have you constructively criticised an NT's communication?

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On the first science exam I took in high school (Gr 9) there was a question asking the distance of a lightning strike, based on the flash appearing X seconds after the thunder. I assumed that this was one of the trick questions mother had warned me about, and answered correctly that this observation was of two events, and thus the answer was indeterminate. The teacher, probably under advisement, told me that I should have questioned the exam proctor about it and answered what they had meant to ask. I can't recall such a query ever being put. I still got a zero, and quit paying attention in school.

Recently, a nurse was hassling me for not coming to the hospital the day before, and I pointed out that the message I got said "today" and had been sent that morning. I got her to check and admit the error, but she then set an impossible deadline for my next appointment to make me the "bad guy" to the system and cover her mistake. My broken bone never did get set.

In both cases, I was focussed on the facts, while the other party was focussed on their feelings and dignity.

In what context are you applying this observation outside of your engagement with your ex-wife?

Both agree, and disagree.

Teachers can mess up when designing exam questions.


For example " there is a tribe of fat people. One day a thin boy moves into the village. Several generations later everyone in the tribe is thin. This is an example of ____________ ?"

That was an actual question on a test given by my highschool anthropology teacher. Fortunetly it wasnt a real exam that our grades depended upon. But still...

I suspect that she was looking for answer that has to do with genes and DNA. But obesity and the lack thereof is caused by many factors- heredity and environment.. The village coulda had a famine for chrissakes! LOL! What the f**k was she asking about?

However...
Sorry to have to tell you this, but...

Your thing is NOT an example of that.

First off...you apparently now remember the question wrong.
Its not likely that they asked about "the flash appearing AFTER the thunder". That would have been a trick question-because seeing the flash AFTER hearing thunder from the same strike is impossible.

The real question was probably the other way around: thunder after the flash.

Something like...

If you see a lightening flash, and six seconds later you hear the thunder, how far away was the lightening?

Answer: since sound travels at about 1200 feet per second it would have been six times 1200 feet away. Or 7200 feet away (like a mile and a half).

Simple, straightforward. Nothing wrong with the question.

I sure as heck do not remember that question wrong. My teacher, in her first year in Canada, looked pretty sick and apologetic about the zero.

Okay. So they screwed up and really did flip it around, and put hearing it before seeing it.

But ( if you dont mind me making some constructive criticism of your [i]communication [/i])

...when you made this post you should have MADE THAT CLEAR to us readers.

You should have said something like "they asked what looked like the old 'how far away is the lightening? question', but instead of how you're supposed to state it (seeing the flash first, then hearing the thunder) they flipped it around by saying hearing first and then seeing, which makes no sense. Thereby forcing me to wonder if it wasnt a trick question."

When I made my previous response to your post. I read what you said they asked, and I unconsciously flipped it back around to the right way! So I couldnt understand what the problem was. It wasnt until I re read it several times (while proof reading my own response) that I caught how it was wrong.

Their question was an accidental version of the thing that comedian Steve Allen would do on purpose- go up to folks in the street and ask them "how would you feel about a heterosexual being elected president?" . You would actually hear it correctly and call out Steve Allen for asking a trick question. I would probably be like everyone else, and respond with...how I felt about Gay rights. Lol!

^^ "On the first science exam I took in high school (Gr 9) there was a question asking the distance of a lightning strike, based on the flash appearing X seconds after the thunder."
CLUE ONE: "I assumed that this was one of the trick questions mother had warned me about, "
CLUE TWO: "and answered correctly that this observation was of two events, and thus the answer was indeterminate. "

You still manage to make it my fault. I think you illustrate my point about people putting emotion before logic. I could write all day about people ignoring logic around gender issues even with no semantic trickery, unless someone is assuming that "equality" can only be applied selectively.

I'm not sure what your question is. So far I haven't here applied that observation to any context outside of the anecdote I told. If you mean do I think it's discourteous to say unclear things, yes to a degree I see it that way, though "annoying" might be a more appropriate word. Hmm.....

Courtesy:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/courtesy
a courteous, respectful, or considerate act or expression.
favor, help, or generosity

I see it as considerate, helpful, and an act of some generosity and a favour to me if a person takes the trouble to communicate clearly to me. Sometimes I use the expression "author-friendly" about (usually written) communication that the author hasn't bothered to organise and phrase in a way that's easy to understand, but has taken the easy way out and left a lot of the work to the reader.

But a serious flaw in all that is that it's hard to know in a given situation whether the author or speaker was able to do any better, or whether they knew that their communication would be hard for the particular recipient to follow, so I can't categorically declare lack of clarity to be universally discourteous, I just think that some of the time it is.

Similarly, my ex-wife wasn't entirely correct to declare my repeating her words back to her as discourteous, in fact I know she was wrong, because I had no idea at the time that it would annoy her to do so. I had been hoping she would simply listen back to her words and notice their obvious unintelligibility, which was pretty extreme, and rephrased it. Certainly it's common enough for me to write something unclear, read it back to check it for clarity, and notice it's not clear - and only then can I correct my mistake. So it would appear that such a feedback process is useful. Just that self-criticism perhaps carries less of a sting than criticism from others, and my ex-wife wasn't always good at receiving criticism gracefully, though she often dished it out a lot more harshly than I did.

Does that answer your question?

They screwed up when they framed the question, and the rational thing for them to do would have been to ignore that question when assessing the marks. It was supposed to be a science test, not a test of neurotypicality or ability to second-guess and allow for serious flaws in the questions - that would have been appropriate to a subject such as communication studies. Shame on them. I wonder if they would have also given you zero if you'd answered "The answer is incalculable because a lightning flash does not follow the thunderclap it caused" ?

