(this is based on / expanded from a response I wrote to a tweet that was talking about how autistic people struggle in the world because the world follows unwritten rules that are more important than the written ones.)
I think most autistic people should invest more in understanding the unwritten rules. it can be cruel and unfair, but it’s important to know how to interact with it. and it’s actually a really interesting system to map out, with its own rhyme and reason.
it’s entirely understandable that people feel burned by bad past experiences, and to have learned helplessness from bullying or other unfair treatment. this kind of thing leaves a scar and can make it feel viscerally hopeless.
but it still feels defeatist to just throw up one’s hands and say “it’s too complicated.” yes, it’s complicated and fuzzy and initially unintuitive and takes years to master. so is ML research. the point of being intelligent is that you are good at finding patterns and learning things, and there’s nothing truly fundamentally different about the unwritten rules of social interaction.
I see people taking examples of weird unintuitive social rules all the time and, tbh, none of them are truly that complicated compared to like, language learning, or ML stuff? like, memorizing lots of arbitrary rules is just part of learning literally any intellectual discipline. not to mention that there often is actually underlying structure that you can reason about.
imo one other reason this happens is that complaining is fun! a bit of a digression: to build on the language learning analogy, I love to complain about e.g how deranged the kanji system is in Japanese. it makes for an entertaining story to explain that each kanji maps onto between two and a zillion very distinct possible pronunciations, and that it’s entirely context dependent on the phrase, with lots of strange exceptions and so on that you just kind of have to memorize. but honestly, when I reflect on my experience as a Chinese speaker, I notice that that even though Chinese characters, unlike Japanese, map to a unique pronunciation 99% of the time, I still think of the conceptual atomic unit of Chinese as being groups of characters, and it’s actually really easy for me to forget that two different words actually contain the same character. (like imagine if “pter” were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain “pter”, but you’d probably think of “helicopter” as an atomic unit with its own unique identity).
so while it’s fun to complain about Japanese, it actually isn’t as bad as it sounds to learn it, and it actually does fit the shape of the human brain quite well. i think this is basically the right way to think about learning unwritten rules in social interaction as well. it takes lots of effort and practice, some things like accents are a ton of work to fix, and it’s obviously hard to become as fluent in it as a native speaker, but you can get pretty damn good even if you get started later in life if you truly care a lot.
I don’t know about other autists, but my primary problem with the neurotypical world isn’t that I don’t understand it, it that they don’t understand me. It doesn’t matter how well I can decode the social norms, if I can’t also control my unvoluntary emotional expressions, and also do other things ranging from impossible to unpleasant.
I do understand social white lies. It’s not that complicated. But I still find it unpleasant to speak them. When I was younger I got into trouble for literally being unable to utter words like “thanks” and “apology” when I did not mean them. (My native language does not have the ambiguous “sorry”.) I am now able to tell white lies, but it makes me feel bad, in a way that has nothing to do with morals. The dissonance is just intrinsically hurtful to my sole, in a way that non-autistic people don’t understand and typically don’t respect.
Another common thing is that people assume that if I don’t succeed in hiding my negative emotion this is an invitation/request for them to to try to help me, and then proceed to try to do that, even though they have zero skills, in this. And then they refuse to listen to anything I say, including not leaving me alone when I ask to be left alone.
I don’t want to hang out in a space where the norms are set up to be comfortable to people un-like me, at the cost of making it unpleasant for people like me, and then being told that it’s a skill issue and I should just learn the rules.
I accept that the wider norms will be set up to be good for the average people (i.e. not me). I just prefer to not go there.
I agree, those are two different things: (1) how well can you navigate other people’s world, and (2) the fact that even if you can do it perfectly, your own world is still somewhere else.
As a metaphor, imagine that you are interested in quantum physics, but other people are only interested in celebrity gossip. So you follow the standard advice: study celebrity facts from Wikipedia, read the standard media, practice talking about celebrities in front of a mirror, etc. Twenty years later, you get great at celebrity gossip, everyone loves you, they invite you to all the cool parties, so that they can discuss the latest gossip with you.
...that’s all very nice and useful, but what you would actually wanted to discuss is quantum physics. And frankly, that’s never going to happen. At least, your celebrity-gossip skills do not contribute to this goal. It was never the goal of the standard advice to actually help you with this problem.
and then being told that it’s a skill issue and I should just learn the rules.
This part is not aimed at leogao’s post!
What I was (not very skillfully) trying to point at is people who think that autistic people are just worse at social skills. I’m so fead up with this claim, and is a contributing reason to me avoiding the neurotypicals. But it’s not a claim that I read leogao’s as having made.
leogau’s language comparison is actually pretty great for this. You would not call someone who have a difrent native langue “bad at languages”, but nerutypicals are often mistakenly beleveing that autists are “bad at social skills”.
