Man, this essay… feels like there’s a mistake being made. Hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, though. (Apologies for some implicit unkindness here, I don’t intend to say “you should feel bad for feeling bad”, but it feels like there’s an important and true thing in need of exploration which I need to be somewhat unkind in order to explore.)
One angle: someone says something, and I realize that their model of people is literally unable to account for certain properties of me. And then I’m like… duh? I am in fact an outlier. You are in fact an outlier. Obviously many peoples’ world models will just totally fail to account for you and I in various ways. Obviously insofar as the world is built for in-distribution humans, you or I will will not fit it. So what’s the angst about? Is the problem that, like, you wish to “be seen”, and that just totally fails to happen? Or maybe it’s something like… people implicitly asserting that their model, which totally fails to account for certain properties of you/me, is “supposed to be true”, like it is somehow a failure on your/my part to fit that model?
I’m not quite sure where the angst is coming from, but it feels like the sort of angst where there is some true fact about the world such that, upon emotionally updating on that fact, the angst would probably mostly stop happening. Like, if you could find the true name of the angst-generator, you’d be like “oh well duh” and then it would just stop seeming significant? Or maybe you could grieve a bit and then move on?
John, I think you’re onto something, at least in that you’ve accurately perceived “something’s not right here” and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I’m not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to “what should be done about it” suggests you’re missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan’s post is closely related to stuff I’ve been mulling over lately, and I can’t tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don’t have any clear answers yet, just questions that I’m still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it’s helpful to think of a well defined class of people with a specific straightforward way of being weird, such as people who are mobility impaired and mainly get around using wheelchairs or scooters. (I imagine it would also be really helpful to talk to people from within such a class, rather than acting like I’m confined to analyzing my own imagination, and while I’m not going to do that in this particular comment, I think it would be pretty cool if somebody piped up who actually knows what the world’s like from the perspective of a wheelchair or scooter.)
What would it be like if I had a really hard time walking or couldn’t do it at all, and even my close friends who are hearing went around saying things like “everybody loves hiking” right in front of me? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond?
What if most of the buildings I wanted to enter were only navigable by stairs? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond? How does my answer to that change if there are one billion people like me, or ten million, or one thousand or ten, or if I’m literally the only one?
And what are the similarities and difference between “everybody loves hiking” and “the bathroom at the theater is up a flight of stairs and there’s no elevator”? What about when the bathroom’s upstairs at a friend’s house party?
If there were a sovereign island populated mainly by people who were substantially weird in some way related to their physical or sensory abilities (with respect to genpop on the continent)—people with mobility challenges, Deaf people, people with low vision, people who are 6′5″ or taller, people with super smell who vomit when there’s body odor, etc.—what would the built environment of that island look like by default? How would things be designed, and what design principles would seem obvious there that are at best afterthoughts right now? And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well? What paradigms is continental architecture unnecessarily stuck in, to its detriment?
What about all of these things, but for far less visible cognitive and perceptual variance?
My overall point here is that I think Duncan’s sharing first-person information about a kind of problem that is in fact quite deep and complex, and that figuring out the right thing for someone in his position to do is correspondingly difficult. Imagine suggesting to a Deaf person that the lack of closed captioning on a popular TV show shouldn’t feel significant to them once they’ve fully understood that most people can hear. Yes, they are probably not having the best-for-them possible response if they’re deeply emotionally hurt every time they’re reminded of how almost nobody considers people like them when determining the social or physical environment. But in the absence of a much better suggestion than “grieve and move on”, pointing out that they are somehow causing themselves to suffer beyond what the reality of the situation strictly requires seems like… not quite the right move, to me.
Some thoughts I had while reading the post, which seem even more relevant to your comment: insofar as we want to think about “how to handle weird people”, wheelchairs or deafness are the wrong analogy. Those are disabilities, but they’re disabilities which lots of people have, and therefore which most people already know about. Society has “standard APIs” for interfacing to wheelchairs/deafness/blindness/etc. They’re not really “weird” in the sense that society just doesn’t have APIs for them at all (though perhaps they are “weird” enough that those APIs aren’t implemented everywhere).
One of the things which makes weirdness specifically unusual/interesting is that we’re in a very-high-dimensional space, so there’s surprisingly many people who are very weird in ways which society simply does not have conceptual buckets for, at all. People who don’t fit the standard ontology of society. And what makes that weirdness uniquely interesting from a design standpoint is that, because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that. In other words, adopt a persona, something which matches some standard archetype which most people recognize, and play that role. For instance, I aim to give vague vibes of cartoon villainy, and that actually works remarkably well at getting people to interact with me the way I prefer.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that.
I note that you seem to be arguing from a position of “make it work as best you can within the broken system” and that there is a separate mode of “try to fix the system,” and evaluating actions taken under one mode as if they are being taken under the other mode is a recipe for (wrongly) seeing someone as being silly or naive.
I do agree that your advice is pretty solid under the “make it work as best you can” strategy.
I am not quite sold on that being the right strategy.
Separately, it’s quite hard to do both at once but part of what you’re seeing is me trying to do both at once.
It feels like John came to the “make it work within a broken system” position because of his belief that “because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance”. I think I mostly believe this too, which is a bottleneck to me thinking that “try to fix the system” is a good strategy here.
