A little girl sees her mum cooking sausages and asks "mum, why do you cut the ends off of the sausages before you fry them?" Her mum replies "well, that's how I learned it from my mother."
So the girl calls her grandma and asks "grandma, why do you and mum always cut the ends off of sausages before you fry them?" The grandma replies "well, that's how I learned it from my mother."
So the girl calls her great grandmother and asks "great grandma, why do you, mum and grandma always cut the ends off of sausages before you fry them?" The great grandma replies "have they not bought a bigger pan yet?"
My family members always get up in arms when I tell them I changed the family recipe for one dish or another. "You can't change perfection!" Then they try it and ask for the recipe. I hate reverence for the mystical ancestors; they can be - and often are - wrong.
Mom, please get off the internet. It's not good for you.
For clarification, Just joking. That sentence was one of the most repeated anwsers to everything when i dared to ask how something works from my mother.
And also "this is how we've always done it" - cool, you've always done it wrong.
I literally did that when I started my current gig, because they were doing so many things manually that were trivially automated and didn't require a three page checklist and multiple hours of time. Within 3 months I took a 4-5hr/instance task into a 30 minute one that also gives you 80% of the shit you need to check off on the QA sheet.
This is me to my core. (I mean, just check the username.) The easiest way to lose my trust is to say the reason is "because I said so." Okay, but why do you say so? Is there a real reason, or are you being a buzz-kill? Because plenty of people have arbitrary reasons for things and sometimes that's what it comes down to.
I can recall specific instances where I was given a reason and it made all the difference. Like a lot of little kids, I used to scream when having fun. Just saying, "Don't do that" didn't make an impact. But when my mom explained that when she hears me scream, she thinks I'm in trouble, and if I scream for no reason it'd make it harder for her to respond if I were actually in trouble, that's the day I stopped.
A little bit of explanation can go a long way. Sometimes people treat kids like they can't understand deeper reasoning, but that's not true for everyone.
I pay it forward now. A kid I worked with preferred to point at things using his middle finger instead of his pointer finger, even when the thing he was pointing at was on the ceiling. When I told him to use his pointer instead and he asked why, I told him, "Some people think that means something very mean. I don't want people to think you're trying to be mean." That's all it took for him to start using his index finger instead.
Point is, when people explain why something is done a certain way, they can be far more likely to respect their rule. I get that there are times when quick obedience is required, like when there's imminent danger. However, explaining more trivial situations builds the trust necessary to navigate those moments better. If someone's always pushing for authority over arbitrary things, they shouldn't be surprised when people (especially kids) don't listen to them when the matter is serious. Which is why I take the time to explain things with the kids I work with - sometimes we really do need to move quickly, particularly when another kid is acting out aggressively and we need to leave the room. They know I'll give reasons when there is time, so when I tell them to do something with urgency, they know things are getting real and it's time to move.
I think one of the reasons some of the little kids in my life like me is I try to give them honest explanations. They don't always fully understand, but I think they appreciate getting answers. And probably appreciate the occasional "I don't know, actually. Let's look it up"
it's frankly baffling to me that people don't just throw in a one-sentence explanation of why kids should do things, how tf are they supposed to learn?
Something i've come to realize is that an absolutely horrifying amount of my """autistic""" traits were just from not having had the opportunity to learn things, like when i was a kid i literally didn't understand that i was supposed to speak up if i'm in pain, i just sort of assumed that adults knew and didn't care.
Just in the past 5-10 years my life has been hugely improved by seeking out knowledge on my own, to the point that i now find informal social stuff so easy that other people are impressed.
It's why i'm an ardent supporter of the idea that most (or at least many) disabilities are almost entirely a problem with society, not the individual. And the depressing thing is that a lot of the adjustments to be made are really not that significant at all.
My parents did this as well, and I have massive respect for them because of it. Similarly, the only time my dad would yell at me was when something was urgent and dangerous and he needed me to do the thing right then and there's no time to explain. I knew I could always ask for an explanation after the fact.
What is an example of a safety rule who's conditions no longer exist which would not have the conditions almost immediately return if the rule was removed?
Like every example I can think of is a regulation to stop companies from hurting people which they would simply resume doing given the choice, thus making us still need the rule?
What is an example of a safety rule who’s conditions no longer exist which would not have the conditions almost immediately return if the rule was removed?
My job is populated by dinosaurs that only recently adopted git for version control. They had some rules and procedures that made a kind of sense when deployment meant "I'll scp the files to the prod server", but don't add value anymore.
Some people had a rule where after "deploy" they would SSH into prod and check the md5 hash of the files and compare them to their local copy. You don't have to do that.
They also wanted to only allow one person to work on a file at the same time because "you can overwrite their changes". Git handles that fine (unless you really fuck up the merge conflict, admittedly)
"Safety Law" that is still on the books, but not enforced.
Kentucky has a law that states that all women drivers must be preceded by a flagger on foot, to warn oncoming pedestrians and other traffic. The true irony of this law is that it was passed before Kentucky had paved a single road, and the cars of the time still used wagon style wheels. This meant that those cars were practically "on rails" as they were driving in the ruts that other wagon and car wheels had created in the roads.
i mean more like rules as adaptation to dangerous condition that no longer exists instead of rules that prevent the dangerous condition from occuring. like, i have a habit of boiling all drinking water even after moving to a place that doesn't require it
tons of things relating to food, like here in sweden you can honestly straight up just eat raw chicken and you'll probably be fine, in germany raw ground pork is a fairly normal dish, but in other parts of the world and in the past this would have fucking horrified people.
I don't want to "probably" be fine. I don't want to roll a D20 when I eat chicken and I get salmonella if I roll a 1. And why is your chicken so clean anyway that you can get to "probably"? Because of a ton of laws and regulations mandating cleanliness in the processing plants.
Conservatives are measurably dying at slightly higher rates because they have stupid beliefs and believe lies about things like drinking raw milk.
Some fire safety laws predate modern fire resistant building materials and active fire suppression. A big example is the requirement for multiple stairwells in multi family homes.
Sometimes the real reason is uncomfortable and they don't want to say it out loud. Like, "the CEO is an idiot, and wants it this way for stupid reasons"
Though maybe "the CEO doesn't understand how Google calendar works, so he thinks putting our time off in a shared spreadsheet is easier" would satisfy?
At my job a lot of stupid things come out of "someone high ranking doesn't understand computers" or "they don't benefit from fixing this, so it's easier for them to leave it stupid"
ITT rampant discrimination/ableism. People acting like the world is functional or that most rules make sense and are grounded in reality.
If somebody asks why a rule is the way it is, something really beautiful happens if people entertain and allow that questioning.
Was the rule made that way to simply punish someone in the past? Could the rule be improved? Does the rule apply to the present day? Could the rule be done away with?
If the enforcement of rules is taken seriously, the questioning, validity, and improvement of those rules should be, as well.
Otherwise, we live in an authoritarian society that actively encourages enforcing/following draconian rules no one understands - rules that would likely be enforced improperly or in an unbalanced sense, because nobody can properly explain it when somebody questions the rule (in good faith).
Having trouble with authority and/or being neurodivergent doesn't mean you are anti-social, dangerous, or bad for the workplace.
Bad rules, however, can be anti-social or create a culture of anti-social behavior, they can be dangerous or harmful (especially if they can not be explained and are not widely understood), and they can be bad for the workplace. It may just not be readily apparent when everybody keeps their heads down and says yes all the time to bullshit.
It's like people think I'm just trying to be an asshole. I really don't like starting conflict without having a good reason, and questioning the questionable is one of the best reasons out there.
I swear, some of my recent posts have brought out some nasty responses that I didn't expect. On one hand, I don't want to hold myself back from posting stuff just because I fear unjustified backlash. At the same time, I need to better prepare myself for it.
I'm sorry your experience has been less than ideal. I enjoy every single one of your posts that I've caught and I truly appreciate them.
I suggest doing what I did, just accept that every experience (in this case, post on social media) is a learning opportunity for yourself and others.
Some people have more learning to do, and we don't have to blame them or feel badly about ourselves for being discriminated against, or not being understood/accepted, or having our intentions misread. You clearly aren't trying to hurt anyone!
You said it in your reply earlier to me, embracing yourself and all your quirks helped you move forward. That helped me! Think about all of the people who are helped by the discussions you spark and move forward proudly! 💚
You're right. You can also learn a lot about the culture and society around you because of that questioning, even if you end up still following the rules.
On the other hand, what's there to gain from following the rules without question and forcing others to do the same? The only thing I can imagine right now that could be gained is the feeling that you are helping society "stay in the right track".
This means that there are about 3 options:
Learn something new;
Continue to follow the rules without question while trying to force others to not learn something new, and feel good about it.
Do nothing and continue to follow the rules (you're not bothered enough to learn something new, but also don't want to be a pain in the ass);
Notice that when questioning the rules, you might come to the conclusion that there's no harm in following the rules, or that following the rules is what's the best for you or those around you.
Questioning ≠ opposing.
Question = checking validity and understanding why.
For the reasons Michael has outlined above, questioning the rules feels like the most productive approach.
Yes, much better, and not only that - I advocate for them (even when it's unpopular). I'm somebody who thinks even Peter Thiel can choose another way of being and I'd be happy to help them out if they ever decide to release their ambitions for world domination.
Me? Suggest illegal action? Never. The matrix can be released without advocating for any harm, loss of freedom, or suggesting anything illegal. It just takes a willingness to reform our justice system and engage in rehabilitative or restorative justice, justice that is based on a foundation of consent.
If Peter Thiel wants to surveil the entire world and create AI-based tools to enslave humanity, with his consent, we can answer his desire and make him a computer program that resembles the matrix/our world. Let him cook and enslave/kill billions in a virtual reality he is empowered to help create. We could even employ human actors who choose to participate in his recovery. When he's gotten it out of his system, he can be assisted in joining the society he sought to enslave under the guise of libertarian ideology.
Is the rule well intentioned but impossible or self defeating to apply consistently, and the intent needs to be known because that's the only part that's worth a single fuck?
If somebody asks why a rule is the way it is, something really beautiful happens if people entertain and allow that questioning.
What happens in the interim? Is the rule enforced while it's under debate, or does the question suspend the enforcement?
If I tell someone to move their car because they're blocking the bike lane, I'm not inviting a debate about whether it's a good idea to have a rule like that. The rule is there to save me (a biker) time on my commute, and stopping to explain the rule would defeat the purpose of the rule.
Same with the tech support caller who insists that the support agent explain everything to the user, without the background knowledge of being able to understand the explanation. It's a waste of time.
Or, if a rule is suspended while being challenged, then people can opportunistically challenge rules to try to get an advantage. That's why pretty much any sport that allows for challenges during a game/match limits the number of challenges and limits the scope of calls that can be challenged, and has a specific limited period for proposing rule changes (in the off-season, to take effect the next season).
Sometimes people are just annoyingly obtuse, and their challenges to a rule or the application of a rule do more harm than good. It's important to be able to justify a rule, but it's also important to limit the time, place, or manner in which that rule can be challenged.
If I tell someone to move their car because they’re blocking the bike lane, I’m not inviting a debate about whether it’s a good idea to have a rule like that.
To be fair, most people doing stuff like that know very well, why the specific rules exist, but do not care, and are intentionally breaking them. In this example, if you have a driving licence, I image in most places they require you learning the rules of traffic, so they can be assumed to already have the knowledge. If they cared about the actual specifics of the reason, they would have asked, when they had to learn about it: thus them demanding answers for the rule on the fly, should also be assumed to be dishonest.
And also in this example, if you are unable to figure out on your own, why you should not endanger bikers, by putting huge metal obstacles, with suddenly opening doors in front of them, means you should not have a driving licence at all.
They always have some reason, they think is good enough for rule breaking - and might be, like some medical emergency or something, but those times would normally be solved with a polite discussion anyway, after the situation allows it - but usually it is just them being selfish morons.
What happens in the interim? Is the rule enforced while it’s under debate, or does the question suspend the enforcement?
I guess that would depend on the organization and the nature of the rule. If it's over 100 degrees outside, and there is a rule forbidding shorts and temperature-appropriate clothing, would you enforce a rule and make somebody wear pants and long-sleeves if there are no safety concerns or reputational risks for dressing down during the heat?
If I tell someone to move their car because they’re blocking the bike lane, I’m not inviting a debate about whether it’s a good idea to have a rule like that. The rule is there to save me (a biker) time on my commute, and stopping to explain the rule would defeat the purpose of the rule.
I was more talking about workplace rules that are not time-sensitive. Like another commenter put it, we're not talking about debating rules during a bomb defusal.
Same with the tech support caller who insists that the support agent explain everything to the user, without the background knowledge of being able to understand the explanation. It’s a waste of time.
As somebody with a background in IT, I disagree. You can't assume to know what somebody does or doesn't know, what they can understand or not - otherwise you risk offending that person. What you can do, however, is document higher-level procedures, terms, and concepts into writing as you go and pass that along with a broad, but succinct, explanation verbally. When they ask for detail, you have already provided it in writing. You can direct any further concerns to email or text (if you have that option) to save time, or schedule another call at a later point to address any concerns.
Or, if a rule is suspended while being challenged, then people can opportunistically challenge rules to try to get an advantage. That’s why pretty much any sport that allows for challenges during a game/match limits the number of challenges and limits the scope of calls that can be challenged, and has a specific limited period for proposing rule changes (in the off-season, to take effect the next season).
Each workplace can handle this on their own. I have no specific thoughts on this matter besides to say that I am someone who is not an advocate for hierarchy and traditional workplace/ownership structures. I think worker-owned cooperatives are an ideal to strive for as a society. Workers deserve a piece of the pie of the place they work hard at. In such an organization, rules would be likely made to preserve the integrity of the space e.g. no bigotry or discrimination.
Sometimes people are just annoyingly obtuse, and their challenges to a rule or the application of a rule do more harm than good. It’s important to be able to justify a rule, but it’s also important to limit the time, place, or manner in which that rule can be challenged.
I specifically made sure to include that I specified "in good faith". That is subjective, though. If somebody is challenging rules to game the system or get an undue advantage, I'm not sure that is in good faith. I guess it depends on the nature of the employment. For example, if it's sales related, and employees compete for sales, I could see questioning a rule, such as an ethical rule, to increase sales or performance in a way somebody can personally benefit from as not qualifying as being in good faith.
