Got to meet Temple Grandin today

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That is really cool that you got to meet Dr. Grandin!! !! !! !! I'm an alum of CSU, so I heard of her as a professor from my pre-vet friends before I realized she was super-famous hehe! Anyway, I met her actually on the CSU campus when she did a lecture at the University Center of Arts' giant theatre. I got to ask her a question at the Q & A!! !! !! !! I was soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo nervous but soooooooooooooooooooooooooo excited hahahaha!! !!

Yeah, I definitely have to remember that like us on the spectrum, she is limited by rigid thinking and social interaction issues. This comes out in her overgeneralizing of things. I do agree that maybe a lot of NT people forget that and take her word without realizing that she's speaking as one of the now many inside voices of the Autism Spectrum but her perspective is also limited because she's on the spectrum as well.

However, many people (me included) see her as a role-model and one example of how a life can be lived successfully on the spectrum! For this, she should definitely be given credit!

Again, that is really cool you got to meet her!! ! I share your excitement

So you go to CSU? I knew Grandin was a professor at one of the western colleges but didn't realize it was CSU.

Anyways, a little off topic, but how do you like it there? I actually go to UW which is about 2 1/2 hours north of you guys on Hwy 287.

But yeah, it was pretty exciting. And the fact that I got interviewed by international journalists about my experiences with AS was also a high point.

I'm actually suprised that there was a news crew from Japan there. At first I was like "Just how famous is Dr. Grandin?!" and then they told me that it was actually part of a larger story on autism that they were going to be airing on NHK. I know there was a thread here recently on how autism/Asperger's is dealt with in Japanese society, so perhaps I should tell it over there.

But really, Grandin is my role model. Someone asked her during the Q&A session if she was ever going to get into politics. She said no but went on to talk about how Congress and state governments need to shape up and start putting more of an emphasis on education. She said it in this no-nonsense manner that made me think "Hell I'd vote for her!" because she voiced my sentiments exactly.

Thats called categorisation. Thats how you sort the wheat from the chaff to use a metaphor, without sorting, attributing and categoraisation, concepts become hard to define and not a lot can get done.

The claim to successfulness probably refers to the amount of impact she has had, what she has done is firstly introduce design changes to the way livestock is handled and processed, I forget the figures but the IIRC the majority of livestock handling facilites in the USA now use her designs or desing principles.
Secondly she has probably done more to bring awareness of Autism issues to the general public (and here I'm speaking from my perspective as someone who knew just the average about autism until a year ago) than any other individual through her books and high public profile.

I believe the objection is that Dr. Grandin's thought categories are inaccurate and limited. anbuend has listed multiple kinds of thought that go well beyond Dr. Grandin's categories and achieve greater accuracy and detail as a consequence. While I could be mistaken, I've seen her post more extensively about this with the aforementioned list, and I think I understood her point at the time.

I like to categorize things myself, but I prefer to try to be as explicit, accurate, and exhaustive as necessary. I don't see the point of incomplete and to some degree inaccurate categories. That would be misleading and potentially useless.



This means she is successful and to some degree influential. Actually, the fact that she's a single autistic voice that NTs listen to means that they're unlikely to hear other autistics speak up, or consider them as influential when they do. So while she is successful, and I am not saying this is necessarily her decision or choice, her success may eclipse other, better-informed autistic voices who have a broader, more nuanced perspective on the autistic spectrum, but who (like Dr. Grandin) do not speak for all autistic people.

I doubt no one knows this information. I'd question the interpretation myself.

You said she epitomized evil. I said my experience suggested something about people that easily judge others. No where did I definitively say you actually were evil nor did I directly characterize you in any way. The way I phrased it gave you a way out - all you had to do is say that you didn't mean she was actually evil.

I'm sorry you are so defensive. It's possible you don't really believe she is evil and just chose your words poorly. If you actually consider her evil, I stand by my words, not as an insult but a statement of observed human behavior.

It's way more than ordinary categorization. There are very few people who could take hundreds of people's thinking styles and reduce them to "verbal logic", "visual", and "music-math". Because with categorization, the thinking styles you're talking about have to actually at least vaguely fall into the categories you're thinking of. How could you possibly, for instance, put someone with, for instance, a highly kinesthetic thinking style into any of those three categories and maintain even a small degree of accuracy about it? I guarantee she ran across people with those sorts of thinking styles, but the way her mind works would have erased the memory entirely as irrelevant since it didn't fit any of her three categories. If she'd been thinking more accurately she'd have needed at least 6-12 styles to cover the real possibilities. The way my mind works doesn't even close to fit into any of her categories, and yet I know plenty of other autistic people whose mind works enough like mine that we clearly share a common "category" of thinking.

There was one other instance where she asked hundreds of autistic people about something and came up with something else that was so oversimplified as to distort reality significantly, but I can't remember what exactly it was.

I'm not that crazy about her to be honest. Her "thinking in pictures" book is very boring and I didn't even read the last chapter. I got sick of reading about cows after the first few chapters. I didn't buy this book to read about the structure of slaughter houses, yaaaawn.
Oh yeah and the hug box thing is just weird. I'd rather hug a person any day.

I wonder about the differences between Temple Grandin the person and Temple Grandin the image. Somewhere along the line somebody figured out her story was compelling enough to sell things. Like books and movies. So there has to be somebody managing her image. Also it is likely there are now people around her telling her what they think she needs to hear for her to "make the most of her opportunities" (cynically, this is the same as capitalizing as much as possible on the image being crafted). I wonder how much she is responsible for this crafted image and how much is just a public persona foisted upon her by editors and others with their own agendas. And also I wonder how aware she is of this dynamic.

The 'hug box' is one of Grandin's stims. She puts her head inside the chute, adjusts the pressure being applied to the sides of her head, and it calms her. She also uses the 'hug box' to deal with sensory overload.

Although Temple Grandin is a role model for showing that autistics can lead productive lives, there are others who bring to light the benefits of living with ASD's. Daniel Tammet and John Robison come to mind. James Durbin, perhaps.

I am certain that some of this is going on. Because I've experienced it myself. Often what people mean about autism when they say my name, bears little resemblance to me-the-person, and that's all kinds of messed up but it's so hard to explain it. And often people don't even listen. When I dealt with the media I would tell them one thing about me, and they would say the opposite. If this happened even with my comparatively small experience of the media, I'm certain it happens to anyone like Temple Grandin, with a much larger exposure to the media. I've heard over and over stories about how for all that people claim to admire her-the-image, when she's at conferences, often she eats meals alone because nobody really wants to sit with her-the-real-person and talk.

If she eats alone by her own choice, meh. But if she is alone because she doesn't fit in and that's how she ends up, it makes me sad.

It sounds like she can handle eating alone, but she doesn't do it because she just decided she didn't want to be around people, she does it because for the most part people decide they are uncomfortable being around her. (At least one of the times I heard this from someone, it was from someone who actually went and ate with her, and she didn't seem to mind that. But the person noticed that people just really didn't seem to want to spend any time with her socially for all that they "admire" her in other ways.)

Otay. I'm sorry you think all people everywhere are purveyors of evil for having ethics, that must be rough.

What is wrong with the humane slaughter of livestock. Where else shall we get our meat?

ruveyn

In Temple Grandin's position, what she did was probably a better choice than nothing at all. Of course she could have gone into a different field, but she chose this - and what she developed means that cattle are treated more humanely before they're slaughtered.

Doesn't seem to be a stance of absolute evil, there.