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it—maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
I think this comment is pointing in the right direction. But I disagree with
E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached
There are buckets, but I don’t know what the draft APIs would be. Unless you count “finding your own tribe and stay away from the neurotypicals” as an API.
In Europe at least, this is beginning to lead to accommodations like letting you work more from home, spend more time offline, getting a low sensory stimulation space for work and exams, skip excessive meetings, being allowed to move during meetings and work, being excused from social events, specialised tutoring, medication, therapy, etc.
Well, maybe I should have said “API in a drafting stage”, rather that an actual “draft API”, but I’d think today people tend to know these categories exist, and tend to at least to know enough to have some expectations of neuroatypical people having a [much?] wider range of possible reactions to certain things, compared to how a neuroatypical person would be expected to react, and many (most?) have at least a theoretical willingness to try to accommodate it. And then, maybe at least as importantly, given a name for the bucket and Google, people who are actually willing, can find more advice—not necessarily all equally helpful, but still.
Separately, I note that it doesn’t really feel like the above comment is an actual response to Logan? That’s sort of headlined by “some thoughts I had while reading” but I am in fact curious what you would say in direct response to Logan’s reply.
what would the built environment of that island look like by default?
A big part of how I try to structure my brain and my life and my discourse is to make more Nevilles Longbottom feel able to exist by default.
And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well?
We get a LOT of tech that millions of “normal people” find useful from designs intended to help people who are struggling or weird. Snuggies are a bit of a punchline, but they were wildly popular, and they were invented specifically for people with mobility issues who have a hard time putting on coats/sweaters and who would have been trapped/impeded by just being buried in a blanket.
Right, and yet it seems clearly wrong to me for there to be eg regulations requiring all coat manufacturers to also make snuggies, or something. I haven’t worked out what the right take-away is from this kind of thing.
(We don’t have split voting here, presumably because this draft is from before split voting was created, but if I could I would strong upvote and strong disagree.)
I think an important piece of “why not grieve?” is that it doesn’t just come from dismissable randos, it also comes from friends and family and so forth. Something something, this bit from HPMOR:
“I think you’re taking the wrong approach by trying to defend yourself at all,” Harry said. “I really do think that. You are who you are. You’re friends with whoever you choose. Tell anyone who questions you to shove it.”
Hermione just shook her head, and turned another page.
“Option two,” Harry said. “Go to Fred and George and tell them to have a little talk with their wayward brother, those two are genuine good guys—”
“It’s not just Ron,” Hermione said in almost a whisper. “Lots of people are saying it, Harry. Even Mandy is giving me worried looks when she thinks I’m not looking. Isn’t it funny? I keep worrying that Professor Quirrell is sucking you into the darkness, and now people are warning me just the same way I try to warn you.”
“Well, yeah,” said Harry. “Doesn’t that reassure you a bit about me and Professor Quirrell?”
“In a word,” said Hermione, “no.”
There was a silence that lasted long enough for Hermione to turn another page, and then her voice, in a real whisper this time, “And, and Padma is going around telling everyone that, that since I couldn’t cast the P-Patronus Charm, I must only be p-pretending to be n-nice...”
“Padma didn’t even try herself!” Harry said indignantly. “If you were a Dark Witch who was just pretending, you wouldn’t have tried in front of everyone, do they think you’re stupid? ”
Hermione smiled a little, and blinked a few times.
“Hey, I have to worry about actually going evil. Here the worst case scenario is that people think you’re more evil than you really are. Is that going to kill you? I mean, is it all that bad?”
The young girl nodded, her face screwed up tight.
“Look, Hermione… if you worry that much about what other people think, if you’re unhappy whenever other people don’t picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that’s already dooming yourself to always be unhappy. No one ever thinks of us just the same way we think of ourselves.”
“I don’t know how to explain to you,” Hermione said in a sad soft voice. “I’m not sure it’s something you could ever understand, Harry. All I can think of to say is, how would you feel if I thought you were evil?”
“Um...” Harry visualized it. “Yeah, that would hurt. A lot. But you’re a good person who thinks about that sort of thing intelligently, you’ve earned that power over me, it would mean something if you thought I’d gone wrong. I can’t think of a single other student, besides you, whose opinion I’d care about the same way—”
“You can live like that,” whispered Hermione Granger. “I can’t.”
The good people who think about these sorts of things intelligently matter to me; it’s hard not to oof at their roundings-off even though it’s pretty easy not to oof at (most) randos (most of the time).
I do think there’s something here à la Buddhist attachment or whatever, that there is something that could be released or cauterized, but I think that releasing or cauterizing it comes with a real and significant cost, and not having been able to disentangle those (such that I can avoid losing the precious thing) is a deterrent.
This is what I wanted to get at about your post. There are some people/some environments where I feel totally attached to (what I imagine) are people’s models of me. I’ve worried about my mom’s judgement for basically all my life. But she can’t know me entirely because as you rightly point out, she isn’t me — I’ve felt a lot of comfort in realizing that her model of me (and my model of her modeling me) is necessarily incomplete, and therefore can’t be eternally true. My worthiness isn’t dependent on her model. If it’s any consolation, having this feeling for the past short while hasn’t made me detached from what I generally think is her good judgement.
