I can’t imagine dedicating this much time analyzing whether or not I can acknowledge when I’m wrong. It’s almost like this entire piece is an elaborate rationalization the author is making rather than admitting they are wrong.
> A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.
> In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question. Is our checkout page not performing well?
> However, the manager interpreted my words as outright rejecting their idea.
If this is what actually happened, the manager is terrible and unprofessional. I feel I run into situations like this as well, where I ask a simple question and because the person asking is treating me like an NPC in a game they're playing but not telling me, I don't get the question answered and furthermore I get something attributed to me (e.g. refusal, uncooperativeness, etc.) that isn't true at all.
I wish there was some way to easily communicate universally that "I mean the literal meaning of these words, nothing more, nothing less."
Imagine you hear throughout your life that you can't admit you're wrong or that your _kind of person_ can't admit they're wrong. Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?
And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
> If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
Ah, but here's the thing: if your interlocutor has some motive other than truth-seeking then they will demand you admit error regardless of whether you are actually in error. This means to them you can fail to admit error even when no error occurred.
It's circumstances like this that the author is analyzing by taking "I was right" as a hypothesis - the article doesn't claim this is always the case but wants to make some particular conclusions about cases where no error was made.
Unless the author is correct 100% of the time, it should be easy to point to examples where the author admits they’re wrong, which would trivially negate the hypothesis that autistic people can’t admit they’re wrong. Instead of providing examples, the author choose to write many hundreds of words that basically boil down to “I’m not wrong, everyone else is wrong.” That doesn’t sound like healthy introspection to me. It sounds like rationalizing.
> Wouldn't it be a sign of healthy introspection to dedicate time to analyze whether that's correct?
I wonder if Author is in fact autistic. It seems (not sure if I've got this right) that author wasn't diagnosed until his forties. I'd have expected a diagnosis of autism to occur pre-teen.
Mental health diagnoses pretty much only happen when the patient's life is impacted enough to convince the people involved in their life that there's a problem and figuring it out is necessary. If you get good enough grades, have a non-zero amount of friends, have a family and career that accommodates your random foibles, and generally manage your life well, then you can be as textbook mentally ill as you want without ever getting mental health professionals involved in your life.
As a relatively famous example, take Bill Gross, aka the "Bond King". He only realized he had Asperger's in his seventies when it was randomly the topic of a psychiatrist he was having dinner with. And why would he seek out some kind of diagnosis? He's happily married and running fantastically successful bond funds.
I questioned the "autism" thing because author seems to be able to express himself clearly, seems to have empathy, and seems to care. I only mentioned the (assumed) late diagnosis because it seems to lend weight to my question.
It's been suggested to me that I might have Asperger's (I believe the suggestion was hostile; it was my ex-wife, who is a trained psychotherapist). If I have Asperger's, it's only in the sense that everyone has a little bit of Asperger's. But I worried about it for several years. Vague psychological diagnoses are harmful.
Another good finance example is Michael Burry. He completed medical school and largely completed specialist neurology and pathology training without realizing he was autistic. It wasn't until years later, after his son was diagnosed with autism, when he got his diagnosis.
I was wondering the same thing, the author exhibits many traits that I didn't consider someone who is traditionally diagnosed as autistic as capable of having.
I feel like the author might lie somewhere on the spectrum but I was pretty sure being actually autistic was a separate and vastly more serious diagnosis.
Hmm, that sort of assumes that there's essentially no undiagnosed autism. After some very quick googling, it seems like undiagnosed autism is very common, and it seems more common the farther back in time you go. It doesn't surprise me one bit that someone with a milder form of autism born in the 70s/80s might not get diagnosed.
How could one tell how common undiagnosed autism is? All you can do, surely, is divide the number of autism diagnoses by the number of - autism diagnoses.
OK, so you can presume that an autism diagnosis represents some undiagnosed history of autism. But that's presumption. Or I suppose you can make other presumptions - like, this guy's diagnosed autistic, and he functions well; so many other people who function well are probably also autistic. But that's also presumption.
The DSM diagnostic criteria for autism look pretty shaky to me. I'm not saying I don't think autism exists; I think it does exist. But if you want to chuck around statistics about autism, then you have to stick to some strict definition. "Undiagnosed autism" isn't strict, on any criteria. The DSM doesn't define undiagnosed anything.
[Edit] I'm not at all surprised that some people are diagnosed in their middle age; 40 years ago, autism was a pretty exotic diagnosis, few doctors knew much about it or were experienced with it.
When you notice your self-perception is out of alignment with how other people perceive you, especially on an axis you value (e.g., intellectual humility in the author's case), I think that's a great occasion to spend some time analyzing how much truth there is to each perception.
If you discover your self-perception is wrong, the next step might be thinking about how you can change your behavior and clarify your own judgement. If you determine that others misperceive you, the next step might be thinking about how to change that.
The author didn't get far into a next step, but the first step is critical and valuable as far as it goes, IMO.
