much of my own social friction has come from belieiving that people know more and can think more clearly than is generally the case, but I still prefer to err on the side of concision. Probably an emotional decision- I'd rather be seen as cryptic than boring. Probably many people hold both impressions of me at once, but you can't please everyone.


Seems quite familiar.

I've tried both styles, and tend to switch a bit back and forth.

On CM, I tend to be verbose, quite simply because the alternative is that ten people misunderstand what I mean (which is sometimes more than a little bit controversial in and of itself) and jump on that, leaving me to spend ten times as much time and effort explaining in response to the five different ways these ten people have misunderstood me, before finally getting back to the topic, only to have someone else drop into the thread, not read to the end, and start the cycle over again.

Of course, I still fail, but it seems to work better than the alternative.
And, as you say, one can't please everyone.



teamnoir -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:55:31 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

Ironically, when I started talking with an older coworker about it recently, that was his take as well. He said, "Oh, but all the good engineers are like that." And I had to defend the NT engineers.


I'd like to hear the defense at some point in time.


Bricks have no value without mortar. While aspies can generally produce larger projects alone than NT's can alone, aspies don't necessarily scale well. NT engineers are typically better communicators, even when it comes to facilitating communications between two aspies. There's that whole concept of "team player" that doesn't really translate very well into aspiedom.

Granted, we sometimes form our own versions of syndicates, but in my experience, having some NT engineers around to either smooth the way between aspies and/or communicate with the outside world, (or at least management), tends to be useful. NT engineers make better support engineers, IMO, for instance.

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Recent aspergers experts also claim that roughly 95% of self identified aspies really are AS.


Interesting. That is a lot higher accuracy than most professionals have in making the diagnosis.


Yes, but adult aspies aren't hampered by impossible formal diagnostic criterion. We use a completely informal method for self identification that tends to skip irrelevant criterion.

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Yes, there are people who attempt to claim AS as a causal agent, ("It wasn't me, it was my AS what dun it"), but this is a pretty transparent ruse used by people of all neurotypes. I've heard it used at least once on this thread already.


That's one of the differences I've observed between aspies and NTs. The NTs who claim AS, use it as an excuse. The aspies offer it as an explanation for something. Subtle distinction, but relevant IMO.


I don't think I agree. I think both are ascribing causality to a syndrome, which is silly. A syndrome is just a name for a collection of symptoms. So to say that I have a symptom because I have syndome-which-contains-that-symptom is just as useless as saying that I have syndrome because I have symptom. It's just a semantic label. It's not a bug.

And I think you haven't met many of the crop of young adults who were diagnosed AS as children who are now finishing college. Many of them, especially in their early 20's, feel significant amounts of fatalism and hopelessness, precisely because they feel that they have been "fighting" AS all their lives. They frequently ascribe causality to AS.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 11:33:08 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

The walkers in the last star wars movie weren't believable because their sense of motion and balance was off to the laws of physics.


Yeah. It doesn't so much ruin things like sci-fi for me, but it does ruin MA.

I mean, look at Elektra. The actress has obviously done a fair bit of work to look like she knows what she is doing, but the dynamic balance is completely absence, the static balance is off, and the skeletal alignment just wouldn't work for generating any amount of force worth talking about.

OTOH, watching Narnia, I was rather taken by the way Jadis moves, even if it wasn't ideal.

That's why Jet Li movies work for me. Even when he's doing something unrealistic, you can tell that the guy knows how to use his body, and that the things that are "off" are artistic liberties, not glaring errors.

quote:

I can also often peg gymnasts, dancers, and former gymnasts and dancers. And sometimes musicians.


Dancers, I can do, sometimes. But I lack the experience with these things to use myself as a point of reference, and I don't know too many people who are good at it, so I don't have anything to compare with. The exception being my uncle, who is a police officer (something akin to SWAT, I think) and a dancer. His movements are very distinct.

Basketball players, I'm not sure about, but the ones I've seen, seem to have this thing going with their knees.

Martial Arts, however, I can usually discern. Sometimes, it's just a notion that a person has good body awareness, dynamic balance and so forth. Other times, I can say that a person is a ren-faire weapons enthusiast. Other times, I can go "ah, that guy did Shotokan Karate years ago", or "this one must be doing 'soft' koryu arts", or "see that hand, she's been doing way too much basic forms in animal style kung fu".