BUT, at the same time, my mom has been able to like take one look at me and totally figure out motivations that I couldn’t articulate beforehand. I don’t know myself entirely. There are some motivations which appear transparent to to others, and which I could reasonably say right now “I don’t feel”, but I actually might. Not saying this is true of most of the A-ful without B-things you’re feeling. And obviously people over-extend their heuristics. Still, I think this is the value of putting stock in other people’s models of you — different info from the outside. But variable levels of attachment seem to be the problem?
One thing worth noting is that I have an entanglement between [my defense of my self] and [my defense on behalf of all the Nevilles Longbottom out there].
Like, I have T O N S of evidence that my own “hey, HEY, you don’t speak for everybody, bucko!” has been deeply nourishing for lots and lots and lots of people in lots and lots of contexts; even if I were to solve this one completely such that I had no need for self-defense along this axis I would likely still want to push back against the roundings-off on behalf of all the other people who had not yet solved this one for themselves, and are constantly taking damage.
No doubt I can do both the [self defense] and the [other defense] more effectively, but fixing my own orientation is not enough because other people have broken orientations, and I want them to be okay, and allowed to exist in their own skin under the sun.
Lol this entire thread that you’ve linked to is “why neurotypicals are bad, except I’m not going to admit that they’re bad and I’ll keep protesting devoutly that they’re not bad even though I haven’t said a single actually positive thing about them yet.”
Go ahead and test the prediction from the start of that thread, if you like, and verify that random people on the street will often deny the existence of the other two types. (The prediction also says not everyone will deny the same two.) You already know that NTs—asked to imagine maximal, perfect goodness—will imagine someone who gets upset about having the chance to save humanity by suffering for a few days, but who will do it anyway if Omega tells him it can’t be avoided.
Oh god, that not only describes Jesus but also many main characters of epic fantasy stories etc. The whole reluctant hero bullshit. I was always like, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be the hero? Interesting point though!
One way to make it stop hurting when most people effectively say you do not exist, or that if you do, you are wrong and do not matter, is to tell yourself that most people don’t matter. It’s what I told myself as a weird kid.
But that is a really harmful and problematic thing to tell yourself in so, so many ways. It reflects something dark. It has dark consequences. It becomes a self-fulling prophecy, because you no longer try to connect and understand, and this means the other side has even less of a motivation to do so for you. It means you miss out on the valid pain and valuable insights and skills of the other people around you. It can turn you into an elitist jerk. It can remove you from any sphere of impact. It can leave you isolated in an environment where you would not have to be, and where isolation comes with ignorance and danger.
I think making the pain over not being included in society disappear by deciding that society is shit anyway is the wrong approach. It prioritises not feeling pain, not admitting hurt and vulnerability, over recognising the amazing potential that humanity and civilisation have. The pain fucking hurts, and it hurts because you sometimes begin to imagine that this could be different. It’s a pain that is needed to drive and guide a change for something better. It is pain demanding rights, rather than giving in to not having them. It is the pain of wanting to contribute and fix things, and if you retreat, something is lost. I think it is a brave and good thing to feel it and allow yourself to stay with it, rather than getting over it. It is a thing worth grieving over, and raging against.
I can’t answer for Duncan, but I have had similar enough experiences that I will answer for my self. When I notice that someone is chronically typical minding (not just typical minding as a prior, but shows signs that they are unable to even to consider that others might be different in unexpected ways), then I leave as fast as I can, because such people are dangerous. Such people will violate my boundaries until I have a full melt down. They will do so in the full belief that they are helpful, and override anything I tell them with their own prior convictions.
I tired to get over the feeling of discomfort when I felt misunderstood, and it did not work. Because it’s not just a reminder that the wold isn’t perfect (something I can update on and get over), but an active warning signal.
Learning to interpret this warning signal, and knowing when to walk away, has helped a lot.
Different people and communities are more or less compatible with my style of weird. Keeping track of this is very useful.
I think this is part of why I feel safer with people who are weird/different, even if they are weird/different on very different axes than I am.
I’ve had to learn that other people have needs that I do not have and do not understand, and these needs are legitimate and deserve protection even though I do not get them. Because my needs are not the norm, so average needs generally do feel mysterious and weird to me, and the supposedly weird needs of other divergent people do not register as weirder. If your needs do not fit the norm, even though they are different from the way mine do not fit, you’ve probably had the same experience. Similarly if you have ever deeply cared for, or properly listened to, someone who has unusual needs, and taught yourself to accommodate them even if you don’t always get it. And that changes how you approach the world.
I find it frightening when I encounter adults who have apparently never made this leap. Who will give support to me and others in the way they want support to be given to them, and absolutely refuse to alter this, no matter how much I tell them that this is not what I need, and is actively harming me. The classic scenario of giving gifts and invitations for things they would want, and being deeply angered if they are not accepted and used, insisting that this is bad and foolish. Like, giving me hugs when I am hit by a PTSD trigger, because they like hugs when they are distressed, and not stopping this, and being personally offended when I flee this, because if they did what I am doing now, it would imply that they do not like the person giving hugs so clearly, I need to get over it and like the hugs.
