As an autistic person, my problem with authority figures throughout my life has always been that authority figures were generally incompetent for the role they were fulfilling and they behaved in arbitrary and capricious way. Ironically, my best relationships in my childhood were always with adults who were competent authorities in their particular field, and I had zero issues whatsoever following their instruction, but I was labeled as "oppositional defiant" and "having a problem with authority" because most of the authorities in the school system and elsewhere were low IQ petty tyrants.
At no point have I ever felt that authority or hierarchy or rules are meaningless, in fact I revel in the clarity of well-written and reasoned rule sets and often wished for some clearly documented guidelines of behavior in many situations. I appreciate when authority originates from competence, and I am brutally introspective about my own areas of competence or lack there-of, and immediately submit and cede control if I encounter someone significantly more competent than myself in the situation of the moment. The problem has always been that authority is mostly exercised for authority's sake, to stroke the ego of petty tyrants who are incompetent and mean.
For me it was that those types of people didn't follow the rules, changed the rules, or couldn't explain why the rules existed. It wouldn't make sense because a system of rules were logical (or supposed to be), but they seemed to be acting "arbitrarily". Only later I realized that the arbitrary actions/rules weren't arbitrary once viewed through a political lens - they were violating the rules for their own power or safety. But yeah, I was always pointing out the inconsistencies and being called a smart-ass or future lawyer.
Yup, the "because I said so" type really isn't worth respect in the first place.
Authority figures are fine when they act with reason and respect. When they don't, that's when we have a problem. I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures. They don't even question it most of the time!
As I've gotten older, my level of tolerance for disrespectful people in general has dropped off dramatically. If you disrespect me while demanding I respect you, I'm just gonna ignore you entirely. You are literally not worth the brainpower it takes just to hear you.
> I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures.
Neurotypical people tend to pick their battles. Especially in the workplace, incompetence is quite often not your problem. I’ve seen autistic coworkers raise hell over perceived incompetence, eventuating in a lot of stress and ultimately losing their job. I tried to explain “who cares if they are making a bad decision that could affect the company. You don’t have any exposure to that risk, it’s not your problem if something goes wrong”.
As well as the fact that quite often it isn’t even incompetence from leadership but a failure to recognise that these leaders are often operating with more information or different incentives. They don’t to let you rewrite the product from php to rust because their incentive is to make the most money, not to build the most technically impressive program.
> authority figures were generally incompetent for the role they were fulfilling
The problem is: who judges competency? If you make yourself the sole judge, you're setting yourself up as the authority (meta-authority?) which can seem "arbitrary and capricious" to others. I say this because I've been there. I almost got fired once for using the exact phrase "arbitrary and capricious" too many times in a big public meeting. I've had feelings like you describe, and it often led to unnecessary conflict. One thing that reduced that conflict was the recognition that calling people incompetent - and particularly saying so to their faces - was a form of escalation. It literally never helped. See: almost fired.
> they behaved in arbitrary and capricious way
I think this is the part that really matters. They behaved. Not were. As you say, rules have value. Rules can even provide a level of comfort, if they are well justified, if they are applied fairly and consistently. The problems come when people act like they have the unilateral right to change or reinterpret the rules. Doesn't work for them, or for you, or for me. The productive response IMO is not to pit self-assumed authority (or meta-authority) against self-assumed authority, but to focus on the rules and the system and what needs to happen regardless of who is in what position relative to those.
> immediately submit and cede control if I encounter someone significantly more competent than myself in the situation of the moment
I have the same tendency and it almost stopped me from earning Eagle Scout. My project was building a cabinet for my school and we were able to use on of the other scout's father's woodshop to do the work. Once there, I, without thinking, basically stepped aside and let him direct. I knew basically nothing about woodworking, and certainly nothing about his shop. Unfortunately for me a big point of an eagle project is to demonstrate leadership, which is hard to do from the sidelines. Fortunately I managed to make the case that I demonstrated enough over the course of the project, but it was definitely an obstacle to have deferred to the competent authority in that case.
> I appreciate when authority originates from competence, and I am brutally introspective about my own areas of competence or lack there-of, and immediately submit and cede control if I encounter someone significantly more competent than myself in the situation of the moment.
This, along with your "low IQ" comment, makes me wonder whether you have been easily swayed in the past by mid- to high-IQ scam artists or ideologues pitching intricate schemes.
Why are you so unwilling to accept the extensively documented phenomenon of an autistic person being more intelligent than average?
Some autistic people are genuinely ahead of the curve. Some individuals develop extreme talent/intelligence in certain areas. There is no question of whether this happens or not, it's a demonstrable fact.
Your quote illustrates something that self-aware and reasonable people do: recognize their limitations and yield to someone with more expertise.
If you think that's somehow a bad thing, you should have a really long think about what that says about you.
When you throw computers into the mix and have them control people's lives, then authority is no longer about a structured relationship towards a common goal and facilitating social behaviour.
I remember spending significant effort on a creative essay in highschool. I had been a high performance, motivated student who was willing to jump through every hoop and do the work.
My english teacher took the essay, gave it a C.
I asked them for clarification about the logic of how they gave me the grade. They simply couldn't answer. There was no explanation. It seemed to me that they just picked a random grade out of a hat and couldn't explain why (probably more than likely).
My teacher blew up and accused me of "grade grubbing."
At that point I realized that the grading criteria was arbitrary, probably based on how they felt and if they like you personally and decided that school didn't matter since there was no actual standard for grading.
I never recovered my ability to care about school and stropped trying.
My reasoning was: "Well...if I try really hard and do all the work, they will give me a random grade based on how they feel anyways so this is a waste of time."
It was entirely a disagreement and disrespect for institutional authority.
Likewise, I have had constant struggles with VPs and Directors and CEOs I have worked with, challenging them on their behavior and lack of analysis, strategy, deep thinking.
Pretty much I need to work for myself, it is usually only a matter of time.
God help you if you try to tell me what to do from an authority position and I don't agree with your plan. I just start fighting with people, can't stand it.
I think this really depends on the quality of the school.
I went to a Catholic school (in Australia). We had to write a year 9 religion essay on a moral issue. I wrote this lengthy essay on why drug prohibition was immoral, with copious references. Our religious education coordinator was some hyper-conservative Catholic, when he saw my essay, he took it off my religion teacher, and in his rage at it he gave me a mark of 1.5/20 and accused me of plagiarism. I appealed to the school principal, who was a religious brother (De La Salle brothers). He upheld my appeal, dismissed the plagiarism allegations, and ordered my mark changed to 19.5/20
I totally admit that my essay was designed to cause controversy-it was an expression of my anger at the school, by deliberately choosing a topic they would dislike. This was not a new thing for me - in year 2 I was asked to write a short story about a clown. I hated the task, so in my anger I wrote one about a clown that gives primary school children cocaine. At the end of the story, he was executed in the electric chair. The school was so disturbed by this they called my parents in for a meeting-why is an 8 year old writing stories about cocaine? My parents assured them they were respectable people who had nothing to do with drugs, and my knowledge of the topic came from watching the evening news
I had a college professor change my first grade in the class from a B to a D and give me a lecture about “subjective versus objective grading”, after I asked him for feedback. Apparently my B was supposed to be one of those and the D the other one. His rant didn’t have anything to do with subjectivity or objectivity so I’m not certain which was supposed to be which, but he acted like giving me the B was doing me a favor. This guy clearly grade-grubbed through school and assumed everyone else is just there for the grade too. I just wanted some feedback other than “B”, so I could, you know, learn.
You are a disagreeable person. I love working with disagreeable people, but I avoid them after work. On Saturday, I don't feel like being lectured to on how hamburgers are supposed to be cooked. Other guests find it rude to called out on their own occupation.
No damned idea if I’m autistic, but I do view humanity like an alien anthropologist.
I have had the misfortune of spending my school years in the company of many people who are now politicians, captains of industry, princes, doctors, lawyers, and all the rest. I say misfortune, because it means that I absolutely distrust all of the above, as every exemplar I have personally known has been one variety or another of common-or-garden idiot.
Doctors - I cannot fathom how people put their faith in these unimaginative individuals who followed a default career path and squeaked their way through medical school on charisma alone.
Politicians - every one a self-serving charlatan.
Captains of industry - daddy bought me a newspaper.
Lawyers - see also: doctors.
Princes - thankfully harmless, but good lord, what they used to have run countries. Pudding between the ears.
I can’t trust any authority, as I have seen behind too many curtains - although I never did, even before the denouements - I never respected any rule or order which couldn’t be reasonably and justly explained.
