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Technic1
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24 Jul 2021, 9:24 am

How is your general knowledge and how is the general knowledge of other aspies?

What’s the difference between general knowledge and what we know - our interests?



Mountain Goat
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24 Jul 2021, 9:37 am

Pass!

My general knowledge isn't my strong point and sometimes people are taken back by what I don't know that they assumed that everyone knew (Of course not everyone knows as no one knows everything!), but within my specialist subjects my knowledge does have a fair depth to it, though I admit that I don't know everything... But in the realm of my special interests my knowledge runs deep. (What I mean by this is that specific areas within the hobbies that I love is where I really go deep but as general subjects of the hobbies themselves I am average for someone in the hobby? But in the individual specific areas I love within the hobby I go very deep if that makes sense, and I am still learning).

When I get a subject I can latch onto, I go deeper and deeper and deeper, but if I get a subject I can't get myself to latch onto it, even my best efforts to try and learn it dissapear from my mind within days or weeks or a month or three. A maths teacher at secondary school used to be puzzled by this because he could teach me a mathematical subject and I could do it and get it, but come next lesson in a day or twos time and it was as if he had never taught me at all!
But within my special interests, I can churn out facts and figures I learned when I was a child! (Admittedly some knowledge I may have lost, but in general I can remember a lot of it such as poiler pressures and wheel diameters etc of specific Great Western Railway steam locomotives... (I surprized myself to look them up about a year or two ago and find that I was right in what I remembered, though I do admit that my mind works better visually so pictures and scenes can be easier to recall... Though I may not recall in very precise detail but as a general scene it stays in my memory for a long time... Many people I know from an early age I can say to "Do you remember..." and they hardly remember at all, and yet I can remember many of them as if they were yesterday as it is all visually played out like a TV film. I can sometimes go back into old childhood memories and replay the scenes ad notice things that I did not think about before).


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24 Jul 2021, 3:15 pm

General knowledge is just non-specialised knowledge.

I think there was a general knowledge section in the 11-plus exam, which I passed, apparently with flying colours. The questions would have all been "sensible" questions, i.e. no celebrity or sports questions. These days I don't know how well I'd do in a general knowledge test. I might be useful as part of a team in a pub quiz, because I think my general knowledge has a lot of holes in it that they could fill, while I'm a bit more nerdy than average so I might know the answers to the academic questions that they didn't.

These days I don't have any interest in becoming better at general knowledge. I don't see much point in clogging up my memory with stuff that any fool can look up on the internet, and outside of an academic situation I would think a lot of it was pretty useless. Like (I guess) most Aspies I prefer to specialise in whatever I happen to feel curious about, which is a pretty broad range of subjects in my case but there are topics I'm not interested in at all.



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24 Jul 2021, 3:31 pm

He was a great man.

Won many battles, and even defeated General Sundry!



Technic1
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30 Jul 2021, 11:15 am

Are aspies no good at general knowledge.



Fnord
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30 Jul 2021, 11:26 am

Technic1 wrote:
Are aspies no good at general knowledge.
Really?

I was the Captain of my College Trivia team, and only because I could answer ~90% of the questions classified as "General Knowledge".

Typical examples of General Knowledge questions include:

Q: What commercial product rates an SPF of 15 or higher?
A: Sunscreen.


Q: Who was the author of a book featuring green eggs and ham?
A: Dr. Seuss.


Q: Which TV show features a fictional company called "Dunder Mifflin"?
A: The Office.


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Technic1
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31 Jul 2021, 9:09 am

If you have a problem with me Fnord….why?

Your attitude is sht on this forum.



naturalplastic
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31 Jul 2021, 11:04 am

Technic1 wrote:
Are aspies no good at general knowledge.


Unlike someone else ...I correctly read this statement as a question. And not as an assertion.

The answer to the question is... I dont know. But based on myself...I am great with general knowledge and excel at Jeopardy and Trivial persuit type games, and the more useless the knowledge is the better I am at it! And some aspies ive met are similar. An attractive young lady at the local support group is quite a brainiac - can go off into quoting Chaucer at the drop of a hat.

But some are not. You encounter individuals on WP who have impressive specialized knowledge of a certain hobby/job, but the same individual will need to have both highbrow things (acedemic learned things), and lowbrow pop culture references constantly explained to them.

So apparently you cant generalize about "general knowlege" in aspies.



Harry Haller
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31 Jul 2021, 12:53 pm

General knowledge is knowledge useful across many disciplines.

So knowing how numbers work is general knowledge.
It is useful in mathematics, medicine, business, physics - and their sub-disciplines.

Don't know that it is specific to spectrum.



Fnord
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31 Jul 2021, 4:47 pm

Technic1 wrote:
If you have a problem with me Fnord…
I have no problem with you.  I do have a problem with false assumptions, sweeping generalizations, and fallacious reasoning.
Technic1 wrote:
Your attitude is sht on this forum.
Would you prefer that I made up my own "facts", expressed my opinions as absolute truths, and/or agreed with everyone else's fantasies?


