My revised essay, Rejection and Asperger's Syndrome

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I corrected some things, added in a few sentences, took off the picture of Kyle Schwartz and put him in a link instead, and tried to make it seem less offensive. I want your opinion on whether you'd like it seen on the front page.

Rejection and Asperger's Syndrome

If you don't like it, I strongly encourage you to post your feedback including what you didn't like about it.

Great essay, thank you for writing it.

I'm getting some 'No' votes, but you're not telling me why! If you don't tell me, I'm just going to have it posted (if Alex agrees, of course).

Pretty cool essay. It makes some very good points. I especially like the idea that people diagnosed with AS will self-fulfill the symptoms, and people who are rejected automatically gravitate towards AS symptoms due to insecurity, rebellion, etc. I did have a few issues.

Your analysis of formal speech... well, I just don't see what point you're trying to make. Aspies read more, and thus they are more formal? Of course this makes sense, but that doesn't mean they aren't going to stick out as being overly formal and pedantic. Is it a wholly BAD thing to be formal? No. But it's going to stick out. And that is what a symptom list is about - the things that stick out and can reveal what disorder/syndrome/whatever a person has.

Your argument about black/white thinking seems to be that black and white thinking could be the "correct" way to think in an objective world. I understand what you mean, but a lot of aspies, myself included, find that black and white thinking, while perhaps theoretically appealing, can make it difficult to function in practice. For instance, many times I have put a friend on a pedestal only later to decide that this person is a bad person after a relatively small offense. This can make it difficult to form realistic, healthy relationships, because people are very complex and it is very difficult to judge them as "good" or "bad" in most cases. This example of friendship is but one of many.

Finally, the whole thing about unwritten rules. This point isn't incredibly clear to me. It's true that unwritten rules can be taken to bizarre extremes. Is your major complaint that telling aspies to follow the unwritten rules isn't very helpful? If that is your point, it is hardly revolutionary. That's kind of the whole point of having AS. Let's think about this objectively, which is the strong suit of aspies... the fact is, there are unwritten rules. For example - at the risk of seeming to pick on you, which I am definitely not trying to do, if you go to school dressed in a suit and tie, unless you have some serious charisma and confidence and most likely do not take yourself too seriously, you are going to stick out, most likely in a confusing/bad way. People don't like to be confused. I am not easily confused in most cases, and this tendency of people to be so averse to different ways of acting/thinking/whatever has always bothered me, but it's the way it is. If everyone at school is in jeans, and you are in a suit, they are going to be confused. Why is this person wearing a suit? Doesn't this person know that people dress casually at school? Is this person trying to seem important? Now it wouldn't bother me one bit if someone wanted to wear a suit to school. But, most people operate very much in the whole fitting in/social hierarchy frame of mind, and thus any unnecessary attempt to stick out, especially in an unusual or confusing way, is probably going to be met with, at best, annoyed bewilderment and, at worst, disdain. Again, as with the pedantic speech thing... is it inherently bad to dress differently, speak differently, walk differently? No. But, these are real differences, and most people don't like obvious differences.

Anyway, I think the essay makes some really good points, and I like the conclusions, but some of the specific arguments (the ones I addressed above) seem to be more misdirect complaints than anything else.

Thank you for your reponse, Butch. I've addressed your statements below.

Yes.



Overly formal and pedantic for what purpose? Not making the group angry at you?



Not that sticking out is always a bad thing.

In fact, there's a whole subject in philosophy called deontological ethics in which it is proposed that we should act the way we want others to act. If everyone began speaking formally with you, it wouldn't stick out. Not that speaking formally must be a maxim, or rule that one can or cannot will to become universal.



The likelihood of betrayal can theoretically be considered a quantity about which one may make true-or-false claims or base one's decisions.



No, my major complaint is that the idea of an "unwritten rule" is capable of being abused. The fact that telling us to obey them isn't helpful goes along with that.



Maybe it did confuse them a little, but I didn't mean to offend anyone or cause anyone needless suffering.

To a considerable degree, yes, I "stuck out." But was there an unwritten rule that students (students of a free country at that) should not wear formal attire to a public school? There was certainly no law against it--I can wear whatever I want, as long as it isn't against the dress code--but if there were an unwritten rule against it, then I guess you could also make an "unwritten rule" against wearing black jeans, or backpacks that aren't Jansport, or square glasses, or bow ties, or parted hair, or watches with pictures of Mickey Mouse on them. You get the picture. It isn't helpful or even fair.

I'm not saying you'd have to--that would be a slippery slope fallacy--but you can, which throws the whole philosophy of unwritten rules into question.

You still seem to miss the point about unwritten rules. Their content is not materially significant to their relevance to Asperger's Syndrome. The point is that by some cognitive means, people without Asperger's Syndrome have a comprehensive knowledge of information that we are not capable of deriving reliably by the same cognitive means.

Whatever is wrong with wearing a suit in the social context you describe (attending high school classes), everyone 'knew' as a matter of consensus that it was 'wrong' on some level, and further the strength of their reaction probably clustered strongly together. They did not need to discuss the issue (although they may have done). From the first glance they all knew the same thing ('wrong' on some level that is socially significant). This did not occur because of voodoo magic, psychic communication, demon possession or some such other.