As for somebody being perceivably "annoyingly obtuse", that is also subjective. There should still be a procedure to deal with the rule being questioned, that doesn't waste resources or time on trivial matters while still addressing the concern with a pro-social process.
Right lol poor kid. "Don't question anything, just mask and shut up so nobody thinks you're insufferable."
Lowkey sounds like what the parent went through and views as the 'normal' way of dealing with being ND.
Aren't you the guy who thinks some invisible, male entity created the entire universe? Did this male and masculine entity create evil and is he now powerless to stop it? Or is it that this invisible penis having guy actually enjoys the suffering and tortures souls for eternity?
That's weird. The Bible is pretty specific about god's gender. God created everything but not evil? So god didn't actually create everything then? Or is he just powerless to stop it?
That's not the point. HE, as you refer to HIM as, can either be powerful enough to destroy all evil or is not good so does not stop evil from happening. Whether eradicating evil destroys you or not is irrelevant. Your existence contradicts your teachings.
So your penis having God, that used his penis to impregnate a virgin and cuck her fiance, is either not all powerful or not all good. Which is it?
Questioning social norms doesn't necessarily makes you an asshole, it depends on how it is approached.
By not defying them we will remain stagnant, imagine the downhill slope we would end up on if no one ever questioned why a man shouldn't love another man or a woman shouldn't love another woman.
People shut you down because many are intolerant to change and have their values under scrutiny is seen as hostile, but that doesn't imply compliance is productive. Of course, you don't want to this all the time, but teaching your kid to repress their displease of social norms doesn't sound good either.
because if you want to succeed let alone survive in life the attitude needs to change or it needs to hide.
Framing things this way is a big mistake and I don't see why it isn't more obvious to people that it's a mistake. You want someone you care about to believe that there is a binary choice between a sustainable existence and resolving their emotional needs? You couldn't make a more persuasive argument for suicidal thinking and self destructive behavior if you tried. And it isn't even true because they are mutually dependent priorities. It took me too many years and therapy to figure this out, you should really consider approaching the issue from a different angle than this one.
social norms have reasons as well. you cant just say "because social norms exist" and expect someone to accept that answer as a reason. its basically the same as saying "because everyone says so". so why dont you explain why the particular social norm is one in the first place. if you dont know maybe you need to find out before you try to enforce it on others.
also as an autistic person you shouldn't be encouraging people to mask. that shit is incredibly damaging to people. i masked for most of my life and what people dont see is that i was basically just surviving that whole time. i developed an incredible amount of anxiety, to the point where i couldnt really function in society for more than a few hours at a time before i had to isolate for a day or two to recover. i wore the mask so often for so long i didnt even know who i really was anymore. i didnt start to live until a few years ago when i started making a concerted effort to take off the mask and be myself. and you know what, people fucking accepted me way more than they ever did when i was being fucking fake all the time for the sake of appearances. you might mean well telling your son and all the autists who will see your comment to mask to get by, but all youre doing is fucking hurting them and you need to stop. masking isnt for us, its for you.
"If you don't learn to adopt them you will isolate yourself" might be true if there was 1 neurodivergent person. We are a community and personally I'm not interested in being more than acquaintances if I have to mask around you all the time. That's not a mutually beneficial relationship.
Autistics are constantly told this lie and it completely ignores the fact that there's plenty of other autistics that will understand and accommodate each other's needs.
This is an ableist way to see the world and my lived experience directly contradicts it.
That's awesome. Sadly, it does't apply to their kids PTA, their neighbors or their Jobs.
There is some level of faking and coping that greases the wheels and lets you not have to swim through the raw sewage of every other 'normies' ignorance.
Don't fold in and just give on every thing, but don't die on that fucking hill either.
As someone with that, I say, fuck off to that "authority".
Social norms are to be broken. We didn't get Stonewall riots by following police and law and order. We didn't get women's rights by meekly letting men trample us. We didn't get general suffrage by not rioting. We didn't get the right to strike by doing nothing.
I think the attitude you're being held back by, is more destructive. You're willfully following rules instead of questioning them, then deciding whether they are justified to follow or not.
I think what you're telling is not a "harsh reality" but a fabrication that neurotypical people tell themselves to justify "following orders". Fuck that shit.
If I did what you said me to, I'd be in a much worse mental headspace now. I feel sorry for your son. You blindly following social norms IS the problem. Try to address that instead. Try to actually understand why your son finds it difficult. Most of us find it difficult because the authority is not justified: there's no explanation, not even an imperfect one. We're instead told to just suck it up instead of hearing, "hey, yeah, you got a point." or even just engaging the discussion. Let it be the other way around. You go try to think if there's something that you both could agree as justified for a rule. If such a thing isn't there, then no need for the rule. Good authority doesn't flow from "because I say so", but from clear and justifiable rules.
I'm not going to mask myself because others refuse to take others into account. I have plenty of good interaction when I am not forced into masking, and less when I have to mask.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone through what your son is going through with you now? Should a good parent not want to try to understand their child instead, rather than to force their own norms onto their descendant?
Perfectly reasonable but let's also recognize that some social norms exist only because of tradition, and are unnecessary & uncomfortable, these social norms need to be questioned & challenged & done away with. When enough people question them and challenge them, and eventually get rid of some unnecessary oppressive social norms, we can continue to evolve as a species.
The issue isn't people choosing to behave a certain way, it's the expectation that everyone need to behave that way. If people want to do the same as everyone else, fine. If the standards ultimately don't matter, then who cares?
In my experience, the people who hate me for not following them wouldn't like me even if I tried to play along. I am often more respected when I confidently stand as myself than when I try to follow the rules as meekly as possible. If I'm gonna be freak either way, I'm better off keeping my head held high.
You're free to act however you want to. Honestly, that's fine with me.
But the crux of this is, if you're acting how you want, there's a good chance that people don't want to be around how you're acting, and those people shouldn't be chastised for not bending over backwards to cater to people who're behaving in different ways.
If you want on that ride, fine. But don't cry about it when no one else wants to accept that kind of thing.
If people are actively excluding somebody for being themselves, especially in a workplace, that is a problem that needs addressed.
It's one thing if you're being yourself and not being respectful at all, such as violating somebody's space or taking up their time excessively, it's another to silently shun somebody because they perceivably "went their whole lives being catered to".
That's discrimination. You said it yourself, "But don’t cry about it when no one else wants to accept that kind of thing."
Not accepting is discrimination. You can communicate your needs, such as a need for focus or a reduction in non-work conversation, without being a dick.
Avoiding is another level of discrimination. If you don't like someone or you are uncomfortable talking to someone, then say so instead of contributing to the culture of discrimination that they face.
Communicate your needs instead of acting like you don't owe people basic respect because they were perceivably catered to... because they are different.
You're right. Brahma, the one true god, did all this for us.
I didn't know he got rhe romans to kill that imposter on the cross but you learn something new every day.
Hinduism is false as it commits multiple fallacies in itself, it is a mess of thousands of contradicting books with no unity.
many modern hindus claim its a "philosophy/way of life not a religion".
Hinduism is also slowly dying, and the only reason it has a "billion people" is that the Indian government assumes that everyone is a Hindu at birth, and they made hinduism the "default" religion in their databases
By masochistically sacrificing Himself, to Himself, to pay a price He chose to charge of His own free will, in order to cleanse us of the "taint" of actions He considers sins.
For the sake of argument let's assume what you believe happened happened and that your god is real. The problem with omnipotence is that you can't blaim anyone else for the system you set up. The crucifixion didn't need to happen to "free us from sin", God wanted to incarnate into a mortal form and be tortured to death. Why? I cannot say, but He could have chosen some other way. He could choose to not threaten us with eternal torture simply for not loving Him. That isn't love.
God is a fair judge, and he cant just let people off UNLESS someone else takes the punishment
Why not? Seriously. He set up the system. Why require punishment in that system? Jesus and God are the same person (hence "triune" ), so He essentially had us torture and kill Himself to appease His own vengeance.
He could have forgiven us without preconditions. He chose to require punishment. Then He chose to be tortured and killed . Now He demands that we thank him for it or He'll punish us for eternity. That's psychopath behavior.
Lol if you didn't see their take on Hinduism, it's even more hilariously unaware. Some of their points are the most common skepticisms of Christianity.
And as far as I know this community's instance doesn't do down votes, so any down votes are from your home instance. Never seen such a ratio on Lemmy before, wow.
::: spoiler (long) transcript of that song:
I have an apology to make.
I'm afraid I've made a big mistake.
I turned my face away from you, Lord.
I was too blind to see the light.
I was too weak to feel Your might.
I closed my eyes; I couldn't see the truth, Lord.
But then like Saul on the Damascus road,
you sent a messenger to me, and so ...
Now I've have had the truth revealed to me.
Please forgive me all those things I said.
I'll no longer betray you, Lord.
I will pray to you instead.
And I will say Thank you, thank you, thank you God.
Thank you, thank you, thank you God.
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum.
I had no idea but it's suddenly so clear now. I feel such a cynic.
How could I have been so dumb?
Thank you for displaying how praying works:
a particular prayer in a particular church.
Thank you Sam for the chance to acknowledge this omnipotent opthamologist.
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum.
I didn't realize that it was so simple, but you've shown a great example of just how it can be done.
You only need to pray in a particular spot
to a particular version of a particular god,
and if you pull that off without a hitch,
he will fix one eye of one middle-class white bitch.
I know in the past my outlook has been limited.
I couldn't see examples of where life had been definitive.
But I can admit it when the evidence is clear,
as clear as Sam's mum's new cornea.
That's extremely clear! Extremely clear!
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum.
I have to admit that in the past I have been skeptical but Sam described this miracle and I am overcome!
How fitting that the sighting of a sight-based intervention
should open my eyes to this exciting new dimension.
It's like someone put an eye chart up in front of me
and the top five letters say: I C G O D.
Thank you, Sam, for showing how my point of view has been so flawed.
I assumed there was no God at all but now I see that's cynical. It's simply that his interests aren't particularly broad.
He's largely undiverted by the starving masses,
or the inequality between the various classes.
He gives you strictly limited passes,
redeemable for surgery or two-for-one glasses.
I feel so shocking for historically mocking you.
Your interests are clearly confined to the ocular.
I bet given the chance, you'd eschew the divine
and start a little business selling contacts online.
Fuck me Sam, what are the odds that of history's endless parade of gods
that the God you just happened to be taught to believe in is the actual one and he digs on healing,
but not the AIDS-ridden African nations, nor the victims of the plague or the flood-addled Asians,
but healthy, privately-insured Australians
with common and curable corneal degeneration
This story of Sam's has but a single explanation:
a surgical God who digs on magic explanations.
No it couldn't be mistaken attribution of causation,
born of a coincidental temporal correlation,
exacerbated by a general lack of education
vis-a-vis physics in Sam's parish congregation.
And it couldn't be that all these pious people are liars.
It couldn't be an artifact of confirmation bias,
a product of groupthink,
a mass delusion,
an Emperor's New Clothes-style fear of exclusion.
No, it's more likely to be an all-powerful magician
than the misdiagnosis of the initial condition,
or one of many cases of spontaneous remission,
or a record-keeping glitch by the local physician.
No, the only explanation for Sam's mum's seeing:
they prayed to an all-knowing superbeing,
to the omnipresent master of the universe,
and he liked the sound of their muttered verse.
So for a bit of a change from his usual stunt
of being a sexist, racist, murderous cunt,
he popped down to Dandenong and just like that,
used his powers to heal the cataracts of Sam's mum
of Sam's mum!
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum!
I didn't realize that it was such a simple thing.
I feel such a dingaling, what ignorant scum!
Now I understand how prayer can work:
a particular prayer in a particular church
in a particular style with a particular stuff
and a particular book for particular problems
that aren't particularly tough,
and for particular people, preferably white,
for particular senses, preferably sight,
a particular prayer in a particular spot,
to a particular version of a particular god.
And if you get that right, He just might take a break from giving babies malaria and pop down to your local area to fix the cataracts of your mum!
:::
On August 15, 1996, a discarded consecrated Host was placed in water according to standard protocol. Instead of dissolving, it developed reddish tissue and grew.
The Archbishop who ordered the investigation was Jorge Bergoglio — now Pope Francis
Dr. Ricardo Castañón Gómez, a former atheist, coordinated the scientific analysis
A tissue sample was sent to New York for blind testing
The primary examiner was Dr. Frederick Zugibe, a secular forensic pathologist and cardiologist at Columbia University
He was not told where the sample came from or what it had been
The Witness
Zugibe analyzed the tissue and identified it as human heart muscle — specifically from the myocardium of the left ventricle near the heart valves.
He found intact, active white blood cells — cells that typically disintegrate within 15 minutes outside a living body
Professor John Walker (University of Sydney) later confirmed intact white blood cells in the same tissue six years after the event
The blood type was AB, matching the Lanciano relic and the Shroud of Turin
When Zugibe was finally told the sample came from a communion wafer that had been sitting in water for three years, he stated: "How and why a piece of a human heart is still alive, sitting in distilled water, is totally beyond my comprehension."
I personally see the "love of God" people feel as actually being self love that they otherwise wouldn't be able to give themselves. That love really is the most essential to living a full life.
I kinda feel bad about it because I think they were genuinely trying to be supportive. They're far more supportive than the person telling ND people to shut up and mask.
And because they hurt people. And will not apologise or even acknowledge it and prevent it from happening again. See different religions, police forces, politicians, CEOs, ... fuck authorities, if they don't have a proper process to deal with their own errors.
My biggest motivation to work is pure spite. Especially as an engineer. If I'm told my idea for something is shit without sufficient explanation - I'll be secretly working on that to either discover myself why it's shit or come back at ya with "SEE?!".
"So you see, the carrier of charge is the electron, and when they are non uniformly distributed in a conductor, it produces the electromotive force..."
4 years later
"And that's how Gay Sonic memes are stored on the Internet."
A good starting point (since it's not too long) would be There Never Was A West or (longer but still manageable) Bullshit Jobs. I belong to the people who enjoyed both Debt and The Dawn Of Everything from cover to cover.
Yeah I was thinking The Dawn of Everything is probably the most valuable of his writings to read. It's long, but it demonstrates how everything can be different and it's entertaining and fascinating the whole way through.
Though I'll put A Utopia of Rules in next to Bullshit Jobs for the "you know stuff sucks, let's discuss it" category of his writing.
Ah pathological demand avoidance. It's not my inability to cope with ambiguity that's the problem, it's everyone else's inability to meet my arbitrary standards.
