https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224&p=3

(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...

Specifically battlefront #8. He calls it consequential because the the neurodivergent/PC conflict highlights an inherent paradox in the PC worldview. Most applications of political correctness focus (at least on the surface) on defending a marginalized group against the verbal attacks of a privileged one. When applied to autistic or neurodivergent individuals, however, PC norms work to disadvantage an already disadvantaged minority against groups that are both larger and often more economically and culturally free.

It's absolutely maddening when the rules suddenly change for no discernible reason, often with little warning and grave consequences with no second chances for screwing it up.

I see people clamoring for a safe spaces and I wonder where I can find such a thing? (To an extent I can find one at sci-fi, anime and furry conventions are mostly safe spaces for people like me, it's just jarring when I need to leave)

Transitioning did something to my brain chemistry and let me read social cues nearly overnight, but I got friends by delving into the LGBT community. Maybe furry cons is a good approach?

That is incredibly fascinating. I'm not even sure how to classify that... pragmatic psychological function (oookay that's probably not a thing), neurobiology, or what else.

IMO this is a gigantic breadcrumb for Something™. The question is what the axis point was, and what got fixed as a result. Cooool.

I am very curious what else shifted that you'd be happy to share.

This definitely does not happen to every aspie trans woman, but I've heard of it happening to one or two others.

I was worried about losing my intelligence, since I attributed a lot of that to ASD, but actually all my major breakthroughs came after transitioning. My first algorithm that got me noticed was like, 6 months in.

The only real downside was that switching to estrogen unmasked my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and I've become physically disabled. I'm still able to work and think and feel so it's a good trade for me!

I'm not gonna say I'd like to be normal, because I have no real construct of what normal would be like - but ASD also gives me one more insight, normality is an illusion foisted on people by society - all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way.

Ehlers-Danlos may have shown up anyhow, so that doesnt strike me as a downside even, if that makes sense, if anything you got a benefit by finding it sooner.

This is true. However, from a similar (mild form, partially dealt with) ASD observer point of view, I also noticed that the said peculiarities in one's character are like food ingredients. It's about the way one manages to blend them in a recipe and to cook them into something tasteful (for others) that makes or breaks the social connections. Having ASD is like having no smell or taste of your own and you have to rely on the observed reactions in others for measurements. Obviously, it's a challenge to be a cook in such circumstance and the best strategy (if you care) then probably is just to assume damage and operate in damage control mode all the time.

I know many social progressives would argue this is due to socialization...but the effect seems too strong at too early an age to blame solely on socialization to me.

On a related note, I recently read an article about trans men where one noted that they seemed to have become more conversationally impatient, and blamed it on the different hormones: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...

> "The hormones made me more impatient. I had lots of female friends and one of the qualities they loved about me was that I was a great listener. After being on testosterone, they informed me that my listening skills weren’t what they used to be. Here’s an example: I’m driving with one of my best friends, Beth, and I ask her “Is your sister meeting us for dinner?” Ten minutes later she’s still talking and I still have no idea if her sister is coming. So finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I snapped and said, “IS SHE COMING OR NOT?” And Beth was like, “You know, you used to like hearing all the backstory and how I’d get around to the answer. A lot of us have noticed you’ve become very impatient lately and we think it’s that damn testosterone!” It’s definitely true that some male behavior is governed by hormones. Instead of listening to a woman’s problem and being empathetic and nodding along, I would do the stereotypical guy thing — interrupt and provide a solution to cut the conversation short and move on. I’m trying to be better about this."

I was mostly considering the fact that the female hormone, uh, configuration is naturally pro-social, and that dumping that set of hormone balances on the brain promptly elicits the associated responses - ie, that the response (or rather the tendency for those responses to function properly) becomes a partial function of hormone state.

But those sort of general factors (including elevated mood) would definitely be a part of the end result.

It may well be be that some component that's typically more prevalent in females plays a key role in the development of prosocial tendencies. If such a component were identified, it would be interesting to study its involvement in the development of both males and females.

Men and Women experience socialization in fundamentally different ways, because of this I suspect the changing hormonal balance reawakens pathways not used normally, basically. In addition, you basically have a chance while transitioning to relearn socialization from scratch basically, with those new pathways awakened.

In my own experience I've found as that as a majority of my own marbles have figured out "OH, that's which way is up", my own pragmatic learning capacity has transformed from "transmutation ray that turns everything into indecipherable, unmovable rubble" and... what almost feels like a happy grid of FPGAs that bustle about classifying and organizing without me really having to make much effort. After leaving ideas and subjects for long enough (10+ years in some cases) that old broken memories/associations have just about completely died out, yeah, I definitely can look at things with new eyes.

Discovering that HRT can trigger or you might even say accelerate this process is very fascinating, because it sort of maybe points in the direction of the root causes that break everything in the first place.

To be honest, nobody knows for sure. I call these "Seinfeld moments", as in you could make an entire Seinfeld episode out of talking about it: should I have waived? If yes, I did waive, why didn't the other person waive back? Was it because he/she didn't see me? Was it because he/she did in fact see me but didn't like me? etc.

But maybe Seinfeld could have made an episode about your version too.

So for instance, your house is a safe space if you own it and decide who comes and goes, or if your parents are on your side and kick out people that cross your lines.

As an example, some swearwords might really violent to hear for some people, but disallowing their use will be quite hard for those who lived in an environment where it was important part of communication. And it's often use as a distinction between rich and poor people (at least in France).

I'm beginning to think the swearing thing in the U.S. has to do with a perception of the concept of "innocence". Because I've noticed a lot of people only begin to have a problem with swearing here when it involves children. For sure, there are people who are just generally against swearing for religious or etiquette reasons. However, having kids really seems to change a large number of people into prudes regarding swears.

I'll admit, when I first heard my 4 year old swear it was jarring. But I thought it through and was like, "my wife and I swear all the time, why can't the kid swear? I can either cave to this uncomfortable feeling or extend my kid the same privallege I extend myself."

At one point, my brother came to stay with us. He swears like a sailor yet when my kid swore, he was shocked. Not 10 minutes before he was cursing in front of the kid.

I also have friends who swore often when we were at college together and they started forbidding swears when they didn't like hearing it coming from their 3 year old.

American culture still has a partial obsession with virginity and the concept of innocence and my best guess is that this subconsciously extends to people's expectations for their children.

Things changed -- or at least I changed. I don't use furries as a punchline anymore, and none of my friends do, and I'm like "c'mon please don't do that" if anyone does.

Sure, it makes it harder to tell jokes sometimes, but who cares about that?

Did you mean something else?