Of course, with the more popular martial arts, like karate, you don't need to look at the body dynamics. The distribution of muscle will do, or the way they use their hands. For some styles, even the knuckles are enough to pick them out, or so I've been told. I just notice that the knuckles indicate a martial art, I can't differentiate based on knuckles alone yet.

quote:

I find this statement offensive for two reasons. First, you are suggesting, rather strongly, that I cannot learn these skills. And I've just told you that I can. Which means that you're calling me a liar, about my own experience.


Not at all. Sorry if it came across like that.

I meant to say that most aspies I have encountered need to be taught, or find the motivation to learn for themselves and a viable strategy for doing so, in order for them to pick these things up. Not that they can't do so.

quote:

Secondly, your terminology suggests that aspies are incapable of helping themselves.


The suggestion is false, then.
I know aspies that can, and do, help themselves.
But not all learn by themselves, and those could use some help.

quote:

The entire wax analogy is a bad one because we're not talking about a magic bullet here, no pill to cure autism, no wave of a magic wand, but rather the development of skills which can exist at any number of levels.


I was not talking about the same thing you're talking about.
I was trying to elaborate on what I think Najakcharmer meant by hear deafness analogy.

quote:

Aspies who decline to put in the effort are making a choice.


Not all aspies I have met have been aware that it is possible.
In order to make a choice, you must perceive your options.
When the gap is big, it may be hard to see where to start.
In those cases, one may not perceive that there is a path.

quote:

The "deafness" analogy suggests that this choice is out of our hands and disempowers us.


Which is why I used the wax analogy.
You can remove wax yourself.
Or someone else can.
Both ways work.

quote:

Learning to distinguish and discriminate nonverbal cues is a skill.


Clearly. I have said as much. We are in full agreement on this part.

quote:

Please stop describing me as less capable than I am. You aren't doing me any favors there.


I am not attempting to describe you at all, and if you find me describing you as less capable than you are, then there is a problem in communication. My apologies for that.

quote:

I don't need to fight you about it to. If you want to support aspies, then take up this new banner.


Already there.

I'm all for aspies learning by themselves. And I know they can. I also know that that fatalism can be hard to fight, and do not wish to add to yours in any way, shape or form. More than a decade of moderate to severe treatment refractory clinical depression will teach a thing or two about fatalism. It certainly taught me.

I try to help nephandi fight that fatalism when it comes up, because I have found that a heavy road is best walked in good company. But when she loses the way, or starts to think she has reached a plateu, I try to point out something that will help her keep going.

What I meant, is, that in those cases where an aspie isn't learning independently, I think it's a good thing to help them. Not in the sense of just helping with a given situation, but in the sense of helping to show them how they can learn when they haven't figured it out themselves, and not all have, particularly the "low-functioning" ones. "Teach a man to fish..." and all that.

Some learn these things by themselves, as you have, some don't.
Both can usually benefit from learning these things.
I try to help those who haven't learned yet.
Help is not always disempowering.

quote:

We're not missing this sense. The "sense" isn't physical. It's a complex equivalence composed of physical neurological input. The "sense" you speak of is an abstraction of those inputs. And we do have abstractions, even of those inputs.


Depends on how you define "sense", I guess.
All our "senses" are predigested raw data.

The brain is not fed a complex acoustic waveform, it is fed a series of levels from resonant circuits, and this is then fed through delay lines, and then further processed. Neither is it fed two sets of rod- and cone-intensities, but rather a predigested pseudo-3D image with colour and intensity. Similar things go for the internal senses, like kinaesthetics. Pheromones, if humans are sensitive to them (there is still some debate over this), do not register so much as scents, as they do as intangible senses, for which we don't have accurate words.

Whether the interpretation of body language and so forth is a sense, is a matter of definition.

Personally, when I have been in situations where a real, physical threat of violence has been present, even if I have not been consciously aware of it, I have registered it. And it did not register as a conscious assessment, nor through any regular senses. In fact, in some cases, the regular senses were telling me something else, and only afterwards did I find the missing pieces that supported the palpable sensation of tension and danger, which registered through some kind of sense that I did not know I had until it happened the first time.

