I like this approach. “funny meme” aside, I think it is a good way of showing how much a certain language can affect how other people think and feel about a subject. Just read it THAT way and “being neurotypical” suddenly sounds like a disorder that isn’t fully compatible with the public, doesn’t it?
We live in a world that isn’t exactly kind to people on the spectrum. It is loud, flashy, hectic, overwhelming, unrewarding but you’re still expected to work like a cog in a machine, despite having fewer and fewer places where you’d actually “fit in” without grinding gears, and whenever there is some sort of public talk about that topic, it always, always sounds like the affected person is the problem and personally responsible for fixing themselves, when a no small part of “not fitting in” is due to society itself. Maybe a change in language is due to remove that stigma.
I see these as legitimately bad things that people should not do. The fact that society considers this normal is horrible!
I think of it as a dialect difference. Allistic people aren’t “not saying what they think” they are saying exactly what they think. That combination of words just has a specific meaning to other Allistic people outside of their Webster definition. It’s gibberish/meaningless if you speak a different dialect though.
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I’m gonna be upfront with you, Im ND but Allistic. Your boss asking you to make a spreadsheet automatically told me he wanted you to make it look presentable because it was a work enviornment. The context of who was asking you and where made that clear to me, I understand that it wasn’t clear to you. But that’s what I mean by dialect.
I didnt get all the layout details that he might specifically want but if my boss asked me to make a spreadsheet comparing some numbers 9 out of 10 times I’ll have outlines and colors and I’ll hide messy cells. He wouldn’t have to tell me that and I’d bet most Allistic people would hear those instructions as well. In fact most Allistic people would probably be insulted by the level of specific instruction your asking for if they hadnt specifically requested it. So your boss may think he’s being polite and not realizing that he’s instead using poor communication. It may help to specifically tell him you want specific, detailed, instructions like that, otherwise he’s likely to resist giving that level of instruction for fear of insulting you.
I’m sorry that your boss hasn’t figured out that you need more specific guidance in those situations because that’s got to be frustrating and I hope that you and he can figure out a better mutual communication style.
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Such things can also be a domineering strategy.
So based on the info you just provided your example isn’t what I was referring to by differences in dialect. If your boss didn’t tell you the very specific formatting he wanted beforehand then there was no way for you to know and no Allistic person would have been able to figure that out either. Thats not a subtext dialect difference which is what I was talking about. An allistic person would be just as frustrated with that example and your boss is just a dick. No subtext was going to tell anyone the correct color hash that he wanted.
Infers to me practicality over presentability.
Unfortunately that is largely not how the corporate world works.
Which is why more hierarchies = more bullshit work.
I remember, once in a nice small company with flat hierarchy, the office guys did a survey for the works outing (sounds weird, “Betriebsausflug”); it was an excel sheet with not-working checkboxes sent via mail, you had to send it back. Now scale that up.
^ Prime example of speaking a different dialect, if not language.
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I would be willing to bet actual money that they did not mean those exact specific lines and colours, and instead provided them as direction for the type of organisation and presentation of the data they were expecting. They wanted it presented in a manner that made the comparison easier to digest at a glance, and not just a trivially assembled side by side list of plain numbers.
Think about the reason behind the request, and how it changes the situation for the person making it. Could they have gotten a dump of unformatted data themselves? If so then that’s almost certainly not what they’re asking for.
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You literally asked how a short instruction expands to include these seemingly expected additional formatting requirements. The answer is that it doesn’t expand to exactly these arbitrary requirements, but that a certain style or level of aesthetics was implied by being a work environment. Unless your boss is hard to work with and actually demands a specific date format and color coding. Most likely though, they want any form of color coding to distinguish different parts of the spreadsheet at a glance and a reasonable date format that is used in everyday life.
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If you think about it as a dialect the only way to learn it is like any other language that doesnt have a textbook: exposure with the native speakers.
I think the point OP was trying to make is that most likely people who know this dialect (i. E. Are used to working with your bess) have an idea of how he wants things.
In this case, the dialect would have a very small subset of speakers (only the people used to working with your boss).
I can see the logic in this argument, but I don’t think such a small subset of speakers qualifies as a dialect and I think your boss is just being difficult. Also I’m pretty sure this would have been an issue for many neurotypicals too, since the info wasnt communicated properly.
I think this is more an example of power play - your boss is in power and how dare you not know? It’s the same treatment we get from NTs everywhere. They are “in power” in the sense that they can expect most people to pick up on their code and don’t have to change. Your boss on the other hand just doesn’t care if you had a chance to understand and that’s why I think he’s just power trippy.
What people on the spectrum may not understand is that language is more than just the exchanging of raw information. It’s culture, it’s artistic, and it’s a way to communicate intangible feelings and emotions.
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Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.
And is it not rude to assume that everyone’s mind works in the same way … or that others would camouflage in a die-cut way as someone they are not truely; is it not kind of intellectually flat to assume self-similarity, given that this is so obviously not the case – I mean divergent or not, everyone is just so engraved by their past experience that we have no true idea what mental process is going on inside another person unless we get to know them more closely.
e: or put in different words, what to do if the intangible feelings and emotions communicated by someone just don’t match their verbal message? Or worse, what to do when we cearly see someones cognitive dissonance but we are expected to somehow follow that (it’s an illness and following through would be self-denial)?
May read: The Double Empathy Problem;
more on affective vs. cognitive empathy: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence (part 1); (part 2)
I think they understand that just fine.
That sounds as if a daltonic found it horrible that other people use and enjoy colours he cannot separate. I understand it makes your life harder, but you can’t tell people not to use something that is extremely usefull just because you can’t participate.
“You read into phrases past their actual meanings” “Instead of saying what you think, you expect others to infer it based on subjective social rules”
The main issues is that you have to do that because other people will use double meanings no matter what. For exemple to double cross you regarding something. So you have to be able to read them.
Meanwhile there’s actually an other case when people use double meanings : when they can’t foster the courage to tell you something really important that would change everything, or to which you could react badly. Like that they are in love with you. In that case infered double meanings will allow the other person to react by sending similar double meanings to signify that they are on the same page, creating a much reassuring envirronment to finally confess their feelings.
Our species is insanely bad at finding partner. Like wildly bad.