As a general rule of thumb, if someone does this to me, they will also be fucking over other people. Misgendering trans people, because they themselves aren’t trans, and their pronouns aren’t important to them, so they do not get why that would hurt someone different. Making holocaust jokes, because they aren’t hurt by them, so they can’t imagine that others are. Doubting depression is a thing one can’t just snap out of, because they do not have it. Lying to people about whether there is gluten in food, because when they imagined they were gluten intolerant, it turned out to be an irrational belief, and not celiac leaving them critically ill. Insisting on repeatedly hitting on women in contexts where the women cannot retreat and are in worrying power dynamics and have already indicated desinterest, because they themselves would like to be hit on more often, so surely, this is awesome. Mistreating animals by treating them like humans in contexts where this is absolutely counter to the animals needs, and it protests this clearly. It’s simply a giant red flag.
A point, as far as I can guess, is something like “the persistent misunderstanding of you, by others PLUS the lack of time/energy/mental-stamina to correct every person who misunderstands you, in an explicit/verbal way EQUALS very-hard-to-escape psychological suffering, even if it’s low-grade most of the time”.
Like, you can update on this (“I’m an outlier, I’m not like other people”), and it can still hurt. Angst from that, seems difficult to just make “stop happening” from one update.
In earlier times, I spent an incredible amount of my mental capacity trying to accurately model those around me. I can count on zero hands the number of people that reciprocated. Even just treating me as real as I treated them would fit on one hand. On the other hand, nearly everyone I talk to does not have “me” as even a possibility in their model.
Everyone has their own mental models of the world. We don’t always exist in those models. Even during times when they can clearly sense us with their sensing organs, we don’t really exist in their head. We are one of the things in the head. Sometimes it’s just a thing with different colors, male or female connectors, functions in society, that’s about it seems like. Sometimes those things get moved around into different bins depending on how we have interacted with them, for how long, how we made them feel. If we seem like a pleasant person, they will put a little smiley face on their mental representations of us. Suddenly, we aren’t so pleasant, uh oh, that smiley face has to come off now.
“Obvious” makes it sound like this is inevitable and acceptable, and I do not think it is. We do not judge it to be in other areas, either.
If I design a university building today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans can walk and see and hear”. No, I make it wheelchair accessible, accessible for blind people, and accessible for deaf people, even though they are outliers. Because they are outliers we want in academia.
If I design a school curriculum today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans learn the same way”, and teach all my students the same way. Well, I can, and as a result, a large number of students who could have done brilliantly will fail, feel awful, and not be able to contribute to society afterwards. Each of them will individually be an outlier.
There is a famous and interesting example on designing cockpits for pilots in the first planes. Someone made a model of the average, normal pilot, in order to make a cockpit that would fit average people. For each trait, they made sure 9 out of 10 pilots would fall into the range the cockpit was made for. There were only 10 traits or so—eye height, leg length, arm length, body width, horizontal visual range, etc.. - The resulting cockpit suited practically noone. Nearly everyone was uncomfortable in some way, because nearly everyone was an outlier in some way, and nearly everyone flew shittily for that reason. Ultimately, cockpit design was sent back to the drawing board—and we ended up with the individually adjustable seats and turnable equipment that nowadays, all of us are familiar with from modern cars. One size fits all fits practically noone.
We are seeing the same thing with machine learning algorithms. If we feed them data that fits the average, the outliers will be misclassified horribly, with severe consequences, and it is surprising how many outliers you end up encountering and how much damage that does.
A lack of representation does tangible harm. We have seen this in racism, we have seen this in sexism. Tell people implicitly that all scientists, or at least, all scientists that matter, are white men, and this will have consequences on who ends up in science, who speaks up. This is awful for the women and people of colour in question. But it also sucks for science.
And especially when it comes to neurodivergence… the fact that these things can often be masked, that they are not immediately visible, and that they can lead to difficulties with activities considered trivial, or genuine pain from things considered harmless… it is so easy to conclude from that that you are broken, asocial, that something is wrong with you. Everyone else can deal with loud crowds. Everyone else can focus. Everyone else understood this. Clearly, you aren’t trying, or you are sick. I literally had my dad argue, in writing, that the difficulties arising from me being highly gifted clearly showed that being highly gifted was a disease state requiring state intervention. I got handed to psychologists, not to be helped and understood, but to be made to conform. The fact that society says neurodivergence either does not exist, or does not matter, or is shameful, reinforces that you need to hide it, rather than asking for understanding and accommodations that would be empowering. A lot of the things one is told all humans do or need are things framed as moral imperatives, and not feeling them or needing them can feel like being a bad person, a person who cannot act ethically, a person who is inconsiderate, when this is not actually true.
Man, this essay… feels like there’s a mistake being made. Hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, though. (Apologies for some implicit unkindness here, I don’t intend to say “you should feel bad for feeling bad”, but it feels like there’s an important and true thing in need of exploration which I need to be somewhat unkind in order to explore.)