But the reason there was a bit of extra hesitancy there is that I straddle the line on socialization to the extent that while half my brain would probably love going to a con, the other half would basically be cognitive-dissonance-BSODing the entire time. And I'm not sure if repeating "surrealism is art, surrealism is art" would be enough to get me through; I'd probably end up deciding those three specific people over there were safe and hiding behind them the entire time, while simultaneously responding mostly neurotypically to all the social-cue whooshes as I watched them happen. (The missed cues would be what I was hiding from.)

however, this is an imperfect world that needs a lot of change, and it's not going to stop changing, so you're going to have to figure this out. I assume you're a technologist, you are already dealing with constant change? How is this any different?

Think about it this way: Would you hire an SDE who told you they coded down to Java 1.4 standards because that's where their comfort zone is? Java 1.4 is not where the world is in 2021, just like being creepy to your colleagues is not where 2021 is.

Is it a safe space when what you say can be video taped and then used against you by all the other areas of life?

Some years ago there was a case where a woman in Melbourne called out a man for harassing her on public transport. Turns out he was autistic and was outgoing to everyone. His friend had to post on Facebook to stop people sharing a video of the autistic man.

Helen Pluckrose also posted on Twitter a similar story. A man she would help checkin on because he was autistic would get complaints from women for harassment. It was a suggestion from his therapist to help him socialise.

Turned out he had a lazy eye and is daughter had to step up to defend him. Quick to judge and make a scene unfortunately.

I dispute the idea that PC is mostly defensive in nature; rather it seems to be overwhelmingly offensive, targeting people who frequently aren’t even in advantaged groups themselves. I would also suggest that Jews are treated pretty badly by the PC folks, as are Asians (although #StopAsianHate in the wake of what appears to be a non-hate-crime has been a convenient bludgeon).

For example, take the DSM5 criteria for ASD, one type of neurodivergence. Here's just a single factor:

Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication. (From https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html)

A formal diagnosis of ASD would involve a number of these factors. As you might imagine, if you stack enough things like that on a person, it'll tend to be noticed, even when they're trying to hide it.

In the context of being mean, upon being told that they were being a jerk, a person with ASD might think "ah shit, not again" or maybe "wait what, no I wasn't, it doesn't make sense that they'd be offended by that" or something along those lines. The nuances of the behavior and the motivations behind it will tend to be a little different than in a 'neurotypical' perceived as being a jerk.

Many people (including myself) have difficulty with certain social cues and expectations. Many of us can be offputting or come off as overly direct or disrespectful. Where we diverge is when and how we address that fact. Do we (only) lash out and expect the world to accommodate our conclusions, or do we (ever or readily) reflect on that conflict and try to live in some kind of shared world?

Obviously what I’m describing is a spectrum, not an absolute. But if you’re trying to understand whether someone on the spectrum is a jerk, your answer is “how much do they use their social faculties to navigate sharing a world?”

Which is pretty much the same measure as anyone not on the spectrum.

It isn't "oh, I don't know how to read a room." Even granting high function, I feel people use autism in the same way as they do OCD; it's not something you use "neurodivergent" with seriously.

Like generally there's a lot of disability chic or identity these days; but moderate autism makes it incredibly hard to act in daily life in the same way moderate OCD does. If it's significant enough, it's not just someone being brisk or unempathetic in the same way OCD doesn't mean being a neat freak.

People who claim to have "moderate OCD" are just people who like things being tidy, and describe it as OCD because they have no understanding of the real, debilitating condition. Describing yourself as "moderately obsessive" makes no sense, and being able to live with the untidiness means you are not compulsively tidying.

A huge part of the problem with mental health problems is people using the terminology as some sort of 'badge of honor', as if it's something cool and trendy to have rather than an illness that can ruin your life. People really need to stop saying they have OCD unless they've been diagnosed by a professional.

And as for "moderately obese"... I wouldn't have previously described myself that way, but I fit it. My doctor tells me I'm medically obese. Nobody looking at me would describe me that way, but they would admit that I'm over-weight. They all say I look fine and don't need to lose more weight, though. If that's not "moderately obese", I don't know what would be.

What the world needs are terms to describe compulsive behavior, succinctly, other than "moderate OCD". I definitely have things that bother me immensely if I don't fix them, but it isn't to the point that I need help with it. I clearly don't have "OCD", but what do I have? There's no word for it.

I've stopped using the term OCD for anything about me, because I know it bothers other people. But I don't get mad at those who continue to use it because there's no proper term, and thus no way to actually correct their behavior. Only to stifle them. And I don't do that to other people.

Obesity is divided into 3 classes: class 1 (low-risk, BMI 30.0 to 34.9), class 2 (moderate-risk, 35.0 to 39.9), class 3 (high risk, 40.0 or higher). Using the term "moderate obesity" for class 2 obesity may not be exactly standard, but it has some logic to it.

> I clearly don't have "OCD", but what do I have? There's no word for it.

Is it possible you have subclinical OCD?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18849913/

(Or maybe subclinical OCPD?)

As for the OCD... Even that description sounds worse than what I have. But the existence of "subclinical OCD" makes me even less worried about people claiming to have "moderate OCD" or something. Not only is it a spectrum, but the experts seem to be fine with using the word to describe people that are almost it, with some qualifying words.

The thing about a spectrum is it makes room for people who, by necessity or will, share the symptomatic experience but lack some of the disabling impact. The benefit of that inclusion is that those people are able to benefit from a diagnosis and relevant treatment even if they’re not in the direst straits.

In my own experience, this meant that I was able to begin treatment for ADHD even though I’d had over a decade as a successful adult. And that treatment saved my life. Sure, I made it that far with what I could scrap together in myself and my luck in life. But when that wasn’t enough, my “moderate” case revealed its severity. If I’d had access to that diagnosis and care earlier it probably wouldn’t have ever been so severe.

Some people are actually diagnosed with "moderate OCD" though. Some psychiatrists like to use descriptors like "mild" or "moderate" or "severe" when they make a diagnosis. The DSM-5 doesn't include those terms as specifiers, but that doesn't stop some clinicians from using them anyway. (Clinicians vary widely in how strictly they adhere to the DSM-5.)

Also, while the DSM-5 doesn't include the concept of "mild"/"moderate"/"severe" OCD, some rating scales used clinically in diagnosing OCD do include such a distinction. Y-BOCS (Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale) scores are divided into four ranges – subclinical, mild, moderate, severe, extreme. A person with an OCD diagnosis who scores in the moderate range of the Y-BOCS will quite possibly be told they have "moderate OCD".

The DSM-5 does include three specifiers of level of insight for OCD: "good or fair insight" ("The individual recognizes that obsessive-compulsive dis­order beliefs are definitely or probably not true or that they may or may not be true"), "poor insight" ("The individual thinks obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are probably true"), "absent insight/delusional beliefs" ("The individual is completely convinced that obsessive-compulsive disorder beliefs are true"). It is an oversimplification to equate that to "mild"/"moderate"/"severe", but some people will do it anyway.