It's not an inability to cope with ambiguity, it's a "I want to know if this is just another arbitrary rule set for a dumb reason but I'm asking because it might be another rule that looks dumb but actually makes sense when you understand the complexities". It's also a rejection of the idea that ambiguity should be coped with instead of seeking understanding. "Must accept ambiguity" sounds pretty arbitrary itself, not to mention stupid in this world where those who set rules often don't have the interests of those they want following them in mind when setting those rules.
Seeking understanding is fine. Someone's mom would love for you to understand their lifetime of trauma that rule prevents happening to your mom.
Challenging rules to avoid altering behavior, not to understand, is more the point of pathological demand avoidance. It is inherently not about why, it's about a rule existing.
I agree but I can also accept that I’m not necessarily capable of understanding a reason why. Something not making sense to me personally doesn’t inherently mean it doesn’t make sense objectively. Maybe I’m lacking context or perspective or I’m ignorant to some important factor. I’m not the arbiter of what makes sense or not and my ego isn’t so big that I think I get to be the one who decides what makes sense and what doesn’t. If a person can explain to me why it’s important to them and it can withstand some poking or prodding that’s good enough for me. Sometimes it’s an understanding problem not an explaining problem. I accept the rules of physics are real but I don’t actually understand them in any depth, it’s the same thing. Humility is important too.
I agree but I can also accept that I’m not necessarily capable of understanding a reason why. Something not making sense to me personally doesn’t inherently mean it doesn’t make sense objectively.
Rulemakers not being able to explain something in a way you do understand is not a you a problem though. That just implies the rulemakers also don't understand.
Rulemakers not being able to explain something in a way you do understand is not a you a problem though.
Doesn't that depend on who the "you" is, and whether the rule itself falls within that person's expertise?
There are plenty of safety rules written in blood, enforced by those who might not understand the background or the theoretical reasons behind the rule. But someone knows the reason why, and sometimes the reason is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have sufficient background. I'd rather someone build a house to comply with the fire code than to ignore the portions he can't justify to the homeowner.
"I don't understand gravity so fuck it, Imma just throw a cat out of the window so that it can go for a walk"
Meaning there are different kinds of rules, different reasons and different understanding capabilities. Some rules are bullshit, some rules I will be able to verify only by experiment, simply because my knowledge and perception are limited
I feel like this meme being originally from an autism community, posted outside of it without that context, has lead to some egregiously bad takes in the comments. Unfortunately ironic. People coming in here having no idea what the autistic experience of people giving vague instructions and then just assuming you will figure stuff out is like. And then the reverse; trying your best to explain a process in hopes that there will be no ambiguity, only to be accused of being condescending.
And of course we have a plethora of "well in this edge case, its actually necessary to not question instructions!" takes, as if we are talking about last minute bomb defusals, instead of everyday office procedure or insensitive social situations. People on the spectrum are a great showcase of how unwilling the average person is to question the status quo.
As someone neurodivergent but not autistic I definitely see both perspectives here.
Sometimes the rules are stupid or unclear and the autistic person who's willing to ask the questions changes it from "everyone is winging it in accordance with their own interpretation without understanding why" to bringing everyone onto the same page.
But on the other hand, I and most non autistic people, can instinctively interpret the questioning of the rules as disrespect for the clear reason for them or as a polite way of calling the rule bullshit. I've had enough experience with autistic folks to ask for clarity and try to explain, but most neurotypicals don't (doesn't make it ok). This is something neurotypicals need to be taught to be sympathetic towards. It will make them better not just at interacting with autistic people but with being coherent towards each other and preventing the situation where everyone just assumes their way to incoherence.
Also sometimes it's a situation of "can you please just accept the rules so we can get to what we're here to do?", which is a situation where I'm sympathetic to both sides.
Nah. Those people are just always the problem. They are how the world got like this. Modern (and historic) articulations of tyranny that last more than five minutes would not be possible without them.
i'm not sure why "social cues" and "authority" would have much to do with each other, it's not like anarchists are socially inept, in fact being socially adept is kinda a core part of functional anarchy.
I dislike arbitrary things as well, but thanks to the magic of understanding how to be social i can just talk to people about it and explain why i think arbitraryness sucks ass, and they then treat me nicely and feel bad about my struggles since i'm so easy to deal with.
And it's not like i'm some 10 charisma bard, simply being chill and not actively unpleasant gets you 80% of the way. Even if you never make eye contact you'll still be seen as pretty normal if you speak normally and follow basic conversational etiquette.
A common issue autistic people have is with "implied authority", which has the same main issue as social cues. Doing things because "that's how its always been". A manager who has a job due to nepotism and a common courtesy that is just a white lie are going to cause the same kind of rage in an autist. If it can't be explained in a way that is logical and fair, they will not have any patience for it.
I feel like you're talking about a completely different thing, though. You can be no-nonsense but still nice to interact with, it's something i've gotten hugely better at in just the past like 7 years.
Like in the example of someone who got their job due to nepotism i'd just bring that up to people i trust and report it to wherever such things are reported, your union representative if nothing else. I wouldn't say "you're a nepo hire and i don't like that" to their face because that would be terrifying to deal with, but i wouldn't be silent about it either.
If your response would instead be to rage about it to their face, then; like others have said, i think that goes beyond just autism and into oppositional disorder or whatever.
Realistically, this is how I actually handle these situations. I don't like being rude to people, even when I refuse to follow norms. Besides, I get away with a lot more rule breaking when I am nice and likable.
The secret ingredient is violence. Often legal state-mandated violence, otherwise just plain abuse and violence that's willingly ignored by the authorities.
"Do it or the state will hurt you" is a valid reason that I will understand. I will still sneakily do the thing instead if I think it's worth the risk, but I do consider the reason.
I worked in the nuclear industry and having this sort of mentality is probably one of the fastest ways to get fired from that line of work. It’s absolutely chock-full of very specifically worded dense procedures which are written the way they are to address anything from obvious concerns to very arcane ones buried deep in lists of references, and inside the plants there are very specific boundaries, signs and expectations that must be followed strictly even without someone around to explain why this particular area got roped off suddenly when it wasn’t before or why work instructions are written in one particular order. Nothing wrong with doing your research, that was encouraged because they don’t want you screwing up (though at some point you do need to actually get stuff done and not just read manuals all day), but willfully disregarding procedure or instructions in favor of your preferred way of doing things without going through the processes to get exemptions will go incredibly poorly for you.
I think this post is about rules of society. But even if I'm mistaken, it doesn't feel very hard to give a simple, even if a bit shallow, explanation of why rules must be followed in the nuclear industry.
"Follow this rule."
"Why?"
"Because, if you don't, the process isn't as efficient and/or things can become dangerous. If you really want a more in-depth answer to it, you'd have to study a lot about the history of this rule. I can kind of explain it, but if I were to explain it right now, we'd be here for hours, which is not time we have right now."
"👍"
"Its something to do with how the proteins unfold when you get them wet. I don't Know, I'm not a bread wizard, but it goes bad when we don't and we already started kneading. Look it up later and get all fucking autistic at me sometime"
Actual thing that has been said to me. He did not appreciate the infodump later.
I've been in the nuclear industry for years and following this meme to the letter is not a bad quality to have. I'm sure you've heard the maxim, "Never proceed in the face of uncertainty." By the reading of this meme, he's slowing down and (hopefully) getting the right people involved.
There is quite a gulf between asking questions and willfully disregarding procedure, but you were able to make the leap regardless, which is actually somewhat impressive.
I was commenting based on the title not the picture.
The meme itself sure absolutely healthy behavior to know what the heck you’re doing before just ignorantly launching in. Whole point of pre-job briefs, job site reviews, anyone down to the newest person being able to stop work and not proceed in the face of uncertainty.
But the title “If you can’t explain why the rule matters, I won’t follow it” will fly over like a lead balloon.
Almost all safety minded rules, especially in something like the nuclear industry, are really easy to explain. Even "it's arbitrary, but something has to be the norm so we're all doing things the same way" is an acceptable explanation. I'm not gonna start driving on the wrong side of the road to prove an intellectual point.
When working in certain fields, norms can be very useful so that way everyone is on the same page. This is not some inexplicable or unjustifiable reason. I'm not a contrarian, I'm someone who refuses to put up with the customs that actually do hold us back.
How do you get "willfully disregarding procedure or instruction" out of "I ask why, and if I don't get an answer, I don't do it"? Did this nuclear facility want people who didn't care to understand the procedures they were told to comply with???
Mother fucker, I guarantee you the only people who are obsessive enough to enforce this shit are on the spectrum themselves. Autistic people aren't selfishly stupid. They want clear reasoning so they don't make mistakes from assumptions.
The title says, “If you can’t explain why the rule matters, then I won’t follow it.” In nuclear you’re expected to follow the procedures and instructions and so on as written unless you went through whatever necessary process to get an exemption or relaxation from that standard. If you know what the rules are and intentionally don’t do that (the “then I won’t follow it”) that’s considered willful disregard and that can get not just the person doing it but also a site tolerating that behavior punished by the regulator to be an example to others because they want nuclear people to strictly adhere to processes regardless of whether they individually think they’re important or not. Everyone has their own view of a facet of some very complex operation and things that appear insignificant to one dude and his coworkers who just see one step as some BS that doesn’t really matter may be necessary to meet a key assumption that is the bedrock of another person’s analysis.
Procedures are often not written in a terribly efficient way to complete the task. That may be intentional if a more obviously efficient method imposes a risk somewhere that the creators/revisors of the procedure didn’t want to take. It could also just be whatever method the writers were familiar with even if a better one exists out there somewhere. So a frequent tension is “Why are we doing it with [Method A] when my used-to plant used [Method B]?” If this other way is immediately better for safety then maybe work should be halted until an exemption or fast track revision is done to have the words match the safer method. If it’s just an efficiency thing though it may take a while to process even a uniformly better method into a new procedure revision such that it has to be done under the existing guidance for the time being… you may well be told that the existing method is flat out worse than the way in the upcoming new rev, but you are expected to fully follow the text of the existing revision regardless.
Or for a different sort of thing with a hypothetical example where there is a guy caught up at a radiological boundary on his way out of the plant. He sets off an alarm on a machine known to be sensitive to the point of occasionally alarming off of background radiation even if you are totally clean. The rule is to wait for radiation protection to show up and clear him before he could go to the cleaner side of the radiological boundary. Most everyone experiences this and generally the way it goes 99% of the time is RP shows up, asks you where you’ve been, they have you go to a monitor another time and sees if you pass or not and if you pass generally they let you go right on through or if not then they start having to be a lot more involved. This guy is impatient after some extended time waiting on RP because he wants to go to the bathroom just on the other side of the boundary and since he’s dealt with a similar situation before he feels it’s OK to just skip the wait for RP, rescan himself again and pass through to the bathroom when he comes up in the clear. By common sense there’s not really a problem, it’s what RP was going to have him do anyway… but it’s not just a matter of common sense. He has just demonstrated that at least in one situation he will not obey the rules that govern radiological boundaries, so how can they be sure he will follow the others? At a site where observing radiological boundaries may make a difference between a normal day and injury or death, that’s actually a huge problem that he can no longer be trusted to always safely stay within the lines he needs to at the times he needs to, an assumption underpinning what areas people are allowed to access. So for that and to enforce the standard and ensure people seriously follow the rules about radiation boundaries, the guy gets fired even though everyone knows that the guy wasn’t actually contaminated upon leaving the boundary.
I wouldn’t personally expect that of people. There are a very VERY substantial number of rules in a vast array of disciplines needed to operate a plant generically before even getting into the specifics of the site and all the equipment on it and how that evolves over time as things happen like equipment upgrades or degradation and new operating experience from the same or other plants getting incorporated. Or instructions provided on a case by case basis for performing a task that is now different in some way that matters to one stakeholder who needed a change but that may not be apparent to others. Even people who have been working at the same place for decades with plenty of continuing training can get caught with their pants down on a task they’ve done all the time when a new revision changes something they were accustomed to doing which is why they have to be ensuring that they’re working with the latest revision for each task every time. Often when you’re working with other departments on a common activity you may need help finding out what the applicable procedures or or other guidance that you’ll need to be following even are, let already knowing the latest details on what changes have been made to them and why. And in recent times the industry has a lot less gray and bald heads than it used to so many more people are freshly learning what their own positions are and don’t have the experience and perspective of watching the place evolve over the decades.
And that is how we break toxic and abusive "ways it's always been / done" that people blindly follow. I tip my hat to you, good fellow. Keep up the good work.
I mean I kinda get it and a team with an understanding of a situation can handle it more efficiently and throughly but if I had to reason every management decision with everyone we would finish nothing at work.
At a certain point, you just gotta label it as "management bullshit" as shorthand. Besides, is management causes confusion that makes it hard to get anything done, that's their fault. In an ideal world, competition from the market would weed out the bad ones, but competition is pressure capitalists loves to mitigate.
It can go too far in either direction. If you're writing a report you know no one will ever read it can help to ask why and push for an answer, but it isn't the driving instructor's job to explain why you should stop at the red light.
"I can explain" is different from "you can understand", and chain of command means you do not have to reason with literally everyone involved/affected by your decision. So if used well, the drop-any-rule-lacking-backup is useful
For real. That’s why they kept having to pull my grandma aside in Sunday school. I guess you’re not allowed to ask questions but I wasn’t willing to believe things you couldn’t ask questions about. It made no sense. Like seriously if Adam and Eve were the only two people and they had two sons Cain and Abel then where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from? Anyway I got in trouble for asking that and got annoyed when my question wasn’t getting answered. I knew then and there if you could not ask questions you were being taught bullshit
I don't think problems with authority were what caused all the bullshit around COVID. It wasn't neurodivergent/anti authority people causing problems, but anti-intellectual conservatives who saw inconvenience as oppression. Most of them were normies who couldn't handle that the social norms they were used to needed to temporarily change to save lives, and had grifters willing to exploit their discomfort. It was a cultural phenomenon, not a personal one.
The pandemic was something we didn't deal with properly as a society, precisely because people were smeared and shamed for having questions and concerns (however valid).
We could've done better. We are less prepared as a society than we otherwise would've been if COVID didn't become a partisan issue, with major experts (from my POV) doing everything they could to not alleviate and address concerns, instead encouraging a culture of fear and a culture of shaming and smearing people who question authority, with no shades of gray.
