[romwell]

What definition are you using? The idea that autistics don't empathize is, put it simply, false.

And difficulty reading social cues doesn't apply in cases where many, many, many people openly and directly explain why jokes at someone else's expense are bad (and correlate with the people being the butt of the joke being mistreated).

I have deconstructed the rape joke in another comment. Maybe to you immediately feel why it's not an OK thing to say. I go through the analysis. We both arrive at the same destination by different means.

[sokoloff]

> What definition are you using?

Literally to mean “in a literal sense; exactly” not the novel accepted usage to include meaning “figuratively, not literally”.

[romwell]

facepalm

What definition of social awareness are you using to make that assertion?

[sokoloff]

The first definition that came up in Google seems to apply: “social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others.”

If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”

Then, having the necessity to apply that rule, you would need to be able to evaluate “is this contemplated joke going to be at someone’s expense?”

I can’t see how you could correctly evaluate such a predicate if you had literally not any “ability to take the perspective of [nor] empathize with others”. Evaluating that correctly requires at least a shred of social awareness.

* defined as above and referenced originally here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186509

[romwell]

>The first definition that came up in Google seems to apply: “social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others.”

Yeah, that's not what autism assessments mean by "social awareness". When it comes to autism, social awareness is more narrowly defined to be literally that: ability to be aware of what's going on in social settings. This would be things like "reading social cues", "reading emotions", etc. (See [1]). However, let's proceed with your definition.

>If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”

First, as I said, autistic people can take perspective of others and empathize with others. What's lacking is the ability to do that through indirect communication, aka "getting the hint".

Second, I do have a rule, and that procedural rule is known as "learning from history", or "taking 5 seconds to google the link between hateful jokes and violence".

The full version of the rule is " Jokes at someone else's expense = bad whenever the people joked about are defined by a characteristic not resulting from their choice".

There are many examples in history how racist / sexist humor being normalized correlated with hate and violence; how "just joking" is used as an excuse to push an agenda[2][3].

You can analyze what makes a joke funny. Take the joke that got a juror dismissed from the Rittenhouse hearings ("Why did the cop shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because he ran out of bullets"). Its punchline is, effectively, "Because you don't need a reason to murder a black person".

Now, if a black person makes this joke, it can be seen as gallows humor - a commentary on the grim situation they find themselves in while interacting with the police - the reality that they don't get to choose. A black person saying "our lives are worth nothing" is calling your attention to a serious problem.

A white person making that joke would be making fun at Jacob Blake's expense (as well as other people killed by police). A white person saying "black people's lives are worth nothing" - well, given the history of racial violence, the premise that this is the person's actual belief may not be excluded; and telling this joke without additional context is harmful, because it would simply reinforce this idea, and put black people in more danger.

There are very good reasons why we should avoid laughing at characteristics that people don't get to choose. I can go on, however - does the above satisfy your inference criteria?

Perhaps it does require * a shred * of social awareness, but to say that autistic people don't have that much would be simply false.

[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/erv.2736

[2]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990274685/how-extremists-weap...

[3]https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...