Impulsively correcting others

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Recently there was a thread here addressing pompousness in our personalities and I was curious how many of you constantly correct people when they make a mistake and get called condescending and get profane remarks said to you. Whenever I make these remarks I do it so people are better informed so they won't make the mistake in the future but I am constantly misinterpreted as being condescending. It seems most people now a days can't handle seeming like they're incorrect about something. For example, a person was speaking of electronics when I corrected them on a products specifications and how it effects the products performance compared to its past iteration and they told me to stop intersecting in their conversation in which I told them the proper word would be interjecting and they starting cussing at me and saying I was a condescending a**hole.

The difficulty lies with others because they are not capable of thinking rationally when they are corrected and see any kind of correction not as that, but as a "challenge". I have done this sometimes without sounding condescending or rude, but I still felt that snap-back afterwards.

I haven't interjected myself into a conversation in which I was not wanted, though. I have already learned the hard way not to do that because people feel that I am being nosy- so even if they make a mistake or go about something the wrong way, I keep my trap shut. Most people would say I am too quiet, but once I open my mouth they jump all over me and start judging?? No, thank you. They can wallow in their ignorance.

I have this problem a lot. Right now it happens most often with one of my friends. He'll say something that is just flat out wrong, so I'll have to correct him before the conversation goes any further or we'll just be talking non sense. He says he feels like I just disregard what he says but I just can't hear what I know to be false without saying something to him.

Does anyone else get told to stop listening to their conversation? I personally hate that phrase. I don't understand how people turn noises into background noise and not fully process it. I'm not making the conscious decision to pay attention to their conversation it's just that I can't not hear what people are saying. Because of this I'm almost always wearing noise canceling earphones to block out outside noise.

^ Yeah, how can one NOT listen? I sometimes wonder if it's even a thing for people who claim they can.

I've corrected others in school every time I knew they had clearly made a mistake, and was called a know-it-all and such things.
Nowadays I still think about correcting people sometimes, but I can hold back.
I understand it's annoying and oftentimes I actually don't like being corrected myself or interrupted in a conversation.

I correct people all the time but "luckily" I'm very soft spoken and easy to ignore. Is it just me or does everybody speak about 50% louder than they need to?

I had that problem alittle bit when I was in school & was called a smart-aleck but I outgrew that.

It's rude because its embarrassing the person. I don't correct anyone unless they ask me to look at something. The "intersection" word, you knew what they meant so I would have just let it ride. If I really don't understand what someone is saying (usually here because bigger words are used at times) then I will come out and ask and say I'm not understanding them. I believe the only ones to correct someone are teachers and bosses. Another time would be on medical terms and that would be to clarify what the person is meaning. Regular conversation - no, I just let it be.

I do this frequently, and do my level best for it not to come across as condescending or rude, but simply as me wanting people to know better than they previosuly did. That is, if people get minor details wrong, or use one word and clearly meant another, I let it slide. But when they base a whole discussion or rant of a factually incorrect premise, I feel compelled to explain where they wen't wrong, and I would feel embarassed if I did that and someone else didn't correct me.

I used to do it, too, because I'm curious and was born without the innate "knowledge" neurotypicals have that everything is first and foremost about status, hierarchy and popularity. This means I naturally see corrections as a valuable way to learn something and didn't resent being corrected myself---the only thing I'd resent was corrections clashing with logic or other knowledge I thought I had, and given with no explanation when I pointed out why I disagreed. Of course, this kind of corrections mostly came from people who, in hindsight, seem to have been looking for a way to humiliate me and shut me up, without caring whether their alleged arguments made sense. They probably got fed up with my unwitting smartassery.

It's taken me a bloody lot of carefully observing the way normal, sane people interact, stupid trial and error, and extremely inefficient musing to learn never to correct anyone unless explicitly asked to, and, even in this case, to expect trouble.

Learning formal stuff almost never seems to be a priority to neurotypicals. They're more than glad to sacrifice opportunities to learn things in order to keep everyone in their place. It's not that they "mistakenly" perceive you as condescending. There's no mistake on their part, as they make the rules, because they can. Biological evolution has put them in the position to do so. Your real attitude and intent don't matter---correcting someone means, above all, that you're claiming some kind of superiority to the person you're correcting. If they're not socially below you, they'll strongly reäct to the challenge to show you your place.