If experts encouraged and facilitated dialogue and education, if hospitals/businesses/etc. were held to account for not having proper stocks of PPE or other sensible mitigations to deal with a pandemic, if ventilation became a bigger concern for businesses to address... I could go on. Things could've been better.
They still can be better, especially if we welcome questions and concerns and address them fairly, instead of picking the most outrageous examples of questions and concerns, and acting as if anybody who questions the experts or authority (in a general sense) are just as outrageous or dangerous.
i'm of the opinion that willfully choosing to break a rule after being told why it exists would belong in a different category than not understanding why the rule exists and thus not being able to justify its relevancy.
there are too many systems with conflicting contradictory rules where following all of them is literally impossible and even neurotypicals have to cull instructions on the basis of relevancy as a result, after all...
Honestly, as a very autistic person myself, everyones right and wrong here. When you get stonewalled trying to understand, yes absolutly this. But Ive come to find at least half the time there is a good reason that tact demands be not dived into. Fuck that tho. If you dont know then ask and find a way to answer if you yourself are asked instead of claming up.
well, depending on what we are talking about, your understanding may not be required for you to perform your task. Maybe your instructor also doesn't know. but somewhere down the line someone implemented it for a good reason thats not immediately obvious or easy to explain.
We cannot expect everyone to know everything about what they do. it would be better but isnt feasible.
i dont need to know how to build a car to drive it. would it help? yes. is my mental capacity limited? very!
I don't need to know how a car works to know the consequences of not using it correctly. I don't need to understand how a respiratory virus replicates and harms my body to know that I should wear a mask around others when sick. It usually comes down to more universal concepts like danger, efficiency, or efficacy. What makes a reason good is often simpler than the involved mechanics
And yet we have tons of people unwilling to believe that the response to a respiratortly virus is to wear masks. It was well explained why, they just didn't want to do it because it was seen as too much of an inconvenience.
Same thing happens with driving vehicles.
Sometimes the answer doesn't matter if people want to be obstinate, and saying that they won't do it if not properly explained is an easy out for them.
I am not talking about other people. I am talking about me and how I interact with the world. I'm far more reasonable than it seems like you want to believe, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to live a life unquestioned.
Yes, and there are also time-sensitive cases like emergency services, medical procedures, and working in high-risk environments, where you don't have time to stop and explain everything. Ideally there'd be some kind of debrief tho.
Nobody bothers observing what the difference between insanity and madness is.
Insane: a subjective observation you make about another, they clearly have a self-consistent reasoning process with a metric that you don’t share. But communication and cooperation is still possible. Aka Neurodivergent
Mad: an objective observation that someone is illogical, goes against established and observable evidence, may harm self or others, aka nut case
I don't need to read your argument because I came to the exact same conclusion. I just don't think madness or insanity are useful terms for understanding psychology, nor is making a distinction between the two really worth the effort.
I don't need to read your argument because I came to the exact same conclusion.
There is no argument to be had, then. You asked a question, I provided clarification
I just don't think madness or insanity are useful terms for understanding psychology, nor is making a distinction between the two really worth the effort.
I vehemently disagree. If the distinction is not established then neurodivergents will keep on being misdiagnosed and fed drugs that may or may not work for them.
Oppositional Defiance Disorder was when republicans ran campaigns against vaccines simply because Democrats supported making vaccines affordable and available to everyone.
Republicans literally blamed their outsized deaths and disabilities from COVID on Democrats pushing people so hard to get their shots.
Asking why, and refusing to do something because it lacks a logical precedent is not oppositional defiance, it's basic awareness and attention to your surroundings.
Chesterton's fence. One should not remove a fence until one learns why it was erected in the first place. By all means, learn why!
The current administration is causing huge amounts of damage and suffering by blindly removing and eliminating things without understanding why those things were created and maintained.
It's less about them not understanding and more about them not thinking it matters. The wealthy think they can strip mine society without consequence or meaningful pushback, and in the short term they have been right. The rich Americans of the future will not have to same global reach that they do now, but this generation of oligarchs is absolutely selfish and proud of it. They don't really give a fuck if their kids inherit their empire, or get burned at the stake. Line go up, and most of them won't live to see the system the take for granted crumble into irrelevancy.
Why can't I sit in the floor in the middle of a grocery store? Why can't I just hang out in a public restroom drinking a Pepsi? Why shouldn't I practice my singing in line at the theme park? Explain it to me clearly.
Floor is dirty. You can sit on the floor if you want to get dirty.
People are farting and making piss mist in the bathroom, if you want to eat food in there, you can, but it's weird and gross.
You can practice your singing in line at a theme park, you may annoy people to the point that you get kicked out of line, or assaulted. Seems like good reasons not to do it IMHO, but maybe you are a better singer than I am, good luck with that.
This can be a slippery slope, though. My mom fell into conspiracy theories, and a big part of that was thinking along the lines of "if you can't explain how vaccines can't cause autism, then I'm going to keep believing they do." Silly me with my genetic counseling background made a small, simple slideshow about how the immune system and vaccines work, and of course she still said "you didn't explain it well enough, so I still believe they cause autism."
Essentially the strategy of "if you can't explain why, it's not worth doing" only works if the person asking truly wants to understand, and withholds forming an opinion until they have all the information they can gather, instead of just looking for an excuse to not do something. Like most things in life, it can be abused by bad actors.
Never change anything because society is too difficult to actually understand was the essence of his argument lol. He was a reactionary christain opposed to social change and it's a bad argument.
You should be able to change things without assuming that everything which seems silly has some unknown and important purpose. You should manage change by assessing risks and hazards which are known and planning appropriately.
It's not a bad argument to try to understand an existing system before changing it.
I've seen a lot of "why is this like this? I'm changing it" blow up in software. The clearest memory was not realizing that user names could be null, even though that looked impossible by tracing the registration route. Turns out there was another, stupider, way of registering.
It's especially a good argument when the person evaluating the system has no domain knowledge or expertise.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Is where it comes from, in a book describing why he's a Catholic.
But the reality of the world, especially social institutions is not like this. There is a cunning sleight of hand here, a fence only gets built because someone has a reason to build a fence. Many things in life are not built: they arise spontaneously or emerge from chaos through more complex forms of interaction.
If we switch the argument to being about diverting a watercourse, or regrading land, it suddenly falls apart because it becomes clear that these things do not exist for intelligent reasons.
I don't think it's a bad idea to try and understand the world or to mitigate risks when making changes. I think chesterton's fence is a shite argument because it implies that everything which exists has a planned purpose and favours the status quo which may be intolerable.
If we switch the argument to being about diverting a watercourse, or regrading land, it suddenly falls apart because it becomes clear that these things do not exist for intelligent reasons.
This is not a compelling analogy. Many things in nature may not exist for an intelligent reason, but their presence matters in ways that may not be obvious. Diverting a waterway may cause tremendous damage to the ecosystem and other downstream (pun intended) things. That is an excellent example of why you should understand the current system before attempting to change it.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to try and understand the world or to mitigate risks when making changes. I think chesterton’s fence is a shite argument because it implies that everything which exists has a planned purpose and favours the status quo which may be intoler
I don't think the implied plan purpose is necessary for the argument to make sense. The point of the story is it's not always clear what things are load bearing, nor what loads they bear.
If the chesteron origin is distracting to you, let's discard it. I think we agree that changing a complex system without attempting to understand it first is foolish.
No, I am trying to make a point here. Everyone knows decisions can have consequences and that change should be managed. Chesterton's fence is not "try not to fuck up in ignorance" it is a specific argument made by GK Chesterton and pushed by cryptofascists in the tech industry via the "rationalist" movement to try and equivocate:
Doing stuff recklessly is bad, but so is not doing stuff out of fear. We should have robust ways of making decisions
and Chesterton's argument
Every tradition and social structure has some important reasoning behind it, and if you want to get rid of some prohibition or institution because you think it's outdated, useless, or obstructing progress then that is a demonstration of your lack of qualification to make such a change.
Absolutely, but then the fence should have a clear marking, otherwise it's a booby trap and the idiot that placed it without documentation is just as much at fault as the idiot that removed it without proper analysis.
I'm reminded of that meme of the cartoon girl going "this sign won't stop me because I can't read"
I've had coworkers that changed some code, then just deleted the tests that started failing. Then they get annoyed their PR is blocked by more attentive coworkers.
Oh no, someone voicing an opinion besides "people should be endlessly catered to and those people should never make an effort to cater to others" how shocking right?
It seems like you don't know what it's like to be neurodivergent or have a disability.
People who are different or disabled can go their entire lives not being catered to, while constantly being told their entire lives to adapt every aspect of their being to simply be allowed to participate or fit in (mask), and still meet extreme discrimination and exclusion - even though there are supposed to be protections for disabled people and employers promise extra hard to not discriminate in every job posting.
Think solid barriers to employment, education, etc. all because it's annoying for people with little problems adapting to society to give them a little bit of consideration and support, or at the very least to not discriminate against them.
This is the most irritating part for me. I tried for most of my life to be normal and not only was my life miserable, I ultimately failed to hide my quirks enough to be accepted. Only by embracing my weirdness have I found acceptance, as people like "quirky and confident" more than "shy and awkward"
Displays of consideration can go so far in bridging these gaps. Ask your questions, but by prefacing with a statement like "I just want to understand this rule better" or "Out of curiosity" or something like that can make the questions much more palatable to neurotypicals.
Wouldn't you like it more if you got an actual explanation? Maybe you should look into that instead of dismissing others as "oh look its mr questioning over there". Maybe they got a point... authority, especially that of reactionaries, is questionable.
Sure in an ideal world you're right. The other side of that, is when I'm in a professional or learning environment, and it's constantly being interrupted by arbitrary questions by people.
I had a college class that got entirely derailed by two people like this, and they were actually things I dearly wanted to learn. Instead, we were constantly interrupted by people wanting these questions answered.
Is that fair to me, who paid like 2500 dollars to be in that class? I'm sorry, but I don't think it is. It's disruptive, and it is wasting the time of the (in this case) lecturer and the people there to learn.
View what they ask as something positive instead. You also learn from them.
Lectures aren't there to just sit and listen. They're there to listen and talk together, discussing the content. To me, that's better than a class full of yea-nodders. I want people that question. People that learn. Not people that just repeat.
The questions were not on topic in the slightest, unfortunately. Even with prompting of 'this is not on topic lets get back on topic' they wouldn't do it.
I'm sorry, but someone disrupting an environment is not the only one who has rights in this situation.
Need to know is a thing. If you don't need to know in order to do your job, then you don't need to be told the how or why. Your job is to do what you've been told.
If you can't handle that, then fucking quit. Or consult a web search, I guess. Why waste time and effort explaining if it's not necessary or important? Sometimes it really is just as simple as "some moron says to."
If I can think of a reason to not do it, then I should ask why. If the reason isn't explained to me it's a much more logical conclusion to believe that the reason is a bad one. Or that the person telling me what to do is a moron. If I disagree with the reason but it's not a harmful one then we can start determining if whether it's meaningful enough for me to push back.
If "some moron says" means the thing we're doing is going to go poorly, that should be brought to attention.
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"because that's just how things are done"
Then things are done in a stupid way for stupid reasons that nobody likes and we shouldn't do it then.
A little girl sees her mum cooking sausages and asks "mum, why do you cut the ends off of the sausages before you fry them?" Her mum replies "well, that's how I learned it from my mother."
So the girl calls her grandma and asks "grandma, why do you and mum always cut the ends off of sausages before you fry them?" The grandma replies "well, that's how I learned it from my mother."
So the girl calls her great grandmother and asks "great grandma, why do you, mum and grandma always cut the ends off of sausages before you fry them?" The great grandma replies "have they not bought a bigger pan yet?"
I've always heard and told it as "baking bread in an oven that got bigger over the years" but it's my favorite go-to for appeal to tradition.
My go-to is this version, but that's a bit long to type out on my phone. Either way, appeal to tradition is a joke.
Nice :)
The version I heard was with a roast and involved cutting the ends off. Funny how many version there are.
Yeah, that's the essence of conservatism.
My family members always get up in arms when I tell them I changed the family recipe for one dish or another. "You can't change perfection!" Then they try it and ask for the recipe. I hate reverence for the mystical ancestors; they can be - and often are - wrong.
as if our ancestors didn't change recipes themselves, yes i'm sure ol' great-great-great-great-gramma Beatrice used tomatoes
Mom, please get off the internet. It's not good for you.
For clarification, Just joking. That sentence was one of the most repeated anwsers to everything when i dared to ask how something works from my mother.
And also "this is how we've always done it" - cool, you've always done it wrong.
I literally did that when I started my current gig, because they were doing so many things manually that were trivially automated and didn't require a three page checklist and multiple hours of time. Within 3 months I took a 4-5hr/instance task into a 30 minute one that also gives you 80% of the shit you need to check off on the QA sheet.
/c/autism is leaking.
This is me to my core. (I mean, just check the username.) The easiest way to lose my trust is to say the reason is "because I said so." Okay, but why do you say so? Is there a real reason, or are you being a buzz-kill? Because plenty of people have arbitrary reasons for things and sometimes that's what it comes down to.
I can recall specific instances where I was given a reason and it made all the difference. Like a lot of little kids, I used to scream when having fun. Just saying, "Don't do that" didn't make an impact. But when my mom explained that when she hears me scream, she thinks I'm in trouble, and if I scream for no reason it'd make it harder for her to respond if I were actually in trouble, that's the day I stopped.
A little bit of explanation can go a long way. Sometimes people treat kids like they can't understand deeper reasoning, but that's not true for everyone.
I pay it forward now. A kid I worked with preferred to point at things using his middle finger instead of his pointer finger, even when the thing he was pointing at was on the ceiling. When I told him to use his pointer instead and he asked why, I told him, "Some people think that means something very mean. I don't want people to think you're trying to be mean." That's all it took for him to start using his index finger instead.
Point is, when people explain why something is done a certain way, they can be far more likely to respect their rule. I get that there are times when quick obedience is required, like when there's imminent danger. However, explaining more trivial situations builds the trust necessary to navigate those moments better. If someone's always pushing for authority over arbitrary things, they shouldn't be surprised when people (especially kids) don't listen to them when the matter is serious. Which is why I take the time to explain things with the kids I work with - sometimes we really do need to move quickly, particularly when another kid is acting out aggressively and we need to leave the room. They know I'll give reasons when there is time, so when I tell them to do something with urgency, they know things are getting real and it's time to move.