Clinicians need to convey to patients (and their family members and others) the severity of the individual's condition in terms which lay people will readily understand. Terms such as "mild","moderate","severe", despite their limitations, meet that need.

> People really need to stop saying they have OCD unless they've been diagnosed by a professional.

Self-diagnosis is always a dangerous thing, but I think it includes a big spectrum of behaviours, from "I saw a TV show once about X and now I think I've got it" through to "I've read the DSM-5 and dozens of books and papers on X and I think I've got it". In both cases, the person could well be wrong, but arguably they have a significantly greater chance of being right in the second case than in the first. (And a lot of the time when people who engage in self-diagnosis get it wrong, they actually do end up diagnosed with something, just not the thing they expected.)

Speaking somewhat personally – I've listened to school teachers and psychologists tell me all these things our son does which are "symptoms of autism" and I'm sitting there the whole time thinking to myself "what's 'autistic' about that, I did that too as a child, I even still do that as an adult?" That's not saying that I do or don't have ASD – I've never sought a formal assessment of it for myself, maybe one day I shall, maybe I never will – but my suspicions that I might have ASD probably have somewhat more weight to them than "oh I saw a TV show about it once and now I think I have it".

It's hard to live with moderate asperger syndrome, because you typically look and act normal, but are actually positioned in uncanny valley of behaviour. You try to act normally, but your responses are off enough to be mistranslated by others. You are expected to behave normally but you are missing those expectations. People who are visibly disadvantaged have lower expectations on them from the start.

>it's not something you use "neurodivergent" with seriously.

what do you use neurodivergent with seriously. I would think not being able to read a room is a big problem?

>Like generally there's a lot of disability chic or identity these days; but moderate autism makes it incredibly hard to act in daily life in the same way moderate OCD does.

is it incredibly hard to act in daily life with moderate autism, or is having moderate autism and complaining about its difficulties an example of disability chic or identity? It seems like you want to say it is the latter, but phrasing like 'incredibly hard' make it seem like you couldn't possible mean that.

Having moderate forms of autism is incredibly hard, yes. Severe forms you would need a caregiver and medication for the rest of your life. It isn't just socially awkward behavior or insensitivity, and there's a temptation to medicalize or self-diagnose behavior that way.

Disability chic is medicalizing things that more or less are normal behavior. I feel like with autism people try to make an identity or medicalize some normal traits. I keep using OCD, mostly because I do worry I suffer from it. I am aware of the irony, but i do this more because i suffered from signficant abnormal traits like checking compulsions; hitting a pothole and immediately being afraid i ran someone over, etc. Worrying that you didn't lock a door despite tugging on the doorknob 6 times before you left.I have it light because I don't need drugs to manage it and I'm able to function somewhat in life (though as an adult i worry how much of who I am was because of it)

There really isn't overlap with anything else; like people misuse OCD to mean "neat freak" or forgetful or what have you. Autism though people seem to have some of that; I mean, my customer's son has to be told to not get in people's spaces while many non autistic people may stand too close. It's harder to untangle.

First, I relate to your feelings of minimizing your own experiences, and your impulse to minimize others’. That’s not just how I felt before I was ready to get help, it’s something so ingrained in me that it’s a repetitive conversation with my family and loved ones since I have.

Second and more importantly, if you do have those symptoms I sincerely hope you’ll consider talking to a professional. The worst thing that happens is you’ll waste a couple hours. The next worst thing that can happen is you might make some sense of why your brain is the way it is, and it might lead to some peace. It’s all up from there.

That said, while I’m not an expert on the topic, some of the way you responded is right in line with what I’ve seen people with diagnoses express as harmful. I’m sure you mean well, but ASD presents in a lot of ways. Many which are not nearly so debilitating as what you describe, or more to the point, not debilitating in the same ways. The fact that it’s such a common misconception that it is so debilitating across the board is stigmatic.

I haven’t experienced this disability chic, what I’ve seen is the opposite: people afraid to find out because it may be socially limiting beyond their natural limits.

It’s possible that what you see here is a reflection of high incidence of what you call “high function” but nevertheless also a high incidence of ASD in tech communities.

I hope you’ll consider the possibility. I hope you’ll also consider that it took me a full day to work up the nerve to address your response, and honestly it’s such a sensitive subject that I’m probably going to have to stop looking at my phone for the night because I can’t bear whatever potential negative reaction might be coming. But I couldn’t bear leaving it unanswered even more.

My suspicion is that the reason she was often complaining about her heart was that she in part knew that there was no need to be worried about it.

Openly choosing to recognize the existence of a dragon in your life require either bravery, desperation, or finding a costume to put your cat.

I am not specifically replying to you, I was just stimulated by the topic, but I find it ironic that given a debilitating condition being outspoken about it could maean being of two very different end of a spectrum of experiences.

Are you familiar with the concept of broad autism phenotype (BAP)? A person who has more autistic traits than the average person, but not enough traits (or are not sufficiently impaired by those traits) for an ASD diagnosis, has BAP. Someone who thinks they–or someone else–has ASD in the absence of a formal diagnosis–if they are wrong about the person having ASD, they probably are actually picking up on the person's BAP traits.

And how does the experience of BAP and ASD differ? Well, they are just different positions on a continuum–people with BAP have similar experiences to people with ASD, albeit with less intensity and/or less impairment. And the line between them is unclear and subjective, different clinicians draw it in different places–whether you end up with the diagnosis can depend on factors that have nothing to do with you personally, such as the diagnostic practices and clinical culture of the clinicians you end up seeing. (And the line is moving – a lot of people diagnosed with ASD today would not have received that diagnosis if they'd presented with the same symptoms 20 or 30 years ago.)

Stressful environments often exacerbate people's autistic traits and interfere with their own strategies for managing them. A series of stressful life events can lead a person to a situation in which they end up being diagnosed, whereas if their life had taken a more leisurely turn they might never have been diagnosed – even if their innate traits are exactly the same in the two scenarios. One of the key criteria for diagnosing ASD (criterion D) is clinically significant dysfunction, and dysfunction is highly environmentally determined (unsupportive environments result in far more dysfunction than supportive ones given the same underlying condition)

> If it's significant enough, it's not just someone being brisk or unempathetic in the same way OCD doesn't mean being a neat freak.

BAP is subclinical ASD. Subclinical OCD is also a subject of study, although unlike BAP it doesn't have a distinctive name. A lot of "neat freak" people may actually have subclinical OCD. And subclinical OCD and clinical OCD are on a continuum with each other, with a subjective and varying dividing line between them, just as subclinical and clinical ASD are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537443

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451328

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312895

I mean, there is no "neat freak" trait; that's something people who don't have OCD use because they think that's part of what it is. It's more intrusive thoughts about contamination, and there isn't a spectrum of those traits. Like you can't really "train" yourself to not be contaminated, in the way autism people talk about training to deal with social conditions. Trying to argue against it reinforces the behavior. It happens despite you knowing its totally irrational

I think I get BAP if you mean "the condition isn't severe enough to significantly impair your life," but I can see similarities between my checking behavior and people suffering the same but worse; I'm just fortunate enough that it doens't occur frequently. The talk about autism though is a different kind of talk; the moderate or severe sufferers are different.

