Interview With Simon Baron Cohen - Need Your Help

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Its a sense of gender streotyping. Of course doing gender studies is huge because its a topic which people are interested in. He obviously came in with the bias and was therefore looking for ways to support his bias. With gender there is always a lot of debate. I think the factors which he was looking for X'ed out the different types of empathy out there. Perhaps autistics both have systemizing and empathetic parts to there brain but the empathy shows itself in abnormal ways. I suspect he might've been going off of some autistic streotypes as well.

I've not found this at all true in my experiences. Maybe your experiences are different, but mine definitely don't agree with this.

I am incredibly weak at self-awareness. I'm open about this fact. Others have made it clear that they knew this before I'd realized this (how weak I am I hadn't realized until after my diagnosis).

Yet people's views of me, and how they've talked to me had no level of talking to me like I'm an idiot. They've talked to me like I'm good at puzzles. They've talked to me like I'm good at math.

The fact that I have poor self-awareness doesn't change that I'm one of few people they've ever seen who can tutor in math by truly enjoying math, rather than focusing on making people memorize useless facts.

offtopic:

How does poor self-awareness manifest? People without much self-awareness usually can't talk about it, because then they would have self-awareness. Please talk about it.

If I have no empathy why are you answering me so politely? I'm just writing this down, it's not a video.
Feel free to answer me like I'm a computer voice message system.

Frances

Or you could just say "Dude, I have no empathy so it's ok if I'm rude with you. I gotta ask. WTF is wrong with you? I mean really. Look at all this crap you wrote..." Then pick him apart piece by piece and as he starts getting more upset remind him that acting that way doesn't help because you have no empathy.

Also, how much does he make? Does he have a pony for his kids? What if they made unicorns, would he get one for them? Because unicorns fart glitter and that would be cool. How does he feel about that aspect of unicorns?

Then get right back totally on subject like you never left and deny any asking of unicorn or pony related questions.

Frances

I regularly can't identify my own emotions.
I regularly can't tell if I'm hungry, thirsty, tired, etc, until I'm getting a headache.
I can't identify very well where my body is physically.
I've been unaware of difficulties I have until others point them out.

There's probably more too, but I've been sleeping all day, sick, and can't think very well right now.

As for why I can talk about it - well others point it out, and especially when they point out examples I can figure out that what they're saying makes sense.

Hm, fascinating.

YES.

Someone who has very little ability at recognizing their own feelings, traits, and behaviors has poor self-awareness. This is a problem with a lot of neuro-typicals so don't fret. However, it is very significant to someone who appears to begin early development with minimal or a different orientation toward human contact. I can argue that a give and take between self and others during early development is imperative or is at-least a great advantage in the development of self-awareness.

Examples: A person who constantly gets taking advantage of with regards to the same situations. A person who unaware reacts inappropriately in a particular social situation. A person who has talent in different areas but does not recognize those talents in themselves. Etc, Etc..........

Life experience is capable of teaching you a lot and one of those things might be self awareness. How ? You will keep banging your head against the proverbial wall until you do some self reflecting or a person(s) will comment on it, often enough.

Once again, i want to re-iterate, lack of self awareness is common and prevalent amongst neuro-typicals, like quite a few things, its a spectrum. Some people have very good self awareness, others have very (different) or poor self-awareness. However, just about anything, which involves the use of the social mind based on neuro-typical values, traditions, or mores, is probably going to have a greater effect on the Autistic.

Whenever you read information regarding the Autistic's abilities or disabilities always think in terms of SPECTRUM or DIFFERENCES. The spectrum or differences may possibly be wide or narrow/long or short as compared to neuro-typicals. And, you know what ? IT may or may not include you and that's O.K.

TheSunAlsoRises

I hadn't heard of autistics lacking self-awareness before, except by SBC's weird definition of it.

Well, you have to take into account his major research interests, one being ToM.

TheSunAlsoRises

Ok, I do lack quite a bit of self-awareness, by this defination at least.

This is the way, it's done. You're difficulties in certain areas does not prevent your strengths from shining bright in other areas.

TheSunAlsoRises

TM, you could challenge him with quotes from other autism researchers. Jon Brock said*, "To me, systemizing is a hand-wavy description of 'male thinking' masquerading as a cognitive theory. So devising a test for it is near impossible." Then ask anything related.

* http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... 9053288939

I thought of another humorous question to ask which would be kind of smart alecy mocking him and his views of how we are all this one way.

Ask him if he likes Judge Wopner.

After several questions of this style, he may suspect that you are mocking him. You can answer "No, I don't understand how to, don't you know that?"

Frances

NOT impossible, near impossible. I thrive off of impossible odds, near impossible odds puts the odds in my favor.

TheSunAlsoRises

It's impossible because 'systemising' is yet more SBC junk theorising.