One angle: someone says something, and I realize that their model of people is literally unable to account for certain properties of me. And then I’m like… duh? I am in fact an outlier. You are in fact an outlier. Obviously many peoples’ world models will just totally fail to account for you and I in various ways. Obviously insofar as the world is built for in-distribution humans, you or I will will not fit it. So what’s the angst about? Is the problem that, like, you wish to “be seen”, and that just totally fails to happen? Or maybe it’s something like… people implicitly asserting that their model, which totally fails to account for certain properties of you/me, is “supposed to be true”, like it is somehow a failure on your/my part to fit that model?
I’m not quite sure where the angst is coming from, but it feels like the sort of angst where there is some true fact about the world such that, upon emotionally updating on that fact, the angst would probably mostly stop happening. Like, if you could find the true name of the angst-generator, you’d be like “oh well duh” and then it would just stop seeming significant? Or maybe you could grieve a bit and then move on?
John, I think you’re onto something, at least in that you’ve accurately perceived “something’s not right here” and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I’m not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to “what should be done about it” suggests you’re missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan’s post is closely related to stuff I’ve been mulling over lately, and I can’t tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don’t have any clear answers yet, just questions that I’m still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it’s helpful to think of a well defined class of people with a specific straightforward way of being weird, such as people who are mobility impaired and mainly get around using wheelchairs or scooters. (I imagine it would also be really helpful to talk to people from within such a class, rather than acting like I’m confined to analyzing my own imagination, and while I’m not going to do that in this particular comment, I think it would be pretty cool if somebody piped up who actually knows what the world’s like from the perspective of a wheelchair or scooter.)
What would it be like if I had a really hard time walking or couldn’t do it at all, and even my close friends who are hearing went around saying things like “everybody loves hiking” right in front of me? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond?
What if most of the buildings I wanted to enter were only navigable by stairs? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond? How does my answer to that change if there are one billion people like me, or ten million, or one thousand or ten, or if I’m literally the only one?
And what are the similarities and difference between “everybody loves hiking” and “the bathroom at the theater is up a flight of stairs and there’s no elevator”? What about when the bathroom’s upstairs at a friend’s house party?
If there were a sovereign island populated mainly by people who were substantially weird in some way related to their physical or sensory abilities (with respect to genpop on the continent)—people with mobility challenges, Deaf people, people with low vision, people who are 6′5″ or taller, people with super smell who vomit when there’s body odor, etc.—what would the built environment of that island look like by default? How would things be designed, and what design principles would seem obvious there that are at best afterthoughts right now? And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well? What paradigms is continental architecture unnecessarily stuck in, to its detriment?
What about all of these things, but for far less visible cognitive and perceptual variance?
My overall point here is that I think Duncan’s sharing first-person information about a kind of problem that is in fact quite deep and complex, and that figuring out the right thing for someone in his position to do is correspondingly difficult. Imagine suggesting to a Deaf person that the lack of closed captioning on a popular TV show shouldn’t feel significant to them once they’ve fully understood that most people can hear. Yes, they are probably not having the best-for-them possible response if they’re deeply emotionally hurt every time they’re reminded of how almost nobody considers people like them when determining the social or physical environment. But in the absence of a much better suggestion than “grieve and move on”, pointing out that they are somehow causing themselves to suffer beyond what the reality of the situation strictly requires seems like… not quite the right move, to me.
Some thoughts I had while reading the post, which seem even more relevant to your comment: insofar as we want to think about “how to handle weird people”, wheelchairs or deafness are the wrong analogy. Those are disabilities, but they’re disabilities which lots of people have, and therefore which most people already know about. Society has “standard APIs” for interfacing to wheelchairs/deafness/blindness/etc. They’re not really “weird” in the sense that society just doesn’t have APIs for them at all (though perhaps they are “weird” enough that those APIs aren’t implemented everywhere).
One of the things which makes weirdness specifically unusual/interesting is that we’re in a very-high-dimensional space, so there’s surprisingly many people who are very weird in ways which society simply does not have conceptual buckets for, at all. People who don’t fit the standard ontology of society. And what makes that weirdness uniquely interesting from a design standpoint is that, because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance.
From the perspective of a weird person, the main strategy this model suggests is: pick one of the standard APIs, whichever one works best for you, and use that. In other words, adopt a persona, something which matches some standard archetype which most people recognize, and play that role. For instance, I aim to give vague vibes of cartoon villainy, and that actually works remarkably well at getting people to interact with me the way I prefer.
I am highly sceptical of the idea that neurodivergence is rare in comparison to physical disability. Which numbers do you have in mind here? Even if we just count things like being highly gifted, autism and ADHD, the numbers are huge.
I am also sceptical of the idea that mental weirdness cannot be accommodated, because it is too individual.
People in wheelchairs are very, very different from each other. Some can walk, but the amount they can walk is unpredictable, so they are using a wheelchair to prevent a scenario where their steps for the day run out and they are stranded. Some have paralysed nerves, others malfunctioning ones, some are obese, some have joint diseases, some have muscle wasting diseases or chronic fatigue, many complex combinations of these. Wheelchairs and scooters are not the condition, which is varied, they are the measure taken for all these very different people to gain access.
