"You are how you seem"

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I may have posted on something similar before, but even if I did, it's worth repeating.

Recently my mom was watching a cooking competition where kids were baking cakes. This one boy wanted to make an amusement park-themed cake (a choice he picked from some options), because he was thinking of making an elaborate one with a roller coaster going up and down between layers of cake. In fact, as soon as he picked the amusement park theme, I suggested to my mom that making a roller coaster on hills of marzipan or something would be my first thought in that situation. It turned out, though, that his baking skills were not nearly up to the task, so his cake looked kind of sorry when he was done, and he very clearly ended up in last place in the competition.

I mentioned to my mom afterward that this is very much the problem I face with art, and self-expression in general. I have great, beautiful ideas, but don't have the skills to actually turn them into reality. She mentioned that this is a problem, because people don't see what you are imagining, only what you can do. And it's true. If a person "writes" a great song in her mind, but then sings it horribly, people will think the song really sounds like the bad rendition--they probably won't "fill in the gaps" mentally to "hear" how it actually should have sounded.

I find that this is one of the big differences between me and most NTs, and it has been there since I was very young. I remember I used to invent things and try to build them with Lego, only to find that I didn't have the right kind of pieces, and then get upset. It seems most NTs think more "outward in", in other words they compensate from the beginning for the way something will come across, or be manifested in the real world, rather than just assuming it will be perceived the way it is intended. They realize, without being told, that to other people they ARE (in the sense of "they might as well be") how they come across. I was curious if others have noticed this too.

Huh, never really thought about it that way. It makes sense. The way I approach is I just know people aren't quite as they seem, so I avoid making any unneeded judgements.

I also relate with the art thing so much.

Yes, I get what you are saying.

It has always been a struggle for me to understand that people cannot see what is going on in my mind.

We are victims of our biology and psychology and driven by such instincts.

We do tend to judge a book by it's cove and such.

A related concept is the Fundamental Attribution Error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundament ... tion_error

This essentially means we judge someone's one-time behavior as what they must be like all the time, e.g. a person who responds annoyed/angry to you must be an a55høle rather than they've had a very bad day and don't need anyone to bother them.

Or it also means we hypocritcally assume something that applies to us doesn't apply to others, e.g. If I make a mistake in sports, I've just made a mistake. If someone else does, clearly they are bad.

If I eat something very unhealthy, it's not bad because I eat healthy 99% of the time. If someone else does, clearly they probably eat like that all the time/don't care about their health as much as I do.

I keep getting this dumb, judgementel attitude all the time and I want to just overcome it. I know most of the time I'm wrong and admit it.

Even NTs have to be admonished by Dr. Phil that "perception is reality" (ie that what folks think is the social reality even if it isnt the truth).

But yes- your's is an interesting observation: that perhaps autistics think inside out, while NTs think outside in.

Yes I think I get where you're coming from. It annoys me when people glibly assume that "if it looks bad, it is bad." People seem to jump to conclusions, as if they're averse to any depth, or don't have the time to look carefully or to ponder what might really be going on beyond what's superficially apparent. For them, it's as if presentation is everything.

I should add that I'm sometimes the same way with music. I hear early demo recordings of songs and I wonder how anybody knew they were worth persevering with, yet they did, and the final polished result shows that they were right to stay with the original idea. Yet I've risen above that from time to time. I was working with a singer who wasn't pitching his notes very accurately. My first thought was that he must be a bad singer, but my next thought was to wonder whether he simply couldn't hear himself, and sure enough, the PA system wasn't providing enough foldback. Putting that right removed the problem. I also worked with a very loud drummer who didn't seem able to keep time with the rest of the band. It turned out that he couldn't hear us because our amps were too quiet, or were pointed the wrong way.

I once attended a sociology lesson in which we were shown how easily the human mind, once it has found one plausible explanation for a thing, ceases to look for further explanations. So maybe that's why these travesties of justice happen.

People often don't give each other enough of a chance to shine, and I think it's often true for ASDers that if only folks would examine the conditions we're expected to work under, they'd see how much better we can perform once the right environmental tweaks have been found. As for solutions, analysing the situation ourselves and bringing those results to the attention of those who have misjudged us, where possible, would seem a good idea.

PS Outrider's remarks are very much in harmony with my own view of things.

I don't think this is an autism problem.
Many people have this problem.
People value execution more than ideas, doing or making something good rather than thinking something good.
It makes sense to me that making something good that one thought of making would be better than only thinking it.

Well, this is eerily synchronous...I picked up a book the other day, Controlling People by Patricia Evans, and it talks a lot about this "outside-in" kind of thinking. Here's a quote...

^
The penultimate paragraph of that sounds eerily like me when I was a little younger. Mostly in the form of opposition.