I wonder how others look upon you. Especially from your school days. And what they say about the entirety of the populace who've chosen to enter your occupation, on the basis of you as a teenager...
This article is a bit maddening. I find the beginning encouraging....
I’ve written before about how autistic people often
struggle to know how to act around authority figures.
Actually, that’s not true– we don’t seem to *care* how
we act around authority.
I like the distinction between unknowing and uncaring. I like the level of personal responsibility that this suggests and I wish the rest of the article continued in this vein.
It makes us *really weird* to neurotypical people,
who seem to accept authority happily.
This is not correct at all in my experience. I don't think anybody loves submitting to authority just for the fun of it.
Certainly there is a lot of personal calculus that goes into whether or not we accept a given authority. Cost vs. benefit. Whether we see a reason to respect the authority. Whether we see value in it. Social pressure. Of course this calculus will be different from person to person and from situation to situation, and of course neurotypicals and folks on the spectrum will tend to have a different view.
But, "seem to accept authority happily?" Yeesh. It seems to imply an absence of thought rather than different criteria weights.
I think that "seem to accept authority happily" is exactly how it looks to a neuroatypical person. With emphasis on "SEEM".
Autism and ADHD both bring a lack of executive control. A lack of executive control limits our ability to comply with demands, including the demands of authority. The demands of authority generally include following the dictates of authority, while convincing authority that you're happy to do so.
People with poor executive control can only act this way out of desire. We have to really, really want to. And so a neurotypical person's ability to do what they should (regardless of how they feel) looks to us like something you're doing because you want to. No matter what the truth might be.
Yes, your internal experience may be entirely different. But, particularly with autism, neuroatypical people are often not very good at judging internal experience from external appearance. And so we may be fooled by the appearance.
> A lack of executive control limits our ability to comply with demands, including the demands of authority. The demands of authority generally include following the dictates of authority
I'd say this framing is upside down. Lots of people can "demand" lots of things. The only thing that gives the demands of "authorities" any import is their possible consequences - they're only privileged pragmatically. Furthermore I wouldn't say that a brain that grants priority to someone else barking orders has "executive control" - in fact I'd say it lacks executive control, likely due to sustained abuse of being forced to act (comply) first and think later.
I would say what makes "seem to accept authority happily" ring true is not the fact that most people straightforwardly comply. Rather it's that when someone does not comply, most people line up in support of the authority even when the authority is clearly wrong. This points to a dynamic of not merely pragmatically following authorities, but rather seemingly being in support of authorities for authority's sake.
> Autism and ADHD both bring a lack of executive control
It’s not this but what I’ve heard labeled as ‘integrity as an obstacle’^. Many neurodivergent people (myself included) are governed less by social norms and more by authenticity. Conforming is counter to their very beings, and grotesquely undesirable
^ I’d call it a strength, but it’s a matter of perspective
Not sure it's an ADHD(confirmed) thing myself or some mild form of the above(has been suggested to me)
I always found following some instructions hard, not because I disliked it but because I would genuinely misinterpret them, miss a word or get stuck at a point where a part of an instruction could be interpreted multiple ways, this was always awkward because then ruminate on if I should make a decision or ask for clarification.
Biggest one I noticed last year in a temp retail job is when people asked me "have you done X?". I'd hear "are you working on X?" or "will you do x?"
From the outside it didn't look great that I was apparently saying I finished X, when clearly X wasn't done yet or I was clearly in the middle of doing X.
From the outside it just looked like I was blatantly lying, and sometimes it was easier to lean into that. Than try to explain there might issue related to condition some people don't believe is real, and that it wasn't at all in my interest to disclose.
Once I made enough mistakes to know what was expected though I had no trouble.
I don't know much about autism. I can say though, that while I might appear to "accept authority", that's not really true. In each case, I'm weighing the benefits and drawbacks of that, and choosing what to do.
Often, if I disagree with an authority figure's position on something, there's more efficient ways to get what I want than public disagreement.
Yeah, that might be the best way to come to an agreement with the statement - I feel I’m very much the same. Plenty of non-spectrum people are ‘playing the game’ in a way that I imagine someone on the spectrum may not even realise is happening.
Of course, different people are better or worse at picking up on this, but I find often the people who want to wield arbitrary power are usually worse at picking up subtle manipulation (a pretty strong correlation), and those who aren’t as arbitrary you can be more direct with!
I suspect the author meant something more like, "neurotypical people live contented lives holding the belief that arbitrary authority actually exists." But I can't truly speak for them.
Even before I fully reasoned it out, growing up I always knew that arbitrary authority doesn't exist for me. Sure a SME should be given more weight discussing their subject, and a parent understands dangers of the world that their young child literally can't comprehend. But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong, perhaps because their brains aren't wired a way to unconsciously detect those red flags.
I don't like this trend of using the label "neurotypical" to describe one's idea of the most boring, unimaginative person one can think of, and then applying it to pretty much everyone that isn't on the spectrum. "Neurotypical" people range from absolute rebels who reject any kind of authority to people happily working for and supporting a fascist regime, and then everything in-between. There is no less of a variety of opinion and thought in them than in "neurodivergent" people.
> It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong,
That’s a very bold claim and I don’t think it’s that accurate. Rather maybe “neurotipical” are less willing to challenge “authority” when they have nothing to gain from that.
> But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong
This would not be perhaps the most-universal example of arbitrary authority, played with in countless pieces of mainstream media, if neurotypicals were as you suppose they are.
I think you need to go back to the drawing board on this one.
> and a parent understands dangers of the world that their young child literally can't comprehend
As an adult I find that my perception of danger was actually much more correct as a child than the adults around me.
They were, and are, paranoid and driven by moral panics. For some reason they were unable to comprehend that me walking a mile across an upper middle class suburb at 12 years old was perfectly safe, but I was. They feared edge case dangers like pedophiles and school shootings while us children made jokes about them.
When there were a handful of shark attacks on the east coast and it made the news, the school banned students from swimming in the ocean on school trips. Driving for hours on the interstate was, of course, deemed safe as always.
To me, this sometimes seems like a first order response to a 2nd (or higher) order problem. Some neurodivergent people I've worked through this with have definitely unconsciously/consciously detected "red flags" and responded to them, but their modelling of what was going on was clearly reductive and sometimes obviously incorrect.
I'm in no way suggesting it's universally true, but it's happened enough times to feel like it's likely, if that makes sense? Sometimes neurotypical people are seeing exactly the same data, but interpreting it differently.
Context: I've never been formally diagnosed, but based on informally discussing things with therapists and various self-assessments it seems pretty likely to me that I'm somewhat on the spectrum, probably on the shallow end. Maybe this means I understand both the neurotypical and neurodivergent worlds a bit, or maybe it means I understand neither.
But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children,
and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the
workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice
that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong, perhaps because their brains
aren't wired a way to unconsciously detect those red flags.
I feel extremely confident in saying that everybody hates this. Honestly, it might be the first thing I've been certain of all day long.
I'm less confident in this, but: I certainly also think it's possible that many on the spectrum underrate how much literally everybody hates because-I-said-so's.
I know one other thing.
If a person is in the upper N% of intelligence, "gifted" if you will, they will have a natural curiosity about how things work, and have probably improved many things in the past, and will naturally tend to chafe at doing things in sub-optimal ways for unexplained reasons, and will therefore tend to hate "because I said so's" even more than most people.
Does autism sort of act like a force multiplier when combined with that trait? Maybe. Probably? I mean, one of the traits of autism is that we tend to need our own ways of doing things.
growing up I always knew that arbitrary authority doesn't exist for me
I think one possible issue is that neurodivergents can't understand the reasons why neurotypicals (sometimes) like authority, or seem to like it.
Imagine Bubba, a guy with USA and police and military stickers all over his pickup truck. This guy just loves the imaginary absolute authority of the USA, right?
It's probably more complicated than that. In the micro sense of things, he probably hates being told what to do just like the rest of us. He probably grumbles when paying taxes just like the rest of us.
But he probably likes to imagine the USA as a superpower that will crush its/his perceived enemies. But maybe Bob just kind of wants an identity to cling to. Also maybe he and/or many of his friends and relatives are in the military, possibly because it's one of the few stable career paths for people without higher education, and he would like to think there is some kind of positive thing being done. Maybe he's sending a dog-whistle signal to "liberals" or immigrants. Or hell, maybe he does just have pride in the cool things that do happen in America. Maybe he's an American history buff! But for all of the complex factors in Bubba's enthusiasm for America, actually doing what America tells him to do probably isn't the part that delights him.
