No "gray area", just "black/white"

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I also get told I am black and white or I am being black and white or "it's not black and white."

I can see the gray areas. Here is one:

It's illegal to kill people but the gray area is it's only legal if someone is trying to kill you but it has to be in the act.

Another one:

It's rude to hang up on people but the gray area is it's not rude to hang up if they are being rude to you or it's a telemarketer, a drunk person, someone speaking a foreign language, and of course someone giving you a prank call.


You're right, smoking is stupid but it doesn't make them bad people or intelligently stupid. They are stupid for what they are doing.

Believe it or not, i base my own opinions on my own thoughts.

But since you are an obvious smoker with the typical non-empatic mindset of smokers and have no regard for people with allergies and think that the world is only about your opinion and call it a "right" to smoke and make other people miserable with your disgusting habit.

Smokers should adapt to take consideration to other people, not the other way around. And the rest of us should not pay for your healthcare. You choose to poison your bodies, not us, this is why you should pay an extra 20% tax in healthcare costs.

Are you happy now? This is the reason i didnt want to bring this up! If someone tells you not go go there, damn it, you should not go there!

And now: If you want to further discuss the subject, i suggest you bring it up in a separate thread in an approprotate forum so i can ignore you totally.

And yes, i will ignore your next post in this thread that continue on the subject.

Have you ever had allergies? No? Then dont bring up the subject unless you fully understand other peoples viewpoints. I dont hate people for no reason.

Like i told the other guy, start a separate thread, this thread is not about discussing those things.

I seem to have 2 catagories of "friends" and "none friends" not many inbetweens so that makes people think I hate everyone, which I don't.

I would still date someone if they were a smoker. I don't smoke, but I let people do what they want as long as they don't force it on me. I hate it how people say you're stupid if you smoke. Keep an open mind.
I wouldn't even care if they took drugs. If they had a drug problem maybe I would bring up that they needed to deal with it.
I remember in my christian days my best friend was an atheist.
I know a guy that is so straightedge and against drugs and religion, but I still love him.
Oh and I absolutely love an extremely political person.
I get annoyed by racism. I'll let generalizing a race slide, but racial hate or vulgar jokes I won't stand for.
I get so annoyed by people saying all religion is BS. It's the religious peoples actions that make you think that, not the religion itself. I am open to all religions, that's one reason I left the christian faith. The other reason was I don't think homosexuality is unnatural.
Keep an open mind and you'll have a lot of friends. I think I just worked out why people actually like me.

I also tend to think much too black & white. The gray areas are like big honking blind spots to me. Something (or rather, someone) is either here or there, but never in between.

I hate thinking like that, but I keep falling into that trap.

Regarding smokers, I used to think very much like you do, because my parents were big smokers and I was always so disgusted of this as a kid (this was before the global anti-smoking jihad). As a teenager, this view got reinforced by seeing all the annoying jocks and "cool kids" smoke. I never wanted be anything like them and wanted nothing to do with anyone who smoked, ever

But lately I'm more tolerant of smokers. I think this is because I'm much less forced to be around smokers, and that I actually know a few people I respect, who are smokers.

I encourage you to read an interview with an (NT?) actor who had to think in black/white terms and he found it almost made him go crazy! read here: http://splashpage.mtv.com/2008/08/21/is ... thinks-so/

isn’t exactly anyone’s definition of a true hero except his own, a guy who would sacrifice the whole world if it meant punishing the actions of one wicked man.

and later

“That to me is what’s so admirable about him,” Earle Haley insisted. “Rorschach’s complexity is interesting too because it’s an attacking complexity. He tries to simplify the world in black and white. We live in such a world of grays that it’s next to impossible and I just love the way he does it. Playing this guy I almost went nuts, just trying to reconcile that aspect of him. I just kept staring deeper and deeper and deeper into complexity to try and define it and how you can black and white this.”

I also like how he discusses intentions vs. actions.