I think one of the reasons some of the little kids in my life like me is I try to give them honest explanations. They don't always fully understand, but I think they appreciate getting answers. And probably appreciate the occasional "I don't know, actually. Let's look it up"
it's frankly baffling to me that people don't just throw in a one-sentence explanation of why kids should do things, how tf are they supposed to learn?
Something i've come to realize is that an absolutely horrifying amount of my """autistic""" traits were just from not having had the opportunity to learn things, like when i was a kid i literally didn't understand that i was supposed to speak up if i'm in pain, i just sort of assumed that adults knew and didn't care.
Just in the past 5-10 years my life has been hugely improved by seeking out knowledge on my own, to the point that i now find informal social stuff so easy that other people are impressed.
It's why i'm an ardent supporter of the idea that most (or at least many) disabilities are almost entirely a problem with society, not the individual. And the depressing thing is that a lot of the adjustments to be made are really not that significant at all.
My parents did this as well, and I have massive respect for them because of it. Similarly, the only time my dad would yell at me was when something was urgent and dangerous and he needed me to do the thing right then and there's no time to explain. I knew I could always ask for an explanation after the fact.
some of these mysterious rules are peer pressure from dead people; fuck that. some of these are safety rules meant for conditions that no longer exist
What is an example of a safety rule who's conditions no longer exist which would not have the conditions almost immediately return if the rule was removed?
Like every example I can think of is a regulation to stop companies from hurting people which they would simply resume doing given the choice, thus making us still need the rule?
My job is populated by dinosaurs that only recently adopted git for version control. They had some rules and procedures that made a kind of sense when deployment meant "I'll scp the files to the prod server", but don't add value anymore.
Some people had a rule where after "deploy" they would SSH into prod and check the md5 hash of the files and compare them to their local copy. You don't have to do that.
They also wanted to only allow one person to work on a file at the same time because "you can overwrite their changes". Git handles that fine (unless you really fuck up the merge conflict, admittedly)
"Safety Law" that is still on the books, but not enforced.
Kentucky has a law that states that all women drivers must be preceded by a flagger on foot, to warn oncoming pedestrians and other traffic. The true irony of this law is that it was passed before Kentucky had paved a single road, and the cars of the time still used wagon style wheels. This meant that those cars were practically "on rails" as they were driving in the ruts that other wagon and car wheels had created in the roads.
i mean more like rules as adaptation to dangerous condition that no longer exists instead of rules that prevent the dangerous condition from occuring. like, i have a habit of boiling all drinking water even after moving to a place that doesn't require it
tons of things relating to food, like here in sweden you can honestly straight up just eat raw chicken and you'll probably be fine, in germany raw ground pork is a fairly normal dish, but in other parts of the world and in the past this would have fucking horrified people.
I don't want to "probably" be fine. I don't want to roll a D20 when I eat chicken and I get salmonella if I roll a 1. And why is your chicken so clean anyway that you can get to "probably"? Because of a ton of laws and regulations mandating cleanliness in the processing plants.
Conservatives are measurably dying at slightly higher rates because they have stupid beliefs and believe lies about things like drinking raw milk.
Some fire safety laws predate modern fire resistant building materials and active fire suppression. A big example is the requirement for multiple stairwells in multi family homes.
Edit: disregard; I misread the comment above me. For the record, I'm very much in favor of vaccines.
Poliovirus agrees and would love fewer vaccinations against it
If not for the CIA making a deal with Plague we'd be done with polio by now.
And I'd like to know the latter even if they're no longer appropriate.
Sometimes the real reason is uncomfortable and they don't want to say it out loud. Like, "the CEO is an idiot, and wants it this way for stupid reasons"
Though maybe "the CEO doesn't understand how Google calendar works, so he thinks putting our time off in a shared spreadsheet is easier" would satisfy?
At my job a lot of stupid things come out of "someone high ranking doesn't understand computers" or "they don't benefit from fixing this, so it's easier for them to leave it stupid"
In my experience the reason is often "because fuvk [relevant slur]"
ITT rampant discrimination/ableism. People acting like the world is functional or that most rules make sense and are grounded in reality.
If somebody asks why a rule is the way it is, something really beautiful happens if people entertain and allow that questioning.
Was the rule made that way to simply punish someone in the past? Could the rule be improved? Does the rule apply to the present day? Could the rule be done away with?
If the enforcement of rules is taken seriously, the questioning, validity, and improvement of those rules should be, as well.
Otherwise, we live in an authoritarian society that actively encourages enforcing/following draconian rules no one understands - rules that would likely be enforced improperly or in an unbalanced sense, because nobody can properly explain it when somebody questions the rule (in good faith).
Having trouble with authority and/or being neurodivergent doesn't mean you are anti-social, dangerous, or bad for the workplace.
Bad rules, however, can be anti-social or create a culture of anti-social behavior, they can be dangerous or harmful (especially if they can not be explained and are not widely understood), and they can be bad for the workplace. It may just not be readily apparent when everybody keeps their heads down and says yes all the time to bullshit.
It's like people think I'm just trying to be an asshole. I really don't like starting conflict without having a good reason, and questioning the questionable is one of the best reasons out there.
I swear, some of my recent posts have brought out some nasty responses that I didn't expect. On one hand, I don't want to hold myself back from posting stuff just because I fear unjustified backlash. At the same time, I need to better prepare myself for it.
Don't change anything about your posting! You're literally one of the best posters I've encountered on here.
I'm sorry your experience has been less than ideal. I enjoy every single one of your posts that I've caught and I truly appreciate them.
I suggest doing what I did, just accept that every experience (in this case, post on social media) is a learning opportunity for yourself and others.
Some people have more learning to do, and we don't have to blame them or feel badly about ourselves for being discriminated against, or not being understood/accepted, or having our intentions misread. You clearly aren't trying to hurt anyone!
You said it in your reply earlier to me, embracing yourself and all your quirks helped you move forward. That helped me! Think about all of the people who are helped by the discussions you spark and move forward proudly! 💚
Nah sis, your post is totally on point, and I love it. Authority is something we must question!
You're right. You can also learn a lot about the culture and society around you because of that questioning, even if you end up still following the rules.
On the other hand, what's there to gain from following the rules without question and forcing others to do the same? The only thing I can imagine right now that could be gained is the feeling that you are helping society "stay in the right track".
This means that there are about 3 options:
Notice that when questioning the rules, you might come to the conclusion that there's no harm in following the rules, or that following the rules is what's the best for you or those around you. Questioning ≠ opposing. Question = checking validity and understanding why.
For the reasons Michael has outlined above, questioning the rules feels like the most productive approach.
But you might improve something or expose malfeasance. You'll have to be killed. Sorry; just the rule.
Hopefully the Agent Smiths of the world consider another way of being.
Do you think that would be better?
Yes, much better, and not only that - I advocate for them (even when it's unpopular). I'm somebody who thinks even Peter Thiel can choose another way of being and I'd be happy to help them out if they ever decide to release their ambitions for world domination.
Then either its illegal or you're wrong.
Me? Suggest illegal action? Never. The matrix can be released without advocating for any harm, loss of freedom, or suggesting anything illegal. It just takes a willingness to reform our justice system and engage in rehabilitative or restorative justice, justice that is based on a foundation of consent.
If Peter Thiel wants to surveil the entire world and create AI-based tools to enslave humanity, with his consent, we can answer his desire and make him a computer program that resembles the matrix/our world. Let him cook and enslave/kill billions in a virtual reality he is empowered to help create. We could even employ human actors who choose to participate in his recovery. When he's gotten it out of his system, he can be assisted in joining the society he sought to enslave under the guise of libertarian ideology.
Is the rule well intentioned but impossible or self defeating to apply consistently, and the intent needs to be known because that's the only part that's worth a single fuck?
What happens in the interim? Is the rule enforced while it's under debate, or does the question suspend the enforcement?
If I tell someone to move their car because they're blocking the bike lane, I'm not inviting a debate about whether it's a good idea to have a rule like that. The rule is there to save me (a biker) time on my commute, and stopping to explain the rule would defeat the purpose of the rule.
Same with the tech support caller who insists that the support agent explain everything to the user, without the background knowledge of being able to understand the explanation. It's a waste of time.
Or, if a rule is suspended while being challenged, then people can opportunistically challenge rules to try to get an advantage. That's why pretty much any sport that allows for challenges during a game/match limits the number of challenges and limits the scope of calls that can be challenged, and has a specific limited period for proposing rule changes (in the off-season, to take effect the next season).
Sometimes people are just annoyingly obtuse, and their challenges to a rule or the application of a rule do more harm than good. It's important to be able to justify a rule, but it's also important to limit the time, place, or manner in which that rule can be challenged.
To be fair, most people doing stuff like that know very well, why the specific rules exist, but do not care, and are intentionally breaking them. In this example, if you have a driving licence, I image in most places they require you learning the rules of traffic, so they can be assumed to already have the knowledge. If they cared about the actual specifics of the reason, they would have asked, when they had to learn about it: thus them demanding answers for the rule on the fly, should also be assumed to be dishonest.
And also in this example, if you are unable to figure out on your own, why you should not endanger bikers, by putting huge metal obstacles, with suddenly opening doors in front of them, means you should not have a driving licence at all.
They always have some reason, they think is good enough for rule breaking - and might be, like some medical emergency or something, but those times would normally be solved with a polite discussion anyway, after the situation allows it - but usually it is just them being selfish morons.
I guess that would depend on the organization and the nature of the rule. If it's over 100 degrees outside, and there is a rule forbidding shorts and temperature-appropriate clothing, would you enforce a rule and make somebody wear pants and long-sleeves if there are no safety concerns or reputational risks for dressing down during the heat?
I was more talking about workplace rules that are not time-sensitive. Like another commenter put it, we're not talking about debating rules during a bomb defusal.
As somebody with a background in IT, I disagree. You can't assume to know what somebody does or doesn't know, what they can understand or not - otherwise you risk offending that person. What you can do, however, is document higher-level procedures, terms, and concepts into writing as you go and pass that along with a broad, but succinct, explanation verbally. When they ask for detail, you have already provided it in writing. You can direct any further concerns to email or text (if you have that option) to save time, or schedule another call at a later point to address any concerns.
Each workplace can handle this on their own. I have no specific thoughts on this matter besides to say that I am someone who is not an advocate for hierarchy and traditional workplace/ownership structures. I think worker-owned cooperatives are an ideal to strive for as a society. Workers deserve a piece of the pie of the place they work hard at. In such an organization, rules would be likely made to preserve the integrity of the space e.g. no bigotry or discrimination.
I specifically made sure to include that I specified "in good faith". That is subjective, though. If somebody is challenging rules to game the system or get an undue advantage, I'm not sure that is in good faith. I guess it depends on the nature of the employment. For example, if it's sales related, and employees compete for sales, I could see questioning a rule, such as an ethical rule, to increase sales or performance in a way somebody can personally benefit from as not qualifying as being in good faith.
As for somebody being perceivably "annoyingly obtuse", that is also subjective. There should still be a procedure to deal with the rule being questioned, that doesn't waste resources or time on trivial matters while still addressing the concern with a pro-social process.
"you are insufferable for asking why"
"you need to mask, to adapt"
😬
Right lol poor kid. "Don't question anything, just mask and shut up so nobody thinks you're insufferable." Lowkey sounds like what the parent went through and views as the 'normal' way of dealing with being ND.
Aren't you the guy who thinks some invisible, male entity created the entire universe? Did this male and masculine entity create evil and is he now powerless to stop it? Or is it that this invisible penis having guy actually enjoys the suffering and tortures souls for eternity?
God has no sex as he is, LITERALLY God, omnipotent, omniscient creator
and he didnt create evil, he created free will
and if he was to destroy all evil, why do you think he wouldnt start with us?
That's weird. The Bible is pretty specific about god's gender. God created everything but not evil? So god didn't actually create everything then? Or is he just powerless to stop it?
If he destroyed all evil, why do you think he wouldnt start with us?
That's not the point. HE, as you refer to HIM as, can either be powerful enough to destroy all evil or is not good so does not stop evil from happening. Whether eradicating evil destroys you or not is irrelevant. Your existence contradicts your teachings.
So your penis having God, that used his penis to impregnate a virgin and cuck her fiance, is either not all powerful or not all good. Which is it?
why is your mind imprisoned in the physical?
the Virgin Mary was impregnated via a miracle, and remained sinless
he is all powerful and all good, he just CHOOSES not to destroy us and took the punishment for us because he loves us
Questioning social norms doesn't necessarily makes you an asshole, it depends on how it is approached.
By not defying them we will remain stagnant, imagine the downhill slope we would end up on if no one ever questioned why a man shouldn't love another man or a woman shouldn't love another woman.
People shut you down because many are intolerant to change and have their values under scrutiny is seen as hostile, but that doesn't imply compliance is productive. Of course, you don't want to this all the time, but teaching your kid to repress their displease of social norms doesn't sound good either.
Framing things this way is a big mistake and I don't see why it isn't more obvious to people that it's a mistake. You want someone you care about to believe that there is a binary choice between a sustainable existence and resolving their emotional needs? You couldn't make a more persuasive argument for suicidal thinking and self destructive behavior if you tried. And it isn't even true because they are mutually dependent priorities. It took me too many years and therapy to figure this out, you should really consider approaching the issue from a different angle than this one.
Thank you. I'm glad some people realise that telling autistic people to adapt or die is an awful inhumane thing to do.
Because for people like me, that is what you are asking us to do.
social norms have reasons as well. you cant just say "because social norms exist" and expect someone to accept that answer as a reason. its basically the same as saying "because everyone says so". so why dont you explain why the particular social norm is one in the first place. if you dont know maybe you need to find out before you try to enforce it on others.
also as an autistic person you shouldn't be encouraging people to mask. that shit is incredibly damaging to people. i masked for most of my life and what people dont see is that i was basically just surviving that whole time. i developed an incredible amount of anxiety, to the point where i couldnt really function in society for more than a few hours at a time before i had to isolate for a day or two to recover. i wore the mask so often for so long i didnt even know who i really was anymore. i didnt start to live until a few years ago when i started making a concerted effort to take off the mask and be myself. and you know what, people fucking accepted me way more than they ever did when i was being fucking fake all the time for the sake of appearances. you might mean well telling your son and all the autists who will see your comment to mask to get by, but all youre doing is fucking hurting them and you need to stop. masking isnt for us, its for you.
"If you don't learn to adopt them you will isolate yourself" might be true if there was 1 neurodivergent person. We are a community and personally I'm not interested in being more than acquaintances if I have to mask around you all the time. That's not a mutually beneficial relationship.