Like the person I mention never got better or could use coping stuff; he would if anything just end up unable to talk possibly because he was medicated sometimes. I understand I'm not a clinician, but there's a lot of "spectrum" behavior in things now; you have gender spectrums, sexual spectrums (asexual, demisexual, sapiosexual), and I'm not sure the concepts aren't just medicalizing normal variation or individual temperament. I wish i could be doing this for me, if anything.

There is a continuum of intrusive thoughts – the continuum of frequency and intensity of those thoughts, the continuum of how easy it is to move on from them, etc. And a single individual can move back and forward along that continuum over time, in response to life events, development/maturity/ageing, and other factors. We say they have OCD if (a) they have enough frequency/intensity/etc of those intrusive thoughts, (b) the intrusive thoughts are sufficiently impairing in their everyday life, (c) there isn't some other disorder which better explains those intrusive thoughts. We draw a line on the continuum, and say this side is "OCD" (or maybe some other disorder), and the other side isn't, but that line is inevitably a subjective clinical judgement call

> The talk about autism though is a different kind of talk; the moderate or severe sufferers are different.

You mention "moderate" and "severe" – what about "mild ASD"? I guess what used to be called Aspergers syndrome?

> Like the person I mention never got better or could use coping stuff

You can't draw a lot of conclusions from a single person. You can't say that people with milder, less noticeable symptoms don't exist.

I've spent a lifetime learning a rulebook by trial and error that everyone else just seems to know.

It's absolutely maddening then the rules suddenly change for no discernible reason, often with little warning and grave consequences with no second chances for screwing it up.

It's why what people call 'cancel culture' scares the snot out of me, I'm deathly afraid I'm gonna say or do the wrong thing, and not really have a way to respond to it, and pay some sort of heavy toll. I'm okay with free speech having consequences (its the only way to ensure we can actually have speech mostly free of government regulation). I just wish those consequences were not applied for things deemed ex post facto (often by decades) to be violations of social norms.

But there is a certain amount of mental exhaustion from having to filter everything I say outside of some very very narrow circles, lest I say something that could be deemed in the future to be 'problematic'.

The larger issue I see, is our current focus on peoples actions in the past is it leaves no room for personal growth or to change views, it if anything hardens people views and perspectives - if someone gets no credit for getting better about something (like use of pronouns, or whatever else), there is no incentive to improve.

"A bit. If your goal is to look thinner I'd try that other thing instead."

Is this a neurotypical person being a butt, or an autistic person trying to be helpful?

Answer: yes.

So I would never answer this question to someone who didn't love me. And even then, they get offended, even though they ask.

Instead, my answer is, "Nope, not gonna answer that." And then they get mad anyhow.

So the comment above about the "trap" is correct. That person started the rudeness, but they won't take the heat for it.

But I'd say suggestion and (to use the southern term) social grace is one of the most nuanced and culture-heavy forms of communication. In that it assumes a lot of shared culture between you and the other party.

As least down here, with > stranger, < intimate partner, you'd get a "No" in all cases, but the words attached to the no would also differ almost 100% of the time in the "No, but..." case.

And I imagine most of those cues completely disappear cross-culturally.

If they simply disappeared, it would be alright. The problem is when they have the exact opposite meaning.

One example is US-ian unnaturally white teeth, that supposedly look OK there, but are somewhat creepy in the rest of the world. I mean, human teeth are not supposed to be white, but a range of very light ivory tones.

Granted! But also when they have no meaning, or are just... odd (e.g. "That's weird, how do they want me to respond to that reply they just made?")

White teeth are totally creepy here too. If you ask any US dentist, they'll tell you to match eye white (varies from individual to individual) to look natural.

But, then, there's a few "beautiful people" states where norms are so out of whack they don't realize how weird it is.

So even if we suppose that cancel culture somehow has 0 false positives (which I highly doubt), it's likely that many more neurodivergent assholes will be "caught" than neurotypical ones. Which feels functionally very similar to profiling IMO, and practically means we are probably not catching the more "dangerous" assholes. Because it's a lot easier to ignore an asshole view if you're aware of it.

I'm sure you also know of times - I know I do for myself - of times you've knowingly and purposively been an arse.

There's the biggest difference.

Sometimes people think I'm being awkward or uncomfortable, but mostly I'm tripping over myself trying (and failing) to find the right things to say. People expect that you can read them, and read the situation in real time. I can't (although usually I can gather how it's all gone wrong once the moment has passed -- a double-edged sword.)

A lot of "non-autistic assholes" may have other diagnosable conditions, for example narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) or antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Are NPD or ASPD "neurodiverse" or "neurodivergent"? They are probably partially genetic, just as ASD is probably partially genetic.

What makes those diagnoses "neurodivergent" and the others not? Why aren't other diagnoses "neurodivergent" too? How exactly do we define "neurodivergent"? (And why is that the right definition to use?)

> They don’t have much overlap with personality disorders (which do have a lot of overlap among that category).

There is a lot of overlap between the disruptive behaviour disorders (DBDs) – oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD) – and ADHD; so much so that ADHD is sometimes considered a DBD along with ODD and CD. And there is a clear connection between CD in children and adolescents and ASPD in adults – indeed, a child or adolescent with CD can follow one of two trajectories, either their conduct problems resolve with maturity and they become law-abiding pro-social adults, or else the child/adolescent diagnosis of CD evolves into the adult diagnosis of ASPD. So there is definitely a connection between ASPD and ADHD. A child with ADHD (even without comorbid CD) has an increased risk of developing ASPD as an adult – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24284138/

Some researchers consider ASPD to be a neurodevelopmental disorder – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29401045/ – which is the same category that ASD and ADHD (and sometimes also OCD) are put in.

There is also a lot of overlap between ADHD and BPD (Borderline personality disorder) – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739390/

There's also overlap between ASD and BPD – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590952/

Intent is the easier one to understand. Neurodivergent often don't act with the same intent that someone being an asshole does. Two people tell you that you shouldn't be eating that cookie. One is intending to be mean an to hurt you. The other cares about you and means the message in the best interest of your health, not realizing it will hurt.

With time and some prompting they can be led to understand how the message would be interpreted and realize it is hurt and stop, but it happens much slower and is often too little too late.

