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by BurningFrog 1336 days ago
> Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others...

As anyone can see, I did not write that.

3 comments

It was such a perfect illustrative response because your post said nothing of the sort and in fact explained how anyone can pick up the skill
I'm not sure about that. Communication is hard when words associated with specific emotional valence get involved. For the responder, I'd suspect that on the spectrum is one of those phrases.

I think what makes this stuff difficult is that the same word can trigger wildly different responses.

As an example, I've been working from Ireland for US multinationals for a while now. In Ireland, the word stupid means bad or crap but doesn't have a massive emotional valence.

In the US based tech side however, it was literally the worst thing one could say, I suspect because people were identifying with their ideas.

Same word, multiple different meanings lead to communication problems.

The word completely does over-assert that quote, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the quote does not follow from your overall point. People with good "theory of mind" would supposedly read between the lines, but I guess it was never that simple. Spoiler alert: there's no such thing as one true generalized theory of mind.
GP is using “theory of mind” as a technical term with a specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Reading between the lines is a whole different thing.

"Theory of mind" means, among other things, having a good mental model of what other people know and don't know.

Obviously, without understanding what piece of information the other person is missing, it's very hard to explain it to them.

> I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mind" capabilities. People without that will just assume people know what they know, and proceed to fail at communicating with those who don't.

The OP overstated things, but it isn't completely wrong to conclude the basic idea from your above statement.

Also, the OP did not say you wrote it, so maybe being less pedantic would help the situation.