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by michalpleban 268 days ago
From what you are describing, it seems to me that Iran is practically hell on earth for autistic people.
4 comments

I married in to such a family. My solution was to just take people up on their offers until they learned not to offer things they did not really want to offer. It’s such a culturally time wasting practice that I did not want to accommodate it in the U.S.

In Iran I would behave as the locals do.

From my perspective, even the US cultural norm is way too taarof. It's normal for Americans to offer things for politeness, with no intention to follow up and the interlocutor is also expected to understand the offer isn't genuine. So a phrase like "we should grab lunch" can be said without being an actual invitation for lunch. And then there's the whole aspect of avoiding criticism or saying no. "I don't think that's a good idea" in the US is more likely to mean "no, we're not doing that" than "I don't think that's a good idea so you need to convince me more if you want to do that".

As someone who also struggles to decode situations where people's actual, implicit meaning runs contrary to the explicit meaning of the words, American norms of indirectness are already a headache. Persian or Arab communication is much more indirect and that sounds like a nightmare to me.

But, for a person with autism, behaving in this way is practically impossible. I wouldn't even know where to begin and how.
I know you meant this tongue-in-cheek, but thanks for saying it anyway for the replies it would eventually accumulate.

I think we have too many people self-diagnosing autism when what they're really experiencing is ignorance of irrational social norms that are more about fashion than emotional intelligence.

Of course an LLM would be bad at such a topic since these are largely unspoken rules designed to be a form of discrimination.

Not about the Middle East specifically-but I think one advantage more traditional societies can potentially have compared to the secular Western mainstream, is clearer social roles and more explicit social scripts-now, that’s not necessarily true of all of them, but likely is true of some of them.
As an autistic person, you read my mind.