This article should probably be read through a more emotional lens than one of hard facts. Articles like this are littered with very specific details that don't accurately apply to many of the people in the group being described, but are perhaps accurate in spirit. It's also a common pitfall to advocate for ones own group at the expense of another group.
Well the inherent framing of neurodivergent/neurotypical really lends itself well to those kind of arguments. If it's a spectrum and we are all on it with only two words to describe it then we are bound to get that kind of low-quality discussion.
You'd be surprised. "All men are created equal" was a radical statement, almost blasphemous, when penned; the idea that authority and hierarchy were inherent was just something about the world that was accepted, like the sun or even the existence of God, because how could the state of things be otherwise? And post hoc, we rationalized this implicit assumption by inventing the theory that differences in authority were not arbitrary, but based on the quality of the individual. More powerful people were better somehow. The word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best".
The historical context for this was the belief that those in positions of authority were put there by God's will. And so to question the rightness of them being placed over you was to question God.
With the most extreme form of this being the idea of divine right of kings. Because kings were given the most extreme authority, they must have the strongest sanction of God supporting them.
It would be a mistake to think of this as a purely Christian notion, either. Divine right very closely parallels the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven for the emperor. And Christian notions owe a lot to Plato. In particularly the Neoplatonic idea of the Great Chain of Being. Which (though the phrase has a separate history) can be summed up with, "As above, so below." So we are reflections of our rulers. If our rulers are just, we will be. If our rulers are unjust, we will also be unjust. If we upset the natural order by overthrowing our rulers, chaos will descend upon the land. Shakespeare did a great job of capturing the mindset in The Tempest.
> I’ve written before about how autistic people often
struggle to know how to act around authority figures.
Actually, that’s not true– we don’t seem to care how
we act around authority.
I call bullshit. Autistic people can figure out how to operate around authority figures just fine when it MATTERS.
If some autistic person is fucking around with an ATM in front of a cop that they know is there, but don't care, that's being stupid, not being autistic.
I don't have to give a shit about how authority and power is granted to certain individuals, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that insulting the CEO in front of the company is not a good way to keep your job..
Insulting the CEO is rude, because insulting anyone is rude. There's nothing special about the CEO that makes it rude only to insult him.
The article even gives a better example here: casually introducing yourself to the CEO and making a joke. If the CEO feels insulted by this, it's because he has "Authority" and you are "not respecting it" - but wait, the other CEO I met really appreciated this! Suddenly it makes no sense. There's a special rule that this CEO insists I should know, but it's not even consistent with other CEOs. How am I supposed to know which authorities it's okay to make jokes with?
There's a high correlation between smart people and being on the spectrum.
You can likely replace the word "autistic people" with smart people. Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?
Especially when I see you making what seem to be plain mistakes, which not only hurt yourselves, but create a society where your kids will be less satisfied.
Its not like I have the ability to make people do things, that would be a position of authority. Me not accepting me not being responsible for actions with plain evidence I was not in control. Not only proves the point those individuals are responsible for what happened to me, but their inability to accept they should be listening to me makes me most concerned.
> Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?
Off the top of my head:
- I may know a fact that you do not. Your IQ does not make you aware of things you do not know.
- I may have a relationship with someone that you do not.
- I may have past experience that you do not.
- I may have different values than you. Your higher IQ does not dictate that we should make decisions according to your values.
- I may have access to resources (money, engineering teams) that you do not.
A meta comment is: If despite your higher IQ you were unable to consider these possibilities then IQ may not be a good proxy for the kind of intelligence a business may value.
Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155
and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?
A few possible reasons, some overlapping to various extents, not applicable to all situations.
- The person with 120 IQ is a subject matter expert in this particular matter and you are not.
- IQ is an approximation. It is probably the best one we have, but it is a very blunt and generalized metric. It is not evenly distributed across all areas of reasoning and functioning. A person with a 155 IQ or even a 200 IQ is going to be great at many things and awful at others. A person with 120 or even 80 IQ may be better in specific areas.
- Both you and the 120 IQ person might be overqualified for the matter at hand, so your "extra" intelligence is irrelevant.
- The person with 120 IQ is representing something larger than themselves, the accumulated wisdom of which dwarfs yours (imagine, I don't know, a 120 IQ forest ranger telling you how you should/shouldn't interact with particular flora and fauna)
- It may be a situation where it is impractical to have individualized rules for highly intelligent or highly capable individuals.
There are many high IQ people who are not able to proverbially tie their shoelaces. Or, more literally, shower. So yes, please do listen to your not so smart colleagues. Thanks.
It's more complicated than that. Autistic people are spread more widely, they are more likely to have very high or very low IQs, and it's not all that useful to generalise.
It's a little strange to me that everyone accepted the premise of this claim since it's really, really obvious that the situation isn't a straightforward jump in IQ.
a) because other people listen to that person, and one person's smarts only outstrips the strength multiplier of followers in extraordinary circumstances
b) because they're part of the tribe, and like it or not you're gonna be working with them. More useful to everyone to invest resources into figuring out what makes them tick than tuning them out.
c) because responsibility is rarely as divestable as one might hope. If my team lead doesn't listen to me and then sets up the team to shit the bed, I can certainly document "I wasn't involved in this decision; I would have done it differently," but the response upper management's gonna give me is "If you knew a better approach, why didn't you coach the team lead to take it?"
It's hard to talk about anything sometimes, because with 8 billion people on the planet there are always some counter-examples.
But to the point of the linked article, I think the author misses the point and insults neurotypicals and neurodivergents alike with the his assertion that normals just love them some blind submission as a default way of being, and autists just can't do that
When my respected boss retired and was replaced by an outside hire, I had a lot of issues accepting the authority of the new guy at face value which may have contributed to me being fired later.
The other engineers would go by his office to make small talk, chat about great projects they're working on, and sports they both like. I never did any such thing and stayed in my office working.
Then when we all went out for drinks at the end of the week, I chatted as I normally would but I felt like the new boss kept shutting down my stories to get a laugh from the others. I felt like I was already being judged. That's when I reached negative respect for this new guy.
Over time I would see him going to all the other engineers' offices to chat and catch up on projects, but never mine, and that further cemented the feeling that this guy doesn't like me.
I felt that if my boss isn't going to make any effort to get to know me or respect me, then I'm not going to kiss his ass to make him like me. I'm sure he felt the same way, especially since he previously held a position of authority in the US military so he probably saw boot kissing as mandatory.
Once performance reviews came, even though I had met all the quantitative goals that were set, he gave me a bad rating because of qualitative reasons which I felt were injected into my review to make it negative to match his bias.
Once the pandemic hit I was fired, but I have a better job now. It doesn't pay as much, but is more interesting and is work from home, so suck it Scott!
> The other engineers would go by his office to make small talk, chat about great projects they're working on, and sports they both like. I never did any such thing and stayed in my office working.
> Over time I would see him going to all the other engineers' offices to chat and catch up on projects, but never mine, and that further cemented the feeling that this guy doesn't like me.
So... you took it as a sign that he doesn't like you when he didn't come and talk to you, but you don't consider it reasonable that he took it as a sign that you didn't like him when you didn't talk to him?
I'm not required to be friends with my boss, only to do my job and be respectful and friendly to all co-workers. He was not managing me, he was just wielding the power that came with the title.
Whenever we talked, it was because I came to him. He never came to me, I was ignored. The more I felt that he disliked me, the less frequently I went to talk to him and resorted to emails. I felt that he had already written me off.
In the performance review, one of the things mentioned was that I wasn't communicating with him enough. I pointed out how one-sided our relationship was, I would come to him and rarely the reverse. He said that he was very busy and doesn't always have time to come by my office but couldn't explain how he did that for all the other engineers.
I knew that I should suck up to him if I wanted to succeed there but the circumstances caused me to detest working there so I cared less and less about the threat of being fired.
That's not a contradiction, is it? Selective engagement and non-engagement are different things. It's reasonable for some individuals to be generally less sociable than others. That doesn't mean it's OK to explicitly exclude them.
Nobody expects the teacher to bring in candy, but it's kind of awful if they only bring it in for the students they like.
"Rule of law" is ideal, even for laws you don't agree with.
Managers should put in effort to reach out to their reports, even ones who don't initiate chatting/small talk. People get nervous about the new boss - would the chatting be viewed negatively (wasting time or whatever)?
Further:
> Then when we all went out for drinks at the end of the week, I chatted as I normally would but I felt like the new boss kept shutting down my stories to get a laugh from the others.