Justification is the harder to understand or empathize with possibility. Due to the previous issue impacting every area of life, often resulting in a significant decrease in quality of life and a significant increase in emotional pain, some will lower the extent they empathize with others. It is harder to explain because people think of their own times being hurt by others and think how they had the option to just do better than was done to them and rise above, not conceptualizing what qualitative differences occur when a pain goes from a short term event to a life long occurrence.

One further problem is that justification is only sometimes deemed appropriate by society. The differences in what are deemed appropriate differ strongly enough I'm hesitant to list examples because many will consider just making the comparison as a very asshole move. I am not at all clear if this consideration is in good faith or not.

I have found the difference to be willingness to reflect or to what extent they are trying.

A lot of my socially clueless friends (can't speak for if they lie on the spectrum) are delighted when I offer them a new set of rules that were previously invisible, instead of insulting them for not 'getting it'. They love being told what the lines between mean&blunt or curt&concise are. They can work around context well too, as long as it is explicitly laid out to them.

Mean people (adults) are usually one of:

1. Neuro-diverse people who don't know they are mean

2. People with insecurities they are trying to work on

3. People with insecurities they refuse to acknowledge

#3 is not worth it. #2 can seek help using traditional means. #1 needs some training wheels and personalized instruction to work their way up to socially well adjusted. Think of it as a person with a learning disability.

Neurodivergent/autistic people are usually unaware that what they say could cause offense: they lack either the emotional capacity to feel those emotions themselves, or the ability to empathize and predict that other people will feel them.

Assholes know, they just care about other things more. They might throw their coworker under the bus for a promotion. Or they'll sexually harass women because 1 out of 10 times, it gets them laid. Or they care more about being right than being diplomatic. Or they stop paying rent because there's an eviction moratorium, even though they could, because it saves them money and their landlord has no way to enforce agreements anyway. Or they sell drugs to children because they want money. Or they cut people down because it makes them feel big in the moment.

This doesn't seem like particularly assholeish behaviour.

Caring more about being perceived as right (even when erroneously), sure, but if the person is actually right of course they should care more about that than diplomacy. Surely we have enough examples demonstrating the pitfalls of fostering a culture where the truth can be ignored if you don't like it.

I'm particularly partial to being right on the Internet rather than diplomatic, so I'll cop to being an asshole. But I wanted to make the point that different people have vastly different definitions of "asshole". Some people will recognize themselves in the examples; others will recognize the person they can't stand. Sometimes those people are one and the same.

It's also possible to be both correct and diplomatic, and to criticize diplomatically. Failure to do so (often from a perspective that being right means one need not worry about diplomacy) is assholery.

Note that this is also somewhat self fulfilling. If you do end up being wrong, you can not admit that, as it would make your behavior inexcusable, so even when incorrect, you feel the need to fight and bully the people correcting you, in hopes that they go away.

Oh absolutely, but those are both totally compatible with someone who "care[s] more about being right than being diplomatic". It's if they didn't care about being diplomatic at all that they'd be an asshole.

I perceived that specific quote as referring explicitly to situations where the two are mutually exclusive, in which case I believe that being right is by far the better option in most scenarios.

I've been trying to come up with examples where that might happen and the best one I can think of is someone's young child asked you if Santa was real, but even then I'm about 50/50 on whether anyone in my social circles would care. I know at least a few who'd be pretty disgusted if I didn't tell the truth in that situation.

Now I recognise that this almost certainly is not representative of the general populace, but this is also one specific example (and the most egregious one I could come up with), whereas there's entire history courses written on the catastrophes that occur when people choose diplomacy over the right thing.

Playing into the Santa Claus lie with your friend's kid is absolutely inconsequential to you, but it could mean a lot to that kid (and to the parents) to keep that lie alive a bit longer. (And if telling the truth to that kid, against what the parents would wish, is that important to you, I'd suggest you re-examine your priorities.)

Context matters! Sometimes being right is essential to making some important thing work out. But hey, sometimes being diplomatic (and allowing the other person to be wrong) also can be essential to make some important thing work out. The big thing is knowing the difference and acting appropriately, which is sometimes hard to do in the moment.

But if we're talking about a kid believing in Santa Claus, and the parents actually do care that you keep up the fantasy, you actually are an asshole if you tell the truth, no question. If the parents really don't care, sure, go nuts... though if they didn't care, I'd expect the kid to already know the truth anyway.

Why is the desire of the parents more important than the desire of the child? Remember that we're talking about a scenario where the child is explicitly asking. They want you to tell the truth, their parents want you to perpetuate a lie. It's an easy choice for me to make.

You may not see the useful function of the Santa Claus fantasy[0], but it is not your (or my) place to decide that for a child or their parents.

Let's try with something a bit less trivial, something that my young nephew had to deal with not too long ago: death. One day kid realizes that grandpa hasn't visited in a long while, and ask parent what's up. Parents don't think kid is emotionally ready to have the death talk. So they spin a story about grandpa having to move away, and how grandpa loves his grandkid very much, but won't be able to visit anymore. And let's say you're over visiting your friend, and their kid walks up to you and says "my grandpa had to move far away and I miss him... do you know why he can't visit me?" You know that your friend's father died recently. If your answer isn't "well, what did your parents say?" followed by affirming whatever the answer is, you've probably done a bit of harm to that child's emotional well being, and likely have introduced some trust issues between the child and parents. What right do you have to do that? I would not be surprised if your friend stops inviting you over after that.

Don't get me wrong; I think many decisions parents make for their kids probably aren't the best ones. There's no authoritative parenting handbook, and most parents do the best they can. But it is not anyone else's place to "correct" someone's parenting decisions, outside of active harm and neglect. (And no, telling a lie about Santa Claus or death does not clear that bar.)

[0] Personally I'm not a big fan of it myself; while Santa Claus can be a useful tool to help a child's imagination develop, I really dislike how tied Christmas has become to consumer culture and materialism.

I couldn't help but laugh at this.

If you want to avoid trust issues, maybe don't lie to people. Seems like an easier solution than lying to them and calling other people assholes if they don't perpetuate your lies.

> What right do you have to do that?

There is a conversation occurring between two people. One of them asks a question. Both parties in this conversation want the question to be answered truthfully.

You are saying that I don't have the right to do so because someone who is not involved in said conversation wants me to lie instead. This is insane.

I find that very hard to believe. To be correct you not only need to be able to say carefully thought-out, nuanced things; you also need to be able to speculate wildly, to take half-baked ideas where they might lead. But the half-baked version of some important truths probably sounds exactly like the most offensively ignorant notions you could think of.

And good people are the ones who won't punish you for that. I'd agree an entire social group being this open minded seems unlikely in 2021, but GP may just have really effective filter bubble.

Versus most of the time, people who we don't know well do things for reasons that are inscrutable to us.

And we're left to judge solely on that basis of that information.

If you're not invested in someone enough to understand them, why should you be invested in them enough to try to destroy them?