My guess is that the question was set by the head of the department. It may even have been copied from previous years, uncaught. If I'd gotten double marks, I'd have been encouraged. It would have cost them nothing. However, they were standing on their dictatorial dignity as a surrogate mother, rather than their intellectual merit as a scientist.

We students were not always the losers, though. Two biology teachers, sisters, who had lived in the area all their lives, announced that they were moving 20 miles south, to commute from outside the school district. The class clown, who lived at the edge of the district 12 miles south managed to convince them that they would have to deal with snow up to their second-storey windows. This was between lakes Ontario and Erie.

As the OP, I believe you're right - I doubt that I'd be some saintly person who'd patiently drop it down a gear or two and repeat myself with more direct expectation stated. As my guiding beacon for dealing with NT communication, people generally don't want to "beg" to ask favours from you - it's more implied - because people have their dignity to maintain. So as a compromise, asking "OK, would you also like me to (insert possible action)?" - as long as you ask seriously w/o sarcasm or sounding passive-aggressive, you should be fine except for toxic personalities like Type-A or narcissists.

On a tangent, I have noticed salesmen who are "very NT" to act in the complete opposite manner, like a person on the autism spectrum - they don't seem to "get" subtle rejection or nuance - so I get justifiably impatient with them. But I digress.

But all that being said, I have also misinterpreted "common sense" unstated expectations based on EMAIL messages, where no para-language is involved.
So sometimes, the disconnect in communication isn't due to missed socio-emotional cues, but the other person just flat-out expects you to be a "mind reader" in any given situation

I should also add to this thread, that should you choose to constructively criticize an NT's communication as being ambiguous and where they could improve it / how you would rephrase it, you may want to catch them alone - without anyone else present. The reason I say this is b/c that way they won't have anyone else to "bounce it off of" to check if it was just THEM who had the communication issue. Think about it: if you were in a room with that person and seven other people (whom let's say are all NT, for obvious reasons), and you constructively criticized something they said then others would be like "no, I understood them just fine" then others follow suit in saying so, like the bandwagon effect, leaving YOU rather embarrassed.

It gets worse if you get into a "back and forth" with your interlocutor in a a room with other people, in trying to nail down the intent of their phrasing, and a 3rd party/person says to you, "No, what he/she means is (insert intended meaning)" - and they say it with conviction, like they detected no ambiguity whatsoever, and it's YOU who's being the difficult or weird one.

I prefer to just politely listen to NTs - I may occasionally chime-in (and even at that), I exercise neutrality.

I sometimes imagine being able to constructively criticize an NTs communications -yet, I usually "bite my tongue" in actuality. Those times I'm able to successfully yield constructive criticism might involve topics related to special interests; yet I sense such successes are more or less by luck.

Two months ago, I got a bit rude to a SIG leader who was floundering, and trying to impose his own political views. He challenged me to do better, and was probably surprised that I felt well prepared. I had to wait an extra month, but I managed to avoid further conflict, and had a popular presentation. I think I was wise to include an early description of stupid people which everyone was reluctant to identify with, despite the odds against present company being all exceptional.

Actually salesmen/women are uber NT. You have to remember they won't take "no for an answer", they know the signals and selectively ignore resistance from a potential customer. The trick they use is to persistence to wear down the customer.

Yes I can see one of the issues with this approach. To an autistic person NTs might appear to be tuning into a particular frequency of communication that requires manual dialing like on a radio to keep up with as the frequency seems to jump around the place,

NTs learn social skills/communication by mirroring other people when they are young....but copying/imitating isn't enough, They also have to learn nuance in responding in a particular way based on the person and situation. They do this by triangulation. Paying attention, observing multiple people in different situations and scaffolding their responses to tailor to the upcoming situation. If you do this often enough (as most NTs do) then you can be quite efficient but also you learn to respond to people based on a type of consensus or common threads so that NTs from the same background tend to speak to each other in the same way and they often can anticipate (this often happens to me) what the other person is going to say,

So what you call a courtesy, they take for granted. This is what I mean dropping down a gear to accommodate the autistic person. Sure, a lot of NTs don't mind being patient, But a lot of them won't, In most cases if they don't have patience they tend to just ignore you or politely change the subject. However, if they are annoyed you are not on their wavelength they might are likely to be passive-aggressive like a comment or eye rolling or furrowed brow.

I totally get this predicament... in my younger days, like in my teens, I'd watch several movies and have to rewind the VCR and play back (not an issue with today's technology!) and I also took drama classes so I was a bit more proactive, even though I didn't have a diagnosis (this was circa 1990) - despite being told I had ADHD, I had some visceral feeling that I had trouble absorbing the full extent of someone's communicated intent but the difficulty lay in processing efficiency - so I had to train my brain based on romcoms and dramas and such - they say that an "Aspie brain" is very good with intra-hemisphere communication, but not so much inter-hemisphere, for those who know what a neural network is you'll understand the analogy... so, yeah, that helped somewhat - seeing as I wasn't achieving the "minimum passmark" to socialize with same-age peers, I had to accelerate it thru this method of movie interaction review and study, which helped somewhat but I was still left with many life obstacles which only really got better later in my 20s (and after diagnosis at 27).

All of which is to say, IT IS possible for "Aspies" to socialize around an acceptable threshold as NTs (what we know colloquially as "masking"), but it just takes more conscious practice and somewhat unconventional methods.