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It’s what makes me good at my job.
I thought going into engineering would be a better environment for this kind of questioning. It turns out my toddler-level frequency of “Why?” transcends bachelor level expectations, thus I must pursue even higher education.
Walking into a contract with uncurious junior engineers was frustrating to say the least.
Engineering, in general (not talking about programming) is a super conservative field. It’s crazy how many people I run into that are clearly intelligent, but have just been so silo’d into one field that they have no understanding of anything practical outside of their field.
Few things have benefited my career more than my obsessive desire to figure out what went wrong in as quick a time as possible
And few things exercise my mind more wonderfully than emergency mode high stakes troubleshooting
My grandfather was right, I should have been an electrician.
I think electrician is still too mundane for us.
Not when you get to the level of ‘The guy they call when the grid goes down’ level like my grandpa. The kind of intricate and expansive knowledge needed to address those issues is just the kind of mind fire I desire
He was deeper on the spectrum than me by a wide margin, honestly I have no idea how he managed to be so successful going diagnosed and unassisted his whole life. I bet his wives had a lot to do with it.
At this point he would probably be considered an electrical engineer.
Considering his work for Pratt & Whitney I’d guess he had the certs for engineer but he was also ridiculously proud of the fact he ‘came up through the ranks’ so identified more as a Master Electrician.
When he heard I went to college for CS he considered it a waste, I guess he grew up in a world where competence was enough. Not like that anymore
Nothing wrong with being a hedge engineer. I have a GED and associates in liberal arts.
What is the purpose of this post?
Why do you ask?
I need to know why
Why do you need to know it?
The existential dread of not knowing; gnaws at my psyche in uncomfortable ways that I cannot adequately put into words.
im confused by the mixed signals… am i too?
Imagine if an evil villain could delete all of the times in human history that an autistic person thought “why” about something seemingly unimportant WAYYY too hard?
Fuck… would we even have shoes? Toothbrushes? Washing machines? …idk It would be a devastating attack upon humanity in terms of pure capability, technology and knowledge, that is for sure.
I am not saying all of the important discoveries were made by autistic people, just like we all know that we have met some autistic people (wait, you ARE one of those people aren’t you!?) that are extraordinarily smart in their own way, and you can see in the people around them that they are such a powerful, clear lucid mind that they are loved and supported in their quirkiness because they move mountains (or don’t). As it goes with all minds that are different in one way or another… but certain machines and weapon systems… I just feel like… there HAS to be at least ONE autistic person behind that shit! Probably a lot of other kinds of minds too! Hopefully!
To anyone who hasn’t met those autistic people or is unaware they have, damn I am sorry those people are incredibly fun and illuminating to talk to wtf. Not that anyone in this lemmy community would fall under that category, just making a point like I get so mad when people attack autistic people for so many reasons, but weapon systems are a big one that is hard to argue with, weapons aren’t clubs and swords these days they are fiddly, super complex electronics warfare sensor ridden monstrosities… and they NEED the people developing and using them to understand the kind of horrifyingly long manuals some autistic people eat for breakfast while humming happily to themselves.
…and people dare to pick a fight with those people and their friends???
"I have a great idea let’s have a moral panic about autistic people and ostracize/punish/seperate them out while denying them the care they need (established by science) AND THEN try to fight wars using shit like this…
???
TL;DR People are silly
mine’s not orange
I do. And I know that folks will get snippy if I ask.
Thankfully, Wikipedia exists, and it is more than willing to vomit forth information without getting an attitude about it.
As it turns out, inexplicably, this is not a trait that works out well within corporate America… Source: Of course I know him, He’s me.
I want to know why other ppl don’t want to know why
Everyone has a different amount of curiosity for different things. Just because someone doesn’t want to know how a carburetor works doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in other things.
Also curiosity can be a luxury. Some people are very focused on following the beaten path because they think it might be safer. Start asking questions and rocking boats and you might cause problems. Curiosity killed the cat and all that. Over a lifetime people settle into their own groove of curiosity and satisfaction.
isnt it safer to not try without the why?
