Hi , Do autistic people think they are always right?
Yes.
And: No.
Sometimes.
Maybe.
…on second thoughts…
I don’t know.
I’m uncertain about this.
There is an area of Catholic Social Teaching that insists on absolute humility and obedience, to accept without question, protest nor any further comment that one is always wrong in every situation and circumstance if someone in a position of Athority deems it so and one must be and remain silent after this
Hi,
I've come to a conclusion about this recently.
We notice and process tiny details and our subconscious minds store a huge library of information that we as autists can recall when needed.
Also, I over-think everything and pretty much instantly can foresee multiple scenarios that could result from any given action. At least one of those will be the outcome!
A lot of it has to do with our society weaponising grief and bereavement.
This obsession with Trauma Therapy created an awful lot of psychobabble, and junk philosophy, created by American Universities. Prime example being someone in your family with cancer. Suddenly everyone else, in the family, is held prisoner.
Yes... and no.
Whilst I believe many do, there have been numerous instances in my life when I've been convinced I am right about something, only to discover that I am way off the mark and completely wrong.
I try to be open to the idea that I might not always be right about things, and also try to be careful with how I phrase things when expressing my beliefs. For example, quite often I'll start out by saying, "I think...". Hopefully, this conveys that I am merely stating what I think based on the facts/evidence available to me at the time, and am therefore not assuming I am right.
One thing I do dislike is when I am proven right about something I perceive to be negative, especially if the 'thing' is something that has a detrimental effect on my health and well-being. That is when I often desperately wish I could have been proven wrong.
Also I’ve come to the conclusion that autistic people argue differently than non-autistic people. A lot of us seem to be bottom up thinkers. We start with small details and move upwards towards the big picture step-by-step. Where is a lot of non-autistic people tend to start with the big picture & general trends and themes and try to distract them into smaller parts piece by piece.
so suppose there is an autistic person who thinks the answer is A and a non-autistic person thinks the answer is B. Well the autistic person has probably reached the conclusion A by building up from lots of small details and he won’t be convinced to change his opinion on A unless someone goes into the small details with him and argues them out one by one. And if someone does argue those small details with him and managers to change his opinion on one or two of those small details he won’t suddenly switch his position to B. Instead he’ll rerun his previous reasoning and probably come up with some new variation of A, A* for example. because after all you’ve only persuaded him on one or two small details.
and from the non-autistic persons point of view that’s very frustrating because it looks like changing the goal posts in the argument. But from the autistic persons point of view it’s really helpful because you’ve helped them improve their understanding of the world you’ve helped them find a more precise and nuanced understanding of how the details fit together.
Sherlock Holmes talks about how logician could infer the existence of oceans from a drop of water. Douglas Adams talks about deep thought starting with ‘I think therefore I am’ and moving up to the existence of income tax and rice pudding from first principles. I think autistic people often do you prefer that mode of thinking.
where as the Neurotypical person sees a lot of B type things and some unknown answer to a problem that is nestled amongst all those B type things and thinks ‘oh the solution must be a B type thing.’
I think that’s very much one of the main distinctions between autistic and non-autistic people. an autistic person tends to focus on the discrepancies between patterns. Neurotypical people tend to see the commonalities in patterns. given a lot of B type things the first thing The Neurotypical person notices is ‘isn’t there a lot of B.’ Whereas the autistic persons eye is immediately drawn to the handful of A’s scattered among the predominant B.
given 100 repetitions of the same experiment that are absolutely Rigorous in execution and control if one experiment gives an anomalous result the autistic person’s first response is to say what happened there whereas the non-autistic person is overjoyed that they have a 99% success rate improving their hypothesis.
I would argue this makes autistic people really good at picking out those special cases where things buck the trend. Of course it also means it can take them quite a long time to come to conclusions that to other people might seem like really obvious common sense because they do have to work through all the details before they can be sure of the answer.
I think the tendency to research things often creates a greater likelihood that an autistic person would be correct about a stated fact as long as the sources of their information are unbiased and widely corroborated.
If you ask me about my personal experience or something that falls under my special interest then chances are the information you will get out of me will be correct with very small margin for error.
But if you ask me about say... Star Wars I'm not likely to be able to give you any more than a guess about it because it doesn't interest me enough to research it in depth and idaf if I am correct or not about anything to do with Star Wars.
What do you mean think? :p
seriously though I don’t think it’s that we’re oblivious to the possibility that we are fallible. We are very aware that we are fallible. We just don’t find it particularly implausible that we could be right and everybody else could be wrong. If that sounds arrogant then consider that for me personally I would always be able to back up my opinions with arguments and facts.
other people often can’t they just say it’s their gut feeling or ‘if you had kids you would understand’ or ‘ when you are older you might think differently.’ I don’t know if every autistic person feels this way but I have a natural distrust of the opinions of others when they can’t back them up with solid deductive and inductive reasoning based upon good data. If you can’t point to something to justify your opinions and then point to something to justify that and point something to justify that until you get down to something that’s so basic that it couldn’t possibly be denied or something that you can factually demonstrate as an autistic person I am likely to discount your opinion. If your opinion doesn’t line up with my own internal reasoning that’s led me to form my own views.
The opinions of hundreds or thousands of people who contradict my opinion don’t amount to a lot of weight in my view unless they can back it up with something.
I find it very frustrating when people make decisions or believe things purely based on feelings, emotions or groups they think they identify with.
I only value facts and can be persuaded when people present arguments based on facts.
It seems most people value emotions more.
Autistic people do think.....more than most.
Accordingly, it is reasonable to hypothesize that autistic people are generally right......more than most.
Often, our rightness is deemed wrongness simply because we express and explain ourselves in an unusual way.
Just my opinion - obs.
We think in a particular way and don't like change, so I think sometimes we have to be right because we can't cope with the consequence of being wrong. Being wrong changes our world view and that's incredibly distressing. But I don't think it's exclusive to NDs. I suspect it's more of a personality thing but can't prove it