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Edna3362
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31 Jul 2021, 10:29 pm

Not me. :lol:

Mostly because I don't do media references, collecting names and facts/stories behind it, history and it's dated numbers in general, and various trivial facts simply do not stick with me because I never encountered it in real life.


Another aspie might. Just definitely not me. :twisted:

I'm the type who has a special interest on hand.
Yet never bothered to even know what that special interest is called or named, let alone where it came from, how it came to be, etc. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


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naturalplastic
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31 Jul 2021, 11:43 pm

Harry Haller wrote:
General knowledge is knowledge useful across many disciplines.

So knowing how numbers work is general knowledge.
It is useful in mathematics, medicine, business, physics - and their sub-disciplines.

Don't know that it is specific to spectrum.

Wrong. That is not what the phrase "general knowledge" is used to mean.

"General knowledge" is a body of knowledge drawn from areas. Not knowledge of one thing that applies to a lot of things.



Technic1
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01 Aug 2021, 12:16 pm

Fnord wrote:
Would you prefer that I made up my own "facts", expressed my opinions as absolute truths, and/or agreed with everyone else's fantasies?[/quote]

No we’d all just rather you didn’t post on our threads?



Technic1
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01 Aug 2021, 12:21 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Technic1 wrote:
Are aspies no good at general knowledge.


Unlike someone else ...I correctly read this statement as a question. And not as an assertion.

The answer to the question is... I dont know. But based on myself...I am great with general knowledge and excel at Jeopardy and Trivial persuit type games, and the more useless the knowledge is the better I am at it! And some aspies ive met are similar. An attractive young lady at the local support group is quite a brainiac - can go off into quoting Chaucer at the drop of a hat.

But some are not. You encounter individuals on WP who have impressive specialized knowledge of a certain hobby/job, but the same individual will need to have both highbrow things (acedemic learned things), and lowbrow pop culture references constantly explained to them.

So apparently you cant generalize about "general knowlege" in aspies.


You are correct it is a question. (!)



Something Profound
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02 Aug 2021, 2:36 am

I would most certainly qualify as an "Aspie" if anything should I finally get an ASD diagnosis. Getting assessed as an adult is nigh impossible and takes a long time...

But in any case, I probably am fair to decent at "general knowledge." But again, it isn't exactly clear what that means. I have no interest in sports statistics, weather reports, local events, celebrity gossip, etc. I can engage in those discussions, but I am quick to tell others that I have no interest in football, and if I have to watch people engaging in a sport like that I would rather watch European Rugby because at least those people are actually risking themselves in the sport. That is, it has some merit in skill that might be interesting.

...at that point people either ask what Rugby is, or they lose interest in talking about it and I am free to be indifferent. Should they ask, I will tell them pretty much exactly what I said here...and I tend to get the same result. Sometimes they bother to ask if I have a team in Rugby I like, to which I say, "I don't live in the UK, so I don't watch Rugby either." This will usually show that I really have no interest in sports, so again...same result as before.

All this is to say: I *can* have those talks, but I don't have those interests, so I would much rather not and I am not going to be a very engaged conversationalist if you make me have those discussions.

Like everyone here, I think I similarly would be more than able and willing to go deep into discussion about my areas of interest. What is different for me that seems to be unusual amongst Aspies or people with ASD is that my interests fall in a category that can make me seem...sociable (for lack of another word).

That is, while I dislike math discussions and have no desire to get involved in formulas or equations, I can talk about things like mythology, folklore, legends, etc...which means I also have enough discussion material on topics that some people do find interesting. I can articulate the origins of vampire lore, which has a crossover with zombie lore, and since there are enough movies that have both, most people seem more comfortable in these areas. It is when I start getting into the deeper history stuff and going on side tangents about why a zombie isn't really a zombie, or what vampirism is in different cultures that are not Eurocentric that things start to go awry.

I also have an intense interest in art, specifically (but not exclusive to) Cartoonism. It makes for an interesting conversation starter, I suppose, but most people don't care about me going on into rubber hose animation or the elegance and brilliance of Hanna Barbara budget animation. Even Art Majors seem a bit bored by it.

I also like words...the shape and structure of them. Etymology fascinates me. But again, not overly useful (but it does explain why I am extremely articulate).

But I am not overly brilliant in these areas, just invested and interested enough to have more than standard competence.

My interests merely have enough of a "socially acceptable" overlap with "General Knowledge" subjects, and I am pretty good at remembering odd bits of trivia (It is actually annoying how much stuff gets stuck in my brain), so I am able to hold my own in conversation. This attributes for one of the reasons for why I probably was overlooked for diagnosis: I have enough of the socially acceptable info to make do, and come off as just being a nerdy "Know It All." It was perhaps easy to overlook the other stuff (particularly because the community I grew up in wouldn't know what ASD or Asperger's was if you hit them in the face with the DSM-IV and a dictionary).

but in the end, it really isn't easy to answer this question without knowing what you mean by "General Knowledge." If the point of this topic is to better understand what that is, I certainly can't help you. I stick to my personal interests, and either other people care, or they don't. I am not gonna even try to understand what "normal" people (NT people) consider "General Knowledge," because it isn't interesting to me, and seems a waste of my time to develop said interest.