Adapting to the neurotypical world is not the same as conforming
Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org Posts 214Comments 768Joined 3 yr. ago
Gaywallet (they/it) @ Gaywallet @beehaw.org
Posts
214
Comments
768
Joined
3 yr. ago
Deleted
The Autistic Soul of the Internet Has Been at Death’s Door for Years. Its End May Finally Be Here.
Jump
A well written article on some of the changing tides of the internet, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees. Every website goes through a process of enshittification or at least of cultural relevance or peak participation which shapes what it looks and how people interact with it. Even during these periods of change some people thrive and others do not. I think its fair to talk about seeing a particular flavor of interaction or website disappear from your immediate vision with no clear alternatives in sight, but it's also quite clear that the as others have stated the author clearly hasn't set out on a pilgrimage to check out large slices of what's out there on the internet. There are platforms with tens to hundreds of millions of people out there which are hardly mentioned (such as tiktok, mentioned elsewhere) which have thriving autistic communities. Hardly no mention is given to platforms more dedicated to chatting than posting, or the plethora of tools which facilitate the creation of communities which float between those which primarily are virtual but host occasional in person meetups.
I'm also a bit confused about why the author believes it is dying? They don't seem to talk a lot about how these folks are being pushed out, so much as perhaps they are being more difficult to find. Rather than being in the town's center, they are lost in the crowd? If that's what they are lamenting, then perhaps they should be mostly avoiding platforms above a certain size. You wont find many oddballs in a sea of normal people, and the size of places they remember from their childhood, where they claim these individuals were around were much smaller. I would argue even more strange people exist on these massive platforms today than they did back then, it's just that their voices are lost to the sea.
I've been back home for two days. I stayed near the hospital for a few but there's really no comfort like home. 1 week post-op will be tomorrow. Now I get to work on my leave paperwork with this shitty 3rd party company we pay to manage work leave, hooray.
Thank you! I'm doing so much better now that I had the ability to actually sleep. One night away did wonders. Now I've had two and probably gonna make the trek back home today since nothing is alarming and being close to the operating hospital is no longer as much of a concern.
Different kinds of social media have different focuses. Reddit and forum style have a bit less focus on the person and more focus on the content than Twitter because of how people interact with the platform itself. Twitter is very person centric, encouraging you to follow people to cut through the noise. Having communities which surface voted content puts more emphasis on the community than the individual and draw out the timeframe of algorithm engagement.
Planned surgery happened this week. Unlike the last time where they blew two IVs (currently wait listed end of October for this). Was supposed to be only one night stay but the doctor kept me a second night due to an overabundance of caution. Currently waiting for them to come check on me in the morning and hopefully finally let me go. I'm off pain meds, been walking, passing gas, and bleeding has pretty much entirely stopped. I can't think of any reason they'd keep me here but hoping to leave soon so I can actually get some rest.
Actually I think most people are decent. The problem is that those who are in power are not.
You seem to keep making a lot of assumptions about what happened, absent any evidence that it did. Why do you assume that she didn't make 'any attempt to talk to that Black employee's immediate coworkers'? Why do you assume she 'just talked to him'? Why do you assume there was no 'further investigation'?
We don't have any of this information. It's not fair to assume anything about whether they happened or not. Why are you making all of your assumptions in the direction of discrediting this individual? The article that is linked here links another article exposing a pervasive issue of gender and racial bias at this company, so it seems rather odd to be assuming that they had completely fixed this issue by the time of her hiring, a mere few months later, and that it was not at play in this situation. However, even if this article was not linked and this company was not specifically exposed for these issues, it seems odd to me to assume in the direction that research on bigotry in the workplace also does not support.
Why do you feel compelled to jump to the defense of someone you do not know, over an accusation which doesn't affect you and you have no stakes in nor any knowledge of the circumstances?
Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.
I don't mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?
It's so awesome to see so many of these taking off across the country. Can't wait to see it start to become more and more normalized and replace legacy welfare that comes with a bunch of red tape and overhead.
While this is a reasonable take, the tensor chips are supposedly focused on AI (which would make sense given their push into the AI space for phone tools like spam, photo/video editing, assistant, etc.) and this refresh builds upon AI stuff they rolled out to previous gen phones. I doubt any of it is so cpu intensive that whatever AI they've created in a few years wont also run on the older phone, it just might not be as snappy.