Similar with people with visual impairments. You have people who are completely or partially blind in their eyes, from birth, or later in life. You can also have perfectly functioning eyes, but fascinating forms of cortical blindness, often acquired in adulthood such as through brain injury, such as blindsight, where they can do things like walk around obstacles and catch things, but not respond to them rationally and counterintuitively, because they cannot consciously see them, though their subconscious can. You have things like people seeing detailed textures and colours, but not shapes (which is bananas to think about when you realise they see multiple different textures and colours at once but still no shapes, e.g. someone seeing the exact texture and colour of your skin, and of your hair, and of your clothes, respectively, but they do not see a face or a human and these things have no spatial arrangement and connection). I know someone with partial cortical blindness who seemed completely normal and functional at a party in a dark room, then pulled out a cane when we left the building, and mentioned that she is completely incapable of using computer screens, because her body literally blanks when a certain light threshold is exceeded, so she works exclusively with screenreaders and tactile and audio input. If you focus less on how the specific person individually is, and more on things they say would help them, you still run into commonalities—like canes, support dogs, websites that operate with screen readers and do not need mouse input.
Similarly, if I offer varied forms of instruction in a classroom, the people who embrace a particular form and thrive with it are not identical, and might have different reasons for doing so. When my university recently replaced all light switches with an automatic and undimmable system of extremely bright white light, multiple people were super upset over this and requested control over light levels and their own space in their offices, and they had very different neurodivergencies that had them get stressed out over this. Similarly, the university currently wants to switch to none of us having desks and offices anymore and making everything flex spaces, and discussing this in groups on accessibility that are a crossover between physical disability and neurodivergence had us all very quickly hone in on aspects of this that were absolutely fucking with many of us, albeit for different reasons, from workspaces not customised to physical needs, to a lack of routine, to a lack of silence and privacy. If you include neurodivergent people in the planning process, and they consult other neurodivergent people, they tend to find that they are not alone in their problems. And while the result will still not fit everyone, it will include a lot more people, and that is a good thing.
I note that you seem to be arguing from a position of “make it work as best you can within the broken system” and that there is a separate mode of “try to fix the system,” and evaluating actions taken under one mode as if they are being taken under the other mode is a recipe for (wrongly) seeing someone as being silly or naive.
I do agree that your advice is pretty solid under the “make it work as best you can” strategy.
I am not quite sold on that being the right strategy.
Separately, it’s quite hard to do both at once but part of what you’re seeing is me trying to do both at once.
It feels like John came to the “make it work within a broken system” position because of his belief that “because high-dimensions, it’s plausibly not possible to build an API which will handle it all in advance”. I think I mostly believe this too, which is a bottleneck to me thinking that “try to fix the system” is a good strategy here.
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it—maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
I think this comment is pointing in the right direction. But I disagree with
There are buckets, but I don’t know what the draft APIs would be. Unless you count “finding your own tribe and stay away from the neurotypicals” as an API.
If you know something I don’t let me know!
In Europe at least, this is beginning to lead to accommodations like letting you work more from home, spend more time offline, getting a low sensory stimulation space for work and exams, skip excessive meetings, being allowed to move during meetings and work, being excused from social events, specialised tutoring, medication, therapy, etc.
I believe you that in some parts of Europe this is happening, witch is good.
Well, maybe I should have said “API in a drafting stage”, rather that an actual “draft API”, but I’d think today people tend to know these categories exist, and tend to at least to know enough to have some expectations of neuroatypical people having a [much?] wider range of possible reactions to certain things, compared to how a neuroatypical person would be expected to react, and many (most?) have at least a theoretical willingness to try to accommodate it. And then, maybe at least as importantly, given a name for the bucket and Google, people who are actually willing, can find more advice—not necessarily all equally helpful, but still.
Yes, that makes sense. Having a bucked is defiantly helpful for finding advise.
Separately, I note that it doesn’t really feel like the above comment is an actual response to Logan? That’s sort of headlined by “some thoughts I had while reading” but I am in fact curious what you would say in direct response to Logan’s reply.
Strong upvote.
A big part of how I try to structure my brain and my life and my discourse is to make more Nevilles Longbottom feel able to exist by default.
We get a LOT of tech that millions of “normal people” find useful from designs intended to help people who are struggling or weird. Snuggies are a bit of a punchline, but they were wildly popular, and they were invented specifically for people with mobility issues who have a hard time putting on coats/sweaters and who would have been trapped/impeded by just being buried in a blanket.
>Snuggies
Right, and yet it seems clearly wrong to me for there to be eg regulations requiring all coat manufacturers to also make snuggies, or something. I haven’t worked out what the right take-away is from this kind of thing.
My guess is that grieving ‘a bit’ is underappreciating the amount/quality of grieving this’d be by quite a lot.
(We don’t have split voting here, presumably because this draft is from before split voting was created, but if I could I would strong upvote and strong disagree.)
I think an important piece of “why not grieve?” is that it doesn’t just come from dismissable randos, it also comes from friends and family and so forth. Something something, this bit from HPMOR:
The good people who think about these sorts of things intelligently matter to me; it’s hard not to oof at their roundings-off even though it’s pretty easy not to oof at (most) randos (most of the time).
I do think there’s something here à la Buddhist attachment or whatever, that there is something that could be released or cauterized, but I think that releasing or cauterizing it comes with a real and significant cost, and not having been able to disentangle those (such that I can avoid losing the precious thing) is a deterrent.