Because neurotypicals don’t actually think, they just respond to stimuli
🤨😬
You can deny it for now but someday you’ll agree with me. All it takes is enough exposure
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Or persist in a series of varying thoughtless reactions, whether lashing out or simply engaging without stopping to think with ‘depth’.
Though, I’ve also come to understand many people seem to have no model for cognitive engagement. Like, “How do I think about this situation I’m in?”. So, I try to give some grace, but, ffs, what the damn… I wish more people would just physically stop, physically pause, and think before doing something which just causes a bigger problem. Like gd, why is everyone in my family like this…
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Yes! I have to understand how a process works before I can do it myself.
To all the people who just “give it a go” without knowing exactly what they’re doing - I cannot comprehend how you do that.
I am currently reading into the religion of ancient germanic tribes. Sadly WE HAVE NOTHING! EVERYTHING IS LOST TO TIME!
We have a few names, but that is basicly it. Roman and christian sources are heavily bias so they cant be trustet
That’s really interesting. Can we make any educated guesses about what it was like?
Well we know how they lived and their culture (as always it depends on the region), how they dressed.
Religion wise, we know they had similar gods to to the norse/north germanics (skandinavia. You know thor, odin, frija, loki aso). They put people into the swamp. Criminals and religiouse human saceafises. We know that its religiouse human sacrafises because there are also animals and tools found in swamp beds.
Burrials and funerals were different to each region and tribe. Many in the south and north west burried their people in hills, like the celts. The bodies sometimes were put in specific positions. As the romans arrived, these practises noticeablely changed. Building dedicated buildings, giving offerings and money. From what i have also read is that cremetion and burning the body was also a common practise.
But how they really worshipped, and their mythologie we have nothing on as faar as i know.
Idk if that is true but i think we also know that they, also had some spiritual leaders. Oracles. Young virgin woman that could predict the future threw bones, weather speak to the gods and stuff, that had a set place where they lived and rulers traveled to them.
Things are waaayyy worse with the celts though. We know they had these druids. But we do not know what their job in society was. We guess they were spiritual leaders, maybe also medical, maybe diplomatic. The druids were not just a closed off people. Didnt write anything down themself, the forest was holy and no one but druids was allowed to be at their meetings and in their forrest.
I’m really curious about this too. We know that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes brought their gods to the British Isles - we have the days of the week Tir’s-day, Wodan’s-day, Frigg’s-day - but the Romans had already supplantdd the native Britons’ druidic traditions with Christianity. We already know little enough about this period of history but basically the only surviving writing we have about it is by Christian scholars like Bede written after the fact, with all their biases.
That’s really interesting thanks!
I am working on a mod for a game (and applying that same knowledge to a game later on)
So lots of theologie research. Its crazy.
There was a group of christians in the Mesopotamian delta in the early centurys of christianity, that saw incest as a holy ritus because adam and eve were siblings and therefore performed incest
Always. I always must understand why something needs to be done before I do it. Rare exceptions in people I have an absolute trust to make decisions for me.
I couldn’t cook a damn thing until Alton Brown showed me how/why cooking works.
Then I learned about all the types of cooking and why they work.
Then I looked at how the Michelin chefs do it and why they do the things they do.
Now I cook pretty well and occasionally pull off something way above my skill level.
Good Eats was an amazing show. Amazing, fun, educational! Loved it
Yeah that was the same for me. But I used Salt Fat acid as the book that I used to learn how to cook
Yes. I can’t help that everything is fascinating to me…
As a child I used to annoy the hell out of my mother, by asking why… I’m a scientist now. Now I wonder why, as the pay is shit 😂
As a child I used to annoy the hell out of my mother, by asking why
This is true for literally every kid. All kids are born scientists but many lose interest or get frustrated over time
When I was a kid and bugged my mom with ‘why’, she’d hand me a book about it and it would shut me up for hours
And yet I’m told that millenial parents doing the same with their kids and youtube is fine and just like how my mother would hand me a book
And we’re seeing the results come through highschool rn
I’m not sure if I understand it. Are you framing it as a bad thing that your mother got you a book about stuff you were interested in?
