Impulsively correcting others

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Several commenters defend this practice, and complain that NT's don't appreciate correctness.

One or two others, too, touched on the fact that it can be annoying. All of you who think it's fine to correct others, imagine you are trying hard to converse and someone keeps interrupting. Would it interfere with your train of thought? I believe it would.

It's too bad that the NT's aren't more gracious when corrected, but that's life. Myself, I get flustered when someone sidetracks me conversationally, but I've learned to deal with it properly, taking a deep breath and not becoming defensive. (but I'm not NT)

You can’t judge by yourself what is rude to others. Most people see their beliefs as a matter of freedom and personal space. Putting those beliefs to the test isn’t as high a priority, and they won’t welcome any effort to educate them if they haven’t asked you to—they’ll get defensive because they don’t like being forced to spend time listening to your arguments, which is a waste of time to them.



That’s happened to me a lot. It seems privacy and other people’s limits is something aspies always struggle with. Other people’s stories may be different, but it’s hard for me to relate to how important it is for others to exclude strangers from their private conversations, because I’m not used to having much privacy or anyone to share it with. In fact, it’s hard for me not to feel compelled to let anyone who asks know everything they want to about what I do, think, feel or say and why, and to keep doing so if I can’t convince whoever decides to judge me badly for it if I can’t convince them to change their view.



Well, that’s the problem: what “drives the conversation dead” to neurotypicals is usually what makes it interesting to us.



And I wonder, why on Earth must a casual conversation not be a debate? Don’t neurotypicals realize any other kind of conversation is a waste of time, beating around the bush and avoiding the exchange of clear thoughts and empirical knowledge?

I’m joking, and I know it’s not that way to them, but it is to us. We’re bad at casual conversations in no negligible part because we’d rather be doing something else. Talking for the sake of talking, without learning or teaching anything, always protecting your delicate worldview from critical thinking lest it might change if you discover flaws in it, is something I really could do without.



The main reason I sometimes feel a pressing need to correct someone I’m talking to is because, otherwise, I’m silently agreeing with them whenever the conversation progresses to something depending on the faulty premises I let them build on. I’ve also had a hard time learning when not correcting someone means you personally endorse everything they say, and I’m still not entirely sure in many cases.

The amount of offhand assumptions neurotypicals make all the time can be real torture when talking with them as an aspie. I never know, for example, how to answer a question which takes for granted some false premise, let alone a lot of them, since pointing out the mistake is always rude, and they’ll get offended because I attacked them instead of answering their question. If they ask you what color the hat you’re wearing is, “I’m not wearing a hat” is not an acceptable answer, no matter how true it may be. At least, it’s not when I give it, because I never know an acceptable way of delivering it, if there is one at all, which seems doubtful at best.

Last edited by Spiderpig on 03 Oct 2015, 12:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If I'm incorrect on something I'd rather know, it's very rare though because I don't engage in conversations I know nothing about-- and if I do I ask questions. I also don't form opinions unless I have evidence to support them. My approach to "correctness" isn't even an autistic thing, it's a philosophical approach-- I believe putting opinion on par with evidence will have negative ramifications for humanity in the long term. As for people constantly interrupting, I don't do that, and when it happens to me I quickly put said person in their place because at that point it's not about the conversation but one of those silly social status games.

Note – All the text I’ve sent since the last post from BeaArthur was meant to go in a single message, but I couldn’t get the captcha to let me post it without splitting it into tiny pieces, especially around quotations.

That's what ctrl-c and ctrl-v is for. Select all your text and press ctrl-c, that will copy it into your computer's memory then if the cloudflare monster steals your post make a new one and press ctrl-v to paste it back in and then resubmit. Sorry, but I have a problem with correcting people...

And I don’t like people gratuitously assuming I’m stupid. I copied and pasted it countless times and that’s how I found out it wouldn’t let anything but small fragments go through. If I’d had to type it again for every attempt, I’d have given up the first time.

Have corrected folks here on WP. Sometimes the person goes ape. More often a third person will go ape in "defending" the person I corrected without even asking that person I corrected ,and even though I wasnt even attacking the person. So folks an aspie sites are no more rational about being corrected than are NTs are about it in real life.

On the flip side of that, I should be free to regard everyone else as rude for simply existing. They can't judge for themselves what is rude to me, and therefore whatever I feel like doing to them for offending my delicate sensibilities so is prefectly justified.

Meanwhile, in reality; I have spent enough time around people to have a fairly good sense of what can reasonably be considered rude and what can't. "Excuse me, but I don't think what you just said is correct, and here's why." is not rude. "B*tch you wrong!" a bit more so.





"Athens is the capital of Cyprus" is not a matter of belief. I can open an atlas and show that the capital of Cyprus is actually Nicosia. Therefore I am objectively correct. Freedom of belief does not extend to being entitled to your own facts.

Also, you make it sound like I prowl the streets, sneakily eavesdropping and ready to pounce random people who might be wrong about something. I'm talking about situations in, say, the break room at work, where someone might say "hey, did you guys know X?".




Again, not talking about beliefs.



If they make a counterfactual statement that I can straight up disprove, then that requires no argument, it's a "checkmate in one" situation. And if they walk away with maybe just a small grain of doubt that maybe, just maybe, the moon isn't actually made of green cheese, then that's objectively not time wasted for anyone in my submission.


(Offtopic: this captcha is fracking rabid!)

fixed! thanks to wolfram87 for reporting.

you can also ask us to post for you, i can post and then change the poster.

If I thought you were stupid I would have started with booting up the computer...even in this day and age a lot of people don't know the power of copy and paste. No need to get defensive, a simple "I tried that it didn't work because" would have sufficed.