Fireblossom wrote:
QFT wrote:
This being said, it is still obvious how she reads things from the script, and how she is not able to answer the questions during the interview. Like one example was they asked her, before her speech, what was her message. She clearly looked confused, looked at the script, didn't now what to say, and then said "the message is we are watching you" just to get herself out of situation. And on the interviews when she was asked "what do you want us to do about the climate" she never really answered that question: she just repeated the same old platitudes.
A script can still be self written, in other words, the person's own words. When I go give lectures at hobby events, I make and practice the whole lecture a lot beforehand, so I don't need to read it from anywhere. I also try to prepare for questions, but sometimes, I get a question that was completely unexpected or one that is asked in such a way that I don't know how to put the answer in to words even if I think I have one. I think Thunberg might be in a similiar situation: her "scripts" are speeches she herself has prepared beforehand, but when she gets a question that she hadn't prepared for, she doesn't know what to say because she hasn't had the time to think about it. Like when asked what her message was, she might not have thought of a short summary for her speech or anything of the like that could be counted as the core of the message. Or she could have misunderstood the question, like maybe she thought what the message of some particular thing she said was? As for repeating the same old platitudes, well, if those
are the only things she can think of that she wants to be done about it, then it's a proper answer, isn't it? Repeating the same old mantras only becomes meaningless once the problems those mantras are about have been handled one way or the other. Assuming those mantras are about the subject at hand, of course.
In my case I don't prepare the scripts. I remember my mom suggested that when I teach I should recite my lectures before hand, and I always told her I won't do it cause I am not a robot. I did, however, recite some of the talks on the conference. But the purpose was solely to make sure I fit in the time. And it never actually worked: because during the actual conference I ended up talking either slower or quicker than what I recited, which again goes back to the fact that I didn't recite actual words, only practiced the pace. I finally realized that what works a lot better for me is to simply have "too much" material that I am "going" to talk about, and then judge by the clock what to say and what to skip. Nobody will know I skipped a bunch of stuff since they aren't mind readers. I guess when it comes to the conference talks, then I myself would be unhappy skipping things because I feel like some of my ideas are super important (even if others don't). But when it comes to teaching I am a lot happier doing it because a course consists of several lectuers, so whatever I didn't do today I can always do next time. The problem that I encountered though, is staying with the syllabus. Since syllabus and homework was written by class coordinator, when I lagged behind the homework schedule last semester it was a problem. But this semester I am writing homeworks myself so that makes it much better: I can simply go at my own pace and write homeworks based on what I cover.
Its interesting that while I am more autistic than you when it comes to social skills, you seem more autistic than me when it comes to being scripted. Could it be that the two are related. As in, trying to be scripted is a way of compensating for social skills problems. And precisely "because" you can't just answer things on the spot the way I do, you are "also" less likely to make social faux passes? Or in other words, you are masking better than me, and masking comes with being scripted? However, Greta won't be a good example of masking since in her case her weirdness is quite obvious.
Despite all those differences, I do however see a lot of similarities between myself and Greta Thunberg. Even though I don't write script, what I say sounds scripted simply because I am stuck on a certain train of thought that I had for many years. And I do sound as a single-topic person. For example, in physics conferences it might sound like "I don't care about anything besides Grassmann numbers". On diabetes forum I sound like "I don't care about anything besides my glucose" and here on WrongPlanet I sound like "I don't care about anything other than people approaching me". Obviously, each one of those assertions is not true since it is being contradicted by the other two assertions. But that is how I come across. So watching Greta Thunberg videos was actually helpful because it helps explaining why others react to me the way they do. If all I care is Grassmann numbers, then of course they assume I don't want friends or a girlfriend. Well, except that its not true that thats all I care about, I just come across that way. So maybe, after Greta is done talking about environment, and I am done talking about Grassmann numbers, we both go home to complain about our loneliness, yet nobody ever thinks either of us even have that concept.
Fireblossom wrote:
Also, the reason one doesn't hear her talk about other things is likely because she's the face of an environment movement. If she talks about other stuff, it's not relevant to the topic, so it doesn't hit the news. She might also be keeping her social media and other things focused on the cause on purpose as a tactical move to get as much attention on it as possible and have more private accounts that she uses with friends and family to talk about other stuff.
I don't think that coming across as a face of single issue would help the credibility though. At least my reaction tends to be the opposite. I have some other examples of single-issue people.
One example is a website
www.therefinersfire.org whose sole focus is how Christians should observe Torah and Jews should believe in Jesus. I actually agree with this, since I am Messianic myself. But since that seems to be the ONLY thing that website talks about, AND it repeats the same sentences in the same words (for example, some of her favorite phrases are "have heaven and earth passed away yet" and "forever didn't end on Tuesday"), that website began to feel robotic, as if its web master does not have any original thoughts. The good thing is that the web master wrote autobiography and even wrote a book. That helped. But still I wish she wasn't so single-issue-repetitious.
The other example is David Duke. He "used to" hate all minorities, blacks, Jews, gays, etc. But within the past few years he became single-focused on Jews. I am Jewish myself (although I believe in Jesus) but my reaction to his narrow Jew-focus is not anger. Instead, it is just boredom. I feel like every time I open one of his videos I can predict exactly what he would say, since I know he has to bring up Jews and there are only so many ways of doing so. I miss the good old days when he talked about blacks. By the way, two years ago he stopped posting videos at all. I am kinda curious what happened to him.
And then in physics, too, same thing. I noticed that some physics communities are stuck with certain train of thought that I know exactly what they would say. For example, the community that works on causal set theory, also has very specific view on quantum mechanics. Logically, I don't have to couple these two views to each other, yet thats what they do. I guess thats because they have a tradition of doing it, so they just blindly follow that tradition. By contrast, I like to couple causal set to a *different* interpretation of quantum mechanics, yet nobody pays attention to me.
With other math and physics communities, same thing. Each time I go into a specific community, everyone repeats whatever they have to traditionally repeat. Nobody thinks outside of that little box. That is why I don't fit into any of them, I like to come up with my own creative ideas.
And by the way, socially I noticed the same thing. Social groups "feel" a certain way. And when it feels like a social group "feels" in some way that is specific to that group, I want to get away so I could get a breath of fresh air. Could "this" be the rout of my social problems: that I don't like to repeat and be a robot?
Then could it be that being repetitious or copying stuff is something that both NT-s and aspies are guilty of, they are just do it differently. And so NT-s don't even notice they are doing it themselves since they are too used to it so they allege thats what aspies do when actually they do that too?
I do know that Greta is an aspie though. So it would be nice to put myself and Greta on one side, as examples of aspies, and those other people on the other side as examples of NT-s and see how they compare.
13 Sep 2022, 8:53 am