This is what I wanted to get at about your post. There are some people/some environments where I feel totally attached to (what I imagine) are people’s models of me. I’ve worried about my mom’s judgement for basically all my life. But she can’t know me entirely because as you rightly point out, she isn’t me — I’ve felt a lot of comfort in realizing that her model of me (and my model of her modeling me) is necessarily incomplete, and therefore can’t be eternally true. My worthiness isn’t dependent on her model. If it’s any consolation, having this feeling for the past short while hasn’t made me detached from what I generally think is her good judgement.
BUT, at the same time, my mom has been able to like take one look at me and totally figure out motivations that I couldn’t articulate beforehand. I don’t know myself entirely. There are some motivations which appear transparent to to others, and which I could reasonably say right now “I don’t feel”, but I actually might. Not saying this is true of most of the A-ful without B-things you’re feeling. And obviously people over-extend their heuristics. Still, I think this is the value of putting stock in other people’s models of you — different info from the outside. But variable levels of attachment seem to be the problem?
One thing worth noting is that I have an entanglement between [my defense of my self] and [my defense on behalf of all the Nevilles Longbottom out there].
Like, I have T O N S of evidence that my own “hey, HEY, you don’t speak for everybody, bucko!” has been deeply nourishing for lots and lots and lots of people in lots and lots of contexts; even if I were to solve this one completely such that I had no need for self-defense along this axis I would likely still want to push back against the roundings-off on behalf of all the other people who had not yet solved this one for themselves, and are constantly taking damage.
No doubt I can do both the [self defense] and the [other defense] more effectively, but fixing my own orientation is not enough because other people have broken orientations, and I want them to be okay, and allowed to exist in their own skin under the sun.
Except, if you Read The Manual, you might conclude that in fact those people also can’t understand you exist.
Lol this entire thread that you’ve linked to is “why neurotypicals are bad, except I’m not going to admit that they’re bad and I’ll keep protesting devoutly that they’re not bad even though I haven’t said a single actually positive thing about them yet.”
Go ahead and test the prediction from the start of that thread, if you like, and verify that random people on the street will often deny the existence of the other two types. (The prediction also says not everyone will deny the same two.) You already know that NTs—asked to imagine maximal, perfect goodness—will imagine someone who gets upset about having the chance to save humanity by suffering for a few days, but who will do it anyway if Omega tells him it can’t be avoided.
Oh god, that not only describes Jesus but also many main characters of epic fantasy stories etc. The whole reluctant hero bullshit. I was always like, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be the hero? Interesting point though!
Agree.
One way to make it stop hurting when most people effectively say you do not exist, or that if you do, you are wrong and do not matter, is to tell yourself that most people don’t matter. It’s what I told myself as a weird kid.
But that is a really harmful and problematic thing to tell yourself in so, so many ways. It reflects something dark. It has dark consequences. It becomes a self-fulling prophecy, because you no longer try to connect and understand, and this means the other side has even less of a motivation to do so for you. It means you miss out on the valid pain and valuable insights and skills of the other people around you. It can turn you into an elitist jerk. It can remove you from any sphere of impact. It can leave you isolated in an environment where you would not have to be, and where isolation comes with ignorance and danger.
I think making the pain over not being included in society disappear by deciding that society is shit anyway is the wrong approach. It prioritises not feeling pain, not admitting hurt and vulnerability, over recognising the amazing potential that humanity and civilisation have. The pain fucking hurts, and it hurts because you sometimes begin to imagine that this could be different. It’s a pain that is needed to drive and guide a change for something better. It is pain demanding rights, rather than giving in to not having them. It is the pain of wanting to contribute and fix things, and if you retreat, something is lost. I think it is a brave and good thing to feel it and allow yourself to stay with it, rather than getting over it. It is a thing worth grieving over, and raging against.
I can’t answer for Duncan, but I have had similar enough experiences that I will answer for my self. When I notice that someone is chronically typical minding (not just typical minding as a prior, but shows signs that they are unable to even to consider that others might be different in unexpected ways), then I leave as fast as I can, because such people are dangerous. Such people will violate my boundaries until I have a full melt down. They will do so in the full belief that they are helpful, and override anything I tell them with their own prior convictions.
I tired to get over the feeling of discomfort when I felt misunderstood, and it did not work. Because it’s not just a reminder that the wold isn’t perfect (something I can update on and get over), but an active warning signal.
Learning to interpret this warning signal, and knowing when to walk away, has helped a lot.
Different people and communities are more or less compatible with my style of weird. Keeping track of this is very useful.
I think this is part of why I feel safer with people who are weird/different, even if they are weird/different on very different axes than I am.
I’ve had to learn that other people have needs that I do not have and do not understand, and these needs are legitimate and deserve protection even though I do not get them. Because my needs are not the norm, so average needs generally do feel mysterious and weird to me, and the supposedly weird needs of other divergent people do not register as weirder. If your needs do not fit the norm, even though they are different from the way mine do not fit, you’ve probably had the same experience. Similarly if you have ever deeply cared for, or properly listened to, someone who has unusual needs, and taught yourself to accommodate them even if you don’t always get it. And that changes how you approach the world.