Autistics are constantly told this lie and it completely ignores the fact that there's plenty of other autistics that will understand and accommodate each other's needs.
This is an ableist way to see the world and my lived experience directly contradicts it.
That's awesome. Sadly, it does't apply to their kids PTA, their neighbors or their Jobs.
There is some level of faking and coping that greases the wheels and lets you not have to swim through the raw sewage of every other 'normies' ignorance.
Don't fold in and just give on every thing, but don't die on that fucking hill either.
When you tell your autistic child to mask you’re encouraging them to make their mental health worse: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613251353358
As someone with that, I say, fuck off to that "authority".
Social norms are to be broken. We didn't get Stonewall riots by following police and law and order. We didn't get women's rights by meekly letting men trample us. We didn't get general suffrage by not rioting. We didn't get the right to strike by doing nothing.
I think the attitude you're being held back by, is more destructive. You're willfully following rules instead of questioning them, then deciding whether they are justified to follow or not.
I think what you're telling is not a "harsh reality" but a fabrication that neurotypical people tell themselves to justify "following orders". Fuck that shit.
If I did what you said me to, I'd be in a much worse mental headspace now. I feel sorry for your son. You blindly following social norms IS the problem. Try to address that instead. Try to actually understand why your son finds it difficult. Most of us find it difficult because the authority is not justified: there's no explanation, not even an imperfect one. We're instead told to just suck it up instead of hearing, "hey, yeah, you got a point." or even just engaging the discussion. Let it be the other way around. You go try to think if there's something that you both could agree as justified for a rule. If such a thing isn't there, then no need for the rule. Good authority doesn't flow from "because I say so", but from clear and justifiable rules.
I'm not going to mask myself because others refuse to take others into account. I have plenty of good interaction when I am not forced into masking, and less when I have to mask.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever gone through what your son is going through with you now? Should a good parent not want to try to understand their child instead, rather than to force their own norms onto their descendant?
I'll take unloved and alone over your fake love.
Perfectly reasonable but let's also recognize that some social norms exist only because of tradition, and are unnecessary & uncomfortable, these social norms need to be questioned & challenged & done away with. When enough people question them and challenge them, and eventually get rid of some unnecessary oppressive social norms, we can continue to evolve as a species.
They're still social norms because people are fine with them.
Just because a group of people online are against things, doesn't mean that everyone else isn't fine with it.
The issue isn't people choosing to behave a certain way, it's the expectation that everyone need to behave that way. If people want to do the same as everyone else, fine. If the standards ultimately don't matter, then who cares?
In my experience, the people who hate me for not following them wouldn't like me even if I tried to play along. I am often more respected when I confidently stand as myself than when I try to follow the rules as meekly as possible. If I'm gonna be freak either way, I'm better off keeping my head held high.
You're free to act however you want to. Honestly, that's fine with me.
But the crux of this is, if you're acting how you want, there's a good chance that people don't want to be around how you're acting, and those people shouldn't be chastised for not bending over backwards to cater to people who're behaving in different ways.
If you want on that ride, fine. But don't cry about it when no one else wants to accept that kind of thing.
If people are actively excluding somebody for being themselves, especially in a workplace, that is a problem that needs addressed.
It's one thing if you're being yourself and not being respectful at all, such as violating somebody's space or taking up their time excessively, it's another to silently shun somebody because they perceivably "went their whole lives being catered to".
That's discrimination. You said it yourself, "But don’t cry about it when no one else wants to accept that kind of thing."
Not accepting is discrimination. You can communicate your needs, such as a need for focus or a reduction in non-work conversation, without being a dick.
Someone avoiding a person is not discrimination. People are not entitled to other peoples' time or patience. That's what I'm trying to say here.
Avoiding is another level of discrimination. If you don't like someone or you are uncomfortable talking to someone, then say so instead of contributing to the culture of discrimination that they face.
Communicate your needs instead of acting like you don't owe people basic respect because they were perceivably catered to... because they are different.
It's fine so long as we can coexist and work together without issue. I would dislike spending time with you more than you would with me
you are never unloved
You are always loved by God
any love of man is incomparable to the love of God
Which one? I'm vetting them to see who has the better dental plan. There's just so many to choose from, it's tough to decide.
whatever you do don't fucking deal with the fae, they'll get you to sell your own teeth for a pittence
Jokes on them, I'm all out of pittances.
There are a lot of gods, so which one? Also, i never saw a god showing love to me, did i got left behind? Damn it
The one triune God
and you being born, being alive, having food, having a machine to comment this are all examples of hs Love for you
and he expressed the ultimate love to us on the Cross
You're right. Brahma, the one true god, did all this for us.
I didn't know he got rhe romans to kill that imposter on the cross but you learn something new every day.
Hinduism is false as it commits multiple fallacies in itself, it is a mess of thousands of contradicting books with no unity.
many modern hindus claim its a "philosophy/way of life not a religion".
Hinduism is also slowly dying, and the only reason it has a "billion people" is that the Indian government assumes that everyone is a Hindu at birth, and they made hinduism the "default" religion in their databases
By masochistically sacrificing Himself, to Himself, to pay a price He chose to charge of His own free will, in order to cleanse us of the "taint" of actions He considers sins.
For the sake of argument let's assume what you believe happened happened and that your god is real. The problem with omnipotence is that you can't blaim anyone else for the system you set up. The crucifixion didn't need to happen to "free us from sin", God wanted to incarnate into a mortal form and be tortured to death. Why? I cannot say, but He could have chosen some other way. He could choose to not threaten us with eternal torture simply for not loving Him. That isn't love.
It is not God who rejects us, it is us that reject God
and the concept of hell is basically a place without God
you didnt want God your entire life, so yeah, you wont be with God, you have free will
but ohhh you want the privileges that come with creation and God himself but not put in any spiritual effort yourself?
God is a fair judge, and he cant just let people off UNLESS someone else takes the punishment
Jesus took the punishment
Why not? Seriously. He set up the system. Why require punishment in that system? Jesus and God are the same person (hence "triune" ), so He essentially had us torture and kill Himself to appease His own vengeance.
He could have forgiven us without preconditions. He chose to require punishment. Then He chose to be tortured and killed . Now He demands that we thank him for it or He'll punish us for eternity. That's psychopath behavior.
because there are consequences for your actions?
and the trinity is comprised of three different persons and one God
We know very little about hell currently, and dantes inferno isnt canon
WAIT SO MY MOM HAD AN AFFAIR WITH GOD?!
No need to slap it again in my face TwT
He never paid a dime duh
I am sure that i have this phone because some chinese kid manufactured this, unless...THE KID IS GOD??
This is a lot to process...
no, God ensured the circumstances for your birth
He provided the food, without him, there would be no wheat for the bread you enjoy
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?
Martin Luther is a heretic
The one universal church (the Catholic Church) is true
I was referencing a joke about that exact sentiment. You have zero self awareness.
Lol if you didn't see their take on Hinduism, it's even more hilariously unaware. Some of their points are the most common skepticisms of Christianity.
the complete absence of upvotes on this lmfao
And as far as I know this community's instance doesn't do down votes, so any down votes are from your home instance. Never seen such a ratio on Lemmy before, wow.
it still has zero upvotes except their own
Also the complete absence of ability to read the room.
if "god" "loves" me then why does its book say it hates me (im queer)
when have there ever been signs of a real god
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8HT6Ux8FM (invidious: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=zi8HT6Ux8FM )
::: spoiler (long) transcript of that song: I have an apology to make. I'm afraid I've made a big mistake. I turned my face away from you, Lord.
I was too blind to see the light. I was too weak to feel Your might. I closed my eyes; I couldn't see the truth, Lord.
But then like Saul on the Damascus road, you sent a messenger to me, and so ...
Now I've have had the truth revealed to me. Please forgive me all those things I said. I'll no longer betray you, Lord. I will pray to you instead.
And I will say Thank you, thank you, thank you God. Thank you, thank you, thank you God.
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum.
I had no idea but it's suddenly so clear now. I feel such a cynic. How could I have been so dumb?
Thank you for displaying how praying works: a particular prayer in a particular church. Thank you Sam for the chance to acknowledge this omnipotent opthamologist.
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum. I didn't realize that it was so simple, but you've shown a great example of just how it can be done.
You only need to pray in a particular spot to a particular version of a particular god, and if you pull that off without a hitch, he will fix one eye of one middle-class white bitch.
I know in the past my outlook has been limited. I couldn't see examples of where life had been definitive. But I can admit it when the evidence is clear, as clear as Sam's mum's new cornea.
That's extremely clear! Extremely clear!
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum. I have to admit that in the past I have been skeptical but Sam described this miracle and I am overcome!
How fitting that the sighting of a sight-based intervention should open my eyes to this exciting new dimension. It's like someone put an eye chart up in front of me and the top five letters say: I C G O D.
Thank you, Sam, for showing how my point of view has been so flawed. I assumed there was no God at all but now I see that's cynical. It's simply that his interests aren't particularly broad.
He's largely undiverted by the starving masses, or the inequality between the various classes. He gives you strictly limited passes, redeemable for surgery or two-for-one glasses.
I feel so shocking for historically mocking you. Your interests are clearly confined to the ocular. I bet given the chance, you'd eschew the divine and start a little business selling contacts online.
Fuck me Sam, what are the odds that of history's endless parade of gods that the God you just happened to be taught to believe in is the actual one and he digs on healing, but not the AIDS-ridden African nations, nor the victims of the plague or the flood-addled Asians, but healthy, privately-insured Australians with common and curable corneal degeneration
This story of Sam's has but a single explanation: a surgical God who digs on magic explanations. No it couldn't be mistaken attribution of causation, born of a coincidental temporal correlation, exacerbated by a general lack of education vis-a-vis physics in Sam's parish congregation. And it couldn't be that all these pious people are liars. It couldn't be an artifact of confirmation bias, a product of groupthink, a mass delusion, an Emperor's New Clothes-style fear of exclusion.
No, it's more likely to be an all-powerful magician than the misdiagnosis of the initial condition, or one of many cases of spontaneous remission, or a record-keeping glitch by the local physician.
No, the only explanation for Sam's mum's seeing: they prayed to an all-knowing superbeing, to the omnipresent master of the universe, and he liked the sound of their muttered verse.
So for a bit of a change from his usual stunt of being a sexist, racist, murderous cunt, he popped down to Dandenong and just like that, used his powers to heal the cataracts of Sam's mum of Sam's mum!
Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum! I didn't realize that it was such a simple thing. I feel such a dingaling, what ignorant scum!
Now I understand how prayer can work: a particular prayer in a particular church in a particular style with a particular stuff and a particular book for particular problems that aren't particularly tough, and for particular people, preferably white, for particular senses, preferably sight, a particular prayer in a particular spot, to a particular version of a particular god.
And if you get that right, He just might take a break from giving babies malaria and pop down to your local area to fix the cataracts of your mum! :::
"a god that loves you unconditionally, but only under certain conditions" type shit XD
the Bible never says God hates queer people
and there have been multiple miracles proving God
such as?
On August 15, 1996, a discarded consecrated Host was placed in water according to standard protocol. Instead of dissolving, it developed reddish tissue and grew.
The Witness
Zugibe analyzed the tissue and identified it as human heart muscle — specifically from the myocardium of the left ventricle near the heart valves.
When Zugibe was finally told the sample came from a communion wafer that had been sitting in water for three years, he stated: "How and why a piece of a human heart is still alive, sitting in distilled water, is totally beyond my comprehension."
https://nacn-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/Zugibe-scanned-reports-26-3-05-and-15-3-05-RON-ack.pdf
article analyzing that claim: https://stacytrasancos.substack.com/p/dr-zugibe-and-the-living-heart-tissue
the blood type was tested and it is AB
they failed to do some genetic tests, but living muscle tissue is present
I personally see the "love of God" people feel as actually being self love that they otherwise wouldn't be able to give themselves. That love really is the most essential to living a full life.
the 1 upvote to 29 downvotes is so funny to me
I kinda feel bad about it because I think they were genuinely trying to be supportive. They're far more supportive than the person telling ND people to shut up and mask.
I mean I usually do have a problem with authority, mostly because they can't adequately explain why.
And because they hurt people. And will not apologise or even acknowledge it and prevent it from happening again. See different religions, police forces, politicians, CEOs, ... fuck authorities, if they don't have a proper process to deal with their own errors.
My biggest motivation to work is pure spite. Especially as an engineer. If I'm told my idea for something is shit without sufficient explanation - I'll be secretly working on that to either discover myself why it's shit or come back at ya with "SEE?!".
this is basically how the scentific process was invented.
"your shit sucks"
"yeah? prove it, fuckface"
"WELL HAHA HERE'S A FUCKING EXPERIMENT THAT PROVES IT, SUCK IT WHOPAOW"
"Because we'll stop paying you if you don't do it."
...well, that's fairly convincing.
Yeah, convincing me to find another job.
Supremely unconvincing.
See if starvation is a little more charismatic.
An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.
This is why Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest sunnuvabitch in space!
Space isn't expanding, it's running away.
I mean, often what people mean is "I don't have the time and/or energy right now to explain it to you".
I'm willing to postpone explanations if they insist, but I still eventually want an answer
Which is fine. Although as an adult it's also fair to expect that you research it yourself.
"So you see, the carrier of charge is the electron, and when they are non uniformly distributed in a conductor, it produces the electromotive force..."
4 years later
"And that's how Gay Sonic memes are stored on the Internet."
What I learned to do is mentally answer my own question with
"Because at the end of the month we will get a 4 number number added to the bank account, which we need for wifey to get dino nuggies"
– David Graeber
More people need to read his books if for no other reason than to have their eyes opened to that.
A good starting point (since it's not too long) would be There Never Was A West or (longer but still manageable) Bullshit Jobs. I belong to the people who enjoyed both Debt and The Dawn Of Everything from cover to cover.
Yeah I was thinking The Dawn of Everything is probably the most valuable of his writings to read. It's long, but it demonstrates how everything can be different and it's entertaining and fascinating the whole way through.
Though I'll put A Utopia of Rules in next to Bullshit Jobs for the "you know stuff sucks, let's discuss it" category of his writing.
Ah pathological demand avoidance. It's not my inability to cope with ambiguity that's the problem, it's everyone else's inability to meet my arbitrary standards.
