[ebjaas_2022]

> What I don't know how to handle (as evidenced by some comments here) is when to divulge how much I study / what fields I have a lot of experience in. I never understood where the boundary is between people thinking you are a know-it-all and arrogant, and thinking you are an idiot.

I think the thing to understand, is that non-autistics are very, very particular about the difference between what's inside their own mind, and what's inside your mind. Even on a topic that you may know "everything" about, you still know nothing about what the other person knows about the same subject. Everything on the right side of the below drawing (assuming that you're the one on the left) is in the dark to you, or close to it. And, likewise, everything on your side is in the dark to the other person.

  |   O                                                           O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                                           |   |
  |  / \                                                         / \  |

The process of discussion, as seen from the non-autistic person's point of view, is to let you peek into their mind, and to let you see what they know (or don't know) about the topic that's being discussed. And they expect you to let them peek into your mind, and to let them see what you know about the subject. What they are very particular about is that their facts (about the subject at hand) are their facts, and your facts are your facts. Their mental model is to try and align their own thoughts about the subject at hand with your thoughts about the subject. Their goal is for both of you to "see" each others minds, and to bring them into sync, on the topic at hand. It's a process of alignment of two minds, on a particular topic.

  |   O                                O   |
  | ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
  |   |                                |   |
  |  / \                              / \  |

The autistic person, instead, has a tendency to think that when he has studied everything that there is to know about a subject it allows him to not consider the contents of the other person's mind, because the contents "should" be the same. This is what's considered as "arrogant" by the non-autistic counterpart. To him, when you do this - and I will stress this, even if you know everything there is to know in the world about a particular subject - it's a transgression. To him it's as if you disregard the existence of the contents of his mind. He wants you, and expects you, to consider the contents of his mind, even in the case where it's blank on a particular subject.

What non-autistic persons react to, usually, is the blurring of the line between what's inside their mind, and what's inside your mind. When you see it as if you're just communicating the objective facts of the situation, and "divulging how much you've studied the topic", they view it as a transgression, and as a side-stepping of the natural process of "alignment of minds".

Finally, since your user name has a sort of Nordic ring to it, I will disclose a related poem by the Norwegian poet Haldis Moren Vesaas (if you're not Nordic, just disregard it):

  ORD OVER GRIND

  Du går fram til mi inste grind
  og eg går òg fram til di.
  Innanfor den er kvar av oss einsam,
  og det skal vi alltid bli.

  Aldri trenge seg lenger fram,
  var lova som gjaldt oss to.
  Anten vi møttest titt eller sjeldan
  var møtet tillit og ro.

  Står du der ikkje ein dag eg kjem
  fell det meg lett å snu
  når eg har stått litt og sett mot huset
  og tenkt på at der bur du.

  Så lenge eg veit du vil kome iblant
  som no over knastrande grus
  og smile glad når du ser meg stå her,
  skal eg ha ein heim i mitt hus.

[larve]

thanks for the comment. for what it's worth, I absolutely don't recognize myself in either description.

If anything, I am a pretty good software engineer because I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).

There are many different ways of thinking, and they are right there in front of me, and some people are aware of certain patterns, certain people tend to consistently not realize this approach exists, others just can't back down from rewriting everything in a functional style, when others in the team don't do well with it. When I see programmers argue about style or programming language or framework I am often confused because I don't understand why they can't see that other people don't think like them :)

This same kind of behaviour can be observed all around us every day. I never understood how people get upset at staff at a restaurant, or get angry when someone bumps into them. Don't they realize that the other person didn't do it on purpose, and didn't mean harm? Why do people argue about politics so much? Don't they realize that other people have different values, and that we have a government in place to channel disagreement about them? Why yell at each other on facebook, don't you realize none of this is going to change the other person's mind?

[ebjaas_2022]

> I can "literally" see how people think about software when reading source code and pull requests (I say literally because these things are... objects I can manipulate in my mind? it's hard to describe, and it took me a while to realize not everybody sees it this way).

I think you're right.

The impression I get when I talk to an autistic person, or when I cooperate with him on a problem, is that he sees my thoughts and my ideas as "entities" within his own mind. This rhymes with what you say, that you perceive it as if other people's thought patterns are "objects that you can manipulate in your mind".

My subjective experience is that the autistic person will "dive into himself" to find the answer to who I am, in a given situation, while the non-autistic person will look outwards. It's as if the non-autistic person processes me in real time, using a massive parallel social GPU in his head, while the autistic person, instead, consults massive internal lookup tables to try and derive the same information.

I think the difference is fundamental. It has to do with the very "shelf system" in our brains; the way that we have stored information about the world, and made sense of it, since we were small kids. It's not something that we can change as adults, I think.