The shared knowledge (also known as 'unwritten rules' and/or 'common sense') is disseminated fairly reliably because typically developing/functioning humans have cognitive processes that facilitate the acquisition of the knowledge base concerned. Failure of these cognitive processes is a cognitive failure. This is true regardless how insane or absurd the unwritten rules may be.

Maybe they do. But how do we know? We're not just going to believe everything we're told.



I completely disagree with you that it was wrong to wear a suit in 9th grade. I don't know where you got that from.

Do you have an equally good explanation as to how people all arrive at the same uniform answer without prior discussion? Voodoo magic and/or mass demonic possession do not seem logical answers to me, whereas as ordinary mundane cognitive processes seems a great deal more reasonable.


I am not stating that it was wrong to wear a suit in the 9th grade. The quotation marks do not appear wrapped around the words know and wrong in my earlier comment because I thought they looked pretty. If you did not infer from their use that whatever the opinion being described is, it is not necessarily shared by the describer, then I wonder what you imagined the purpose of my typing them was.

The point is there is clear evidence all over the place that typically functioning people share 'knowledge' that allows them to arrive at the same answer without prior discussion. Without the rules being written, or specifically explicated, drawing on some process or other, they all get to the same conclusion about these rules. Whether you wish to believe the cause is a cognitive one, a magical one, or something else, there are tangible, observable results. Either you can know these things without explicit instruction, or you suffer a deficit relative to those who can.

Nor do quotation marks allow you to use whatever word you want and get away with it.

I'm hurt, pandd. You know, a lot of people liked my suit. And no, wearing a suit isn't wrong in the same sense that murdering babies is wrong.



The "voodoo magic" thing seems a bit of a straw man.

But I want to end this post on a good note, so I'll tell you about a philosophical idea I learned from thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Einstein. The idea is that the force of nature we use to move our bodies is the same force of nature that makes grass grow and planets orbit the sun. The law of this force is the same everywhere in space. Thus, when we act together and draw the same conclusions, we do so in virtue of the omnipresence of the laws of nature.

People possess the ability to please social groups in varying degrees. But "unwritten rules" I don't buy. Whether or not they exist, it's a concept that's open to abuse.

You either wish to communicate or wish to engage in strawman burning. I used quotation marks for a reason. If you wish to concentrate on presentation rather than the information someone is trying to convey, if you'd rather chose an inference and argue about it even when you are directly told the inference was not implied, then you'll have to find someone else to play with. I really cannot be bothered.

That's your responsibility. If you chose to interpret what was not implied in order to construct a sense of bereaved hurt for yourself, that does not really have very much to do with me and does not really require any further input from me. Just let me know, and I'll leave you to it.


A lot of people like my cat. And no strawberry ice-cream is not a motor vehicle in the same sense that a car is a motor vehicle.


Your notion that I have commented negatively on your suit is a strawman.

The point is unwritten rules exist and so do means of concluding what the rules actually are. Those who have a deficit in this area have a deficit in this area regardless how absurd any particular unwritten rule may be.


You do not 'buy' unwritten rules literally in any sense. The only figurative interpretation I know of for 'dont buy' is to not believe, but such an interpretation leaves you suggesting you do not believe X without regard for X's truth value.

It's not even easy to determine what you are arguing. Either unwritten rules objectively exist as a phenomena or they do not. The evidence that they do is pretty convincing. There is no evidence that they do not exist. Whether or not they are open to abuse is a function firstly of whether they exist. If they do not exist, they cannot be abused, if they have been or are abused, they have been or do exist. It almost appears as though you are arguing that they do not exist because whether or not they exist they could be abused if they did exist.

I'm not saying that unwritten rules don't exist. I'm saying that a priori, they don't deserve much respect.

The reason for this is that any social group could just single someone out and say, "He's ugly. He breaks the unwritten rule." Without saying it aloud, of course.

Last edited by MikeH106 on 23 Sep 2008, 5:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

I enjoyed your essay, and I added it to my links page:

http://links.neurelitism.com

The original name for Asperger's in the DSM (the DSM-III) was schizoid disorder of childhood and adolescence. The present name was adopted in the DSM-IV.

I'm glad you liked it, nominalist!

You No-voters, post your feedback!

I liked it.

I liked it and voted as such. Very thought provoking.

Last edited by Biogeek on 24 Sep 2008, 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Your essay made alot of valid points. The section about unwritten rules kind of hit me because that was one of my sister's favorite things to pull on me. She often came up with these so called "unwritten rules" that were basically against me. My sister always wanted to push me around and control every aspect of my life so I often ignored her saying I didn't recognize her rules or said since it's unwritten, I'm not going to worry about it. Of course, that annoyed the hell out of her as did my refusing to obey her to begin with.

Another issue I dealt with was the concept of "doing anything." My sister would tell my parents "he's not doing anything" so they'd intervene and force me to join her in swimming(the most common thing) or whatever other activity she wanted me to have to do. The reality was I'd be creating an adventure with action figures(something I loved to do as a child) and having a great time by myself. I didn't understand why that wasn't considered "doing anything."

One summer I took an interest in building a shortwave radio from a kit, apparently that wasn't "doing anything" either. One time I tried to get my sister to do something I wanted to do and I tried to say she wasn't "doing anything" and I got told "she's reading, don't disturb her while she's reading." I thought "doing anything" was doing something physical, which she wasn't, apparently that's not the case. I never could quite figure out the meaning of "doing anything," other than doing what my sister did, but of course, that makes no sense. More irrational NT behavior I guess.