It's not an inability to cope with ambiguity, it's a "I want to know if this is just another arbitrary rule set for a dumb reason but I'm asking because it might be another rule that looks dumb but actually makes sense when you understand the complexities". It's also a rejection of the idea that ambiguity should be coped with instead of seeking understanding. "Must accept ambiguity" sounds pretty arbitrary itself, not to mention stupid in this world where those who set rules often don't have the interests of those they want following them in mind when setting those rules.
We're describing different things.
Seeking understanding is fine. Someone's mom would love for you to understand their lifetime of trauma that rule prevents happening to your mom.
Challenging rules to avoid altering behavior, not to understand, is more the point of pathological demand avoidance. It is inherently not about why, it's about a rule existing.
Exactly!
You must work in HR.
autism in one picture.
I agree but I can also accept that I’m not necessarily capable of understanding a reason why. Something not making sense to me personally doesn’t inherently mean it doesn’t make sense objectively. Maybe I’m lacking context or perspective or I’m ignorant to some important factor. I’m not the arbiter of what makes sense or not and my ego isn’t so big that I think I get to be the one who decides what makes sense and what doesn’t. If a person can explain to me why it’s important to them and it can withstand some poking or prodding that’s good enough for me. Sometimes it’s an understanding problem not an explaining problem. I accept the rules of physics are real but I don’t actually understand them in any depth, it’s the same thing. Humility is important too.
Yeah! That feels like the right approach!
Rulemakers not being able to explain something in a way you do understand is not a you a problem though. That just implies the rulemakers also don't understand.
Doesn't that depend on who the "you" is, and whether the rule itself falls within that person's expertise?
There are plenty of safety rules written in blood, enforced by those who might not understand the background or the theoretical reasons behind the rule. But someone knows the reason why, and sometimes the reason is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have sufficient background. I'd rather someone build a house to comply with the fire code than to ignore the portions he can't justify to the homeowner.
"I don't understand gravity so fuck it, Imma just throw a cat out of the window so that it can go for a walk"
Meaning there are different kinds of rules, different reasons and different understanding capabilities. Some rules are bullshit, some rules I will be able to verify only by experiment, simply because my knowledge and perception are limited
I feel like this meme being originally from an autism community, posted outside of it without that context, has lead to some egregiously bad takes in the comments. Unfortunately ironic. People coming in here having no idea what the autistic experience of people giving vague instructions and then just assuming you will figure stuff out is like. And then the reverse; trying your best to explain a process in hopes that there will be no ambiguity, only to be accused of being condescending.
And of course we have a plethora of "well in this edge case, its actually necessary to not question instructions!" takes, as if we are talking about last minute bomb defusals, instead of everyday office procedure or insensitive social situations. People on the spectrum are a great showcase of how unwilling the average person is to question the status quo.
Exactly. This thread is a good reverse example for those wanting to learn to be more sensitive. There hasn't been much sensitivity displayed here.
As someone neurodivergent but not autistic I definitely see both perspectives here.
Sometimes the rules are stupid or unclear and the autistic person who's willing to ask the questions changes it from "everyone is winging it in accordance with their own interpretation without understanding why" to bringing everyone onto the same page.
But on the other hand, I and most non autistic people, can instinctively interpret the questioning of the rules as disrespect for the clear reason for them or as a polite way of calling the rule bullshit. I've had enough experience with autistic folks to ask for clarity and try to explain, but most neurotypicals don't (doesn't make it ok). This is something neurotypicals need to be taught to be sympathetic towards. It will make them better not just at interacting with autistic people but with being coherent towards each other and preventing the situation where everyone just assumes their way to incoherence.
Also sometimes it's a situation of "can you please just accept the rules so we can get to what we're here to do?", which is a situation where I'm sympathetic to both sides.
Nah. Those people are just always the problem. They are how the world got like this. Modern (and historic) articulations of tyranny that last more than five minutes would not be possible without them.
"It's there for a reason" drives me bonkers. Sometimes the reason is bad!
i'm not sure why "social cues" and "authority" would have much to do with each other, it's not like anarchists are socially inept, in fact being socially adept is kinda a core part of functional anarchy.
I dislike arbitrary things as well, but thanks to the magic of understanding how to be social i can just talk to people about it and explain why i think arbitraryness sucks ass, and they then treat me nicely and feel bad about my struggles since i'm so easy to deal with.
And it's not like i'm some 10 charisma bard, simply being chill and not actively unpleasant gets you 80% of the way. Even if you never make eye contact you'll still be seen as pretty normal if you speak normally and follow basic conversational etiquette.
A common issue autistic people have is with "implied authority", which has the same main issue as social cues. Doing things because "that's how its always been". A manager who has a job due to nepotism and a common courtesy that is just a white lie are going to cause the same kind of rage in an autist. If it can't be explained in a way that is logical and fair, they will not have any patience for it.
This meme is not about anarchists.
I feel like you're talking about a completely different thing, though. You can be no-nonsense but still nice to interact with, it's something i've gotten hugely better at in just the past like 7 years.
Like in the example of someone who got their job due to nepotism i'd just bring that up to people i trust and report it to wherever such things are reported, your union representative if nothing else. I wouldn't say "you're a nepo hire and i don't like that" to their face because that would be terrifying to deal with, but i wouldn't be silent about it either.
If your response would instead be to rage about it to their face, then; like others have said, i think that goes beyond just autism and into oppositional disorder or whatever.
Realistically, this is how I actually handle these situations. I don't like being rude to people, even when I refuse to follow norms. Besides, I get away with a lot more rule breaking when I am nice and likable.
The secret ingredient is violence. Often legal state-mandated violence, otherwise just plain abuse and violence that's willingly ignored by the authorities.
"Do it or the state will hurt you" is a valid reason that I will understand. I will still sneakily do the thing instead if I think it's worth the risk, but I do consider the reason.
I worked in the nuclear industry and having this sort of mentality is probably one of the fastest ways to get fired from that line of work. It’s absolutely chock-full of very specifically worded dense procedures which are written the way they are to address anything from obvious concerns to very arcane ones buried deep in lists of references, and inside the plants there are very specific boundaries, signs and expectations that must be followed strictly even without someone around to explain why this particular area got roped off suddenly when it wasn’t before or why work instructions are written in one particular order. Nothing wrong with doing your research, that was encouraged because they don’t want you screwing up (though at some point you do need to actually get stuff done and not just read manuals all day), but willfully disregarding procedure or instructions in favor of your preferred way of doing things without going through the processes to get exemptions will go incredibly poorly for you.
I think this post is about rules of society. But even if I'm mistaken, it doesn't feel very hard to give a simple, even if a bit shallow, explanation of why rules must be followed in the nuclear industry.
"Follow this rule."
"Why?"
"Because, if you don't, the process isn't as efficient and/or things can become dangerous. If you really want a more in-depth answer to it, you'd have to study a lot about the history of this rule. I can kind of explain it, but if I were to explain it right now, we'd be here for hours, which is not time we have right now."
"👍"
Actual thing that has been said to me. He did not appreciate the infodump later.
I've been in the nuclear industry for years and following this meme to the letter is not a bad quality to have. I'm sure you've heard the maxim, "Never proceed in the face of uncertainty." By the reading of this meme, he's slowing down and (hopefully) getting the right people involved. There is quite a gulf between asking questions and willfully disregarding procedure, but you were able to make the leap regardless, which is actually somewhat impressive.
I was commenting based on the title not the picture.
The meme itself sure absolutely healthy behavior to know what the heck you’re doing before just ignorantly launching in. Whole point of pre-job briefs, job site reviews, anyone down to the newest person being able to stop work and not proceed in the face of uncertainty.
But the title “If you can’t explain why the rule matters, I won’t follow it” will fly over like a lead balloon.
Almost all safety minded rules, especially in something like the nuclear industry, are really easy to explain. Even "it's arbitrary, but something has to be the norm so we're all doing things the same way" is an acceptable explanation. I'm not gonna start driving on the wrong side of the road to prove an intellectual point.
When working in certain fields, norms can be very useful so that way everyone is on the same page. This is not some inexplicable or unjustifiable reason. I'm not a contrarian, I'm someone who refuses to put up with the customs that actually do hold us back.
"why should we do XYZ?"
"It keeps your bones on the inside :DDD"
Ok that's fair and completely valid. I missed the title and definitely judged you too soon. My apologies.
No. We should just send ignorant morons into nuclear facilities and have all if them cargo cult us to Chernobyl. That's smart. You're smart.
You're also expected to all have degrees in this shit andbunderstand why it's in place, and not need constant explanations.
How do you get "willfully disregarding procedure or instruction" out of "I ask why, and if I don't get an answer, I don't do it"? Did this nuclear facility want people who didn't care to understand the procedures they were told to comply with???
Mother fucker, I guarantee you the only people who are obsessive enough to enforce this shit are on the spectrum themselves. Autistic people aren't selfishly stupid. They want clear reasoning so they don't make mistakes from assumptions.
The title says, “If you can’t explain why the rule matters, then I won’t follow it.” In nuclear you’re expected to follow the procedures and instructions and so on as written unless you went through whatever necessary process to get an exemption or relaxation from that standard. If you know what the rules are and intentionally don’t do that (the “then I won’t follow it”) that’s considered willful disregard and that can get not just the person doing it but also a site tolerating that behavior punished by the regulator to be an example to others because they want nuclear people to strictly adhere to processes regardless of whether they individually think they’re important or not. Everyone has their own view of a facet of some very complex operation and things that appear insignificant to one dude and his coworkers who just see one step as some BS that doesn’t really matter may be necessary to meet a key assumption that is the bedrock of another person’s analysis.
Procedures are often not written in a terribly efficient way to complete the task. That may be intentional if a more obviously efficient method imposes a risk somewhere that the creators/revisors of the procedure didn’t want to take. It could also just be whatever method the writers were familiar with even if a better one exists out there somewhere. So a frequent tension is “Why are we doing it with [Method A] when my used-to plant used [Method B]?” If this other way is immediately better for safety then maybe work should be halted until an exemption or fast track revision is done to have the words match the safer method. If it’s just an efficiency thing though it may take a while to process even a uniformly better method into a new procedure revision such that it has to be done under the existing guidance for the time being… you may well be told that the existing method is flat out worse than the way in the upcoming new rev, but you are expected to fully follow the text of the existing revision regardless.
Or for a different sort of thing with a hypothetical example where there is a guy caught up at a radiological boundary on his way out of the plant. He sets off an alarm on a machine known to be sensitive to the point of occasionally alarming off of background radiation even if you are totally clean. The rule is to wait for radiation protection to show up and clear him before he could go to the cleaner side of the radiological boundary. Most everyone experiences this and generally the way it goes 99% of the time is RP shows up, asks you where you’ve been, they have you go to a monitor another time and sees if you pass or not and if you pass generally they let you go right on through or if not then they start having to be a lot more involved. This guy is impatient after some extended time waiting on RP because he wants to go to the bathroom just on the other side of the boundary and since he’s dealt with a similar situation before he feels it’s OK to just skip the wait for RP, rescan himself again and pass through to the bathroom when he comes up in the clear. By common sense there’s not really a problem, it’s what RP was going to have him do anyway… but it’s not just a matter of common sense. He has just demonstrated that at least in one situation he will not obey the rules that govern radiological boundaries, so how can they be sure he will follow the others? At a site where observing radiological boundaries may make a difference between a normal day and injury or death, that’s actually a huge problem that he can no longer be trusted to always safely stay within the lines he needs to at the times he needs to, an assumption underpinning what areas people are allowed to access. So for that and to enforce the standard and ensure people seriously follow the rules about radiation boundaries, the guy gets fired even though everyone knows that the guy wasn’t actually contaminated upon leaving the boundary.
I'd expect anyone working in that field to already know the reason behind most of those rules myself.
I wouldn’t personally expect that of people. There are a very VERY substantial number of rules in a vast array of disciplines needed to operate a plant generically before even getting into the specifics of the site and all the equipment on it and how that evolves over time as things happen like equipment upgrades or degradation and new operating experience from the same or other plants getting incorporated. Or instructions provided on a case by case basis for performing a task that is now different in some way that matters to one stakeholder who needed a change but that may not be apparent to others. Even people who have been working at the same place for decades with plenty of continuing training can get caught with their pants down on a task they’ve done all the time when a new revision changes something they were accustomed to doing which is why they have to be ensuring that they’re working with the latest revision for each task every time. Often when you’re working with other departments on a common activity you may need help finding out what the applicable procedures or or other guidance that you’ll need to be following even are, let already knowing the latest details on what changes have been made to them and why. And in recent times the industry has a lot less gray and bald heads than it used to so many more people are freshly learning what their own positions are and don’t have the experience and perspective of watching the place evolve over the decades.
That would definitely be one of the places this doesn't apply, and there aren't very many of those.
another absolute banger from TotallyNotJessica <3
Imagine doing remote tech support for someone with such an attitude lol
"I don't exactly know why it works but it has solved similar problems in the past"
Absolutly valid answer
Also I don't think that's what this post is about
This post is apparently about giving people a space to "um, actually" to their heart's content 🙄
whatugonnadoboutit
And that is how we break toxic and abusive "ways it's always been / done" that people blindly follow. I tip my hat to you, good fellow. Keep up the good work.
This is why fascists hate us autistic people :3c
They "like" the ones that are obedient specifically to them.
Indeed. If only everyone else could see how stupid fascism is. I suppose the problem is that they don't know they're living under it.
fascists are the ultimate bottoms, they bow before authority /hj
Exactly! Cannot be allowed!
I mean I kinda get it and a team with an understanding of a situation can handle it more efficiently and throughly but if I had to reason every management decision with everyone we would finish nothing at work.
At a certain point, you just gotta label it as "management bullshit" as shorthand. Besides, is management causes confusion that makes it hard to get anything done, that's their fault. In an ideal world, competition from the market would weed out the bad ones, but competition is pressure capitalists loves to mitigate.
Maybe that's a sign that we don't need all that bullshit management then?
It can go too far in either direction. If you're writing a report you know no one will ever read it can help to ask why and push for an answer, but it isn't the driving instructor's job to explain why you should stop at the red light.
"I can explain" is different from "you can understand", and chain of command means you do not have to reason with literally everyone involved/affected by your decision. So if used well, the drop-any-rule-lacking-backup is useful
"That's just how it is" is not a good reason, just fucking explain to my autistic ass!
I find that a credible threat of violence will usually suffice to get me to do it, also.
Literally how the military (and government) works, in a nutshell.