I also want to add that lots of atuists learn how to interact with the neurotypicals. It’s called masking, and involves learning more than just their wierd customs. It also involves hiding ones natural reactions. I hear it’s common for autistic women to get so good at this that they don’t get diagnosed untill later in life, when the burden of constant masking causes depression or something. This did not happen to me, because I am terrible at masking.
like imagine if “pter” were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain “pter”, but you’d probably think of “helicopter” as an atomic unit with its own unique identity
I often do chunk them, but if you’ve picked up a bit of taxonomic Greek pter means ‘wing’, so we have helico-pter ‘spiral/rotating wing’ and ptero-dactyl ‘wing fingers’ - both cases where breaking down the name tells you something about what the things are!
yeah, that was an intentional feature of the example chosen. i’d guess most people who are aware of this fact do still think of helicopter as a single unit in their head unless they choose to decompose it, because you hear each of these words often enough that you don’t really need to work out the meaning from etymology. and so if pter were pronounced the way it currently is when in helicopter but pronounced as “peter” in pterodactyl it would not actually be that much more confusing than it currently is.
I find all of this plausible and vaguely resonant with my experience but … still not quite sure.
I know very intelligent people who swear by their inability to learn, say, languages or whatever. Would they succeed if they put in enough effort? Would they reach some escape velocit if they got past the initial friction and actually focused on it and kept a consistent practice?
Maybe? But specific developmental disorders (like dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc, impacting one domain of cognitive ability but sparing cognition beyond that domain) are apparently a thing and if they are a thing, then something milder is probably even more of a thing, meaning that human ability to learn stuff given a fixed amount of raw cognitive power (say, ~g) is actually more patchy.
I know very intelligent people who swear by their inability to learn, say, languages or whatever. Would they succeed if they put in enough effort?
Inability to put equal effort into everything throughout the day reifies into heuristics about which things get the effort/engagement. In principle, if you are going to spend 2 hours on something, why take it any less seriously/playfully during those 2 hours than anything else, even if you are not planning to put 10,000 hours in it in total?
And so you get silly heuristics where you do put 10,000 hours into something, but systematically never do it seriously/playfully, and so never become proficient. It’s not enough to be very intelligent to get proficient at moderately complicated things if you systematically avoid learning anything about them.
Fair allocation of effort that ensures progress requires that the silly heuristics of systematic avoidance of effort are not in total control. This can happen naturally if you are lucky enough that your heuristics happen to be less silly, or if you have infinite energy and motivation and really do habitually put similar effort in everything throughout the day. But if that’s not the case, it’s often possible to take deliberate control of your curiouslity and allocate it in a way where any single thing you interact with a nontrivial amount does get a fair portion of effort.
It’s an obscure enough principle that I’m not sure many people are practicing it, and so any reports of systematic inability to learn something need to account for this confounder of silly-on-reflection systematic avoidance of (productive) effort towards learning a particular topic, that’s not just about the time (let alone discomfort) dedicated to it.
I’m pretty smart, clearly above average in general inteligence. But I’m also clearly below average in ability to learn langugaes. I can learn, I did learn English after all. But for a long time I was much worse than the typical Sweed my age.
Some of the obstacles of adult language learning and of adult implicit social rule learning are both similar and extrinsic. It seems to me that there’s a lot of cases where having an obvious ‘childhood’ or ‘foreigner’ role cues people to impart necessary information, but once you’re past that point, it’s both expected that you’ll already have it and broadly Not Done to give it to you anew—and I don’t just mean by explicit instruction, because other people will implicitly change their behavior around you in a way that ‘ruins’ the signal. Outside of very specific environments, finding a way to credibly signal “I want to integrate” at the correct visceral levels and get the other people to actively avoid papering over things in a way where a slip-up will permanently relegate you to the ‘weirdo’ role is rather hard, and if you don’t have enough initial sense then you won’t even know when it’s happened.
There are ways of mitigating all of this, but I guess what I’d say is that getting real practice in anything social where there’s this kind of status/integration involved tends to itself have strong status/integration social prerequisites—so it’s a very noncentral example of practice, enough to make “it takes practice” misleading when unqualified. This is as distinct both from a lot of more specific skills which still have a major social practice component (martial arts, ensemble music) and from skills where solitary practice gives you the bulk of the signal (mathematics, maybe running?).
Also, if the social skills you’re trying to learn involve something like class performance in a highly contested social class, people around you will have a more active incentive to make it more difficult. So it can also be adversarial practice…
like imagine if “pter” were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain “pter”, but you’d probably think of “helicopter” as an atomic unit with its own unique identity
Unless wiktionary is among your primary facilitators of procrastination on the internet.