To me, that qualifies as a sense; to you, it might not.
I know aspies who have experienced this sense.
Their descriptions are quite congruent.

IMO, it is not at all implausible that NTs register less "primal" cues in a very similar manner.
That certainly fits well with some descriptions NTs have given me of social interactions.
And a learned interpretation of these cues may not become a "sense" in that way.

quote:

What we typically lack is the socially agreed upon lexicon of idioms.


~nod~

quote:

They're all over the aspergers forums. The children who were toddlers or early elementary school age in 1994 are now driving cars, voting, attending college, and becoming doctors. They aren't hard to find at all.


Diagnosis based on eye motion tracking is still experimental.
The initial research wasn't even around back in 1994.
And current "treatment" teaches this stuff poorly.
Some programs work well, others do not.
Most start well past the toddler stage.

quote:

Please stop marginalizing my opinion because I'm an aspie.


A difference of opinion does not equate to marginalizing yours.

And if I ever were to marginalize your opinion, which I have not intended to do so far, it would not be because you are an aspie. My nephandi is an aspie. Many of my close friends are aspies. I myself am PDD-NOS, leaning somewhat towards a cross between Asperger's and ADHD Predominantly "Inattentive" Type. If anything, I assign your opinions more credit for being an aspie, though I try to avoid that bias as well.

quote:

The deafness analogy has some minor value, I agree, but it's value is extremely limited and comes at a high cost.


I would point out that the deafness analogy was made by an aspie.
Its value and its cost would probably have occured to her.
Do not marginalize in the way you accuse me of.

quote:

There are analogies available which are even more illuminating, are empowering rather than disempowering, and which are far more apt.


Quite so.
But sometimes, people pick the low-hanging fruit.
In short, there's no need to be hostile / confrontational.
I get enough of that from NTs when I pick my words poorly.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 11:40:13 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

HFA is not a medically precise term. It's not a DSM-IV diagnostic tool. There is no clear nor consensus definition for the term. My understanding of the term is simply "autistic yet functional" as distinct from "disabled due to autism".


My understanding of the term is different, as was the use in the medical community around here when I was first in touch with them. Perhaps the meaning has drifted, or the meaning had geographical locality, I don't know.

By your understanding of the term, it applies, though I'd say ASD, rather than autism.

quote:

I've actually found wikipedia to be a remarkably balanced perspective on most of the things I've looked up there. I also find it invaluable that the degree of consensus is essentially portrayed along with the entry.


Perhaps we have been looking at different topics, or comparing to different sources.

quote:

You must be either from a very different culture than I am or considerably younger than I am.


Both, actually. I'm from Norway, and just turning 27.
I was 23 or so when the picture I use for my avatar here was taken.

quote:

Most of the people my age in my culture don't have that information available.


In mine, it depends. Some have talked that much, and that plainly, with their parents while they still had them, others have not. For those of us young enough to have parents to ask about it, it is available.

quote:

The simple fact that no one recognized subtle delays back then means that even if such delays were present, they would have needed to be particularly aggregious to have even been noticed, much less recorded or remembered.


I'm not talking about subtle delays.

quote:

Rather, a more common experience among adult aspies is that of having been either hospitalized for emotional difficulties or been through the justice system for socially inappropriate behavior as a child.


~nod~

Though it takes a lot more for people to enter the justice system here than in the US.

quote:

Neither of these are part of the DSM diagnostic criterion and the stories I've heard all represent considerably more pervasive and more redical impairment than what I've experienced.


There are definitely differences of degree, both for autists and aspies (if one uses that distinction).



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 11:51:23 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: teamnoir

Bricks have no value without mortar. While aspies can generally produce larger projects alone than NT's can alone, aspies don't necessarily scale well. NT engineers are typically better communicators, even when it comes to facilitating communications between two aspies.


Ah. Your experience has been radically different from mine, then.
Perhaps we have identified one distinction between HFA and aspie?
In my experience, aspies scale well, and communicate well with each other.

quote:

There's that whole concept of "team player" that doesn't really translate very well into aspiedom.


