I am not the author of the original post, and as such I am rather freer in my ability to express pushback to criticism of said post, without invoking social friction-costs like “But you might only be saying that to defend yourself”, etc.
So, to wit: I think you are mostly-to-entirely mistaken in your construal of the sentences in question. I do not believe the sentences in question carry even the slightest implication that the word “autistic” is synonymous with, evocative of, or otherwise associated with the word “stupid”. Moreover, since I am not the post’s author, I don’t have to hedge my judgement for fear of double-counting evidence; as such I will state outright that I consider your interpretation of the quoted sentences, not just mistaken, but unreasonable.
Let’s take a look at the sentences in question. The first:
I spend a lot of time around people who are not as smart as me, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart as me (or smarter), but who are not as conscientious, and I also spend a lot of time around people who are as smart or smarter and as conscientious or conscientiouser, but who do not have my particular pseudo-autistic special interest and have therefore not spent the better part of the past two decades enthusiastically gathering observations and spinning up models of what happens when you collide a bunch of monkey brains under various conditions.
There is no way to replace the word “autistic” here (without or without the “pseudo-” prefix) in a way that makes sense; doing so irrevocably modifies the sentence’s meaning in a way that simply does not at all parse in the context of everything else the article is arguing for. “[People] who do not share my [stupid/pseudo-stupid] special interest” is nonsensical; there is little-to-no wiggle room for interpretation here, and certainly not for interpretations like “I believe you are using ‘autistic’ as a synonym for ‘stupid’”.
The remaining two sentences use the word in question as part of the same noun phrase, so I will group them and their treatment together:
If there are Special Cool People™ who are above the law, be explicit about that fact in a way that could be made clear to an autistic ten-year-old.
Give up, and admit that we’re kinda sorta nominally about clear thinking and good discourse, but not actually/only to the extent that it’s convenient and easy, because either “the community” or “some model of effectiveness” takes priority, and put that admission somewhere that an autistic ten-year-old would see it before getting the wrong idea.
And again, in neither of these two sentences is can the phrase “autistic ten-year-old” be substituted with the phrase “stupid ten-year-old” without entirely and irrevocably modifying the meaning of the sentences in question. The qualifier “autistic” is performing actual semantic work in those sentences; in particular it is requesting that certain pieces of social information be conveyed in a way that is meets a particular standard of legibility, and using the hypothetical autistic ten-year-old as a measuring stick for that standard. Conversely, there is no corresponding standard for the phrase “stupid ten-year-old”, and given this I again consider it unreasonable to suppose that the word “autistic”—which, again, is doing real semantic work in those sentences—is being used as a synonym for a word that cannot do the same work even in principle.
You may note that this comment is rather strong in its pushback. This is intended. I believe that your comment, separately and in addition to the object-level misunderstandings it presents, is an instance of a more general trend that I strongly dislike, and would prefer to see less of. The trend in question is imputing intention to others where there is none; the moment you claim to have the ability to read the mind of your interlocutor (and moreover to do so with enough precision to identify subconscious, harmful intentions) is the moment you introduce a dimension to the conversation that, in my view, should not be there. I believe both of your initial comments fall afoul of this, but especially your second one, which contains allegations such as
Differentiating between pseudo-autistic and actually autistic could be done for the motive of avoiding negative connotations.
and
I hold it in high probability that your mind is doing a mini-dodge of negative connotation and you are suffering from a very mild case of internalized ablism.
I consider both of these examples of epistemically corrosive behavior—and in this particular case that impression is amplified by the fact that you then proceed to inject at least mildly political undertones (“And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism”) based on your imagined interlocutor’s implicit intentions. I am very strongly against the notion that people should take offense to the meaning they project onto someone else’s sentences, and on that front I think your comment scores terribly. Strong downvote.
Thank you for explaining your vote, I have upvoted it.
Your analysis that trying to reword “pseudo-autistic” to stupid is indeed correct that it can’t really be done.
I have a different bone to pick about it and that I need to separately tell what the bone is speaks of my communication being inadequate. Fine expressions to me would be “autistic special interest” or “intense special interest”. The danger there is not to dilute the meaning anything near a “hobby”, special interests are a separate thing and the latter is what is went after.
The bone is more with the use of “pseudo”. If you are a bit homosexual you are not “pseudohomosexual” or “pseudoheterosexual”. You can be bisexual or homocurious, those are nearer to being actual things. But “pseudohomosexuality” is not a thing but a weird adhoc construction attempt. You don’t do weird “its not gay if the balls are not touching” games is gay is something non-negative. You can be neurotypical, you can be autistic, but rather than being “pseudo-autistic” you have aspergers or you are a high functioning autist or you are a person on the autism spectrum.
Anyway on the other thread it has surfaced that the main motivation was to avoid self-identification.