Work isn’t high school. A manager or lead, if they’re doing their job right, are a force multiplier for productivity. If they’re not, it’s time to jump ship
> Then when we all went out for drinks at the end of the week, I chatted as I normally would but I felt like the new boss kept shutting down my stories to get a laugh from the others.
If that's an accurate characterization (and your stories weren't tone deaf, or going on too long, or something), then the new boss might have already decided to put you into an "other" group, and was using that to try to build rapport with a different group, in a juvenile cliques kind of way.
I've seen execs doing things like this. In one example, at a team-building dinner, where I suspected that the exec had already decided they didn't like one of the shy/nerdy engineers there, as the engineer was walking away from the table, the exec made a crude sexual comment to the table about the person's figure. (I don't know why the exec thought that a table of diverse engineers would go for that kind of locker room 'camaraderie', nor why the exec would expose themself and the company in an open&shut case way like that, except maybe they didn't think that through.)
If you imagine that people will sometimes revert to grade school or high school, some behavior makes a lot more sense. Also, alcohol at company events is risky.
I think you're right. I left out some context which is that this was a conservative oil company and I was a liberal city slicker environmentalist who hates oil but was willing to put up with it for a few years for the paycheck. My boss was the tough ex-military country guy, and my co-workers were somewhere in between - nerdy engineers, but more country types.
When out for beers, he said his wife does horseback barrel racing and I said I used to do that as a kid and it's a cool sport. He just replied, "Hah, I find that hard to picture" and got some chuckles from the other guys before changing the subject, not following up to learn more. He asked what our favorite movies were and everyone received approval except when I said A Clockwork Orange, he said that was weird.
I was already masking HARD to fit in at this company. Another coworker had already outted me as an atheist as a joke at a weekly meeting. I didn't find that funny, my boss's boss in the room had previously invited me to his church as had another coworker.
I used to like this job under my old boss. Now it hurt and I didn't want to be there anymore, but the paycheck was so good I knew I'd never earn that much again in my whole life. Once I started hating my boss, I may have been "silent quitting" without realizing it. I blame him and he blames me, I don't know.
> Once performance reviews came, even though I had met all the quantitative goals that were set, he gave me a bad rating because of qualitative reasons which I felt were injected into my review to make it negative to match his bias.
This is actually the real reason many jobs stayed work from home indefinitely. There is a significant productivity boost from making it difficult to socialize with coworkers. So many places were struggling with this problem.
I would be surprised to hear that Scott is still working there either. This style of management is pretty much dead at all but the crappiest and most miserable small businesses that don't know better.
As someone who is non-neurotypical, it's not authority I have a problem with, it's arbitrary rules. The extent to which authority is heavy handed in enforcing the rules is the extent I have issues with authority. A big contributor to my divorce was my wife's objection to me not following the rules. She became an authority to me.
I don't think I need to go into the senseless rules that govern our lives and social interactions, because the 'rules and order' people won't see them and those who know what I'm talking about already know.
I learned early in my life that passing as typical was important. Learning to pass is all about learning which arbitrary social constructs people value personally. You can learn that by paying attention to their mannerisms. You can then tailor your behaviors to that person.
It also helps to establish a reputation as a boundary pusher who will maliciously comply with stupid rules.
Higher education is a great field to work in, because everyone expects a certain amount of that sort of thing from you anyways.
Right or wrong it has kept me gainfully employed for decades. Ethics and personal identity are very funny things when you have to eat.
> arbitrary social constructs people value personally
Can you list a few examples?
I've never encountered a bonafide example before on HN that did not serve at least some purpose(s)/benefit some group(s)/etc..., after a careful analysis. So I'm a bit skeptical as to the claim.
>> It also helps to establish a reputation as a boundary pusher who will maliciously comply with stupid rules.
That, and it's also good to know that every boundary has gaps, either through policy, implementation, or both. When you find a useful gap there is no point in drawing attention to it since you are just following the rules.
I'm not autistic, and I have the same issue with arbitrary rules, airports or other security theatre are a classic example. I'm sure there are many people out there that feel the same way
Security theater is one of those things everyone is familiar with. I'm talking about the more subtle rules. I'm a fan of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" because Larry David is always rebelling against these rules or making up new rules that actually make sense ("chat and cut is not allowed").
To give you an example from the show that actually happened to me, I went into the men's room. The stalls were full so I used the wheel chair stall. I didn't see anyone in a wheel chair in the building. I got yelled at by someone, a 'rules and order' person, who claimed I was never under any circumstances to use the wheel chair stall if I wasn't in a wheel chair, which is stupid. There are a lot of rules like that and neurotypical people just accept, but I can't.
That was my biggest problem with jail and prison. As Piper's lawyer told her in Orange is the New Black, prison is "chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."
> I don't think I need to go into the senseless rules that govern our lives and social interactions, because the 'rules and order' people won't see them
Maybe those from our own culture. There are “rules and order” people in every culture, but the rules are different.
One other effect of this fact is that we (e.g. me) recognize who the rules-and-order people are based on how they follow our society’s rules. In another culture, we may peg someone as a free-thinker, only to find out that they are very conservative, just conservative in a way we don’t recognize. We have to recognize what rules people care about in a culture before we can really identify which people care about “the rules”.
There are a lot of Asperger's sufferers on here talking about their jobs; meanwhile my cousin with autism doesn't have a job because she can't form sentences properly and is unable to navigate any relationships at all.
I find the DSM V alterations to the terminology jarring; they seem to have somewhat erased the original autists. It's a bit like if mild epilepsy suddenly became fashionable and the people having callosotomies had to sit in hospital watching TV stars talking about how their fugue states gave them special powers.
None of this makes anything in the article incorrect, of course.
I have a cousin in exactly the same boat. I think people don't realize that a third of actual autistic people functionally can't speak and 75% of them are unemployed. They would rather have a normal life, and probably don't enjoy hearing about "quirky" celebrities who got diagnosed by some monkey psychiatrist.
The self diagnosers sort of forget that you're supposed to have all of the things listed: persistent communication deficit, repetitive behaviors, symptoms present in childhood, and symptoms that limit and impair everyday functioning. You can't just only have one because it's a "spectrum."
Looking at the DSM-5 list: when I was little I made eye contact with almost nobody and refused to go on play structure equipment if there was someone else on it. I still like having a "schedule" all the time and am sensitive to sounds - who isn't? But I don't have autism: I can hold a conversation fine and don't have impaired function in everyday life.
Another way to phrase this from an Autistic PoV to an authority figure:
You are no better than I.
Does a person really have to be "better" than you to act as some sort of authority in a particular context?
How about the gate agent at the airport, who boards and deboards people from the plane?
I don't necessarily love listening to that person, but I accept that we probably need somebody doing that job so that we can hopefully get the plane boarded and deboarded in some sort of nonchaotic way.
The thought of whether or not this person is "better" than me seems rather bizarre. They probably know how to board a plane better than me, and even if they don't, it's generally still going to be better than 200 arriving and departing passengers devolving into a free-for-all because they have 200 competing opinions of how things should work.
Generally, most sorts of "authority" I experience on a daily basis fall into this sort of mental bin for me.
Obviously that's a rather trivial example.
What's the logical endpoint of "nobody is better than me" or "nobody is better than anybody?" Just like, no rules whatsoever for anybody, unless you explicitly opt-in to some specific rule or authority figure you happen to like?
And how does this even relate to autism and/or one's (lack of) empathy?
> Does a person really have to be "better" than you to act as some sort of authority in a particular context?
No. And you're correct, IMO, that people can swap into roles without being jerks about it. And I don't think many Autistic folks have a problem with those kinds of people.
But there are also those who gravitate to positions of power and authority just for the power and authority. They're the ones who will say "I won't respect you until you respect me," and mean "I won't treat you like a human until you treat me as an authority (as your better)."
And if you haven't run into that kind yet... good. May you be lucky enough to never run into them.
I think you're looking at it backwards. The problem is people with authority who think that it makes them better than you. The autistic person rejects that idea completely.
You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.
At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.
As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.
To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.
The problem is when authority figures act like they're better than you. This is colloquially referred to as a "power trip". The effects of this can range from annoying (some assistant manager at a store on a power trip) to potentially life-changing or life-ending (a cop on a power trip).
Imagine the gate agent has called Zone 1 and Zone 2 who are almost finished processing. You, looking at your Zone 3 ticket, start queuing but the gate agent asks you to go back to your seat as your zone has not been called. Do you defer to their authority on principle or trust your own expertise? I think the logical endpoint is rules and obedience are evaluated in context rather than with an authority bias heuristic.
