[distract8901]

> I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger

You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".

Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.

> for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly

This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.

Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.

[JohnBooty]

    And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is 
    and is not appropriate is one big stochastic 
    experiment that lasts your entire life

This is heartbreakingly true.

But for the specific case of this hypothetical example, and the slightly more generalized example of "what kind of humor might appeal to strangers to whom I've just introduced myself" it's actually kind of an easy lesson.

The answer is that you have to know somebody before you know what kind of humor is going to be cool with them.

And the answer is also that interrupting strangers to tell them jokes or even to simply say "hello" is likely to be rude, unless it's an social situation as opposed to just like, stopping your CEO in the hallway at 2PM on a Tuesday.

Those are the sorts of lessons everybody has to learn, autism or no. As somebody who's probably a bit on the spectrum himself I understand the struggle to an extent, but also it feels like the actually relevant lessons here in this specific case are pretty learnable even if we might learn them the hard way at first.