Whenever I've heard the phrase "team player", it has been implied that it applies to the ability to cooperate, but has turned out to apply to social integration instead. In my experience, it means someone who puts in a lot of extra hours without pay, doesn't complain about anything, doesn't take credit, doesn't ask questions (even when paid to do just that), spends a lot of time at the water cooler or otherwise socializing instead of working, and turns up for all the corporate social events.

Apparently, those things help the NTs get along.

Avoiding them helps me get along, because I don't feel like people are intruding on my private life.

Admittedly, though, corporate culture here is very different from what I hear described in Silicon Valley.

quote:

NT engineers make better support engineers, IMO, for instance.


With the exception of those aspies that communicate very well with NTs, I'd tend to agree.

That's why I usually tack support tasks on the NTs, rather than the non-NTs.

quote:

Yes, but adult aspies aren't hampered by impossible formal diagnostic criterion. We use a completely informal method for self identification that tends to skip irrelevant criterion.


~nod~

I remember someone saying once that the simplest diagnostic tool, is a gathering of aspies. If you feel like an alien, you're not an aspie. If you feel like you've come home, you are.

quote:

I don't think I agree.


Fair enough.

quote:

And I think you haven't met many of the crop of young adults who were diagnosed AS as children who are now finishing college. Many of them, especially in their early 20's, feel significant amounts of fatalism and hopelessness, precisely because they feel that they have been "fighting" AS all their lives. They frequently ascribe causality to AS.


Well, nephandi is in her early twenties.
The "support" system taught her to blame AS.
I taught her to embrace the notion of unlimited potential.
The latter has been a lot more productive than the former was.
And it has enabled her to grow beyond all expectations anyone had.

Which is not to say I didn't think it possible, quite on the contrary, just that I try to never have expectations about anything, least of all people and their potential to grow, better themselves and achieve happiness and life goals.



Caius -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 8:25:31 PM)

Calandra,

You have received such a wealth of information and insight here already, I struggle to find any general points of significance to add -- in particular, CitizenCane seems to have beaten me to the punch on virtually every point and distinction I would emphasize.   So I am reduced to trying to add some subtler considerations which hopefully may be of some use to you.

But to begin with, one redundant point.  As the discussion thus far has clearly demonstrated -- and, indeed, as many have explcicitely noted here -- AS has a wide array of "pathologies" (no offense meant to anyone here; I'm not going to be remember as anyone's poster-boy for neurotypical, a label which can only be accepted in any account as a necessary conceptual shortcut for discussing matters such as these).  Thus, be wary of trying to form a model for interaction with your sub based upon an amalgymation of the features and tendencies of others with AS.   You seem to have a pretty decent grasp of this point and to be pursuing what I would view as the proper course with regard to it -- mapping the particulars of his disconnect with the typical intuitive social-functioning of NTs.  I mostly revisit the point to say that there simply can't be too much attention to detail in this regard, nor can the potentially massive amount of work necesary to accomplish this understanding be easily overexagerated.

Several metaphors have been employed by others in the thread so far, using the idea that those with AS are often employing their own language.  Well, I'm going to subdue my impulses as a linguist and cognitive scientist to deconstruct this concept and simply say I find it essentially apt.   For many with AS,  much of typical language language use seems to be encyphered.  Their above-average intellects are often capable of astonishign ability in acquiring quite massive sets of explicit rules which most of us possess innately and then applying them correctly as decyphering keys, but these typically have to be provided piecemeal.   Right now, you're at the beggining of a long process of decoding not only his "language" but your own as well and then formulating an entirely new one on the basis of mutual communicativty.  Not so different from the usual complications of language, really.  Now, needless to say, this will require geneuine dedication not jsut from you and your sub, but from everyone in your household, who will likewise have to be in on the construction of these norms.   I've seen some implication here that the difficulty often most surrounds linguistic features of emotional or social content, which I believe to be generally false (though certainly indivdual cases might manifest as such).  Rather, those with AS tend to have much broader problems with semantic variability and ambiguity.  One of the defining characteristics of AS is a lack of mutability of parameters of perception and behaviour, once they are set.  This is not only the source-point for most of the difficulties that those with AS face, it also means that  you might have to make your peace with using a lot of rote features (linguistic and otherwise) in the system you forge.   You also can't expect the system you construct for your household to have much impact on your sub's ability to interact with those outside of it; he will likely have great difficulty with formulatign general rules for social conduct out of the aprticulars which you school him in for your family.