I do take note that I did incorrectly fail to read that the rules contain social information rather that they are especially clear. Flavourings like “10-year-old with ADHD would bother to read” or “10-year-old with dyslexia would not misconstrue” would be fine and relevant. “10-year-old girl would get” would be improper. And the sensible rephasing would be “even those that do not intuitively get social situations would heed and employ”.
For those that are I tried to figure out what was happening and I found that the phrase happening at an emphasis, the topic being about exclusion and shooting down excuses pattern made the categories cross over. Hate words are said in a particular kickful way and the text was going for that kind of “sink in” tempo. Now that I could locate and particularise it provides a accident account even if does not provide excuses. I also noticed a kind of sense that “I should speak up” even if it is hard and even if it is a bit inaccurate, that there was a looming danger that the impulse was too diffuse and had too much inferential distance that if I explained it at full length I would get lost assembling too big of a entity. Thus it felt as say something or hold your peace and holding my peace felt really bad. I notice this triggers a kind of excuse to skip over steps which is probably dangerous in the same sense as “going for the win” but “getting the hint out there” seems less terrible of a beast.
I would like my carrots for sticking my neck out there and aknowledging that since its only a probabilty I might not actually be telepathic. I thought also that being open what my “game” is would make it less hidden, manageable and not be in the shadow if implications and connotations.
If the fallacy that I am invoking via which I express why I reject the thing can be done without summoning the spectre of politics I am all ears. Like does it have a name?
Carrot awarded; I strong upvoted dxu’s defense of the norms but I also have strong upvoted your post here (and reiterate once more that I like and agree with the underlying thing that was motivating you).
Thank you for your response. After reading it, I’m much more sympathetic to your cause, and in particular it has caused me to strongly update against the hypothesis that you were speaking in bad faith. I have upvoted accordingly.
(To be clear, this was not my dominant hypothesis at the time I wrote my initial reply to you, but it did possess non-trivial probability mass, and I think it’s safe to say it no longer does.)
Do you mean that you roled back the strong downvote? Or do you mean you upvoted the revelation of the background?
Do you think “inject at least mildly political undertones” took place and do you still think it is epistemically corrosive? Does “inject at least mildly political undertones” impute intention to others?n (I am trying to understand under what theory I did wrong by finding instances of the theory trying to understand what parts of the rule phrase “imputing intention to others where there is none” mean (I am “revealing my game” because I want to emphasise dealing with confusion over demands for consistency))
There is intensifier cross-talk confusion going on but that was not the whole reason or the main reason I was acting. I made on error reflecting on it that I latched on to the first error that came to mind and thought “of thats what happened and that is why it went wrong”. I am still wrong in those parts but there were contributions from things I was also actually seeing (aka still believe in (even if I didn’t have awareness of them before)).
I reaffirm, as I have tried to a couple of times, that I think the thing you’re pulling for is good. And as I note in the OP, if I or other readers are unable to see the importance of the distinctions you’re making: that might mean that there’s nothing there, but it’s also a real possibility that you see things we don’t.
I am not the author of the original post, and as such I am rather freer in my ability to express pushback to criticism of said post, without invoking social friction-costs like “But you might only be saying that to defend yourself”, etc.
So, to wit: I think you are mostly-to-entirely mistaken in your construal of the sentences in question. I do not believe the sentences in question carry even the slightest implication that the word “autistic” is synonymous with, evocative of, or otherwise associated with the word “stupid”. Moreover, since I am not the post’s author, I don’t have to hedge my judgement for fear of double-counting evidence; as such I will state outright that I consider your interpretation of the quoted sentences, not just mistaken, but unreasonable.
Let’s take a look at the sentences in question. The first:
There is no way to replace the word “autistic” here (without or without the “pseudo-” prefix) in a way that makes sense; doing so irrevocably modifies the sentence’s meaning in a way that simply does not at all parse in the context of everything else the article is arguing for. “[People] who do not share my [stupid/pseudo-stupid] special interest” is nonsensical; there is little-to-no wiggle room for interpretation here, and certainly not for interpretations like “I believe you are using ‘autistic’ as a synonym for ‘stupid’”.
The remaining two sentences use the word in question as part of the same noun phrase, so I will group them and their treatment together:
And again, in neither of these two sentences is can the phrase “autistic ten-year-old” be substituted with the phrase “stupid ten-year-old” without entirely and irrevocably modifying the meaning of the sentences in question. The qualifier “autistic” is performing actual semantic work in those sentences; in particular it is requesting that certain pieces of social information be conveyed in a way that is meets a particular standard of legibility, and using the hypothetical autistic ten-year-old as a measuring stick for that standard. Conversely, there is no corresponding standard for the phrase “stupid ten-year-old”, and given this I again consider it unreasonable to suppose that the word “autistic”—which, again, is doing real semantic work in those sentences—is being used as a synonym for a word that cannot do the same work even in principle.
