Does the cold war ever let up?

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Hey techstep what does that phrase mean; I have a little hard time understanding? <keeping your shadow in your front pocket and the hilt visible>

That's precisely the reason why we need a much bigger and better-organized autistic-friendly subculture, complete with lots of autistic-friendly workplaces.

Winning full acceptance for work-capable autistic people in the larger society is something that's not likely to happen until after an autistic-friendly subculture has been built. The autistic-friendly subculture needs to be centered around a community of autistic people, ourselves, but would also include sympathetic NT's, most of whom would be relatives of autistic people.

Also, the reason why "snap judgments" are such a big problem in today's world is that we live in a mass-market-oriented society. The only way to get away from the mass market mentality is to form small, cohesive subcultures.

The guy I'm thinking of (I'm avoiding his name because I don't want to kick this thread off into a political food fight) had a five minute clip from one of his lectures, of thousands by now, that dealt with how harmlessness is actually dangerous rather than being a virtue and how people need to see that you're dangerous in order to keep the peace - otherwise you end up being a pushover, and if you have a big fake smile on your face like you'll accept anything people give you then people will generally wipe themselves with you. I would have posted a link but I looked back through some of my Facebook PM's - that video and channel are gone.

I really think it comes down to not showing naivety in your body language, the things you say, etc.. It's a bit like you need to show in everything you're used to doing that you've met cluster B personality types before and that you'd so much expect them to be practically everywhere that you wouldn't say anything that would give them a direct foothold (or if you want to step that up further - that if you did dangle something vulnerable you'd only be doing it to fish them out).

Thanks for the explanation. Once you explained the cluster-b target/bait I understand now. As you mentioned, like sharks in the water the personality disorder types are looking for prey. For ego, for advantage, for shoring up a fragile psyche, the reasons are endless. Now that I know many signs of cluster-b's I avoid them 100%. I gotta say, this thread has some VERY high-level thought from all posters. This is GREAT.

I'm thinking something along the lines of the LGBT community, which is NOT monolithic but has many subgroups -- and, as of the last time I was active in it at least (I'm bi), was perpetually spawning more subgroups of people who didn't feel fully accepted in the rest of the LGBT community.

Here in NYC at least, many of the gazillions of LGBT subgroups all get together once a year for the annual Pride parade, where the diversity of the community becomes very evident, at least to anyone who has a copy of march order. There are hundreds of different groups that march in the annual LGBT Pride parade, including groups that normally would have nothing to do with each other and don't like each other very much.

The end result is lots of room for lots of different kinds of people.

The autistic community -- and the larger autistic-friendly subculture that needs to be built IMO -- would likely be even less monolithic than the LGBT community. It probably would be less polarized from the larger society than the LGBT community has historically had to be, because being autistic does not intrinsically violate the commandments of any major mainstream religion.


How "the sexes" relate to each other has varied a lot within my lifetime. It's far from purely biologically determined, although biology is a factor, of course. Even in today's world, it varies by subculture. Hopefully an autistic-friendly subculture can find ways to make it better.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 29 Jan 2020, 10:33 am, edited 2 times in total.

The funny thing is - it's stuff I was seeing as far back as 20 but since hardly anyone talked about it I often times was lead to believe that I'd just found a very toxic environment that that this wasn't anything pervasive about the human condition. I ended up talking philosophy with someone on here a fair amount, introduced him to John Gray, he ended up reading Straw Dogs and recommending it, I think Straw Dogs is quite a tidy 160 page summary of the gaps that exist in both the myth of progress and secular humanism. He says a fair amount as well about nature being filled with deception and I've often felt (Monday Blue on Youtube hints at this a lot as well) as if the social 'game' we're playing is a landscape where people won't tell each other the truth, by design it's a bit like the gullible are handed simple myths to live by, and they find out that they can do everything they're told to and yet life still doesn't work out as promised, and it almost seems like this is either a sort of herding being done by people who know quite a bit about what they're doing (dipping a bit into Aaron Clarey territory) and it's like if you want to get out of that game in good shape you have to navigate your way out of all of the gaslighting that the world has been trying to shovel at you for much of your life.

This is often why I think, especially if there's any chance of things like reincarnation (not a vogue topic but I'm carefully agnostic on that), I want to live as long as possible - even if it sucks - in hopes of learning so much that there's no possibility of hitting childhood quite as naive or gullible in my instincts as I did this time.