I find it frightening when I encounter adults who have apparently never made this leap. Who will give support to me and others in the way they want support to be given to them, and absolutely refuse to alter this, no matter how much I tell them that this is not what I need, and is actively harming me. The classic scenario of giving gifts and invitations for things they would want, and being deeply angered if they are not accepted and used, insisting that this is bad and foolish. Like, giving me hugs when I am hit by a PTSD trigger, because they like hugs when they are distressed, and not stopping this, and being personally offended when I flee this, because if they did what I am doing now, it would imply that they do not like the person giving hugs so clearly, I need to get over it and like the hugs.
As a general rule of thumb, if someone does this to me, they will also be fucking over other people. Misgendering trans people, because they themselves aren’t trans, and their pronouns aren’t important to them, so they do not get why that would hurt someone different. Making holocaust jokes, because they aren’t hurt by them, so they can’t imagine that others are. Doubting depression is a thing one can’t just snap out of, because they do not have it. Lying to people about whether there is gluten in food, because when they imagined they were gluten intolerant, it turned out to be an irrational belief, and not celiac leaving them critically ill. Insisting on repeatedly hitting on women in contexts where the women cannot retreat and are in worrying power dynamics and have already indicated desinterest, because they themselves would like to be hit on more often, so surely, this is awesome. Mistreating animals by treating them like humans in contexts where this is absolutely counter to the animals needs, and it protests this clearly. It’s simply a giant red flag.
A point, as far as I can guess, is something like “the persistent misunderstanding of you, by others PLUS the lack of time/energy/mental-stamina to correct every person who misunderstands you, in an explicit/verbal way EQUALS very-hard-to-escape psychological suffering, even if it’s low-grade most of the time”.
Like, you can update on this (“I’m an outlier, I’m not like other people”), and it can still hurt. Angst from that, seems difficult to just make “stop happening” from one update.
In earlier times, I spent an incredible amount of my mental capacity trying to accurately model those around me. I can count on zero hands the number of people that reciprocated. Even just treating me as real as I treated them would fit on one hand. On the other hand, nearly everyone I talk to does not have “me” as even a possibility in their model.
Everyone has their own mental models of the world. We don’t always exist in those models. Even during times when they can clearly sense us with their sensing organs, we don’t really exist in their head. We are one of the things in the head. Sometimes it’s just a thing with different colors, male or female connectors, functions in society, that’s about it seems like. Sometimes those things get moved around into different bins depending on how we have interacted with them, for how long, how we made them feel. If we seem like a pleasant person, they will put a little smiley face on their mental representations of us. Suddenly, we aren’t so pleasant, uh oh, that smiley face has to come off now.
“Obvious” makes it sound like this is inevitable and acceptable, and I do not think it is. We do not judge it to be in other areas, either.
If I design a university building today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans can walk and see and hear”. No, I make it wheelchair accessible, accessible for blind people, and accessible for deaf people, even though they are outliers. Because they are outliers we want in academia.
If I design a school curriculum today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans learn the same way”, and teach all my students the same way. Well, I can, and as a result, a large number of students who could have done brilliantly will fail, feel awful, and not be able to contribute to society afterwards. Each of them will individually be an outlier.
There is a famous and interesting example on designing cockpits for pilots in the first planes. Someone made a model of the average, normal pilot, in order to make a cockpit that would fit average people. For each trait, they made sure 9 out of 10 pilots would fall into the range the cockpit was made for. There were only 10 traits or so—eye height, leg length, arm length, body width, horizontal visual range, etc.. - The resulting cockpit suited practically noone. Nearly everyone was uncomfortable in some way, because nearly everyone was an outlier in some way, and nearly everyone flew shittily for that reason. Ultimately, cockpit design was sent back to the drawing board—and we ended up with the individually adjustable seats and turnable equipment that nowadays, all of us are familiar with from modern cars. One size fits all fits practically noone.
We are seeing the same thing with machine learning algorithms. If we feed them data that fits the average, the outliers will be misclassified horribly, with severe consequences, and it is surprising how many outliers you end up encountering and how much damage that does.
A lack of representation does tangible harm. We have seen this in racism, we have seen this in sexism. Tell people implicitly that all scientists, or at least, all scientists that matter, are white men, and this will have consequences on who ends up in science, who speaks up. This is awful for the women and people of colour in question. But it also sucks for science.
And especially when it comes to neurodivergence… the fact that these things can often be masked, that they are not immediately visible, and that they can lead to difficulties with activities considered trivial, or genuine pain from things considered harmless… it is so easy to conclude from that that you are broken, asocial, that something is wrong with you. Everyone else can deal with loud crowds. Everyone else can focus. Everyone else understood this. Clearly, you aren’t trying, or you are sick. I literally had my dad argue, in writing, that the difficulties arising from me being highly gifted clearly showed that being highly gifted was a disease state requiring state intervention. I got handed to psychologists, not to be helped and understood, but to be made to conform. The fact that society says neurodivergence either does not exist, or does not matter, or is shameful, reinforces that you need to hide it, rather than asking for understanding and accommodations that would be empowering. A lot of the things one is told all humans do or need are things framed as moral imperatives, and not feeling them or needing them can feel like being a bad person, a person who cannot act ethically, a person who is inconsiderate, when this is not actually true.