Rant: Autism, Abnormal Labels, Sickness, and Statistics

Was discussing this set of social phenomenon, { 

1. "the assertion that some behaviours are normal, despite being implicitly present, rather than explicitly defined", 

2. "the assertion that people should demonstrate sociability by assuming the first assertion, then complying with it", 

3. "the assertion that non-compliance is a disorder",

4. "the assertion that disorders are to be made compliant with the norm"

}

Haha, high-context cultured people who believe in common sense sensitivities are welcome to castigate rule-oriented people as "disordered", and rule-oriented people are symmetrically welcome to castigate emotionally sensitive people as disabled, I think 😛

I just happen to have chosen to believe, years and years ago, that sensitive people are cripples. I don't think there's an objective right or wrong, it's just a preference for what sorts of societies we each want to build out of the world that we are collectively given.

Well, my personal view is that high-context cultures are degenerate and I am generally opposed to endorsing them.

On Gazing; Aside, Body Language

 On gazing. I was telling a friend, I spend half my life worrying that "my stare is too intense", due to various complainers. So generally I have a program to regularly reduce eye-contact duration with conversationalists who are new to me. In reaction to this, I have had feedback from potential investors (who later become er, friends), that my body language during pitches was not sufficiently robust due to my sporadic eye-contact. So in conclusion, I must say, it is best to just imitate the eye-contact pattern of your conversational partner, based on second-to-second feedback. Most people do not actively manage this. But some people do.

As for deception, we have to assume that anyone may be smart enough to lie through performance of whatever body language they presume to be suitable for the event.

So body language, like other language has to be read as "what the subject says," in the broader context of "pay less attention to what people say, than what they do."

"I don't meet people"

 Thoughts on introverts and social meetings: a lot of them assert, "I don't meet people." This should be read as "I don't meet people, except when I really want to." Hence, if you're in a meeting and this comes up, it means that you're a special person and you should treasure their time explicitly (it is polite, by their culture). And if you're not in a meeting and this comes up, it basically means "fuck off". Given that I don't not-meet people, I should probably assume for the purposes of this edict that I'm an extrovert. Of course, the running joke I tell my friends is that I'm a repressed extrovert. Maybe I want to spend all my time with people who are clever and safe ... whereas it seems that most of the people I run into seem stupid and dangerous. Or maybe I would be crudely social if uninhibited, so offensive as to be imprisoned if I didn't just avoid socialising obnoxiously. Ah, the joke. I am.