One of the worst workplace aspects of this, which never stops appalling me because it doesn't just make work much harder than it needs to be but it smashes productivity - is the habit people are in of asking you to do something with 1/3 or of the detail needed to know what they're actually asking for. It turns what should be an hour long task, if that, into several hours of exploration to discover what it is they're asking for.

I'm not sure which is more important at that point - a) productivity or b) dominance. I at least work at a place where if my boss knows this is happening he's fine with me either throwing it back at the client for more detail or billing all of the hours for exploration but I get the sense that if I worked at one of these place the game would be that you have to take partial directions, fill in the rest yourself, and do it within an hour otherwise you're an idiot and you're out the door. That people do this to each other, IMHO, is patently insane.

While I agree that an organized subculture can be a big step toward social acceptance, we have to remember that there are probably at least ten times as many gay as autistic people out there. So, for example, if gay people organize a boycott of a company, it will have a noticeable impact--autistic people, not so much. We just don't have the numbers that some other groups have.

There are indeed more LGBT people than autistic people. However, probably not "at least ten times as many." Autistic people are now estimated to be about 2% of the population. Surveys show LBGT people to be less than 5% of the population, which is probably an underestimate due to denials by closeted LGBT people, but I see no reason to believe that LGBT people are more than about 10% of the population. What is your estimate of the size of the LBGT population, and on what basis?


Luckily, organizing boycotts isn't the most important thing we need to do. The most important thing we need is for relatively well-to-do NT parents, siblings, and other relatives of autistic people to establish businesses that can employ both their autistic family members and other, less well-to-do autistic people, and to establish these businesses in consultation with organized groups of autistic people in the relevant professions/occupations, with the aim of making the businesses as productive as possible while accommodating their autistic workers.


True, but one compensating advantage we have, relative to the LGBT community, is that we are not intrinsically rejected by any mainstream religion. Thus most of us at least potentially (though not currently) have the support of our NT relatives, whereas many LGBT people are now and always will be estranged from their families of origin.

Yep I'm sure there are plenty of places like that.

On the other hand, other places do expect programmers/engineers/etc. to spend a lot of time interacting with the client to nail down exactly what the client wants -- which may be a moving target. This is part of the "Agile" programming methodology. Unfortunately, one consequence is that a lot of employers now require their programmers to have "excellent interpersonal skills," which disadvantages autistic programmers.

I avoid software development itself because of the inordinate demands placed on my ability to follow steep learning curves.

I started on a new engineering & product development team today. I'm happy to have work but the information overload is staggering. I have a lot of thinking to do before I decide how to address my societal concerns & how to bring more civility about among friends.

So I consider myself lucky there, however the roughage in the equation - the clients aren't required to have...well... necessarily any interpersonal skills.

Where I work we're lucky to have a big enough client to actually have a staff who knows how to structure what they need in such a way where 2/3 of the project time isn't redoing our work because they can't or don't communicate.

This is part of why I also can't look at entrepeneurs or business owners as part of the problem much of the time, ie. they're trying to make money and make hours spent on projects profitable all the while realizing that the real functioning of most of the people they'll have to do business and coordinate with function at a 3rd to 5th grade level. One of the things my boss and I and the friend who got me in agreed on recently - a) we probably should only do very small projects, like programs that replace a reasonably small spreadsheet, for customers like construction firms where they have no insight into what goes into making software and where any meaningful question would get a 'what are you doing to me?' stare. Otherwise for larger projects we really need them to do their homework and frame what they want or need ahead of time, otherwise anything goes, any change goes, and we lose our shirts on projects that really should have been much easier.

Also scope creep is a heck of a thing. I remember this from my auditing days in reverse, ie. we were recovery auditors for accounts payable departments and they'd sign a contract for lower rates including pricing review, preventing escheatment, sales and use tax review, etc., they'd sign the contract at that lower rate, then we'd come in and they'd be like 'Oh yeah - we're sorry, so-and-so has that covered, this other person said no to the review...' etc. etc., and anytime we found an error over $50,000 honesty went out the window. It's a bit like that in reverse with scope creep where whatever angles they can expand the project for free they will.

Aka getting you to do the work of 3 people... Every place I've worked the functional scopes inevitably get larger by middle management trying to necessitate their existence. They know human bias, cut corners, and voila! the department is downsized -and consequently stressed out from being forced into becoming human machines.

Kind of a horrifying nugget I just thought of - if your family can't look after you in this culture you're treated like an orphan even if you're not one. In a neoliberal economy and culture, with the family fragmenting, more and more people every day are free now to be exploited and treated however anyone wants to treat them.

^Factual statement.