> What's the logical endpoint of "nobody is better than me" or "nobody is better than anybody?" Just like, no rules whatsoever for anybody, unless you explicitly opt-in to some specific rule or authority figure you happen to like?
Negotiation as equals and on the merits of the matter at hand. For example, rather than a senior colleague telling a junior colleague to do something "because I say so", the expectation would be that they actually provide justification for their decision, and to persuade you rather than simply overrule there is disagreement. Ditto for a parent, teacher or other authority figure.
And that where there is unresolvable disagreement (and one persons decision has to be followed despite lack of consensus), that there is accountability around that decision, and that the results of it are taken into account when resolving future disputes. In other words, authority is earned not decreed.
> How about the gate agent at the airport, who boards and deboards people from the plane?
I've seen law enforcement used as an example of Authority a couple times, but I'm not convinced the author has any idea what they're talking about (yes, I am dismissing his authority as an expert).
To him, "Authority" seems to mean social status-- i.e. how do you react when you meet a celebrity or billionaire CEO at the supermarket. These people aren't better than you because they're older than you, famous or have money. Despite everyone else bowing to them, that isn't Authority. Those people who value such traits are simply fools.
Autistic people aren't retarded. Airport personnel and law enforcement have leverage over you-- if not the risk of getting shot, maced or tased, they are what stands in your way of getting to your flight on time. You will respect their authority or you will miss your flight and/or suffer pain and inconvenience.
The autistic are perfectly capable of reasoning their way through this while simultaneously recognizing that the airport cop is Just Some Guy. Whether you recognize him as an agent of the state is irrelevant; right now, he's just an obstacle in your path that compliance happens to be the simplest path around.
Someone with antisocial personality disorder may decide that confrontation for the sake of belligerence is worth it though.
> Autistic students (and I speak from long experience) will not bow to authority for authority’s sake. [...] They will respect it, if respect can be had, and they’ll do what they’re told— if it makes sense; but they won’t blindly accept authority.
This is literally the exact same advice you find in the opening pages of any book about Huskies.
They are a pain in the ass to train because they don't respect human authority, but the most you can hope for is fostering a mutually-beneficial relationship where they'll stick around and do what you say for as long as you make it worth their while. When you stop paying them in treats, they chew up your furniture and run away. They don't give a shit about you.
We don't just call dogs autistic, declare them unreasonable and let them have the house while we live under the porch. Somehow they still serve as cooperative work animals despite their independence. Somehow they can still be trained to be useful to us.
Yeah - honestly the hardest part about having a discourse on homelessness here (or anywhere else).
People just need to believe that homeless people are inherently bad in some way. It makes it really hard to discuss solutions, since they’re all “drug addicts who should be in jail.”
What's being discussed here looks a lot like one of the three negative individualisation types: by striving to be better than peers in order to look down upon them, by imitating the greater ones for personal gain, and by the fear of the greater ones.
I haven't seen this as a hard rule in people. My experience of people on the spectrum is they often just want a good clear reason to follow rules that seem like nonsense like bowing to authority. Neurotypical people just intuitively know the pros and cons of certain social rules in a way that might take neurodiverse people more active thinking to get. In geekier cultures you run into a lot of people on the spectrum so if I remember something could be a problem then it's not a big deal for me to explain this kind of thing ahead of time in a respectful way that makes sense ("I bet if we suck up to this guy well enough we'll get more funding for our team") so we're on the same page even if they think it's dumb. It takes effort on both sides to bridge the gap.
> My experience of people on the spectrum is they often just want a good clear reason to follow rules that seem like nonsense like bowing to authority
I think that's usually correct. However, I would point out that does not constitute respecting the authority. The extra reason is needed because the authority is not respected unless judged to have earned that authority. Which is a very different attitude to the one I typically see from neurotypical people where it is often seen as a moral duty to respect an authority figure just because they have been given a position of authority by society.
I worked with a very autistic chap once. The most incredible mind and considering his levels of autism he was very self aware.
He said that he should be treated like a computer when it came to work. Clear instructions, no ambiguity and with a clear reason.
If the reason did not make sense then that could be an issue and we would discuss.
In general, respect needs to be earned, so I don’t quite agree that authority automatically implies respect for “neurotypical” people. To the degree that it is true, it might be because the fact that the person was put into a position of authority is taken as an indication that the person probably earned that authority, so is taken as a prior for their credences regarding that person. Also, respect doesn’t necessarily imply obedience or subservience.
Some of the time it’s because the rules can’t be said.
“I picked him for the job because he is more attractive and has the same hobby as me”
“I want you to do this thing which is illegal to knowingly do but if I don’t explicitly say it then it’s permissible”
“I feel like you are faking sick days or being lazy but I don’t have any proof for this accusation so I just want to subtly imply it to pressure you in to changing”
>It’s not that we’re deficient, after all. It’s more that this authority business is a neurotypical notion that we don’t seem to share, and thus we tend to ignore it.
I'm neurodivergent and always find it off-putting when people talk of things like "neurotypical values". neurotypical people are no more of a monolith than neurodivergent people. I've personally met plenty of neurodivergent people with a sense of hierarchy or authority, and plenty of neurotypical people who don't. if you want to make claims like this, at the very least back it up with a study. don't just say how you feel and assume that applies to everyone
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At no point have I ever felt that authority or hierarchy or rules are meaningless, in fact I revel in the clarity of well-written and reasoned rule sets and often wished for some clearly documented guidelines of behavior in many situations. I appreciate when authority originates from competence, and I am brutally introspective about my own areas of competence or lack there-of, and immediately submit and cede control if I encounter someone significantly more competent than myself in the situation of the moment. The problem has always been that authority is mostly exercised for authority's sake, to stroke the ego of petty tyrants who are incompetent and mean.
Authority figures are fine when they act with reason and respect. When they don't, that's when we have a problem. I will never understand why neurotypicals tolerate inept and abusive authority figures. They don't even question it most of the time!
As I've gotten older, my level of tolerance for disrespectful people in general has dropped off dramatically. If you disrespect me while demanding I respect you, I'm just gonna ignore you entirely. You are literally not worth the brainpower it takes just to hear you.
Neurotypical people tend to pick their battles. Especially in the workplace, incompetence is quite often not your problem. I’ve seen autistic coworkers raise hell over perceived incompetence, eventuating in a lot of stress and ultimately losing their job. I tried to explain “who cares if they are making a bad decision that could affect the company. You don’t have any exposure to that risk, it’s not your problem if something goes wrong”.
As well as the fact that quite often it isn’t even incompetence from leadership but a failure to recognise that these leaders are often operating with more information or different incentives. They don’t to let you rewrite the product from php to rust because their incentive is to make the most money, not to build the most technically impressive program.
The problem is: who judges competency? If you make yourself the sole judge, you're setting yourself up as the authority (meta-authority?) which can seem "arbitrary and capricious" to others. I say this because I've been there. I almost got fired once for using the exact phrase "arbitrary and capricious" too many times in a big public meeting. I've had feelings like you describe, and it often led to unnecessary conflict. One thing that reduced that conflict was the recognition that calling people incompetent - and particularly saying so to their faces - was a form of escalation. It literally never helped. See: almost fired.
> they behaved in arbitrary and capricious way
I think this is the part that really matters. They behaved. Not were. As you say, rules have value. Rules can even provide a level of comfort, if they are well justified, if they are applied fairly and consistently. The problems come when people act like they have the unilateral right to change or reinterpret the rules. Doesn't work for them, or for you, or for me. The productive response IMO is not to pit self-assumed authority (or meta-authority) against self-assumed authority, but to focus on the rules and the system and what needs to happen regardless of who is in what position relative to those.
I have the same tendency and it almost stopped me from earning Eagle Scout. My project was building a cabinet for my school and we were able to use on of the other scout's father's woodshop to do the work. Once there, I, without thinking, basically stepped aside and let him direct. I knew basically nothing about woodworking, and certainly nothing about his shop. Unfortunately for me a big point of an eagle project is to demonstrate leadership, which is hard to do from the sidelines. Fortunately I managed to make the case that I demonstrated enough over the course of the project, but it was definitely an obstacle to have deferred to the competent authority in that case.
This, along with your "low IQ" comment, makes me wonder whether you have been easily swayed in the past by mid- to high-IQ scam artists or ideologues pitching intricate schemes.