One thing you are going to have to keep in mind, specfically as the dominant, is that there may well be times you will simply have to back off from a particularly stressing exchange, lest the inherent difficulties of your scenario become even farther exaggerated.   The problem here, of course, is that this these exchanges can be potentially damaging to the dynamic and to the household discipline in general.  However, it does not seem that yours is a particularly ultra-strict or ritualistic environment and besides, if everyone in the household is open-minded and attentive enough,  the difference should be clearly obvious between genuine defiance and inability to cope.    Still, learning to appreciate the subtle distinction with respect to this point will proabably be one of the most consideable challanges to you as the dominant in this scenario.   Of course, the "back-off" principle is by no means a universal -- it could be interpeted as unwillingness to deal with the AS "sufferer" and damage his or her willingess to strive towards the goal of smoother interaction.   Again, you'll have to work hard at determing the particulars of your sub.

The issue with pain also bears repeating as you asked spefically for advice directed towards a bdsm context.  Be very much aware, if S&M is a major compoenent of your lifestyle, that many with AS share a tendency with many others in the atuistic spectrum to be either intensely sensitive to, or largely insesnitive, to certain physical stimuli.

Also, on a  note regarding your sub's ex... I can certainly appreciate your feeling compelled to shield your sub from abuse and because I have no knoweldge of this past relationship nor the nature of her more recent interaction with both he and you, so I have no reason to believe that your statement to her (concerning the fact that she could deal with you if she could not show proper respect) was not appropriate and entirely-needed.  But  I would keep in mind that, given this is a new diagnosis, she might have long been used to perceving herself as the victim of the situation,  someone who put up with a cold and hostile situation for a long time who feels entitled to a little anger.   Of course, if she ultimately proves to be so close-minded that she cannot accept that the amount of emapathy your sub displays is not entirely within his control, then by all means, run the bitch off.   I simply mean to note what others have mentioned here -- not everyone is capable of easily cocneptualizing such a deficiency but are nonetheless people of a carign disposition who can put in years of work attempting to "heal" the situation, often well past the point where it has embittered them.  In this situation, I view partner as sufferign from jsut as signifcant a "disability" as the person with AS; both lack a basic understanding of how the other is operating.  Of course, it's a bit hypocrtical for me to say this to you as there have been times I haven't demonstrated absolute control in my interaction with those who have in the past done harm to my partners, but often these reactions can be counter-productive to the well-being of the sub, well-intentione das they may be.  Once again let me stress that, especailyl given the detail of forthought you have shown on these matters, I by no means intend to imply your actions with regard to this ex were improper; this is simply food for thought.

Well that's about all that occurs to me to as viable direct advice to you that isn't horribly redundant; again, I hope it is of some small help to you.  I'll be posting much more in regard to more global issues that have arisen in this thread later, but until then let me bring my thoughts to a close by saying I very much impressed with the dialgue you have intitiated here; indeed, the type of disccsion I have encountered here has elevated my impression of this entire baord considerably, and has already incited me to post more frequently.  And with regard to your perspectives in particular, they have suggested to me a dedicated and versatile dominant willing to work hard at doing well by her friend and submssive.  Very admirable and if I wa pressed to make a bet, I'd wager that you and your household are going to do very well in this situation.  If nothign else, you posses the msot basic skill in making this dynamic viable -- you perceive the situation in terms of differences and not defects.   Afterall, in many regards, those with certain forms of AS are ideally built for this lifestyle and bring unique gifts to the table.  I doubt it can have escaped your notice that this thread itself is a great example of a scenario in which AS can prove quite beneficial;  the fact that many with AS are quite frequently prone to analyze situations in minut detail (and of course can't help but have an impulse to do so with this subject matter in particular) is no doubt a significant contributing factor to the voluminous and detailed nature of many of the responses you've received so far.

My best wishes to you and your family.  You certainly have my respect.



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 9:26:27 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Caius

I've seen some implication here that the difficulty often most surrounds linguistic features of emotional or social content, which I believe to be generally false (though certainly indivdual cases might manifest as such).  Rather, those with AS tend to have much broader problems with semantic variability and ambiguity.


