Do NTs have trouble understanding "absolutes"?

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That hasn't been my experience. If anything, I find that NTs tend to see things as absolute all too easily - they jump to conclusions and over-generalise. But maybe you're talking about something different. Some examples would help.

It isn't that I (NT) don't understand absolutes. It's that I am skeptical of claims that X piece of information is an absolute. When somebody states that something is an absolute fact, I want to poke around a bit to see if there are exceptions, or even if the thing being an absolute is true a minority rather than a majority of the time. Sometimes pieces of information that are presented as absolute truths are not absolute. Other times they are. So I always look for corroborating evidence and also counter evidence.

I am speaking only for myself and not for any other NT. To speak for anyone but myself about "what NTs believe" would be a false claim that something was an absolute.

"Taking the piss" (or, in polite conversation, "extracting the urine") is "making fun" of something, not being serious, mocking.

NTs and autistic people both use heuristics like "reading a blog instead of scientific papers" all the time. Autistics are not super-human scientists, and neurotypicals do not "hate science".

Without looking for too long, you can find threads where autistic people:
1) Claim autism is caused by vaccines
2) Claim autism can be cured using radical dietary changes
3) Talk about autistic people "lacking pack mentality", "not being alpha", and so forth.
4) Deny that climate change is happening, and is principally anthropogenic
5) Try to claim the universe is 6,000 years old

As you can plainly see, autistic people are not above being ignorant or stupid.

Proving that neurotypicals can be good scientists is harder, because people tend not to openly self-identify as neurotypical in the way that WP users identify as autistic- why would you? But I would be very surprised if most of my lecturers turned out to be autistic (by which I mean there are few lecturers I would not be surprised to learn were autistic), and most popular scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Michio Kaku do not strike me as likely autistics either.

1. I didn't say NT people hate science. I said they hate facts. Of course, not all do, but I thought that was an obvious DUH.
2. If you look a few comments up, I specifically said that I know aspies don't want to believe facts as well, but the original question from the OP was asking about NT people, not aspies, so I answered about NT people on this topic.
3. When did I say that aspies are better at science than NT people? Oh that's right, I never did. I personally suck at science while my NT parents are both fantastic scientists and love it.

You also said "science is facts". If NTs hate facts, and science is facts, then NTs hate science.



Glad we cleared that up.

It's a bit pointless to say things like "NTs often show little understanding of science", or "NTs have two eyes", if you really mean "people...". Generally, when people talk about "NTs", they mean "as opposed to autistic people".

If you could see the pattern of the way you wrote "This is the reason why NT people don't believe science. Science is facts and they hate that."

This sentence leads to the thought that because (1)NT's dont believe science, (2)they hate facts, so that makes (3)science facts... then because science is fact that would mean (4)NT's hate it. Does that make sense? I only wrote this because you said

1. I didn't say NT people hate science. I said they hate facts. Of course, not all do, but I thought that was an obvious DUH.

So I was just clarifying for you where they got the IDEA that you "SAID" NT's hate science. You never LITERALLY said it but the way the words came together to form a thought, made it look like that was what you said.

I understand what you are saying, I am not saying they are correct. I just wanted to help you out with that. Then again, I could be wrong as well.

This is actually a very good point. A lot of autistic people can be very ignorant and irrational.

Don't know if I upset anyone but I'm sorry if I did. It wasn't my intention at all. I can be very opinionated and sometimes it can bite me in the butt.

I do hope you're taking the piss here, and not actually being serious with this nonsense.

Why are you saying that again?

I didn't. I don't know why that comment has reappeared.

Weird

You raise a good point here. I remember, back when I was in elementary/middle school, they tried to teach us how to do mental math/estimation. Everyone else seemed to have no problems with it, but I struggled with it since I simply wasn't used to approximating things. I always wanted my answers to be exact, right on the dot, but everyone else seemed fine with having things be "close enough". Since I expended the extra energy to come up with exact answers rather than simply approximating, it slowed me down a lot compared to the other students, and as a result of this, the teachers tried to discourage me from being so precise, but this just lead to further frustration, on top of the frustration I already had with simply attempting purely mental calculations.

When they FINALLY ditched the mental math lessons and allowed us to start using calculators, it was great in some ways, but at the same time, they mainly started allowing us to use calculators because the new concepts they were teaching us were far more complex than the old ones, so as a result I was still frustrated by my math work.

I should also point out that one of the biggest reasons why I hated math so much in school was because a lot of the concepts they tried teaching us simply seemed illogical to me. The other kids were fine with them, and would just go along with them seemingly without questioning how much sense they actually made, but I found that I can't really go along with things UNLESS they actually make sense to me. This is actually much the same reason why I don't practice any sort of a religion; for years none of the major religions really made any sense to me, and when I finally started understanding some of their underlying concepts, I didn't like most of them, as they often clashed with my personal beliefs and morals.

But in a nutshell, it seems to me that NTs are more willing to just "go along" with things, make approximations, and not worry so much about things making sense, as compared to aspies.

We should not mistake submissiveness for conviction. By failing to grasp certain concepts, and being vague, the NT is signalling the message to his superiors, "I am morally flexible, tell me what to pay lip-service to."

That has been my experience as well.
In my life I met very few people who do not view most things as absolutes. I don't because to me most things are relative. My mother is an NT and sees things as absolutes than me or my father.


Anyway, the title reminds me of a famous quote: "only a sith deals in absolutes".
Maybe when he said that Obi-Wan didn't realize that the very same sentence is an absolute

You are confusing "absolute" with "science" or "social".

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Those are different uses of language.