For real. That’s why they kept having to pull my grandma aside in Sunday school. I guess you’re not allowed to ask questions but I wasn’t willing to believe things you couldn’t ask questions about. It made no sense. Like seriously if Adam and Eve were the only two people and they had two sons Cain and Abel then where did Cain and Abel’s wives come from? Anyway I got in trouble for asking that and got annoyed when my question wasn’t getting answered. I knew then and there if you could not ask questions you were being taught bullshit
I work with a guy like this and he has my eternal allegiance.
And what if they give you the reason and you don't agree with it? Plenty of those guys around during COVID
I don't think problems with authority were what caused all the bullshit around COVID. It wasn't neurodivergent/anti authority people causing problems, but anti-intellectual conservatives who saw inconvenience as oppression. Most of them were normies who couldn't handle that the social norms they were used to needed to temporarily change to save lives, and had grifters willing to exploit their discomfort. It was a cultural phenomenon, not a personal one.
The pandemic was something we didn't deal with properly as a society, precisely because people were smeared and shamed for having questions and concerns (however valid).
We could've done better. We are less prepared as a society than we otherwise would've been if COVID didn't become a partisan issue, with major experts (from my POV) doing everything they could to not alleviate and address concerns, instead encouraging a culture of fear and a culture of shaming and smearing people who question authority, with no shades of gray.
If experts encouraged and facilitated dialogue and education, if hospitals/businesses/etc. were held to account for not having proper stocks of PPE or other sensible mitigations to deal with a pandemic, if ventilation became a bigger concern for businesses to address... I could go on. Things could've been better.
They still can be better, especially if we welcome questions and concerns and address them fairly, instead of picking the most outrageous examples of questions and concerns, and acting as if anybody who questions the experts or authority (in a general sense) are just as outrageous or dangerous.
i'm of the opinion that willfully choosing to break a rule after being told why it exists would belong in a different category than not understanding why the rule exists and thus not being able to justify its relevancy.
there are too many systems with conflicting contradictory rules where following all of them is literally impossible and even neurotypicals have to cull instructions on the basis of relevancy as a result, after all...
Who are also anti choice when it comes to abortion.
Honestly, as a very autistic person myself, everyones right and wrong here. When you get stonewalled trying to understand, yes absolutly this. But Ive come to find at least half the time there is a good reason that tact demands be not dived into. Fuck that tho. If you dont know then ask and find a way to answer if you yourself are asked instead of claming up.
well, depending on what we are talking about, your understanding may not be required for you to perform your task. Maybe your instructor also doesn't know. but somewhere down the line someone implemented it for a good reason thats not immediately obvious or easy to explain.
We cannot expect everyone to know everything about what they do. it would be better but isnt feasible.
i dont need to know how to build a car to drive it. would it help? yes. is my mental capacity limited? very!
I don't need to know how a car works to know the consequences of not using it correctly. I don't need to understand how a respiratory virus replicates and harms my body to know that I should wear a mask around others when sick. It usually comes down to more universal concepts like danger, efficiency, or efficacy. What makes a reason good is often simpler than the involved mechanics
And yet we have tons of people unwilling to believe that the response to a respiratortly virus is to wear masks. It was well explained why, they just didn't want to do it because it was seen as too much of an inconvenience.
Same thing happens with driving vehicles.
Sometimes the answer doesn't matter if people want to be obstinate, and saying that they won't do it if not properly explained is an easy out for them.
I am not talking about other people. I am talking about me and how I interact with the world. I'm far more reasonable than it seems like you want to believe, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to live a life unquestioned.
Yes, and there are also time-sensitive cases like emergency services, medical procedures, and working in high-risk environments, where you don't have time to stop and explain everything. Ideally there'd be some kind of debrief tho.
indeed, i mean exactly those cases
okay, so you know everything about anything in minute detail? then tell me this:
when does the dick sucking begin?? i was told there would be dick sucking!
You have never known a life without it.
That's the good thing about life experience, it answers many of these questions for you.
“It’s because that’s why!”
Have you ever been checked for Oppositional Defiance Disorder? Because as someone who has it, you just described it to a T.
Why is psychology this way?
the coolest thing ever is
The BAD EVIL Disorder
in psychology language
everything has to be a "disorder"
They name the conditions by how they affect normal people, not how the conditions affect us.
Admittedly, I literally told off a priest and a cop at completely different times in the same day, when I was 5.....
Nobody bothers observing what the difference between insanity and madness is.
Insane: a subjective observation you make about another, they clearly have a self-consistent reasoning process with a metric that you don’t share. But communication and cooperation is still possible. Aka Neurodivergent
Mad: an objective observation that someone is illogical, goes against established and observable evidence, may harm self or others, aka nut case
Edit: clarified sentences
bestie, wtf are you talking about?
Neurodivergence as a concept and how academic psychology perceives it. Everything is a disorder if it doesn’t fit the neurotypical mould.
Here’s my argument from Mastodon regarding this: https://mastodon.social/@voodooattack/116564124322479196
I don't need to read your argument because I came to the exact same conclusion. I just don't think madness or insanity are useful terms for understanding psychology, nor is making a distinction between the two really worth the effort.
There is no argument to be had, then. You asked a question, I provided clarification
I vehemently disagree. If the distinction is not established then neurodivergents will keep on being misdiagnosed and fed drugs that may or may not work for them.
Anything that is not a cis white guy who wants to march waving a big national flag is a disorder.
That's not oppositional defiance disorder.
Oppositional Defiance Disorder was when republicans ran campaigns against vaccines simply because Democrats supported making vaccines affordable and available to everyone.
Republicans literally blamed their outsized deaths and disabilities from COVID on Democrats pushing people so hard to get their shots.
Asking why, and refusing to do something because it lacks a logical precedent is not oppositional defiance, it's basic awareness and attention to your surroundings.
I guess my diagnosis is just republican propaganda then.
You can both have it, and be wrong about what it is in this specific instance.
Chesterton's fence. One should not remove a fence until one learns why it was erected in the first place. By all means, learn why!
The current administration is causing huge amounts of damage and suffering by blindly removing and eliminating things without understanding why those things were created and maintained.
It's less about them not understanding and more about them not thinking it matters. The wealthy think they can strip mine society without consequence or meaningful pushback, and in the short term they have been right. The rich Americans of the future will not have to same global reach that they do now, but this generation of oligarchs is absolutely selfish and proud of it. They don't really give a fuck if their kids inherit their empire, or get burned at the stake. Line go up, and most of them won't live to see the system the take for granted crumble into irrelevancy.
Why can't I sit in the floor in the middle of a grocery store? Why can't I just hang out in a public restroom drinking a Pepsi? Why shouldn't I practice my singing in line at the theme park? Explain it to me clearly.
Floor is dirty. You can sit on the floor if you want to get dirty.
People are farting and making piss mist in the bathroom, if you want to eat food in there, you can, but it's weird and gross.
You can practice your singing in line at a theme park, you may annoy people to the point that you get kicked out of line, or assaulted. Seems like good reasons not to do it IMHO, but maybe you are a better singer than I am, good luck with that.
"it's weird"
"it's gross"
"other people won't like you if you do it"
I thought neurodivergents hated such reasoning lol
Maybe, but they wanted the info on why they shouldn't do those things. Now they have the info, and they can make their own decisions.
but... you can do all these things, if you want to.
YES !!
You get an answer, you just don't like it.
You might have ADHD my friend. Just like me!
Well that whole thing hit me like a max range Mirana arrow
You sound cool though
If someone doesn't know, they shouldn't be obeying.
The Hessians complained about colonial troops questioning orders and lacking discipline.
You can either be a dick, or you can suck. If you want to be a dick you better be doing something dope to compensate.
I read this as "I don't understand why so I don't care"
Works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't.
It's more that I want to know why I do the things I do. I crave understanding rather than simple orders
If you can't explain it, then it's probably not important anyway
This can be a slippery slope, though. My mom fell into conspiracy theories, and a big part of that was thinking along the lines of "if you can't explain how vaccines can't cause autism, then I'm going to keep believing they do." Silly me with my genetic counseling background made a small, simple slideshow about how the immune system and vaccines work, and of course she still said "you didn't explain it well enough, so I still believe they cause autism."
Essentially the strategy of "if you can't explain why, it's not worth doing" only works if the person asking truly wants to understand, and withholds forming an opinion until they have all the information they can gather, instead of just looking for an excuse to not do something. Like most things in life, it can be abused by bad actors.
Of course, this was in the context of OP's meme rejecting the rules of society / work / ... without proper explanation.
One should keep Chesterton's Fence in mind.
Idiots like Musk will see a system they don't understand and tear it down, and then people die.
Never change anything because society is too difficult to actually understand was the essence of his argument lol. He was a reactionary christain opposed to social change and it's a bad argument.
You should be able to change things without assuming that everything which seems silly has some unknown and important purpose. You should manage change by assessing risks and hazards which are known and planning appropriately.
It's not a bad argument to try to understand an existing system before changing it.
I've seen a lot of "why is this like this? I'm changing it" blow up in software. The clearest memory was not realizing that user names could be null, even though that looked impossible by tracing the registration route. Turns out there was another, stupider, way of registering.
It's especially a good argument when the person evaluating the system has no domain knowledge or expertise.
Is where it comes from, in a book describing why he's a Catholic.
But the reality of the world, especially social institutions is not like this. There is a cunning sleight of hand here, a fence only gets built because someone has a reason to build a fence. Many things in life are not built: they arise spontaneously or emerge from chaos through more complex forms of interaction.
If we switch the argument to being about diverting a watercourse, or regrading land, it suddenly falls apart because it becomes clear that these things do not exist for intelligent reasons.
I don't think it's a bad idea to try and understand the world or to mitigate risks when making changes. I think chesterton's fence is a shite argument because it implies that everything which exists has a planned purpose and favours the status quo which may be intolerable.
This is not a compelling analogy. Many things in nature may not exist for an intelligent reason, but their presence matters in ways that may not be obvious. Diverting a waterway may cause tremendous damage to the ecosystem and other downstream (pun intended) things. That is an excellent example of why you should understand the current system before attempting to change it.
I don't think the implied plan purpose is necessary for the argument to make sense. The point of the story is it's not always clear what things are load bearing, nor what loads they bear.
If the chesteron origin is distracting to you, let's discard it. I think we agree that changing a complex system without attempting to understand it first is foolish.
No, I am trying to make a point here. Everyone knows decisions can have consequences and that change should be managed. Chesterton's fence is not "try not to fuck up in ignorance" it is a specific argument made by GK Chesterton and pushed by cryptofascists in the tech industry via the "rationalist" movement to try and equivocate:
and Chesterton's argument
If Elon Musk was someone who asked why and accepted answers he wouldn't have torn it down. So this post does not reference him.
Absolutely, but then the fence should have a clear marking, otherwise it's a booby trap and the idiot that placed it without documentation is just as much at fault as the idiot that removed it without proper analysis.
I'm reminded of that meme of the cartoon girl going "this sign won't stop me because I can't read"
I've had coworkers that changed some code, then just deleted the tests that started failing. Then they get annoyed their PR is blocked by more attentive coworkers.
If you can't abide by social or workplace norms, then don't expect people to want to be around you, or want to work with you.
Oh no
anyway...
Oh no, someone voicing an opinion besides "people should be endlessly catered to and those people should never make an effort to cater to others" how shocking right?
It seems like you don't know what it's like to be neurodivergent or have a disability.
People who are different or disabled can go their entire lives not being catered to, while constantly being told their entire lives to adapt every aspect of their being to simply be allowed to participate or fit in (mask), and still meet extreme discrimination and exclusion - even though there are supposed to be protections for disabled people and employers promise extra hard to not discriminate in every job posting.
Think solid barriers to employment, education, etc. all because it's annoying for people with little problems adapting to society to give them a little bit of consideration and support, or at the very least to not discriminate against them.
This is the most irritating part for me. I tried for most of my life to be normal and not only was my life miserable, I ultimately failed to hide my quirks enough to be accepted. Only by embracing my weirdness have I found acceptance, as people like "quirky and confident" more than "shy and awkward"
I'm trying to get to that point myself and stop masking so much! I feel that you are 100% right too, I believe people love authenticity.
When people see somebody who is relaxed and accepts themselves, they are more likely to be relaxed and accepting as well.
Thanks for sharing 💚
Displays of consideration can go so far in bridging these gaps. Ask your questions, but by prefacing with a statement like "I just want to understand this rule better" or "Out of curiosity" or something like that can make the questions much more palatable to neurotypicals.
Wouldn't you like it more if you got an actual explanation? Maybe you should look into that instead of dismissing others as "oh look its mr questioning over there". Maybe they got a point... authority, especially that of reactionaries, is questionable.
Sure in an ideal world you're right. The other side of that, is when I'm in a professional or learning environment, and it's constantly being interrupted by arbitrary questions by people.
I had a college class that got entirely derailed by two people like this, and they were actually things I dearly wanted to learn. Instead, we were constantly interrupted by people wanting these questions answered.
Is that fair to me, who paid like 2500 dollars to be in that class? I'm sorry, but I don't think it is. It's disruptive, and it is wasting the time of the (in this case) lecturer and the people there to learn.
And you think they didn't pay either?
View what they ask as something positive instead. You also learn from them.
Lectures aren't there to just sit and listen. They're there to listen and talk together, discussing the content. To me, that's better than a class full of yea-nodders. I want people that question. People that learn. Not people that just repeat.
The questions were not on topic in the slightest, unfortunately. Even with prompting of 'this is not on topic lets get back on topic' they wouldn't do it.
I'm sorry, but someone disrupting an environment is not the only one who has rights in this situation.
Need to know is a thing. If you don't need to know in order to do your job, then you don't need to be told the how or why. Your job is to do what you've been told.
If you can't handle that, then fucking quit. Or consult a web search, I guess. Why waste time and effort explaining if it's not necessary or important? Sometimes it really is just as simple as "some moron says to."
If I can think of a reason to not do it, then I should ask why. If the reason isn't explained to me it's a much more logical conclusion to believe that the reason is a bad one. Or that the person telling me what to do is a moron. If I disagree with the reason but it's not a harmful one then we can start determining if whether it's meaningful enough for me to push back.
If "some moron says" means the thing we're doing is going to go poorly, that should be brought to attention.
Yeah, then "some moron" can do it himself.
And you can be unemployed.
What the hell is wrong with y'all?
Maybe question the rule instead of shoving it down the other?
Nah.
Find another job.