Some autistic people are genuinely ahead of the curve. Some individuals develop extreme talent/intelligence in certain areas. There is no question of whether this happens or not, it's a demonstrable fact.
Your quote illustrates something that self-aware and reasonable people do: recognize their limitations and yield to someone with more expertise.
If you think that's somehow a bad thing, you should have a really long think about what that says about you.
When you throw computers into the mix and have them control people's lives, then authority is no longer about a structured relationship towards a common goal and facilitating social behaviour.
It's about arbitrary politics.
I remember spending significant effort on a creative essay in highschool. I had been a high performance, motivated student who was willing to jump through every hoop and do the work.
My english teacher took the essay, gave it a C.
I asked them for clarification about the logic of how they gave me the grade. They simply couldn't answer. There was no explanation. It seemed to me that they just picked a random grade out of a hat and couldn't explain why (probably more than likely).
My teacher blew up and accused me of "grade grubbing."
At that point I realized that the grading criteria was arbitrary, probably based on how they felt and if they like you personally and decided that school didn't matter since there was no actual standard for grading.
I never recovered my ability to care about school and stropped trying.
My reasoning was: "Well...if I try really hard and do all the work, they will give me a random grade based on how they feel anyways so this is a waste of time."
It was entirely a disagreement and disrespect for institutional authority.
Likewise, I have had constant struggles with VPs and Directors and CEOs I have worked with, challenging them on their behavior and lack of analysis, strategy, deep thinking.
Pretty much I need to work for myself, it is usually only a matter of time.
God help you if you try to tell me what to do from an authority position and I don't agree with your plan. I just start fighting with people, can't stand it.
I went to a Catholic school (in Australia). We had to write a year 9 religion essay on a moral issue. I wrote this lengthy essay on why drug prohibition was immoral, with copious references. Our religious education coordinator was some hyper-conservative Catholic, when he saw my essay, he took it off my religion teacher, and in his rage at it he gave me a mark of 1.5/20 and accused me of plagiarism. I appealed to the school principal, who was a religious brother (De La Salle brothers). He upheld my appeal, dismissed the plagiarism allegations, and ordered my mark changed to 19.5/20
I totally admit that my essay was designed to cause controversy-it was an expression of my anger at the school, by deliberately choosing a topic they would dislike. This was not a new thing for me - in year 2 I was asked to write a short story about a clown. I hated the task, so in my anger I wrote one about a clown that gives primary school children cocaine. At the end of the story, he was executed in the electric chair. The school was so disturbed by this they called my parents in for a meeting-why is an 8 year old writing stories about cocaine? My parents assured them they were respectable people who had nothing to do with drugs, and my knowledge of the topic came from watching the evening news
What you’re talking about is just basic social skills, but if anything there’s positive correlation between the two.
I have had the misfortune of spending my school years in the company of many people who are now politicians, captains of industry, princes, doctors, lawyers, and all the rest. I say misfortune, because it means that I absolutely distrust all of the above, as every exemplar I have personally known has been one variety or another of common-or-garden idiot.
Doctors - I cannot fathom how people put their faith in these unimaginative individuals who followed a default career path and squeaked their way through medical school on charisma alone.
Politicians - every one a self-serving charlatan.
Captains of industry - daddy bought me a newspaper.
Lawyers - see also: doctors.
Princes - thankfully harmless, but good lord, what they used to have run countries. Pudding between the ears.
I can’t trust any authority, as I have seen behind too many curtains - although I never did, even before the denouements - I never respected any rule or order which couldn’t be reasonably and justly explained.
Certainly there is a lot of personal calculus that goes into whether or not we accept a given authority. Cost vs. benefit. Whether we see a reason to respect the authority. Whether we see value in it. Social pressure. Of course this calculus will be different from person to person and from situation to situation, and of course neurotypicals and folks on the spectrum will tend to have a different view.
But, "seem to accept authority happily?" Yeesh. It seems to imply an absence of thought rather than different criteria weights.
Autism and ADHD both bring a lack of executive control. A lack of executive control limits our ability to comply with demands, including the demands of authority. The demands of authority generally include following the dictates of authority, while convincing authority that you're happy to do so.
People with poor executive control can only act this way out of desire. We have to really, really want to. And so a neurotypical person's ability to do what they should (regardless of how they feel) looks to us like something you're doing because you want to. No matter what the truth might be.
Yes, your internal experience may be entirely different. But, particularly with autism, neuroatypical people are often not very good at judging internal experience from external appearance. And so we may be fooled by the appearance.
I'd say this framing is upside down. Lots of people can "demand" lots of things. The only thing that gives the demands of "authorities" any import is their possible consequences - they're only privileged pragmatically. Furthermore I wouldn't say that a brain that grants priority to someone else barking orders has "executive control" - in fact I'd say it lacks executive control, likely due to sustained abuse of being forced to act (comply) first and think later.
I would say what makes "seem to accept authority happily" ring true is not the fact that most people straightforwardly comply. Rather it's that when someone does not comply, most people line up in support of the authority even when the authority is clearly wrong. This points to a dynamic of not merely pragmatically following authorities, but rather seemingly being in support of authorities for authority's sake.
It’s not this but what I’ve heard labeled as ‘integrity as an obstacle’^. Many neurodivergent people (myself included) are governed less by social norms and more by authenticity. Conforming is counter to their very beings, and grotesquely undesirable
^ I’d call it a strength, but it’s a matter of perspective
I always found following some instructions hard, not because I disliked it but because I would genuinely misinterpret them, miss a word or get stuck at a point where a part of an instruction could be interpreted multiple ways, this was always awkward because then ruminate on if I should make a decision or ask for clarification.
Biggest one I noticed last year in a temp retail job is when people asked me "have you done X?". I'd hear "are you working on X?" or "will you do x?"
From the outside it didn't look great that I was apparently saying I finished X, when clearly X wasn't done yet or I was clearly in the middle of doing X.
From the outside it just looked like I was blatantly lying, and sometimes it was easier to lean into that. Than try to explain there might issue related to condition some people don't believe is real, and that it wasn't at all in my interest to disclose.
Once I made enough mistakes to know what was expected though I had no trouble.
Dead Comment
I don't know much about autism. I can say though, that while I might appear to "accept authority", that's not really true. In each case, I'm weighing the benefits and drawbacks of that, and choosing what to do.
Often, if I disagree with an authority figure's position on something, there's more efficient ways to get what I want than public disagreement.
Of course, different people are better or worse at picking up on this, but I find often the people who want to wield arbitrary power are usually worse at picking up subtle manipulation (a pretty strong correlation), and those who aren’t as arbitrary you can be more direct with!
Even before I fully reasoned it out, growing up I always knew that arbitrary authority doesn't exist for me. Sure a SME should be given more weight discussing their subject, and a parent understands dangers of the world that their young child literally can't comprehend. But many of us experienced "listen to me because I said so" as children, and continue to experience that in school and into adulthood in the workplace. It's meaningless, but many neurotypical people neither notice that it's wrong or understand why it's wrong, perhaps because their brains aren't wired a way to unconsciously detect those red flags.
That’s a very bold claim and I don’t think it’s that accurate. Rather maybe “neurotipical” are less willing to challenge “authority” when they have nothing to gain from that.
This would not be perhaps the most-universal example of arbitrary authority, played with in countless pieces of mainstream media, if neurotypicals were as you suppose they are.
I think you need to go back to the drawing board on this one.
As an adult I find that my perception of danger was actually much more correct as a child than the adults around me.
They were, and are, paranoid and driven by moral panics. For some reason they were unable to comprehend that me walking a mile across an upper middle class suburb at 12 years old was perfectly safe, but I was. They feared edge case dangers like pedophiles and school shootings while us children made jokes about them.
When there were a handful of shark attacks on the east coast and it made the news, the school banned students from swimming in the ocean on school trips. Driving for hours on the interstate was, of course, deemed safe as always.
I'm in no way suggesting it's universally true, but it's happened enough times to feel like it's likely, if that makes sense? Sometimes neurotypical people are seeing exactly the same data, but interpreting it differently.
I'm less confident in this, but: I certainly also think it's possible that many on the spectrum underrate how much literally everybody hates because-I-said-so's.
I know one other thing.
If a person is in the upper N% of intelligence, "gifted" if you will, they will have a natural curiosity about how things work, and have probably improved many things in the past, and will naturally tend to chafe at doing things in sub-optimal ways for unexplained reasons, and will therefore tend to hate "because I said so's" even more than most people.
Does autism sort of act like a force multiplier when combined with that trait? Maybe. Probably? I mean, one of the traits of autism is that we tend to need our own ways of doing things.