Not necessarily so. I think you're approaching this from a different angle, and thus missing the point.

The point is related to modes of communication.

NT communication is very often a lot more response-centric than aspie communication, while aspie communication is often more content-centric (some might say fact-centric) than NT communication. I've seen aspies operate with very ambigous terms and concepts, but usually when that ambiguity is properly in the semantic domain, rather than being tied to response. Some of the ambiguities of NT communication derive directly from the predictor-response model of communication, resulting in ambiguities that are not really semantic in nature. These are very hard for aspies to grasp.

At the "low functioning" end of the scale, you start to see some problems with content-centric ambiguities as well, but I do not get the impression that this is the level toad is functioning at. Hence, that side of it probably won't be a big problem for them.

quote:

One of the defining characteristics of AS is a lack of mutability of parameters of perception and behaviour, once they are set.


This is a human characteristic, not an aspie characteristic.

It only appears to be an aspie characteristic when you measure aspies with NT as the reference scale.

Switch the reference, and it becomes a description of NTs.

(Note that I'm now talking about AS without comorbid OCD.)



Caius -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 9:47:36 PM)

quote:



quote:

One of the defining characteristics of AS is a lack of mutability of parameters of perception and behaviour, once they are set.


This is a human characteristic, not an aspie characteristic.

It only appears to be an aspie characteristic when you measure aspies with NT as the reference scale.

Switch the reference, and it becomes a description of NTs.

(Note that I'm now talking about AS without comorbid OCD.)



I don't disagree with you in the slighest degree on this point.  All human beings posses variable plasticity with regard to certain features.   It is only through a comparative measure that those with AS can be said to be "more fixed." ~laughs~ In fact, I jsut got finished with an extensive debate in another thread to try to estbalish this point.

I do, however, continue to disagree with regard to just how situationally-specific the lingusitic areas with which those with AS most commonly struggle are.  Unfortunately, this view of mine is predicated in phenomena too complex for me to go into just at the moment, but I will get back to you on this very shortly.   This is something of an area of expertise for me,  so I'm looking foreward to the discussion.  Look for it in a post of mine in a couple of days that promises to be mammoth (though perhaps not by your measures!).



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/4/2007 10:07:07 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Caius

Unfortunately, this view of mine is predicated in phenomena too complex for me to go into just at the moment, but I will get back to you on this very shortly.


I shall be looking forward to it.

quote:

This is something of an area of expertise for me,  so I'm looking foreward to the discussion.  Look for it in a post of mine in a couple of days that promises to be mammoth (though perhaps not by your measures!).


I don't have much expertise in the area myself, if you're referring to linguistics. It's a hobby I care a great deal about, but I'm self-taught. If you're referring to the cognitive sciences, there I'm partially self-taught and partially taught by people in the field, with my main emphasis being on the correct use of psychopharmaca in treating pathologies, along with a fair bit of supporting knowledge that goes along with it. Since I haven't worked actively with it for a while, I have forgotten a fair bit here and there, though; the citations don't spring to mind like they used to, for instance, and exact figures and genome references almost consistently elude me.

Either way, though, I'll be looking forward to the post, and will try to follow as well as I can.

If you feel it would, in whole or in part, be too technical to be of general interest, feel free to PM me with the parts that are more technical in nature; I am generally not afraid of picking up the literature needed to understand a piece that interests me. (I did the groundwork and then plowed through close to 100K pages of research data for my initial forays into psychopharmacology, for instance.)



MaamJay -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/6/2007 1:47:30 AM)

One thing that is plainly visible in this thread is that aspies and those with close personal experience of them can conduct an absolutely fantastic debate, have disagreements generally without flames (though it got a little warm here and there) ... heaps of facts of course ;-) ... and just so much to learn for the rest of us NTs. Thank you all so very much. It's quite the best insight I have ever seen into AS, so I copied and pasted most of it into a Word doc (all 80+ pages of it!) for me to keep and reread. Being involved in science education, I trip over people who might well be aspies at times, whether they have been diagnosed or not, and it's so helpful to have these understandings of the way in which they think and operate in a world dominated by NTs.