You may note that this comment is rather strong in its pushback. This is intended. I believe that your comment, separately and in addition to the object-level misunderstandings it presents, is an instance of a more general trend that I strongly dislike, and would prefer to see less of. The trend in question is imputing intention to others where there is none; the moment you claim to have the ability to read the mind of your interlocutor (and moreover to do so with enough precision to identify subconscious, harmful intentions) is the moment you introduce a dimension to the conversation that, in my view, should not be there. I believe both of your initial comments fall afoul of this, but especially your second one, which contains allegations such as
and
I consider both of these examples of epistemically corrosive behavior—and in this particular case that impression is amplified by the fact that you then proceed to inject at least mildly political undertones (“And for the reasons I don’t care about your black friends when it comes to racism”) based on your imagined interlocutor’s implicit intentions. I am very strongly against the notion that people should take offense to the meaning they project onto someone else’s sentences, and on that front I think your comment scores terribly. Strong downvote.
Thank you for explaining your vote, I have upvoted it.
Your analysis that trying to reword “pseudo-autistic” to stupid is indeed correct that it can’t really be done.
I have a different bone to pick about it and that I need to separately tell what the bone is speaks of my communication being inadequate. Fine expressions to me would be “autistic special interest” or “intense special interest”. The danger there is not to dilute the meaning anything near a “hobby”, special interests are a separate thing and the latter is what is went after.
The bone is more with the use of “pseudo”. If you are a bit homosexual you are not “pseudohomosexual” or “pseudoheterosexual”. You can be bisexual or homocurious, those are nearer to being actual things. But “pseudohomosexuality” is not a thing but a weird adhoc construction attempt. You don’t do weird “its not gay if the balls are not touching” games is gay is something non-negative. You can be neurotypical, you can be autistic, but rather than being “pseudo-autistic” you have aspergers or you are a high functioning autist or you are a person on the autism spectrum.
Anyway on the other thread it has surfaced that the main motivation was to avoid self-identification.
I do take note that I did incorrectly fail to read that the rules contain social information rather that they are especially clear. Flavourings like “10-year-old with ADHD would bother to read” or “10-year-old with dyslexia would not misconstrue” would be fine and relevant. “10-year-old girl would get” would be improper. And the sensible rephasing would be “even those that do not intuitively get social situations would heed and employ”.
For those that are I tried to figure out what was happening and I found that the phrase happening at an emphasis, the topic being about exclusion and shooting down excuses pattern made the categories cross over. Hate words are said in a particular kickful way and the text was going for that kind of “sink in” tempo. Now that I could locate and particularise it provides a accident account even if does not provide excuses. I also noticed a kind of sense that “I should speak up” even if it is hard and even if it is a bit inaccurate, that there was a looming danger that the impulse was too diffuse and had too much inferential distance that if I explained it at full length I would get lost assembling too big of a entity. Thus it felt as say something or hold your peace and holding my peace felt really bad. I notice this triggers a kind of excuse to skip over steps which is probably dangerous in the same sense as “going for the win” but “getting the hint out there” seems less terrible of a beast.
I would like my carrots for sticking my neck out there and aknowledging that since its only a probabilty I might not actually be telepathic. I thought also that being open what my “game” is would make it less hidden, manageable and not be in the shadow if implications and connotations.
If the fallacy that I am invoking via which I express why I reject the thing can be done without summoning the spectre of politics I am all ears. Like does it have a name?
Carrot awarded; I strong upvoted dxu’s defense of the norms but I also have strong upvoted your post here (and reiterate once more that I like and agree with the underlying thing that was motivating you).
Thank you for your response. After reading it, I’m much more sympathetic to your cause, and in particular it has caused me to strongly update against the hypothesis that you were speaking in bad faith. I have upvoted accordingly.
(To be clear, this was not my dominant hypothesis at the time I wrote my initial reply to you, but it did possess non-trivial probability mass, and I think it’s safe to say it no longer does.)
Do you mean that you roled back the strong downvote? Or do you mean you upvoted the revelation of the background?
Do you think “inject at least mildly political undertones” took place and do you still think it is epistemically corrosive? Does “inject at least mildly political undertones” impute intention to others?n (I am trying to understand under what theory I did wrong by finding instances of the theory trying to understand what parts of the rule phrase “imputing intention to others where there is none” mean (I am “revealing my game” because I want to emphasise dealing with confusion over demands for consistency))
I thought it a little more and I am going to get partially unrependant.
There is intensifier cross-talk confusion going on but that was not the whole reason or the main reason I was acting. I made on error reflecting on it that I latched on to the first error that came to mind and thought “of thats what happened and that is why it went wrong”. I am still wrong in those parts but there were contributions from things I was also actually seeing (aka still believe in (even if I didn’t have awareness of them before)).
I reaffirm, as I have tried to a couple of times, that I think the thing you’re pulling for is good. And as I note in the OP, if I or other readers are unable to see the importance of the distinctions you’re making: that might mean that there’s nothing there, but it’s also a real possibility that you see things we don’t.