No I am saying that youtube is a poor substitute for reading
Shout out from IT: pay is good, working there today is shit (agile) and confusing as hell.
IT is fun until management comes in and wrecks the place with a load of time-consuming demands absent any reasoned justifications beyond things that don’t concern IT.
The neurotypical urge to not have a good enough answer and then bully the autistic person for asking the question.
(Not a comment on the post, just a frustration)
This is part of what I call “the allistic disability”. They always tried to make us believe we are disabled, but are we really?
are we really?
In many key aspects of day-to-day life…yes, we absolutely are.
It was a joke.
I understand that there are hardships linked to our condition, but many of them are not caused by our condition, rather by the world not willing to accomodate us the same way they accomodate NT’s.
That’s the same with most disabilities. For instance, blindness does have some intrinsic hardship, but then it also has the hardships that come from a society that assumes you have vision and does not accommodate you.
For some people absolutely, but “day-to-day life” is built to not only serve “neurotypical” people but generally to make sure the worst of them don’t need to actually improve anything. Pretty much entire concept of “polite society” and the cowardly basis behind so many instances of “that’s just how we do it ok?!” are rooted in people who cannot effectively communicate blaming you for not being exactly like them and/or afraid to speak up against their authority. People who “don’t understand social situations”, in my experience, are often just people who have a harder time letting assholes steamroll though and like, yea it sucks for them when society punishes them but it’s not their fault that society is a collection of highly flawed rules whichbessentially boil down to demands to not question authority.
Some autustic people have genuine problems that give them problems even when/if those around them have the patience to work with them. Many just make certain worthless people insecure and that’s not their fault.
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Yeah we’re different to NTs, we have different perks but defecates in lots of areas.
I fit in well enough but notice where I’ve said something that’s quite specific to my interests or believed something that was obviously a joke. Shit sucks but every day it gets easier, lean into it and don’t be afraid to be yourself.
We’re not normal but fuck it we ballin’
edit: leaving the autocorrect in, was a ~1am post for me 🫠
Did you just say you shit in a lot of places?
I’m not normally one to point out a spelling mistake, but there is a very important difference between someone with deficits in lots of areas and someone who defecates in lots of areas.
That looks like an autocorrect, not a spelling mistake, and a hilarious one at that!
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This is kind of the core question of disability, I think. What is disability if not a mismatch between your own way of navigating and functioning vs assumed normativity? If your own way of navigating and functioning was the assumed normative mode, would you still be “disabled”? A lot of our societys normative behaviors can in some way be hindering to those exhibiting them, but society is ready to provide full support to compensate for such things as they are a part of the normative mode. It’s a fun thought experiment to consider how difficult it might be for a more or less normative person to function in an autistic society that only recognized and provided for normative brains to the degree that our own society provides for autistic brains. And on that note - Would an autistic society be better at providing for those people than ours does for us? Or would we close ranks around a new normativity the way that our own too often does?
The neurtypical urge to agree what the autist is saying is correct, but refuses to accept it or act on it because they don’t like the way they are being told about it, then to in the end blame the autist when the predicted catastrophe comes because ‘you didn’t try hard enough to convince me’
It has brought be very close to being arrested more than once and I’m sure I’ll be in jail over this in the fullness of time.
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It’ll be the death of me.
Absolutely. I often say I have terminal insatiable curiosity. It will be quelled when I am room temperature.
“So this is what dying feels like…fascinating.”
“I wonder what happens next”
But I’m not in a rush, I’ll wait patiently lmao
I’d love to know, but one of the possible outcomes is that I won’t get to learn about anything ever again. Too risky.
Same, I’m not done with what’s in this room yet
This is a tough one. I have an autistic child. I love that they’re curious, but sometimes, for all of our safety, I can’t explain why I need them to stop talking about a dangerous subject… for now.
Great. I love that you’re curious about bombs. We’re in line for security at the airport. I need you to be quiet now.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
You dropped this, king/queen/highly placed noble: \