Telling people they aren't worth "keeping around anyway" is not nice. We only have one rule around here, and that's to be nice. Knock it off.
I'm not sure I agree, I've seen the far right nonsense on here since day one. Sure, it's increased with the overall popularity/activity, but it's always been there. Then again, since I help to admin a large instance, I'm perhaps more exposed to see it.
Yeah I mean I think they're just taking issue with the breadth or scope of what they're measuring and worried that by calling things conscious which people don't typically think of as conscious, they'd make people doubt the scientific rigor of the field. I don't think it justifies calling it pseudoscience so much as the early stages of hypothesis or looking to expand the colloquial or vernacular definitions of consciousness. To anyone who's worried about that, I'd suggest that they talk with modern physicists because everything we know has gotten extremely weird in the last few decades as we've struggling with a lot of weird conundrums about what reality even is.
That's not entirely true. It's meant to categorize fields of study which try to pass themselves off as scientific, that is to say that they follow the scientific method. To call something pseudoscientific is to say that they aren't following the scientific method. Fields of study which rely a lot on biases, exaggerated claims, are lacking rigorous attempts of refutation, etc. fall into this category.
Last week was rough. I had to bring a friend to the emergency department because they had stopped all of their psych meds cold turkey, and their psychiatrist had just put them on a benzo about a month ago. They're doing okay now, but they were struggling with walking, talking, eating and drinking on the day I brought them to the ED. If you're on any benzos, please please please never stop them cold turkey, you can quite literally die from doing that. Speak with your physician about a taper plan.
The following day I was supposed to have a rather minor procedure to implant a nerve stimulator in my dorsal scapular nerve. A few months back I had this placed. There were issues with that surgery - it was supposed to take 30 minutes but took 2.5 hours, and ultimately they had to remove it because it got infected. When I came in to get it removed, the charge nurse messed up their first IV placement and put the needle through the median nerve in my hand which still hasn't fully healed. It was a huge hassle to get this surgery scheduled because they recommended that I get the next placement done by the doc who's done the most of this particular procedure.
The surgery was delayed about an hour because there were a bunch of accidents that day and it was already a late appointment where they advised me to stop liquids rather early in the day. Unsurprisingly I was quite dehydrated. The charge nurse here knew what he was doing and set the IV no problem in like 5 seconds flat. Unfortunately, however, they blew the IV nearly as soon as they transferred me to the operating table because they were far too aggressive when tucking that arm for surgery. They spent the next hour failing to place an IV about 7 times including using the vein finder and attempting ultrasound placement. Eventually they managed to get one in near the elbow on the arm they were going to need to tuck for surgery (in my opinion not an ideal placement) which also blew immediately upon repositioning my arm. At that point the surgeon who sounded frustrated asked me if I was okay rescheduling the procedure, and because I didn't want a frustrated and exhausted surgeon operating on me I agreed. I don't have a new date, but we are now 4 months out from the initial surgery and 3 trips to the operating room and I still don't have a nerve stimulator 😩
To anyone thinking of reporting this comment, he's already been banned. I'm leaving the comment up because I think it's a good example of the community rallying to push back on a racist idiot. 😄
Surveys are really interesting in that, they often find things that are quite strange, and you are left wondering who was included and who wasn't. For example, I found it kind of surprising that gen z and millennials are way more often to 'touch grass' than the older generations
but it may make sense in the context of who actually got polled - I know I wouldn't bother to fill out an online poll or one that I received in the mail without compensation, and I suspect a decent amount of disconnected individuals would feel similarly. It was an online survey, so it's not too surprising that they caught people who are connected to the internet, but its kind of surprising they found people who are rarely online.
In this case I agree that education is probably a better approach. I was speaking broadly because there are serious issues with ethical considerations involving the implementation of AI. I think highlighting how we broadly run into issues like this as well as the other numerous ethical problems with AI can help to push our legal systems to take this more seriously. Anything involving children often gets more attention and we should be taking advantage of that to push for progress.