Truly for my own self-benefit, I often need to make decisions (e.g. with work colleagues, customers, strangers) on whether someone is (a) malicious or (b) misunderstood.

And that's a pretty important distinction.

Some jerk named Twitter is my understanding.

> Truly for my own self-benefit, I often need to make decisions (e.g. with work colleagues, customers, strangers) on whether someone is (a) malicious or (b) misunderstood.

I think you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. This sorts itself out with any kind of long-term relationship because then you get to know them well enough to tell whether or not they're an ass.

But the first time you meet someone, it's prisoner's dilemma. Everybody defaulting to defect because you're afraid the other guy might be doing the same thing is not going to end well.

See also superrationality etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

Both examples - really all of the examples other than "selling drugs to children", which is from Breaking Bad - are taken from real-world conversations with people that basically said "What a jerk!" The person complaining about their non-paying tenant basically accepts sexual harassment as how the world works. The person (people really, it's a composite of a half-dozen or so conversations) complaining about the sexual harassers would likely find nothing wrong with a tenant skipping out on rent. Both are women, though a generation apart.

"/!\ I do not mean to liken sexual harassment to rent default /!\".

It's most clearly visible in griefers in online games, because the social consequences of griefing are minimal. Some people are just plain nasty.

But I don't think that's what's happening here. And I think it's ridiculous that it's been interpreted this way.

on edit: explanatory, not recommending

This is precisely what people with autism tend to be like because of the difficulty people with autism have empathizing with others and seeing things from other people's points of view.

The asshole is thoughtless because they believe others to be less important than themselves. The person with autism is (may be) thoughtless because their brain isn't wired to be thoughtful. Or they actually are thoughtful, but don't know how to express it in a way that others can understand.

If I appear scrupulously kind to you, it is because I am compensating. If I appear emotionally intelligent to you, it is because I had to learn what is literally instinct to most people. At least for me, I am able to compensate effectively and pass in most social situations, but it is exhausting.

When I read RMS's writing that lead to the conflict in question, it struck me as an entirely reasonable piece. When I read the responses to it, the message I got, loud and clear, was "my thought patterns are not welcome here"

that you choose to be kind does not make you less kind. that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real. that you willingly exhaust yourself exercising those skills is absolutely the opposite of being an asshole.

> that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real.

That is a rather technical statement, that would be dependent on exactly what you mean by "emotional intelligence". Relying on general intelligence to do tasks that most people accomplish with more specialized brain power is certainly different, regardless of if you want to classify it as emotional intelligence or not.

Sometimes I resent the patchy compensation mechanisms I’ve built up. It’s almost impossible to explain the frustration, the exhaustion, of choosing to be kind in a fashion that differs from my own understanding of kindness.

I am inherently kind, and I don’t have to choose that. I am confident in that statement. What I do have to force is mapping my default expression of kindness to the norms that friends, family, and acquaintances will understand. This is so important, because failing to do so means pushing all those people away. I feel like I can never let my guard down.

Then I remember to stop talking about myself; cue flash of (rational) anxiety; catch myself from a mental break; go and take a 50 minute long shower.

I’m so thankful for the people that give me a chance to reset, learn, and grow from these iterations.

I have a generic model and I develop ones for individual people too, what one key find normal another will find distressing - and none of it makes any sense to me at all.

What about all the other people who were excluded from the movement because RMS was an ass? A common human fallacy is to overindex on the contributions of assholes, while ignoring the potential contributions of those who were excluded by their actions.

My subjective evaluation, having met RMS in person and looked at the consistent patterns in his behavior, is that he is "below replacement value" -- he has overall caused far more harm than the average person in his position would have.

In this case, though we actually could, if we wanted to, find some data. We could go around and ask a bunch of people if they wanted to get involved with the FSF but didn't, and see how many of those people were turned off by RMS. Another option could be to look at the demographics of people getting involved in the FSF before and after RMS had been outsted, and compare.

None of that is perfect, and especially the second option would only give you a correlation, not necessarily causation. But, again, our data will always be incomplete, and you just have to go with what your experience tells you will or won't happen.

It's not a special preoperty of spectrum people that they have to learn what neuro-whatsit folks know "instinctively"; we all have to learn these things. Socialisation is learned, not instinctive. You don't have to have a disorder to have poor social skills.

It could be that your poor social skills are the result of inadequate experience or training; it might be that you don't care much (not because you don't care about others, but just because the approval of others doesn't matter much to you, and expending energy on gaining that approval is wasted energy).

Not needing the approval of others isn't a disease; it's a mark of psychological health.

For example, airlines don't employ pilots with extremely poor vision or flight attendants who are too large to fit through the cabin. Someone who relies on a wheelchair may have difficulty becoming a firefighter or a first responder and someone with Tourette's syndrome might have difficulty getting a job as a spokesperson or announcer.

My understanding is that the above constraints are not illegal discrimination (in the US) because the disability/attribute impacts that person's ability to successfully perform key job functions. Maybe extreme PC-warriors take issue with that, but I think most people would agree that these are reasonable constraints.

With respect to neurodivergence it seems dependent on whether it impacts someone's ability to perform their core job functions. As per above we should ask employers should be as accommodating as possible, so I believe an errant joke or comment shouldn't result in anyone being "canceled". But if someone is chronically incapable of processing social cues and/or has trouble interacting with coworkers or customers without triggering HR complaints then they may need to find a different role that doesn't require as much interpersonal interaction. That's unfortunate for the person in question but it doesn't seem any more discriminatory than an airline reassigning a pilot whose vision is failing.

are you saying that the undergrads that Stallman harassed at MIT are more economically and culturally free than he is? Are you saying that we should give a pass to bad bosses who turn their subordinates lives' into a tower defense game?

Harsh truth, but an easy rule for NDs to follow. Anything you say in public will be judged for its potential. If someone can get points for making it sound bad, they will.

Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying.

Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that? This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.

Gamers aren't a coherent group or right wing in general (think of the ages...) but "their side" (the side trampling on them) is anti-left, so the gamers were lumped together and drawn on the right. The 'Autism Spectrum' is the most "centrist" I've ever seen, but because the left uses them to launch its attacks from they're drawn as 'left territory'.

Specifically, the Neuro-divergent group isn't an active group, kind of by its nature. ND people on the map are more of a victim pool who just get picked on because they're easy to maneuver into mistakes. Like the whole Damore incident was Google saying "Does our HR policy look fat" and only James was tricked into engaging. He was more a convenient scapegoat to hurt to consolidate their power than he was an ideological enemy.

Certain groups have all-or-nothing ideological traps laying around everywhere and I think it's that these groups, like armies using landmines in areas with children, are especially harmful to societal non-combatants.