I think one possible issue is that neurodivergents can't understand the reasons why neurotypicals (sometimes) like authority, or seem to like it.Imagine Bubba, a guy with USA and police and military stickers all over his pickup truck. This guy just loves the imaginary absolute authority of the USA, right?
It's probably more complicated than that. In the micro sense of things, he probably hates being told what to do just like the rest of us. He probably grumbles when paying taxes just like the rest of us.
But he probably likes to imagine the USA as a superpower that will crush its/his perceived enemies. But maybe Bob just kind of wants an identity to cling to. Also maybe he and/or many of his friends and relatives are in the military, possibly because it's one of the few stable career paths for people without higher education, and he would like to think there is some kind of positive thing being done. Maybe he's sending a dog-whistle signal to "liberals" or immigrants. Or hell, maybe he does just have pride in the cool things that do happen in America. Maybe he's an American history buff! But for all of the complex factors in Bubba's enthusiasm for America, actually doing what America tells him to do probably isn't the part that delights him.
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With the most extreme form of this being the idea of divine right of kings. Because kings were given the most extreme authority, they must have the strongest sanction of God supporting them.
It would be a mistake to think of this as a purely Christian notion, either. Divine right very closely parallels the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven for the emperor. And Christian notions owe a lot to Plato. In particularly the Neoplatonic idea of the Great Chain of Being. Which (though the phrase has a separate history) can be summed up with, "As above, so below." So we are reflections of our rulers. If our rulers are just, we will be. If our rulers are unjust, we will also be unjust. If we upset the natural order by overthrowing our rulers, chaos will descend upon the land. Shakespeare did a great job of capturing the mindset in The Tempest.
This is still the case in modern society as well. We've just substituted noble blood for money.
I call bullshit. Autistic people can figure out how to operate around authority figures just fine when it MATTERS.
If some autistic person is fucking around with an ATM in front of a cop that they know is there, but don't care, that's being stupid, not being autistic.
I don't have to give a shit about how authority and power is granted to certain individuals, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that insulting the CEO in front of the company is not a good way to keep your job..
The article even gives a better example here: casually introducing yourself to the CEO and making a joke. If the CEO feels insulted by this, it's because he has "Authority" and you are "not respecting it" - but wait, the other CEO I met really appreciated this! Suddenly it makes no sense. There's a special rule that this CEO insists I should know, but it's not even consistent with other CEOs. How am I supposed to know which authorities it's okay to make jokes with?
You can likely replace the word "autistic people" with smart people. Just playing the cards here, but if my IQ is 155 and yours is 120. Why should I listen to you?
Especially when I see you making what seem to be plain mistakes, which not only hurt yourselves, but create a society where your kids will be less satisfied.
Its not like I have the ability to make people do things, that would be a position of authority. Me not accepting me not being responsible for actions with plain evidence I was not in control. Not only proves the point those individuals are responsible for what happened to me, but their inability to accept they should be listening to me makes me most concerned.
Off the top of my head:
- I may know a fact that you do not. Your IQ does not make you aware of things you do not know.
- I may have a relationship with someone that you do not.
- I may have past experience that you do not.
- I may have different values than you. Your higher IQ does not dictate that we should make decisions according to your values.
- I may have access to resources (money, engineering teams) that you do not.
A meta comment is: If despite your higher IQ you were unable to consider these possibilities then IQ may not be a good proxy for the kind of intelligence a business may value.
- The person with 120 IQ is a subject matter expert in this particular matter and you are not.
- IQ is an approximation. It is probably the best one we have, but it is a very blunt and generalized metric. It is not evenly distributed across all areas of reasoning and functioning. A person with a 155 IQ or even a 200 IQ is going to be great at many things and awful at others. A person with 120 or even 80 IQ may be better in specific areas.
- Both you and the 120 IQ person might be overqualified for the matter at hand, so your "extra" intelligence is irrelevant.
- The person with 120 IQ is representing something larger than themselves, the accumulated wisdom of which dwarfs yours (imagine, I don't know, a 120 IQ forest ranger telling you how you should/shouldn't interact with particular flora and fauna)
- It may be a situation where it is impractical to have individualized rules for highly intelligent or highly capable individuals.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.8560...
It's a little strange to me that everyone accepted the premise of this claim since it's really, really obvious that the situation isn't a straightforward jump in IQ.
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a) because other people listen to that person, and one person's smarts only outstrips the strength multiplier of followers in extraordinary circumstances
b) because they're part of the tribe, and like it or not you're gonna be working with them. More useful to everyone to invest resources into figuring out what makes them tick than tuning them out.
c) because responsibility is rarely as divestable as one might hope. If my team lead doesn't listen to me and then sets up the team to shit the bed, I can certainly document "I wasn't involved in this decision; I would have done it differently," but the response upper management's gonna give me is "If you knew a better approach, why didn't you coach the team lead to take it?"
Because we don't live in Gattaca
I can think of some counter-examples
But to the point of the linked article, I think the author misses the point and insults neurotypicals and neurodivergents alike with the his assertion that normals just love them some blind submission as a default way of being, and autists just can't do that
The other engineers would go by his office to make small talk, chat about great projects they're working on, and sports they both like. I never did any such thing and stayed in my office working.
Then when we all went out for drinks at the end of the week, I chatted as I normally would but I felt like the new boss kept shutting down my stories to get a laugh from the others. I felt like I was already being judged. That's when I reached negative respect for this new guy.
Over time I would see him going to all the other engineers' offices to chat and catch up on projects, but never mine, and that further cemented the feeling that this guy doesn't like me.
I felt that if my boss isn't going to make any effort to get to know me or respect me, then I'm not going to kiss his ass to make him like me. I'm sure he felt the same way, especially since he previously held a position of authority in the US military so he probably saw boot kissing as mandatory.
Once performance reviews came, even though I had met all the quantitative goals that were set, he gave me a bad rating because of qualitative reasons which I felt were injected into my review to make it negative to match his bias.
Once the pandemic hit I was fired, but I have a better job now. It doesn't pay as much, but is more interesting and is work from home, so suck it Scott!
So... you took it as a sign that he doesn't like you when he didn't come and talk to you, but you don't consider it reasonable that he took it as a sign that you didn't like him when you didn't talk to him?
Whenever we talked, it was because I came to him. He never came to me, I was ignored. The more I felt that he disliked me, the less frequently I went to talk to him and resorted to emails. I felt that he had already written me off.
In the performance review, one of the things mentioned was that I wasn't communicating with him enough. I pointed out how one-sided our relationship was, I would come to him and rarely the reverse. He said that he was very busy and doesn't always have time to come by my office but couldn't explain how he did that for all the other engineers.
I knew that I should suck up to him if I wanted to succeed there but the circumstances caused me to detest working there so I cared less and less about the threat of being fired.
Nobody expects the teacher to bring in candy, but it's kind of awful if they only bring it in for the students they like.
"Rule of law" is ideal, even for laws you don't agree with.
etc.
Further:
> Then when we all went out for drinks at the end of the week, I chatted as I normally would but I felt like the new boss kept shutting down my stories to get a laugh from the others.
I would take that as a sign he didn't like me.
If that's an accurate characterization (and your stories weren't tone deaf, or going on too long, or something), then the new boss might have already decided to put you into an "other" group, and was using that to try to build rapport with a different group, in a juvenile cliques kind of way.
I've seen execs doing things like this. In one example, at a team-building dinner, where I suspected that the exec had already decided they didn't like one of the shy/nerdy engineers there, as the engineer was walking away from the table, the exec made a crude sexual comment to the table about the person's figure. (I don't know why the exec thought that a table of diverse engineers would go for that kind of locker room 'camaraderie', nor why the exec would expose themself and the company in an open&shut case way like that, except maybe they didn't think that through.)
If you imagine that people will sometimes revert to grade school or high school, some behavior makes a lot more sense. Also, alcohol at company events is risky.
When out for beers, he said his wife does horseback barrel racing and I said I used to do that as a kid and it's a cool sport. He just replied, "Hah, I find that hard to picture" and got some chuckles from the other guys before changing the subject, not following up to learn more. He asked what our favorite movies were and everyone received approval except when I said A Clockwork Orange, he said that was weird.
I was already masking HARD to fit in at this company. Another coworker had already outted me as an atheist as a joke at a weekly meeting. I didn't find that funny, my boss's boss in the room had previously invited me to his church as had another coworker.