This article provides a high-level overview of why there are sex differences in heart attack presentation, and it's primarily about heart attack being a very general term to represent acute severe heart dysfunction, and that sex effects many metabolic differences (for example, men tend to have higher hematocrit levels, which can lead to a specific kind of ischemic event) as well as cultural ones (the kinds of exercise that women and men do are often different; the kinds of foods that men and women eat are different).
Fundamentally the sex itself has very little to do with how the heart attack happens and presents, but sex does generally effect circulating hormones which in turn effect circulation and metabolic profiles. Sex often correlates with gender presentation/identity which comes along with it's own cultural values, which at a population level will effect things like cholesterol due to eating patterns or exercise. Finally, sexism itself is also at fault, in that many women's medical concerns are dismissed rather than addressed which can lead to a worsening of symptoms due to a delay in care.
I think that there is no correct answer when it comes to whether a particular habit should be adapted or conformed or not changed at all. I believe that we need to think a bit more abstractly, about the sum of all experiences when interacting with a person, to understand how well that one person will mesh with society. Some actions are more socially acceptable than others. The more acceptable a certain behavior is, the less one would need to mask it. In fact, the very idea of masking stems directly from this fact... we don't talk about masking acceptable behaviors, and even neurotypicals may find themselves needing to mask behavior that's acceptable in one society but not another.
Instead I think it's better to think of social interactions as an exchange of credit. Every action between two folks either builds or destroys credit. These credits are influenced by the values of the people involved in the interaction which is shaped by their own personality, by the cultures they grew up in, and by the values they internalized from society as a whole. It's an extremely complex interaction for which working out the specifics is hopeless for nearly any individual, but we must recognize that this is the exchange happening to better understand how to develop strategies that work broadly as well as to understand that broadly developed strategies may fall apart at the individual level.
The most effective strategies will be ones which follow societal norms. If it is socially acceptable behavior to say, spend at least a certain amount of time smiling, establishing eye contact, complimenting, and using niceties in speech, than learning to pay attention to and ensure conformity to these will likely win you social credits in most interactions. Some of these actions may come easier than others, and thus priority should be to make as many easy wins as possible. If modifying eye contact is a relatively easy thing to do, for example, then it's probably worth focusing on, implementing, and getting good at. If, however, modifying eye contact causes a lot of stress, it should be weighed against other credit-generating actions such as complimenting. Emphasis should be put on casting a wide net at first to understand all possible low-effort, comfortable masks can be implemented before moving to more difficult ones.
Paying attention to how offputting comforting yet not socially acceptable behavior such as hand-waving is, can also help one to understand how to affect the credit exchange on the other end. Some behaviors may be easily masked in the short term and not cause too much discomfort in the long term. Other behaviors may be very difficult to mask and therefore not good candidates for behavioral modification. Much like learning which skills can be easily added to ones repertoire to build credit, learning which skills are easily masked can help tip the scales in one's favor.
Tangential conversational skills can be of great importance in order to shape these social exchanges as well. Understanding how one can enter or exit a conversation can help to time limit these interactions and reduce the need to self-soothe or make it more tolerable to increase the level of masking in order to build up credit more quickly with individuals so that less socially acceptable behavior can be dismissed or cause less harm in the long term for a relationship with an individual. Knowing when and where it is appropriate to physically leave, how to signal the end of a conversation, how to redirect a wandering conversation towards a central point, and learning to read and anticipate what others are looking for out of a conversation can all be helpful to this regard. Some of these skills may be more difficult to acquire than others depending one's particular flavor of neurodivergence, but reading about the science of human behavior can help to give us some cues, in the same way that many of us have learned that eye contact is important to most (there are many great papers measuring eye contact, among other social cues, which can be of great use to those who struggle).
In this context, I believe, is where the decision of adaptation versus conformity truly lies. If it is helpful to think in black and white, that a specific action must be adapted or conformed in order to implement a change, then that is fine. However, I personally think that social interactions are too complex to distill to such a mathematical component. I prefer to think of each of these interactions as unique, and the decision to adapt, conform, or not change an action at all is a conscious choice to me, informed by the sum of my experiences with this action and others in the past, the reading I've done on human behavior, and a combination of my assessment of the state of the existing relationship and the use of communication to more clearly define it or receive feedback from the other individuals involved in each social exchange.