The social justice advocate's response to that is intersectionality: a defense mechanism of not engaging in advocacy that would benefit one oppressed group at the expense of another. They're not always great at this - some social conflicts are just difficult to actually make judgments on (e.g. Israel/Palestine). The thing is, though - I doubt "drop the autistics" is going to pick up steam in social justice circles. Autism, and neurodivergence in general, tracks very well with queer sexual orientations and gender identities. Social mores intended to enforce rigid gender roles and heteronormativity simply don't work on people who can't parse them. (The contrapositive of this is why there's a huge push for non-gendered children's toys.) Ergo, it's very unlikely that you'd see the social justice left tear itself apart like this, and more likely that you'd see people arguing that "drop the autistics" is bullshit.

I'm also going to point out that, as an autistic person myself, the stricter speech rules of the social justice left aren't terribly difficult to parse. The prior eras of social mores were far stricter because we didn't see them as coercive and thus didn't question their power, and it's somewhat troubling that people don't view it as an improvement from what we had before. It's sort of like how people coming from proprietary software sometimes argue that the GPL is non-free because it has some restrictions that don't conform to the unstated mores of proprietary licensing. Much of the reaction people have to these speech rules comes from two different places:

1. The people reacting to these rules are neurotypical, and used to invisible speech rules enforced by people with a common cultural heritage such that they wouldn't disagree on their unstated rules.

2. Many people in the social justice community are autistic (see above) and also had a hand in writing the rules. Of course, if people who can't parse social cues write the rules of a society, those rules are going to be explicitly stated rather than inferred.

In other words, the problem isn't that the social justice left is going to throw out neurodivergent people, it's that the social justice left is autistic, in cultural control, and writing the new rules of society in a way neurotypicals don't understand.

(Side note: #9 is a conflict that's been brewing in the back of my head for a while now. I love P2P tech but think the entirety of cryptocurrency has been a dead-end full of scams.)

How do you know that everyone who disagrees with the "speech rules" of the "social justice left" is "neurotypical"?

I think "aneurotypical" people (whether ADHD or ASD or whatever) are just as capable of having a wide variety of different political views as "neurotypical" people are. Take any current political or social question, you are going to have a wide diversity of opinion about it, and I don't see why people with ASD/ADHD/etc would have any less viewpoint diversity than society as a whole does. (If anything, people with ASD might have more viewpoint diversity than average, due to putting less value on social conformity leading to a greater willingness to consider and even espouse unpopular opinions.)

> it's that the social justice left is autistic

I really doubt that. Possibly, people with ASD are over-represented on the "social justice left". (I've heard the same claim made about the "alt-right" – although the two claims are not mutually exclusive). But I think the clear majority people on the "social justice left" don't have ASD, and conversely a lot of people with ASD don't identify with the "social justice left".

> As thoughtless teenagers, we made crude SC/ST jokes. Here’s one: at a urinal in a government recruitment center, there is a line marked on the wall with the note, “if you can pee above this line, you get the job.”

This was unnecessary considering the dalits commiting sucide after joining IIT or other elite colleges due to harrasment from the Brahmins community students. Even if you give the benefit of doubt on this one simply as telling a story, look for the next quote.

> .. but I am enough of a free-speecher to acknowledge that it has a right to

This... This is the mindset of the upper caste Brahmins. They don't want the reservations based on caste but at the same time they don't want it to go away, simply because it provides birth entitlement at the cost of the other castes.

It does not matter he is an atheist. Even the founder of Hindutva philosophy is an atheist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar whom these modern educated caste supporting intellectuals admire.

That blog post is quite long, If you read the entire post you get the impression that after all caste system is not bad, just the implementation had gone wrong. In fact any one who says caste is not that bad especially in USA, it is very likely they are from upper caste brahmin community.

I've listened to him be rude to former co-workers (one seemingly on the basis that she was a woman in a technical role) and an absolute one man clown rodeo at various trade show events.

His philosophical brilliance has always impressed me, his personal presence is like rotting offal in the sun. He doesn't get the benefit of being remembered for the former when he puts in so much effort to broadcast the latter.

This is the thing for me. Being neuroatypical and unable to follow typical social cues, or having trouble expressing thoughtfulness or care is just a fact of life. But not being thoughtful and not caring is a choice.

Not if you’re neurodivergent. I think the challenge is knowing who has different brain chemistry and who has regular chemistry and is choosing.

https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

It feels wrong to me to squeeze this tiny little "a" in between the words 'neuro' and 'typical' that flips the combined word's meaning around. The "a" usually goes at the front of a word so that you can tell immediately that it is being negated. I know that "a" is at the front of 'typical' but that's precisely the rub since it is actually in hiding instead of at the front of the combined word.

I do. How the hell do you think I figured it out for RMS? That same critical filtering can happen not just across time, but across various axes of context.

I didn't say that he's "irredeemable" but that the constant hagiographic/endless forgiveness for his chronic boorishness by his acolytes is annoying and serves no benefit.

Most relevant is that it deprives him of useful feedback neurodivergent people can actually use to better communicate with neurotypical colleagues.

http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.html

This is illegible and does not seem to follow from the rest of this thread. I'm missing where the GP made a statement about a person's "philosophical brilliance." Did I miss something, or is this meant to infer something else?

>His philosophical brilliance has always impressed me, his personal presence is like rotting offal in the sun. He doesn't get the benefit of being remembered for the former when he puts in so much effort to broadcast the latter.

Sounds a bit like Diogenes the Cynic.

Stallman seems to be in a similar vein as many of the 'great philosophers'. In that his ideas are challenging and difficult, much like himself. Making the man not one that you like all that much. The phenomenon reminds me of an often misinterpreted Edmond de Goncourt quote:

"Almost no one loves the genius until he or she is dead. But then we do, because now life is better."

The quote is not talking about how the genius made our lives better through their work/effort. Rather, how they were so insufferable.

As to Stallman, only time will tell if he will join the Great Conversation as a loud voice or not.

Care to back that accusation up with anything?

I also observed him trying to dress people down ad nauseum for a litany of inanities: telling me and several other staff from VA when it changed from VA Research to VA Linus that it should be "VA GNU/Linux" while the rest of us were trying to have a conversation with other people. Or the time he could barely control his irritation at an awards event when Linus Torvalds' toddler daughter upstaged him at an awards presentation. Or when he seemed clueless and/or ambivalent about any number of things that other people felt.

Yes, I have a strong negative opinion about RMS. No, it is not based on tertiary opinions, but direct or near-line observations.

One of the responsibilities of anyone in power is to avoid emboldening sexual predators and silencing victims. Anyone in power who does that should be called out; and anyone who continues to do it after being called out should be asked to step down.

Let me start by saying that Stallman's words defending Minsky have absolutely been misinterpreted. He did not say that Guiffre was "entirely willing". And given that the age of consent in most of Europe is 16 or below [1], I think it's hypocritical for so many people to be outraged about Stallman saying maybe 17 isn't so bad.

