Threads Of Autism

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Because my main thread has been locked, I am starting a few days sooner than originally planned this thread here which I have been thinking about starting for at least four months. I never initiate any thread on the spur of the moment, but always think about it a very long time, and several other threads are in the works, too, some of which I have been thinking about starting for even longer, but need to mull over some more, as words are very precious, and I do not want to waste precious words on cheap speech or encourage other people to do that.

"Threads Of Autism" is intended to look at how the organization of threads around certain topics and the particular topics of individual threads created by various individuals affects the organization of community and/or possibly the disorganization of community on Wrong Planet, though mainly the former, and to consider how the way we make these threads can potentially be used to affect a more conscious community so as to not only benefit ourselves but perhaps also the world in general..

It is also intended to explore how some of the various threads in the thinking of people who are autistic, including myself, and even those who are not considered autistic, combine to create a tapestry of autism, a story about autism in the 'mind' of the world and also in the minds of ourselves. I will try to keep the discussion matter on this thread a bit simpler, though I think it could be said in terms of idea content that too much simplicity can kill the cow.

I am looking for serious discussion here and deep enquiry with the intent to understand ourselves better, so please participate in the spirit of this intent.
And, as I have written many times, just because people are not chatting back and forth about any idea that pops into their head from reading this material here does not mean they are not participating.

One qualifier: This thread is NOT intended to look at or examine the particular construction of this system, which imo is actually very well designed, but rather to look at topics such as how the threads of internal dialogue--the internal conversations of a person's mind and also his external conversation can interweave with the threads of the internal and external conversation of others to form community, and to enquire into how the general tone and quality of thinking of a particular community can shape the way people in that community think about themselves, much like parents and other external factors such as school and religion shape and influence the thinking of a child. and to discover how to possibly make a more conscious community here, in this spot of Wrong Planet.

A further qualifier: I am an intellectual of sorts, though a poet, also, as are many others here. This material is not intended to be for everyone. Different strokes for different folks is a general rule of human participation just about anywhere, but anyone who is interested and does not understand is always free to ask a question, and of course people who disagree with any of the ideas content here are free to post, as this is how we all learn, by enquiring into ways of looking at things which may differ from our own.

Moderators, please keep in contact with me if any kind of problem comes up here.

To the various members of this forum who have criticized some of my comments as being demeaning, is anything at all about what I have written just now in any way demeaning? I cannot conceive of how it could be, but if you think it is, please let me know.

I'm not exactly sure what this thread is intended for, and surely there are plenty of serious threads on Autism, especially in the politics section?

A number of threads on the same topic occur often. Lately people are bringing back threads from several years ago and answering questions from OP's that have stopped posting here.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 18 Mar 2014, 1:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

When I first started posting regularly here(only a few months ago.) I found most of the threads very interesting. It was like everyone was posting what I was thinking. Now I'm finding that most of threads aren't interesting me anymore. It's probably because I'm starting to get a bit tired of what people are saying or maybe people are getting tired of what I'm saying. I guess I don't fit in with the Aspies after all. Not that I mind.

This thread is not intended to be about the politics of autism or community organization in that sense, but more about brain function and how it can kind of work in synch or not, and maybe even sometimes should not, as we need diversity and even maybe a little conflict in order to brainstorm. I am not sure. Did you get this idea it is about politics from something I wrote in my intro? I can still edit it a bit if that is not clear. When I say community organization, I am talking moire about how the threads of various ideas come together in the minds of individuals and how this affects the group and visa versa. And are you saying that there cannot be more than one serious thread or that I am implying that other threads are not serious?

I do not see that everything has to be completely clear right away. That would be teaching, and even if it were, which it would not be intended to be, a good teacher would have to be in question. Without going back to the idea content of my other thread, I just started with my own question which was very real to me, though the material was not that well designed, and a couple of ideas came up for me at the very end, after five months, presented by other people,, stuff I never thought of and maybe never would have, but only at the very end. Sometimes it is not all that clear in the beginning. This time I am much more clear, though.

The thing happened to me, too,with so many of the thread topics---like everyone was posting what I was thinking and also basically had many of the same peculiarities as me, which was delightful in many ways, but in my case it took almost a whole year to become disenchanted---this is not why I made this thread, though, as I have been planning it for several months.

I find personal enquiry interesting because I am always coming up with new idea from the few selected threads of others I am very carefully picking and choosing to participate in, and it is actually changing my brain, not just by thinking my own thoughts, but by trying to process the ideas of other people. A lot of material was very dim for me when I came here one year ago, meaning material in my own mind and about my own mind, and also about what is autism.

Last edited by littlebee on 17 Mar 2014, 10:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

So.....you want us to engage in some vague brainstorming with you so you can.....what exactly?

I thought you were against Aspies anyway, why are you still posting here?

AspieRunner wrote:

Get some new ideas and take this new way of seeing things into my daily life so I can begin to understand things better and have a happier life.

You don't think brainstorming with others and coming up with new ideas can be interesting and fun, or, even if it involves effort, a worthy pursuit? I notice you have made only a very few messages in the months you have been here, so I assume that something about responding to this particular thread is interesting to you.


Surprised to see this. Why do you think I am against aspies? I am an aspie myself. Just because a person has different ideas than yourself does not mean he is against you, though I suppose if a person is prejudiced against a group of people you are a member of it could mean he is against you, or a person could feel that someone else is prejudiced against himself even when the other person really isn't.

I suppose I am against small minded people trying to regulate and control other people's speech. Not talking about the moderators here, as imo they have tried their best to be pretty fair, though I may disagree with some of the ways they evaluate data, or even aspies, but just people in general. Anyone could be doing it, and I think a lot of people here are. Should a person just shut up and stop talking out of fear? I think this is what probably has happened to a lot of children, especially autistic children, and then they just shut down.

