Employers Guide to Asperger's Syndrome (PDF)

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In my opinion you did what was right.

I understand the conflict of thinking those other students were deserving what they were getting from the prof, but the prof really has no right to treat the students that way. Neither do the students have the right to treat you that way. The difference is the position of "authority" of the prof vs the more peer-like level between the students and you.

Last edited by eon on 17 Jun 2010, 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

But the students completely got away with terrorizing me while the professor I liked got fired.

According to the PDF 93% of communication for NT's is non-verbal 93%!That can't possibly be right, can it? mean I know they get more from body language and stuff than I do but that has to be way to high, doesn't it?

When I look at the list of different types of communication on the wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-verbal_communication
I could easily believe that 93% of communication is non-verbal.

However, the page itself says that an older study by Mehrabian found "that clues from spoken words, from the voice tone, and from the facial expression, contribute 7 %, 38 %, and 55 % respectively to the total meaning". This study is said to be "weakly founded" and a later study by Argyle "found that non-verbal cues had 4.3 times the effect of verbal cues." This would mean (by my calculations, which should always be in question) that approximately 81% of communication is non-verbal. However Argyle's study was just looking at a dominant/submissive axis and "the relative importance of spoken words and facial expressions may be very different in studies using different set-ups".

Non-verbal communication is not just body language. It also includes tone of voice.

And the link Sparrowrose gives is pretty good.

Thank you for posting this link. I especially liked this bit: "instead of telling her something vague like “take the numbers and run with it” Cindy’s supervisor states specifically, “Analyze the sales reports and write a 10-minute presentation explaining the 3 areas where we can increase revenue.”

I hate it when my boss is vague. He asked me to do something similarly vague the other week and I had to get him to explain what he actually meant. Why don't people say what they mean. I don't know how people do understand these vaugue things.

i had an interview yesterday and I asked whether a particular skill was needed in the job and the response was "admin is the most important aspect, but if somone wants to do that in down time then that would be great." I'm not sure what down time is. It's either in your own time or when the office is quiet. Still, say what you mean.

Hence "and stuff".

I was considering a particular professor for my main doctoral advisor. I realized what a bad idea it would be when I went to him to get a little mentorship about things like choosing classes and deciding on a dissertation topic. He was very friendly and welcoming and happy to talk to me but his advice went along the lines of, "you're a smart girl; you can figure this stuff out. Just take some classes you like and then write your dissertation on something interesting to you." His advice never got more specific than that. In short, it was absolutely useless to me because I knew all of it already and NEEDED some more specific guidelines.

I just hope I will be a good and specific mentor when the day comes that I'm a professor and an autistic university student comes to me hoping for some mentorship!

I realized last night during a chat on a different site that I get very confused when they throw in an expression that I never heard before, I can't figure out what it means really... they said something like "it's like taking a fist to an olive branch" I guess it's beating up a peaceful person? I wasn't sure so I tried to ask and they thought it was funny and added "yeah, and they threw gas on it then threw a match"

That's when someone is offering to end a fight and make peace, but the other person rejects the offer and brings the fight up to a higher level of intensity.


That's an intermixing of the joke with the old canards "throwing gasoline onto a fire" and "playing with matches". When used in this way, it means that the aggressive person mentioned above was vicious and brought the fight to an absurdly high level of intensity.

I don't fully understand what the percentage figure means. Does it mean that if you converted all the nonverbal information into words you would have more than ten times as many words? If that's the case then I would argue that the figure should be 100% rather than 93%.

For example, you can rate how angry a person is based on facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, etc., on a continuous scale. You could assign any real number to the level of anger with zero being completely neutral and 50 being the highest level of anger possible without the person going into cardiac arrest or having a stroke due to a lethally high blood pressure levels. Yet with words you have only have a finite number of choices to choose from, e.g. annoyed, irritated, frustrated, agitated, angry, livid, infuriated, enraged, berserk, etc... maybe you can think of more "in between" the ones I listed... but anyways, you get the point. If you go by this argument then the verbal information has the cardinality of a finite set while the nonverbal information has the same cardinality as the set of real numbers which is uncountable. Thus I have proved that non-verbal communication accounts for 100% of all information since the information contained in the words is infinitesimal by comparison.

Sorry if nobody here understands what the *BLEEP* I'm talking about. Fellow math majors should understand though.

My real argument is that it just doesn't seem possible to be entirely precise with a percentage. Comparing verbal to non-verbal is like comparing apples to oranges. The modes of communication are so different from each other it's hard to even compare information content without being so subjective that the figure arrived at is essentially meaningless.

ÜBER-LOL!
This is what I'm doing as my research project for the summer. (It's funny how great minds think alike.)


Welcome to the wonderful world of applied mathematics, where all your theoretical ideals are discarded as extra baggage. Check out Information Theory, where all random variables are discrete, and as such, can be calculated with discrete math.

Check and mate!


If I'm right, empathy and theory-of-mind is not as complicated as it may seem. Calculation must be possible. Seriously consider: how do you think otherwise unintelligent humans can actually compute this? I don't believe that there's any voodoo magic involved, so there must be an actual algorithm somewhere, however complicated it is. Decomposing empathy is really just a matter of numerical approximation.

In case you're interested, check out the original research paper that I'm basing my applied research on: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf

(Note: the math in it is really freakin' hard! Learning belief propagation using HMMs is hurting my brain.)

Oh god, this was actually really interesting... It's always fascinating to me to read texts about Asperger's written for neurotypicals. Weird.

I did like that this description is actually part of the reason I'd consider medical examiner my ideal job:

yes, they're absolutely on the money with this one. i could not have said it better myself. however, they should have mentioned "no fluorescent lighting"

ok, i've actually read most of this thing now and i have to say it's quite astounding how astute a lot of the observations are.

and it's really funny (in a good way or a bad way, i'm not sure) to read how "baffling" we are to NTs ..

"a person with Asperger's Syndrome may ... end a conversation by simply walking away."

haha ..
you mean that's not ok???


i want to write the corresponding pamphlet for those on the spectrum entitled "Employee Guide to a Neurotypical Work Environment"

it'll say things like:

Unusual perseveration on social structure* and a general disinterest in understanding a logical perspective means that a Neurotypical may:
• Speak in metaphorical code
• Say something they don't mean or mean something they don't say, unintentionally offending (or confusing) others
• Smile falsely or attempt to force eye contact with others (or even demand that they smile)
• Appear friendly when they actually have no interest in the person to whom they're speaking, but wish to project a "positive image"
• Not seem to have any particular interests, or mimic conversation of others rather than interjecting their own opinions or offering information
• Defer to supervisors
• Bottle up frustrations (or deal with them by gossiping), which could be perceived as very passive-aggressive
• Seem very "plastic" or appear to be acting when speaking to one another
• Engage in a lot of "scripted" conversation, such as "I'll see you later" and "Nice talking to you. I have to get back to work now."
• Neglect to ask any questions or show any interest in detail in their work.

*although the term "special interest" is not usually applied to neurotypicals, the best way to describe their preoccupation with small talk and other such seemingly meaningless interaction is to think of socializing as a special interest

I like that PDF.

I'm amazed of how much in it I'm already doing to cope with my work environment.