[puffoflogic]

> That is essentially saying that autistic people can't learn. That's not really the case.

Autists cannot just learn to act more like an NT in the exact same way that a blind person cannot just learn to see better. Your rejection of this extremely basic fact is an all-too-common combination of ignorance and/or bigotry.

[Beltalowda]

This is clearly not true. I was diagnosed with autism in high school, struggled with many things for many years, and nearing 40 now I've learned a great many things since then. My previous comment you're replying to was very much written from personal experience. I didn't mention this because I didn't think it's necessarily all that relevant.

Of course not everyone is the same, and things are different for other people; everyone is different. Some people may struggle more, or may have a hard time learning some things. But a blanket "you can never learn anything, full stop" is just not true.

[larve]

Seeing how many people object to this first question that I think is just... perfectly fine (I talked a lot about it to my wife) unlocked something. I wasn't aware that a question like "do you think our checkout is not performing well?" can be construed as dismissive while another question like "what are you looking to achieve?" wouldn't.

In fact, I would have thought that asking them clarifying details about exactly the topic they are asking about is the good thing to do. I think I know the checkout pretty well, and it doesn't seem to be causing trouble, so clearly there is a piece of information I am missing. While I would think that asking "what are you looking to achieve" is the impolite thing to do, since they just told me what they are looking to achieve, i.e. "making the checkout perform better by rewriting it in react."

I think a good topic for another article is showing what "learn some social skills" and "you need to be aware of the context and you come across" looks like for me.

Because I don't have the mental setup to intuit all the myriads of things that can make a question ok or not ok (words? silence? rhythm of speech? voice level? eye contact? clothes? past interactions? tone of voice? posture? mood of the other person? my mood? temperature? background noise? eyebrows?), and because no social situation ever repeats, the best I can do is figure out some very rigid scripts and then practice them. Why one question is ok and another is not is never going to be intuitive for me. Often, learning to do something better will result in even more awkwardness at first.

For example, my script for speaking to people at conferences is something like:

- say hi - ask where they come from and what they do - say "oh that's cool, tell me more about X" - listen and ask follow-up questions - try to regularly establish eye contact, but not more than a few seconds - mimic their posture - when the first pause comes up, say one or two sentences about what you do - then continue asking questions about them and listen - go for a 20% talk / 80% listen ratio. people like to talk about themselves. - don't talk about any of your real interests because you might lose track of the rules and start going on forever - don't forget to mimic their posture - and eye contact! - don't rock on your chair! - rinse repeat until there is a longer pause, or they look away, or 20 minutes have elapsed.

That's about the level of complexity I can manage. I practiced this and other scripts so much that I don't have to think about them most of the time, but when I am tired, I do have to execute it like a little robot.