Quest_techie wrote:
okay, I DO have some viable insight into this, I just don't know if I can get it out of my head into words
language is a common and external reference point, it is a means of translating internal reference points into external reference points and ganing understanding of the world outside our own minds
so are stereotypes, though they aren't as good
stereotypes are VERY primative reference points, think of them as "river that way" wheras language would be "oh, yeah, that freeway mile marker on I-80 that is 16 miles to colfax, 32 to auburn and 64 to sac" <my favorite roadsign yet>
stereotypes are how we explain things to ourselves that we don't understand, we take a bear minimum amount of information, and compile it into something that ALMOST seems to make sense, or seems to make sense or that we delude ourselves that it makes sense, in some ways as well as being a broken communication pratice it is also a shoot first ask questions later means of defending oneself
if you form a stereotype that a certain type of person is bad to work with because they don't work hard and thus they endanger your standing in the pack, tribe, company, what have you you are going to avoid working with others of that type as a means of trying to protect your standing
this is a bad explanation, I really wish I were better at this whole communication thing, I hope it's enough to allow someone else to put together an explanation that is actually understandable
I understood what you were saying, and it makes sense to me and I think it's pretty accurate!
Stereotypes can give us a basis to work on, and can be useful if we have
absolutely nothing else to work with. Since they are often based on very little information, stereotypes
need to be refined in order for it to be of actual real use. Events that transpire that break the stereotypes should cause the person involved to rethink the situation, to re-evaluate the stereotype and correct it if necessary. This is logical, scientific thinking, and it make sense. However, I've come across my own personal AS situations, as well as read many posts here, where the Aspie does not actually re-evaluate his or her own line of thinking; he or she instead makes the conclusion that "it's not my belief that needs re-evaluating, the situation was simply an outlier and the fact that this situation is different is intrinsic to something unique about this situation, and not something wrong with my thinking." Sometimes the situation really is a one-off, but other times it's not, and that makes the evaluations tricky. People aren't perfect. They won't have the correct idea that explains everything on the first go. Continue to refine your thinking and you'll be closer to understanding reality. Everybody, AS and non-AS, will not learn anything if he or she thinks there is nothing to learn. One will have to admit that there is something he or she does not know. Otherwise that person learns nothing, and yet continues to run into problems and wonders why these problems never get solved.
We all know those people who complain about the same relationship or social problems over and over again, I'm not going to name names.
Some people commented that the issue about male stereotyping of women is not unique to Aspies; non-Aspies do it also. That is true. But that simple fact does not mean (even on a logical level) that AS does not have its own contribution to the stereotyping/generalizing issue, and does not mean that AS cannot exacerbate problems and issues also experienced by non-Aspies. I had a dissertation committee meeting recently where I showed my troubleshooting results: the control condition and the experimental condition both had low results. I concluded that there must be something common in both conditions that contributed to the low results. However, one of the professors on my committee commented that even if the control is also low, does not mean that there isn't something unique to the test condition that would make that result too. It would be something whose effect is masked or hidden by the other common element that is affecting both test and control conditions. It is a similar issue here too, AS can definitely play a role in all the stereotyping and generalizing we see here. And what makes me suspect that AS has such a role? To give suitable evidence to support (not prove, though, proof would require an Aspie who wasn't also human), it'd have to be an example outside of the male/female stereotyping, and that's easy: look at all the stereotyping that goes on here against non-Aspies (NTs). We can talk about stereotypes and generalities all we want on WP, but in the end,
what are we going to do to get ourselves out of this rut? We can all point the finger at everybody else and tell them that it's their problem, not our own, but if that does not solve our problems, what do we need to do? Talking about these issues with sympathetic people is great and makes us not feel alone, but in the long run does not do anything to fix the problems. It allows us to survive and cope with a problem, but it won't get rid of the problem.
I don't want people to think that I believe that everything that the Aspie experiences or does is wrong or is the fault of the Aspie. That's not the case at all. But I think that it isn't healthy, nor right, to think of having AS as this one giant great monolithic thing that is awesome and wholesome. AS is a mixed bag, just like everything else is. AS has some fantastic features (the ability to focus on details in such a way that we don't take the little things in life for granted, almost like a child's perception of things), and some incredible failings (the child's perception makes it more difficult for us to understand more complicated situations, especially when the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts"). One can see that I used the same attribute, childlike perception, as a positive and a negative. Whether it ends up as good or bad depends on the situation. A lot of things in life are mixed bags. Two sides of a coin. We extol the virtues of the good side of AS, but have such a difficult time dealing with the bad side. Things are so much more complicated than anybody, AS and non-AS alike, would like to admit. Sexual/romantic frustrations are significant in themselves, but at the same time one of a whole set of things that Aspies
as Aspies and as human beings encounter.
(Hailing originally from the San Francisco area who used to go up to Truckee/Tahoe for skiing, I'm well familiar with the I-80 sign you're talking about... that sign always intrigued me too, the fact that the numbers were multiples of 16, and were doubles).
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Won't you help a poor little puppy?
23 Jan 2007, 5:34 pm