Personally being autistic I have lived my entire life in a state of anxiety and even at times extreme terror, and I am going to try to not do that anymore.
I think it is possible for a person to feel on a subliminal level that if others do not agree with him, then he will die.This is what happened to me. I only realized it in the last year when I am already over seventy. Too bad I did not become aware of it sooner.

Maybe I will go back to this Autism Documentary thread soon,where I was writing about this Lifetime movie, "Speak." In the movie a teen aged girl was raped, but she could not talk about it, and then through art she found her own ability to express herself. I think that speech in itself can be a form of art.

I have not even made one comment on this thread yet, so presumably people do not know where I am going with this topic, but people can go anyplace with it. I think it is an important topic--the way making all of these threads here and the way the making and weaving together of various threads of ideas in our own minds affects our individual experience and how this may relate to autism.

I know my messages can be kind of long, but imo short messages tend to decrease a person's attention span. Many years ago I read a study about this regarding the attention span of children who watched the show Sesame Street. Probably a combination of loing and short messages is the best.

This is not really intended to be a major thread, like my other thread was, but here is my first comment on the intended subject matter.

As I was studying the threads on this general autism discussion board for over five months before even making one thread, which shows how important it was to me to make a really good thread for my first thread, especially, I observed that the numerous threads though, affecting some vague kind of community organization, were also tending to break it down, as people jumped from topic to topic when the enquiry got a little more difficult and it would require more effort to process material on a deeper level. I found myself very tempted to do it also, but I actively went against that urge in myself.

Basically people can only process so much data at one time, and when they jump around too much, it may decrease the possibility of solutions kind of being forced though like the green shoot of what will be a flower coming up from the ground, or a powerful energy dispersing the clouds that are covering the sun. When the clouds are there, a person can still see, but it somehow is not the same. It is my experience that when difficult but very important material needs to be sorted out, then staying with a particular topic can help disperse the clouds or fog in ones own mind so that the light of understanding can begin to glimmer through more and more until eventually the sky is clear and it is a very joyful day.

My thought exactly. I don't know why there has to be 1 thread. FREEDOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! Personally I prefer to read several different threads than 1 thread on multiple topics. It's too much for me to read and take in. Those sort of threads often get skipped I think because there's too much reading just to reply.

I agree. When presented with walls of rambling text I bounce off them and skip onto something else to read. If the poster can't express themselves clearly and succinctly then I don't have the patience read their posts.

Your message helps explain the first basic idea I am getting at.

My one long thread with very long messages had an average of fifteen hundred hits a day for the first five months, as mentioned---this means 150 days averaged out to 1500 hits per day,and very recently, as many as 4500 hits on one day and 5000 hits on another day, so some of these people were actually reading it, but I acknowledge this did cut out of the mix people who are just not into processing long messages, and I probably should not have made such a thread for my first thread, but I am autistic:-) Yes, even I can play that card>>>>

An inverse argument is that lots of short messages cut people out of the mix, too, maybe even more so, as there is too much interchange to grasp the nuance of back and forth subjective communication by which a lot of important meaning is conveyed right then and there, almost as if by magic, so people on the other side of the world or people who can only come here once or twice a week or on the weekends can be left out and not get what is happening. Of course they can go back and study it, but generally they just would just go to another thread, which probably accounts for a lot of the repetitive content I have seen people complaining about, tso this can kind of break down community.

This thread is not intended to be about the subject matter of that thread, but this is why I wanted to start a different kind of thread where people could stick to one topic and explore into it very deeply, and on that thread one topic was approached from a few different angles, but again, yes, it did some readers out. Not to defend that thread, as I think it was in some ways obviously flawed, but is this kind of deep thread necessarily bad? I do not like talking small talk online, so all these kind of threads cut me out.

Different strokes for different folks. Wind, do you agree with this one simple idea, or do you think all threads here should suit your own taste?

I am a person who is over seventy years old, and I have my own ideas, though still open to modification, about what kind of threads are best. When I was your age I would have probably liked a different kind of thread, maybe a poetry thread, but with pretty short poems, though they did not have all these computer threads then..

So many numbers...

Hits doesn't equal people reading the posts, and hits don't equal reply numbers.

I click on many threads, see a wall of text and go "lol stuff that" gave up one paragraph in.

Too much verbosity. Keep it simple.

Hits aren't necessarily people viewing threads; the site is continuously scanned by automated bots by all the search engines plus some others. They all count as hits though.

I think it would be very difficult for a moderator who is not into reading long messages (and I think most people in general are not, which is not bad or good...it just IS--) to moderate material on such a thread, and I am very appreciative of the work the moderators have done around my participation here. Maybe I can find a way to pay it back, if not to the individual moderators, then to the autism community). What would make it even more difficult is if conflict was occurring around the author of the long thread, even though there was not much conflict on the long thread itself. It could get too confusing to sort out and maybe appear to be not worth the time and effort.

That is a difficult problem. One solution would be to avoid all kinds of conflict on WP and always make very short messages, but I am not sure that is the best solution, as there needs to be some kind of conflict for growth to occur, and alos, sometimes certain info can only be conveyed in longer messages.

Again it may seem like this thread was made as a response to my thread being locked, but I have been planning it for several months, though that event did spur me to do it sooner.. People do not know my history of studying how material organizes on this kind of bulletin board venue in a semi-random population. It has been my special subect of interest for about twenty years.

I hardly ever read posts that are too long. I may skim them or reads parts of it but I always skip over them. I just have a hard time keeping focus.