We as Autistic people have to be careful about intentions vs. actions. As we are often trapped in bodies that respond to stimulus that produces misleading physical responses.

1) We may act out against stress, but mentally be strong pacifists and non-violent people.
2) We may care deeply about the outside person or stress, but mentally shutdown for days or even weeks at a time. See this thread on WP: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt96632.html

This kind of conflict may be why some with AS have such "I'm f****d" problems... suicide and such.

I think we all in this discussion owe Earle Haley a beer for giving us a well articulated bridge between the AS and NT world Just that one interview probably played a good 25% of my recent (3 weeks ago) discovery of AS... as I came to see myself in that description. Then when I seriously reviewed the 100+ other symptoms and characteristics... DUH! I've been compensating my whole life, never getting a happy ending. 39 years of exhaustion. Now I finally understand myself in a way I never did, and am quickly finding new ways to solve it. thank you WP for being another 25% of my discovery of AS!


P.S. I'm thinking of writing book on practicals of thinking with AS, how am I doing so far? I feel like I'm really connecting the dots with people here. Not trying to take credit, but engaging with the community. Socially for me, this is a thrill. One I have had few times with people. I have published computer industry books in the past, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about in terms of the work required.

Well black/white thinking does have to do with a deficit in executive functioning. It should not be that surprising that some of us fall into some variation of this.
I do not necessarily like this myself, I just know it happens, and the truth is I have avoided alot of situations where this may come up. Because if I am thinking in this manner, something is bothering me, and it does signal that my mental processing has gone askew.

I hate people who side with bullies so I blocked my friend and removed her from my lists. She sided with a bully after acting like she didn't like her and stuff and wanted me to do a time line about her when she could have done it herself. Then she decided to side with her and acting like her bullying was okay.

I decide whether I like them or not too. Not much else. Sides can change over time. The only neutral is when I have seen someone but had no more interaction with them and have not seen their behaviour or heard/spoken to them.

One guy at work comes in and is very loud and makes lots of 'jokes' and I hate and find him intensely annoying
Some people come in looking and sounding grumpy - they decrease my mood and I immediately dislike them
People who don't say please/thank you also do my head in

I get confused when one moment someone is nice and the next they can be really criticizing and you don't know whether you're in their good or bad books cos I don't know how to feel about them and I can't describe where on my scale they would fit then cos I can't work it out!

Because humans are more complex: There is only a very tiny minority of people which do not have an idiotic strain. I am consider by the most people as very rational and clever. My option is often sought when it comes to tricky question and I work in a profession (scientific software programming) which demands a high level of rational and clear thinking. But: I am a strong smoker, not that I am not aware about the danger of smoking, but I smoke.

To make it short: To assess a human you need to see a lot of parameters. They together form a picture, which may (or may not) has an overall tendency, but is hardly in one colour. To stay with your black-white-grey-metaphor: This picture is composed of a lot of tiny patches of different colours.

Also: Look at yourself. I would be more than just surprised if anyone would find something very stupid with your behaviour. Prima facie that are not aware about the complexity of human behaviour.

I sometimes wonder if people who criticize 'black-and-white thinking' are just intimidated by the fact that we're so good at it.

I agree.

There is actually something restful about talking to another ASD person in that they always seem to distill things to a set of discrete hard facts. Whereas NTs often, though not always, talk in fuzzy and hedging terms.

They get so much freedom with that, don't they? Not one whit of thinking required.

NTs? Yup.

Of course! I never thought about it like this, but many people on the spectrum are strong "systemizers". Dividing the world up into black & white is just one way of systemizing the world. Perhaps this is the key to "fixing" this problem too.

Like Dussel said,

Maybe by being aware of this problem, we can consciously assign a "black" or "white" color to just this one aspect of the person, without directly and irrevocably assigning that same color to the person as a whole. As more datapoints come in, the person gets more "patches" filled in, allowing us to dynamically count off the total number of white minus the total number of black whenever we wish to assess the person as a whole, so to speak

Or maybe I'm just talking nonsense...