Could someone give some specific examples of both “unwritten rules” and “written rules” of social interaction?
I can’t really think of any. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m just very oblivious or because I’ve internalized them well enough I never have to explicitly think about them.
(this is based on / expanded from a response I wrote to a tweet that was talking about how autistic people struggle in the world because the world follows unwritten rules that are more important than the written ones.)
I think most autistic people should invest more in understanding the unwritten rules. it can be cruel and unfair, but it’s important to know how to interact with it. and it’s actually a really interesting system to map out, with its own rhyme and reason.
it’s entirely understandable that people feel burned by bad past experiences, and to have learned helplessness from bullying or other unfair treatment. this kind of thing leaves a scar and can make it feel viscerally hopeless.
but it still feels defeatist to just throw up one’s hands and say “it’s too complicated.” yes, it’s complicated and fuzzy and initially unintuitive and takes years to master. so is ML research. the point of being intelligent is that you are good at finding patterns and learning things, and there’s nothing truly fundamentally different about the unwritten rules of social interaction.
I see people taking examples of weird unintuitive social rules all the time and, tbh, none of them are truly that complicated compared to like, language learning, or ML stuff? like, memorizing lots of arbitrary rules is just part of learning literally any intellectual discipline. not to mention that there often is actually underlying structure that you can reason about.
imo one other reason this happens is that complaining is fun! a bit of a digression: to build on the language learning analogy, I love to complain about e.g how deranged the kanji system is in Japanese. it makes for an entertaining story to explain that each kanji maps onto between two and a zillion very distinct possible pronunciations, and that it’s entirely context dependent on the phrase, with lots of strange exceptions and so on that you just kind of have to memorize. but honestly, when I reflect on my experience as a Chinese speaker, I notice that that even though Chinese characters, unlike Japanese, map to a unique pronunciation 99% of the time, I still think of the conceptual atomic unit of Chinese as being groups of characters, and it’s actually really easy for me to forget that two different words actually contain the same character. (like imagine if “pter” were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain “pter”, but you’d probably think of “helicopter” as an atomic unit with its own unique identity).
so while it’s fun to complain about Japanese, it actually isn’t as bad as it sounds to learn it, and it actually does fit the shape of the human brain quite well. i think this is basically the right way to think about learning unwritten rules in social interaction as well. it takes lots of effort and practice, some things like accents are a ton of work to fix, and it’s obviously hard to become as fluent in it as a native speaker, but you can get pretty damn good even if you get started later in life if you truly care a lot.
I don’t know about other autists, but my primary problem with the neurotypical world isn’t that I don’t understand it, it that they don’t understand me. It doesn’t matter how well I can decode the social norms, if I can’t also control my unvoluntary emotional expressions, and also do other things ranging from impossible to unpleasant.
I do understand social white lies. It’s not that complicated. But I still find it unpleasant to speak them. When I was younger I got into trouble for literally being unable to utter words like “thanks” and “apology” when I did not mean them. (My native language does not have the ambiguous “sorry”.) I am now able to tell white lies, but it makes me feel bad, in a way that has nothing to do with morals. The dissonance is just intrinsically hurtful to my sole, in a way that non-autistic people don’t understand and typically don’t respect.
Another common thing is that people assume that if I don’t succeed in hiding my negative emotion this is an invitation/request for them to to try to help me, and then proceed to try to do that, even though they have zero skills, in this. And then they refuse to listen to anything I say, including not leaving me alone when I ask to be left alone.
I don’t want to hang out in a space where the norms are set up to be comfortable to people un-like me, at the cost of making it unpleasant for people like me, and then being told that it’s a skill issue and I should just learn the rules.
I accept that the wider norms will be set up to be good for the average people (i.e. not me). I just prefer to not go there.
I agree, those are two different things: (1) how well can you navigate other people’s world, and (2) the fact that even if you can do it perfectly, your own world is still somewhere else.
As a metaphor, imagine that you are interested in quantum physics, but other people are only interested in celebrity gossip. So you follow the standard advice: study celebrity facts from Wikipedia, read the standard media, practice talking about celebrities in front of a mirror, etc. Twenty years later, you get great at celebrity gossip, everyone loves you, they invite you to all the cool parties, so that they can discuss the latest gossip with you.
...that’s all very nice and useful, but what you would actually wanted to discuss is quantum physics. And frankly, that’s never going to happen. At least, your celebrity-gossip skills do not contribute to this goal. It was never the goal of the standard advice to actually help you with this problem.
This part is not aimed at leogao’s post!