Thanks Calandra for Your courage in revealing Yours and toad's situation which got this wonderful ball rolling. I hope You and toad are "on the road to find out" to quote one of My favourite Cat Stevens' songs (yes I'm showing My age *grin*) ... this seems like a wonderful pairing of an aspie and an NT who are both willing to learn about each other. All the very best!

Maam Jay aka violet[A]



petdave -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/7/2007 10:51:19 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad
I've met people who have a degree in engineering, and people who are engineers. The difference is distinct. It is also not uniformly tied to aspies. However, I will gladly cede that I have not found any NT engineers yet, only many NT people with a degree and/or job in the engineering field who could advantageously have been replaced with actual engineers.

It shows up in everything they do.

Take fire, for instance. I've seen "engineers" fail to light a regular charcoal barbecue due to wind or whatever. And I've seen engineers burn wet garden rubbish (sorry, don't know the right word, and "compost" doesn't quite fit; English is a second language for me) while it was raining, with little more than a dry newspaper to start the fire. In the end, we were rid of the mass, and had cracked rock tiles and bent metal with the heat. (I will say nothing of the amount of smoke released by burning things that way, though.)


While "garden rubbish" gets the point across, "yard waste" is probably the most common phrase.

(Coincidentally, i was just dismantling Version 0.2 of my Rural Yard Waste Dispozerator, which overheated and cracked the cinder blocks i used to build it [:D] Oops)



Caius -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/8/2007 4:00:07 AM)

It always amuses me to hear Scandinavians either apologize for completely fluent English, or worry over the subtlest of distinctions. 



Aswad -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/8/2007 6:08:08 PM)

~lol~

Well, yes.

I remember one time at an RP convention where this guy, Sheldon Meneri, had been invited. He commented on the exact same thing, noting that he had no trouble finding his way in Norway, but was rather confused, because he'd ask people "Do you speak English?", and they'd quite universally go "A little bit." in response. When he'd been in other countries like France and Germany, if people said they spoke "a little bit" of English, they really meant a little bit. In Norway, however, when people say they speak "a little bit" of English, they usually mean they are what he would consider fluent in it.

Though, it actually does bear mentioning sometimes. One of my favourite authors once commented that I could have been mistaken for a native speaker (the exact comment was, I think, "you even speak it better than some native speakers do"), and that this can lead to those mistakes I do make causing a lot more trouble. If it is obvious that English is not someone's native language, a native speaker will usually assume good faith, and try to make sense of what is said in a way appropriate to context.

When it is not obvious, however, they will tend to take it much as if a native speaker had said the same thing, even when a native speaker most certainly wouldn't. This can be a serious problem with certain stock phrases, slang, and so forth, not to mention the cultural context.

Case in point, I stumbled upon a Memorial Day thread, where I criticised the choice to enlist in armed forces in countries that do not have a pure self-defense force, but instead actively participate in operations on foreign soil. Nowhere in the topic or the body of the thread did it say that it was Memorial Day, and I was not even aware that there was such a holiday at all. Once someone provided the missing clue to the puzzle, I obviously apologized for the intrusion (to me, it was much the same as how I would not disturb a religious ceremony, even one of a different denomination than my own). The damage had been done, however, with several pointing out (and making good on) that they would no longer read my threads in a positive light, if at all. The missing clue might have been provided a lot sooner if it was obvious to them that I am a non-native speaker, and unfamiliar with their culture.

For myself, I try to apply Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.") and my own corrolary ("Never attribute to incompetence what can be adequately explained by ignorance.") to anything people tell me, although I'll admit to failing at times. I have found that this appears to be a rather uncommon thing to do, however, especially online. Hence, the distinction between "good non-native speaker" and "native speaker" becomes important.

P.S.: Yes, I'm aware that Hanlon's Razor is better generalized to say that one should always pick the explanation for a failure that ascribes it to the shortcoming with the narrowest scope that will suffice, unless there is clear evidence that a specific reason exists apart from that assumption. A concise way of stating that in an uncomplicated manner would be appreciated.



hana20 -> RE: D/s and Asperger's Syndrome (7/13/2007 1:56:51 AM)

my little brother has the asperger sindrome. He is 10 years old and we find it very difficult to keep up with him.



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