Nonetheless, his defense of Minsky is still problematic. Why? Because in the hypothetical situation he described, Minsky had sex with Guiffre even though he should have seen red flags. (Don't get distracted here by arguing that Minsky did see red flags and didn't actually sleep with Guiffre. That's not the point: Stallman still defended Minsky as though he had.) By defending Minsky, he was indicating to all future sexual predators, "I will try to find excuses to defend your bad behavior"; and to all future sexual victims, "There is no point in coming forward; I will try to excuse the person who did this to you."

Now maybe Stallman didn't realize that's what he was doing; and maybe the reason he didn't realize it was because his brain is wired differently, which makes it difficult for him somehow. If so, we can cut him some slack personally; but it doesn't change the fact that it's harmful to have him in leadership.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe

It is absolutely fine for young people to consent to having sex with other young people. A minimum age makes little sense there. Very young kids do stupid things all the time, including touching each other's genitals. By some definitions, if two toddlers "play doctor", the older one is somehow a criminal. That seems insane. I remember being 14 and doing sexual things with my 15 year old girlfriend. At that point we were both falling foul of the law. But once she turned 16, she was suddenly a pedophile and a stutory rapist because I was only 15? Again, that seems insane.

Then there's the issue of older people having sexual relations with younger people. This is where things become a lot more complex. It's pretty clear that it's inappropriate when authority figures are involved (e.g. teacher and underaged student). But then that can be inappropriate regardless of age. I can't imagine 14 year old me having been sexually interested in anyone over the age of 30, but that seems entirely arbitrary and subject to taste. I can certainly imagine 14 year old me thinking that my sex life wasn't anyone else's business. Some 14 year olds are more mature than some 18 year olds. Yet the former somehow can't consent to anything, but the latter can consent to sex with anyone aged 16-120+?

Age is a pretty good proxy for maturity on a population scale, but it's a really lousy proxy on an individual level. Perhaps we, as a society, would do well to remember that individual differences can be huge, and that consent is more important than merely the age.

After some high-profile cases (usually involving minorities and disapproving parents), some states in the US have corrected this via "Romeo and Juliet Laws".

(Had to look into this due to having a bit younger girlfriend right around that age)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Romeo_and_Julie...

Right, and I carefully worded what I said about it to try to avoid expressing any opinion on the subject. :-)

Yes, exactly.

Pointing out extenuating circumstances of someone's (alleged) bad behavior is necessary and useful. But it should always come second to determining what the person should have done instead, and holding them accountable to push society towards a place where everybody has the responsible behavior by default.

The attitude of "if there's any plausible reason person X might have thought they weren't doing anything wrong, we shouldn't punish them" gives the exact wrong incentives.

I admit, the circumstantial evidence is, uhh, indicative, but I don't see it being a matter of public record. Then again, I only did six and a half minutes of internet research, though, and I could be wrong, thus the question mark.

If you understand the concept of the broad autism phenotype (BAP), it is hard not to see it in his behaviour. He obviously has autistic traits.

Now, is it BAP (sub-clinical ASD) or is it clinical ASD? Nobody can answer that unless they are actually a qualified diagnostician (psychiatrist/psychologist/etc) personally evaluating him.

But I'm not sure how much that matters. The boundary between BAP and ASD is vague, it varies from clinician to clinician and is changing over time.

If you choose to view things dimensionally [0] rather than categorically, you have "super-neurotypical" people at one extreme, you have "severe ASD" at the other [1]. And somewhere in between the two, you draw a line (the diagnostic cutoff), and say people on one side of the line have "mild ASD" and people on the other side of the line don't have ASD. And the people who are on the "neurotypical" side of the line, but still close to it rather than far away, that's BAP.

And I think the point is that RMS obviously is somewhere near that line, whichever side of it he may belong on. (And as I said, the line doesn't have a single fixed location anyway, he might be on one side given some clinicians' ways of drawing it and on the other given others'.)

[0] I've drawn an oversimplified one-dimensional model here. In reality ASD is a multidimensional construct. But, treating it one-dimensionally is a simplification which aids in explanation

[1] I know some people don't like phrases like "mild ASD" or "severe ASD" (or their close relatives "low functioning" and "high functioning"), but how else do you explain the difference between someone diagnosed with "ASD Level 1 / Level 1 without intellectual or language impairment" and someone else who is diagnosed with "ASD Level 3 / Level 3 with intellectual impairment and language impairment"?

But it's okay to treat autistic people as less than human because they are not a politically powerful group. You learn a lot about people from how they treat politically disadvantaged, and we have learned a lot about you.

There are, at any given time, few people who walk this world rating so highly on these scales.

A few final statements did bring him down, but he had been chipping at the foundation for years.

I also don't really know all that much about Richard Stallman I just don't like the idea that if you accept someone for themselves all the difficulties of social cohesion magically disappear because it's untrue.

'boys will be boys' doesn't assert that 'boys' get away with whatever they want because they are neuro-divergent, it asserts that gender allows for additional privilege.

>Just because somebody is different doesn't mean they can be a creep

For the sake of argument : what if that person has neurological quirks which disallow 'non-creep' , to use your parlance, behavior?

To take the example even further , it's illegal with fine attached to say curse words on certain beaches in the United States. Is it reasonable to fine an individual with Tourette Syndrome when they scream expletives on such a beach?

If swearing at the beach is unacceptable, full stop, then it's unacceptable for a person with or without TS. (Personally, that sounds like a dumb law, but what do I know)

A TS individual for instance may be annoying, however they aren't causing actual physical harm to other people, in the same sense that a murderer might be.

But I do agree with the idea that letting someone off the hook for all consequences on account of a mental illness isn't viable. That makes things a lot harder for neurodivergent individuals, but that's why we should have extensive support programs and provide resources to help them cope with the expectations of general society.

It's a tricky problem, because to meaningfully distinguish between someone who is mentally incapable of following a law and someone who is capable of doing so but systematically elects not to, you are functionally deciding which humans do and do not have free will on an individual basis. I think most people would believe that either all humans have free will, or no humans have free will, not somewhere in between, so this is a scenario that is uncomfortable to pretty much everyone.

A lot of the internal-to-the-free-software-community frustration with RMS was how he had basically stopped contributing code to GNU but still felt entitled to overrule maintainers. He is a talented coder! He could have continued to use his skills to write free software and delegated the work of being the face of the movement to others. He could have listened when people suggested to him that he'd be of greater service to the movement that way. He didn't do any of that.

Not everyone is ideally suited for every role. That's part of being understanding of neurodivergence.

In my experience, the same sort of people who crusade against the Richard Stallmans of the world are the creepiest and by far most unpleasant to work with, yet they themselves are constantly being celebrated, uplifted, and raised into positions of real power and real harm.