What I was (not very skillfully) trying to point at is people who think that autistic people are just worse at social skills. I’m so fead up with this claim, and is a contributing reason to me avoiding the neurotypicals. But it’s not a claim that I read leogao’s as having made.
leogau’s language comparison is actually pretty great for this. You would not call someone who have a difrent native langue “bad at languages”, but nerutypicals are often mistakenly beleveing that autists are “bad at social skills”.
I also want to add that lots of atuists learn how to interact with the neurotypicals. It’s called masking, and involves learning more than just their wierd customs. It also involves hiding ones natural reactions. I hear it’s common for autistic women to get so good at this that they don’t get diagnosed untill later in life, when the burden of constant masking causes depression or something. This did not happen to me, because I am terrible at masking.
I often do chunk them, but if you’ve picked up a bit of taxonomic Greek pter means ‘wing’, so we have helico-pter ‘spiral/rotating wing’ and ptero-dactyl ‘wing fingers’ - both cases where breaking down the name tells you something about what the things are!
yeah, that was an intentional feature of the example chosen. i’d guess most people who are aware of this fact do still think of helicopter as a single unit in their head unless they choose to decompose it, because you hear each of these words often enough that you don’t really need to work out the meaning from etymology. and so if pter were pronounced the way it currently is when in helicopter but pronounced as “peter” in pterodactyl it would not actually be that much more confusing than it currently is.
I find all of this plausible and vaguely resonant with my experience but … still not quite sure.
I know very intelligent people who swear by their inability to learn, say, languages or whatever. Would they succeed if they put in enough effort? Would they reach some escape velocit if they got past the initial friction and actually focused on it and kept a consistent practice?
Maybe? But specific developmental disorders (like dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc, impacting one domain of cognitive ability but sparing cognition beyond that domain) are apparently a thing and if they are a thing, then something milder is probably even more of a thing, meaning that human ability to learn stuff given a fixed amount of raw cognitive power (say, ~g) is actually more patchy.
Inability to put equal effort into everything throughout the day reifies into heuristics about which things get the effort/engagement. In principle, if you are going to spend 2 hours on something, why take it any less seriously/playfully during those 2 hours than anything else, even if you are not planning to put 10,000 hours in it in total?
And so you get silly heuristics where you do put 10,000 hours into something, but systematically never do it seriously/playfully, and so never become proficient. It’s not enough to be very intelligent to get proficient at moderately complicated things if you systematically avoid learning anything about them.
Fair allocation of effort that ensures progress requires that the silly heuristics of systematic avoidance of effort are not in total control. This can happen naturally if you are lucky enough that your heuristics happen to be less silly, or if you have infinite energy and motivation and really do habitually put similar effort in everything throughout the day. But if that’s not the case, it’s often possible to take deliberate control of your curiouslity and allocate it in a way where any single thing you interact with a nontrivial amount does get a fair portion of effort.
It’s an obscure enough principle that I’m not sure many people are practicing it, and so any reports of systematic inability to learn something need to account for this confounder of silly-on-reflection systematic avoidance of (productive) effort towards learning a particular topic, that’s not just about the time (let alone discomfort) dedicated to it.
I’m pretty smart, clearly above average in general inteligence. But I’m also clearly below average in ability to learn langugaes. I can learn, I did learn English after all. But for a long time I was much worse than the typical Sweed my age.
Some of the obstacles of adult language learning and of adult implicit social rule learning are both similar and extrinsic. It seems to me that there’s a lot of cases where having an obvious ‘childhood’ or ‘foreigner’ role cues people to impart necessary information, but once you’re past that point, it’s both expected that you’ll already have it and broadly Not Done to give it to you anew—and I don’t just mean by explicit instruction, because other people will implicitly change their behavior around you in a way that ‘ruins’ the signal. Outside of very specific environments, finding a way to credibly signal “I want to integrate” at the correct visceral levels and get the other people to actively avoid papering over things in a way where a slip-up will permanently relegate you to the ‘weirdo’ role is rather hard, and if you don’t have enough initial sense then you won’t even know when it’s happened.
There are ways of mitigating all of this, but I guess what I’d say is that getting real practice in anything social where there’s this kind of status/integration involved tends to itself have strong status/integration social prerequisites—so it’s a very noncentral example of practice, enough to make “it takes practice” misleading when unqualified. This is as distinct both from a lot of more specific skills which still have a major social practice component (martial arts, ensemble music) and from skills where solitary practice gives you the bulk of the signal (mathematics, maybe running?).
Also, if the social skills you’re trying to learn involve something like class performance in a highly contested social class, people around you will have a more active incentive to make it more difficult. So it can also be adversarial practice…
Unless wiktionary is among your primary facilitators of procrastination on the internet.
Could someone give some specific examples of both “unwritten rules” and “written rules” of social interaction?
I can’t really think of any. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m just very oblivious or because I’ve internalized them well enough I never have to explicitly think about them.