Of course, compared with a society which worked according to aspie principles, this is depressingly the way mafias like it: blind, deaf and dumb. But this is the kind of society which won the game of evolution; the other is just an aspie fantasy, and, as such, untried and most likely inviable.

One example I have is someone was reading what I had written and I had spelled "there" or "their" or "they're" wrong in a couple places and she kept saying it. Fine, I had made a few boo boo's and I know when each is used (English was my best class), but to go through and just look at my "there's" was not only condescending, but she wasn't getting what I was saying in what I wrote. My point is she could have just said "I would probably recheck all the there's since one was incorrect - it's an easy mistake to make". That's how I would say it. It's all in the delivery.

When someone wants to go out of their way to show how little respect they have for anything you’ve said or written, they don’t need to point out real spelling or grammar mistakes; often, they’ll make them up according to their own improvised rules, which don’t even need to be logically consistent. It’s not about setting you or themselves right on whatever they’re criticizing you for; it’s about disrespecting you. If their status is higher than yours, it’ll always work, and others will enthusiastically join them in their criticism, ignoring any equal or greater flaws they themselves may have.

Moral of the story: whoever is boss is always right.

EDIT – Duoble tpyo.

Last edited by Spiderpig on 03 Oct 2015, 8:32 am, edited 3 times in total.

Oh absolutely, there are plenty of ways to go about it. While I too get annoyed at there/their/they're style mistakes, unless it's in some sort of published work, it's a small matter and easy to correct later. However, an example from this very site: some time ago I resurrected slightly old thread because someone brought up the old "physics says bumblebees can't fly" to set the matter straight. This myth of often used to reach the conclusion that science doesn't know everything, and whatever thing the speaker wants to be true must therefore be on equal footing. That is the sort of thing I'm talking about. What I find most annoying is when my non-rude explanation of why they're wrong is met with an indignant insistance that I respect their conscious decision to be factually incorrect.




Funny story. When I was in Uni, I turned in a first draft of a literature essay for evaluation, and the critique I got was "expand on this point" in one of the paragraphs. For the second draft, I beefed that paragraph up a bit and cleaned the whole essay up a little, and turned it in as my second draft. The single critique on the second draft was "this bit is unnecessary" with the parts I had added to the paragraph highlighted. I deleted what I had previously added, and turned in a text almost identical to my first draft for a passing grade.

This is one of the reasons my husband was let go at work.

Between the stiff body language...
The announcer type, deep monotone voice...
Flat facial expression..

He came across as William F. Buckley, and his co workers HATED him. It didn't help he worked with all women. NT women are even more attuned to voice, body language and affect.

So he would correct something, then dead icy silence.

Or...

Correct something, and they would just walk away.

Or...

"You aren't included in this conversation. Can you leave?"

With his friends and family, most of the time they pretend he didn't say anything. My husband would correct something, and they ignore it.

If my husband is correcting a fact about a product or something specialized or scientific in nature, no one minds. It's when he corrects something that doesn't add anything to the conversation is where people get stabby. You talk about the stockmarket, and someone doesn't correctly say some statistic. Now this is not an academic conversation, just shooting the sh*t. Well, my husband will correct, information dump on why he is right, and instead of everyone thinking "thanks", it's more like thanks a $$ hole for pile driving the conversation dead."

We've been working on this. When he does that with me, I stop and ask him why he his saying this or that. Does he realize this isn't a debate or argument? Most of the time his anxiety is over drive and he is desperately trying to be relevant in the conversation. Casual conversations are so hard for him. He has to work double the amount of effort to keep up. If the conversation is loaded with common social references (Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, Grumpy Cat....that sort of stuff) he's doomed. I don't follow much social stuff, but I know who the above is just from passing references. My husband doesn't absorb information like that.

The lack of pragmatic speech skills and horrible social anxiety are the two over riding issues that makes my husband correct anything he can during a conversation. It isn't so much to be right, but to be included.

Facts and evidence are now four letter words. We live in an era where science and engineering have dramatically changed the way people live and yet the majority of people believe facts don't exist and everything is merely opinion. It boggles my mind.

It really does. I think it was in one of Dawkins' books where he mentions an anthropologist who was studying a native tribe somewhere who believed that the moon was located just few meters above the tree tops, and her position on this is that "therefore this is true for them." Postmodernist thinking isn't.