The NT Has No Clothes

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Thank you. Seconded... by an aspie.

"NTs are more likely to scatter everything all over the tables and counters (leaving no work-space available to work with due to all of the clutter"

Yes, I do that.

It's the ugliness of the world that caused your depression. The red pill causes irreversible depression.

I'm not sure that I would say nt behaviour is useless, vain or superficial. I just don't value the social experience as much as the nt world does.

Are you even reading the posts in this thread?

Perhaps I should say that I am not able to be happy in life because I am distracted by the flaws of society.
You're the only one bitching.

I want the green pill.

Andro, I think maybe the issue in this thread regarding "bitching" comes from things like this:

The cruelty you see in reality isn't something imperceptible to neurotypicals. Many of them care, but feel powerless, for whatever reasons. To say they can't see it and that they hate that NDs can see it sounds like bitching, even if that's not how you mean it.

Last edited by HighLlama on 23 Jun 2016, 4:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

Getting a good theory of mind happening means accepting NTs deficiencies.

NTs don't seem to need to spend so much time consciously considering things like an autistic person does, there's a "fluency" in their behaviour that to a hard put upon autistic person seems plain callous.

Would you agree?

Well, I would also say that neurotypicals are privy to things I will never know about. So it seems to me that the nts are taking this too personally. What I'm trying to talk about is the autistic experience and that we are aware of things that nts are not. Neither group is crueler or worse than the other. What I don't understand is why the autistic contributions to and interpretation of the world are not valued more by neurotypicals.

I'm not sure I would equate their fluency to callousness. But I think nts need to work harder to be aware of things other than themselves. The callousness would come in when one willfully chooses to ignore what one is aware of.

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I'm not sure I would equate their fluency to callousness. But I think nts need to work harder to be aware of things other than themselves. The callousness would come in when one willfully chooses to ignore what one is aware of.[/quote]

When you say "need to", do you mean they have a moral obligation to, or that a kind of deficiency is preventing them from being aware of other people.

I apologize I just have problems understanding people sometimes.

I mean that they do not naturally notice some things that autistic people do. I'm not sure I'd call it a deficiency, but rather a different aptitude.
I don't understand why this thread is offensive to nts. It is not really about them other than that they are the current standard setters.
Earlier I mentioned that nts place value on the shared experience of a common reality. The first reply said that this is because they gain from the shared experience. That if everyone agrees that no one is going to say anything to the Emperor, then go with it. But I find this hard to live with. I think because whatever nts gain from each other I am unable to benefit from. I am aware that talking things out and getting other people's take on an issue is valuable; what I'm specifically talking about in this post is the acceptance of a shared but dangerously inaccurate reality, like the elephant in the room.
In the sense that I am using the term neurotypical I mean free from defect. In practice there are probably not a lot of people who are free of such defects, so my argument is largely theoretical.
Where it becomes personal for me is when I see behaviour modification taken past the point of being necessary. And also that autism is defined by social ability; that if you can mask then you are not autistic. To me, this simplification of autism makes it easy to miss the subtler (and possibly valuable) autistic experience.

Well, it could be that they hate both the art and the artists. Cultural innovation is often uncomfortable at first, when it has the potential to upset widespread popular beliefs and tastes.

But there is also this funny little thing called the Halo Effect, where when we assume that one thing is good about something, everything about it is good. Hence we overestimate the character of beautiful people, underestimate the calories in diet foods, and quite possibly overestimate the charm and cheer of cultural creative types until we actually meet them, and then are like "what the heck is wrong with them?"

The pop-culture view of Aspies often conflates them with quirky NTs (who may often be relatives of Aspies), and shows them in a social group where they can be accepted despite their faux pas because their cultural creativity is just that awesome. (Sheldon and Amy of the Big Bang theory, the title character of Bones, and Abed of Community all have appreciative, or at least tolerant, bands of mostly quirky NTs they hang out with.) But the same neurological diversity that creates those kinds of people, who are only a little off by mainstream standards, also creates autistic and depressed people who are not brilliant cultural creatives yet have all the same "offness," often to a greater degree. Rather than accepting the existence of these people as a necessity in the gene pool to keep a culture healthy, they're written off as dangerously deranged, like many bipolar and schizophrenic people who also don't happen to have what it takes to prove their worth individually in art and science.

So, you get this dichotomy of honorary quirky NTs (whose challenges are underestimated) vs. dangerous loons (whose challenges are overestimated). The neurodivergent people lumped into the latter category seem to suffer from a Reverse Halo Effect: if one thing is bad about them, it's assumed everything else is bad about them as well. This may be why so many NT people hate neurodivergent people in practice.

Uh-huh, you just like to complain about them not caring about "us" (you) and "our" struggles. No hypocrisy here whatsoever... oh, wait, only NTs are hypocrites...


Good observation.

I'm not sure what the OP's intentions actually are, but the whole "NTs are (self)deluded and blind"/"Aspies are lucid and realistic" is arrogant and false. Oh, the irony!

You are totally misrepresenting what I am saying.
My concern is that nts are overvaluing their experience and underestimating the possible contributions of those whose is different from theirs.

NTs do seem to have an over-expressed "Solipsism Gene".

Well, I can definitely agree with this, but I don't understand why you think aspies - in general, as a group, not a few individuals - are any different


*I'm definitely not trying to "misrepresent" what you're saying, I might be misunderstanding it though, hence the above question*

That's exactly what I thought about Aspies, right after joining this forum and reading the L&D section

Well, instead of autistic I could say neurodiverse. It just seems that with media, religion, school, etc. that society spends a lot of time trying to create a common reality. Obviously there are common values that are necessary for survival, laws against violence, for example. but I think everyone would be better off if we are aware of the fragility and uniqueness of our experience.