@Adam_Cadmon1 so it’s NOT just my observations! I wonder what it is about this venue in particular that makes people feel so comfortable doing that…
@pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 It's possible it's the people and not the venue, I suppose. Some of it might just be cultural.
I'm probably guilty of this pretty often. I know that it's a thing for neurodivergent folks like myself to make less common connections between things. In our mutual discussions, it's very normal to take an abrupt turn in the conversation, and no one blinks.
I am only just now starting to realize that that bothers some people, rather than being a pleasant surprise. While I do care and want to do right by people who have different preferences, it can be difficult to know which side of that fence people sit in advance. It's also difficult to understand why it's upsetting, esp. when someone works differently from yourself. And then there's the difficulty in knowing what counts as the same topic vs a subject change, as people will often disagree about where that line falls.
Do you have suggestions on how to track these things, for someone who is trying to do better?
@pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 In retrospect, I probably should have read the rest of the conversation before I replied, and not just the couple of posts in the direct chain leading up to the one I replied to. That's probably a start.
@hosford42 @pippa @Adam_Cadmon1@mastodon.online
A thought in case it’s helpful:
In my experience, autistic folks (less so other types of ND) wildly overestimate the extent to which NT people magically understand each other’s social behaviors, and the extent to which they don’t make the same mistakes. More often (again, in my observation), what helps most is not foreknowledge but a quick recovery: leaving room for and observing reaction, willingness to adjust course or drop a topic without perseverating. And…
@inthehands @hosford42 @pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 i'll double down on that and suggest that neurotypicals often wildly misunderstand each other but *think* they understand and both leave the conversation with different views of what they're agreeing on.
this works fine when they're both operating in a sea of shared context that holds them up but falls apart quickly when deep into the world of abstractions and theory.
@voxpopsicle
This is so true about wrongly assuming mutual understanding! And then sometimes we run off and get halfway through a software project based on that misunderstanding, only to find out we built the wrong thing.