I used to like this job under my old boss. Now it hurt and I didn't want to be there anymore, but the paycheck was so good I knew I'd never earn that much again in my whole life. Once I started hating my boss, I may have been "silent quitting" without realizing it. I blame him and he blames me, I don't know.
This is actually the real reason many jobs stayed work from home indefinitely. There is a significant productivity boost from making it difficult to socialize with coworkers. So many places were struggling with this problem.
I would be surprised to hear that Scott is still working there either. This style of management is pretty much dead at all but the crappiest and most miserable small businesses that don't know better.
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I don't think I need to go into the senseless rules that govern our lives and social interactions, because the 'rules and order' people won't see them and those who know what I'm talking about already know.
It also helps to establish a reputation as a boundary pusher who will maliciously comply with stupid rules.
Higher education is a great field to work in, because everyone expects a certain amount of that sort of thing from you anyways.
Right or wrong it has kept me gainfully employed for decades. Ethics and personal identity are very funny things when you have to eat.
Can you list a few examples?
I've never encountered a bonafide example before on HN that did not serve at least some purpose(s)/benefit some group(s)/etc..., after a careful analysis. So I'm a bit skeptical as to the claim.
That, and it's also good to know that every boundary has gaps, either through policy, implementation, or both. When you find a useful gap there is no point in drawing attention to it since you are just following the rules.
To give you an example from the show that actually happened to me, I went into the men's room. The stalls were full so I used the wheel chair stall. I didn't see anyone in a wheel chair in the building. I got yelled at by someone, a 'rules and order' person, who claimed I was never under any circumstances to use the wheel chair stall if I wasn't in a wheel chair, which is stupid. There are a lot of rules like that and neurotypical people just accept, but I can't.
Maybe those from our own culture. There are “rules and order” people in every culture, but the rules are different.
One other effect of this fact is that we (e.g. me) recognize who the rules-and-order people are based on how they follow our society’s rules. In another culture, we may peg someone as a free-thinker, only to find out that they are very conservative, just conservative in a way we don’t recognize. We have to recognize what rules people care about in a culture before we can really identify which people care about “the rules”.
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I find the DSM V alterations to the terminology jarring; they seem to have somewhat erased the original autists. It's a bit like if mild epilepsy suddenly became fashionable and the people having callosotomies had to sit in hospital watching TV stars talking about how their fugue states gave them special powers.
None of this makes anything in the article incorrect, of course.
I don't think the DSM-5 is unreasonable. Seems like it's just misapplied. https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(.... Even under DSM-4, how many of these Tiktok diagnosees would qualify as Aspergers? https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/autism/case-modules/pdf/... lists the same kind of criteria as is in the DSM-5.
The self diagnosers sort of forget that you're supposed to have all of the things listed: persistent communication deficit, repetitive behaviors, symptoms present in childhood, and symptoms that limit and impair everyday functioning. You can't just only have one because it's a "spectrum."
Looking at the DSM-5 list: when I was little I made eye contact with almost nobody and refused to go on play structure equipment if there was someone else on it. I still like having a "schedule" all the time and am sensitive to sounds - who isn't? But I don't have autism: I can hold a conversation fine and don't have impaired function in everyday life.
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You are no better than I.
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That really upsets certain people.
The Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene with the peasants debating supreme authority with King Arthur is a good representation of this.
NB: This isn't a SovCit situation where one doesn't recognize society around them, nor does it imply resisting authority as a Sovcit might want do.
And of course, no autistic person is the same. Symptoms, limits, and so on are different for everyone.
How about the gate agent at the airport, who boards and deboards people from the plane?
I don't necessarily love listening to that person, but I accept that we probably need somebody doing that job so that we can hopefully get the plane boarded and deboarded in some sort of nonchaotic way.
The thought of whether or not this person is "better" than me seems rather bizarre. They probably know how to board a plane better than me, and even if they don't, it's generally still going to be better than 200 arriving and departing passengers devolving into a free-for-all because they have 200 competing opinions of how things should work.
Generally, most sorts of "authority" I experience on a daily basis fall into this sort of mental bin for me.
Obviously that's a rather trivial example.
What's the logical endpoint of "nobody is better than me" or "nobody is better than anybody?" Just like, no rules whatsoever for anybody, unless you explicitly opt-in to some specific rule or authority figure you happen to like?
And how does this even relate to autism and/or one's (lack of) empathy?
No. And you're correct, IMO, that people can swap into roles without being jerks about it. And I don't think many Autistic folks have a problem with those kinds of people.
But there are also those who gravitate to positions of power and authority just for the power and authority. They're the ones who will say "I won't respect you until you respect me," and mean "I won't treat you like a human until you treat me as an authority (as your better)."
And if you haven't run into that kind yet... good. May you be lucky enough to never run into them.
You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.
At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.
As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.
To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.
Negotiation as equals and on the merits of the matter at hand. For example, rather than a senior colleague telling a junior colleague to do something "because I say so", the expectation would be that they actually provide justification for their decision, and to persuade you rather than simply overrule there is disagreement. Ditto for a parent, teacher or other authority figure.
And that where there is unresolvable disagreement (and one persons decision has to be followed despite lack of consensus), that there is accountability around that decision, and that the results of it are taken into account when resolving future disputes. In other words, authority is earned not decreed.
There's a good likelihood that an authority figure _does_ see themselves as better than subordinates, yes.
> no rules whatsoever for anybody, unless you explicitly opt-in to some specific rule or authority figure you happen to like?
This is a Sovcit scenario, one I specifically avoided.
I've seen law enforcement used as an example of Authority a couple times, but I'm not convinced the author has any idea what they're talking about (yes, I am dismissing his authority as an expert).
To him, "Authority" seems to mean social status-- i.e. how do you react when you meet a celebrity or billionaire CEO at the supermarket. These people aren't better than you because they're older than you, famous or have money. Despite everyone else bowing to them, that isn't Authority. Those people who value such traits are simply fools.
Autistic people aren't retarded. Airport personnel and law enforcement have leverage over you-- if not the risk of getting shot, maced or tased, they are what stands in your way of getting to your flight on time. You will respect their authority or you will miss your flight and/or suffer pain and inconvenience.
The autistic are perfectly capable of reasoning their way through this while simultaneously recognizing that the airport cop is Just Some Guy. Whether you recognize him as an agent of the state is irrelevant; right now, he's just an obstacle in your path that compliance happens to be the simplest path around.
Someone with antisocial personality disorder may decide that confrontation for the sake of belligerence is worth it though.
> Autistic students (and I speak from long experience) will not bow to authority for authority’s sake. [...] They will respect it, if respect can be had, and they’ll do what they’re told— if it makes sense; but they won’t blindly accept authority.
This is literally the exact same advice you find in the opening pages of any book about Huskies.
They are a pain in the ass to train because they don't respect human authority, but the most you can hope for is fostering a mutually-beneficial relationship where they'll stick around and do what you say for as long as you make it worth their while. When you stop paying them in treats, they chew up your furniture and run away. They don't give a shit about you.
We don't just call dogs autistic, declare them unreasonable and let them have the house while we live under the porch. Somehow they still serve as cooperative work animals despite their independence. Somehow they can still be trained to be useful to us.
People just need to believe that homeless people are inherently bad in some way. It makes it really hard to discuss solutions, since they’re all “drug addicts who should be in jail.”
The weird part is if you show them up or prove that you're better than them in some way they become extremely ass kissing.
I find it disingenuous and nauseating and it seems that a lot of people are like this if not most people.
Maybe this is just the normal human hierarchy at work and I have autism and I don't connect with it.
I just try to treat everyone equally. I guess I'm the weirdo.
I think that's usually correct. However, I would point out that does not constitute respecting the authority. The extra reason is needed because the authority is not respected unless judged to have earned that authority. Which is a very different attitude to the one I typically see from neurotypical people where it is often seen as a moral duty to respect an authority figure just because they have been given a position of authority by society.
If the reason did not make sense then that could be an issue and we would discuss.
“I picked him for the job because he is more attractive and has the same hobby as me”
“I want you to do this thing which is illegal to knowingly do but if I don’t explicitly say it then it’s permissible”
“I feel like you are faking sick days or being lazy but I don’t have any proof for this accusation so I just want to subtly imply it to pressure you in to changing”
I'm neurodivergent and always find it off-putting when people talk of things like "neurotypical values". neurotypical people are no more of a monolith than neurodivergent people. I've personally met plenty of neurodivergent people with a sense of hierarchy or authority, and plenty of neurotypical people who don't. if you want to make claims like this, at the very least back it up with a study. don't just say how you feel and assume that applies to everyone