Subject: Autistic ‘black and white’ thinking.
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2: Probability thinking and autism.
There’s growing discussion in cognitive science that many autistic people:
- Prefer system-level pattern detection
- Track contingencies more explicitly
- Think in conditional structures (“if X, then Y”)
- Notice statistical irregularitiesThat isn’t black-and-white thinking.
That’s model-based reasoning.If anything, it can tolerate uncertainty better, because uncertainty is explicitly modeled rather than socially smoothed over.
️@KatyElphinstone *Quantified* uncertainty is certainly easier to handle!
I'm a vocal composer, and as a white cis man (at least to a first approximation) I have all sorts of anxiety about being perceived to be making unfair demands on singers who aren't.
But what counts as this anyway? It's very contextual!
So my writing is overwhelmingly for specific individual singers, who can meet my clarity-seeking demands by explaining what their voices can and can't do, and where there is uncertainty - e.g. in how long one can sing between breaths, which is quite contextually variable - can make *that* clear.
And while classical singers tend to get prescriptive "fach" vocal labels - and are most of the singers who can meet my certainty-seeking demands probably for precisely that reason of having a career-defining label based on these specifics - I don't think about which of these labels fit, at least not on the level of "this is a lyric mezzo I will write a lyric mezzo piece." (One of my muses *did* end up shifting fach soon after I wrote for her - and my pattern detection made me half-anticipate it! - but I wrote for the specific parameters I was given, including stretching her in a specific direction she figured she'd need for her soon-to-be-former fach...)
So I can reliably write things that people I write for will happily sing and sing well. The *social perception* aspect is far more difficult for me to handle, because I can't quantify "how likely is it that people think I'm a cis man sexualising female-coded voices because I'm drawn to warm low notes and floaty ethereal high ones?" (Which I am... For the same sensory reasons I'm sex-averse...)
If the uncertainty is explicit to a working model (in this case, of What Voice X Can Do), I can account for it. If it's rooted in the unpredictability of NT thoughts, not so much...
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Subject: Autistic ‘black and white’ thinking.
It's framed as a deficit often seen in autism, but... is it that simple?
Autistic people are traditionally criticized for our inflexibility, or cognitive rigidity.
But I think this isn’t the whole picture.
To start with what we know, here are ten things we autistic people generally have in common (refs at the end of the thread):
️ #Autism #Neurodivergent #ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Neurodiversity
@KatyElphinstone I spent a while reading the comments here, and the irony of a big group of autistic folks arguing about the nuances of black and white thinking made me laugh. Clearly we aren't all that rigid. It only seems that way because when we do see the logical answer to something we won't accept illogical conclusions.
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@KatyElphinstone @autistics Between "theory of mind deficits", "restricted interests", and now "rigid thinking", it's starting to look as though neurotypicals commenting on autistics is a case of "Every accusation is a confession".
@dedicto @KatyElphinstone @autistics
Projection. Yes, I've suspected this for a while, right down to the origin of the word "autistic" being "a person's retreat from reality into their own subjective world". -
@KatyElphinstone @autistics Between "theory of mind deficits", "restricted interests", and now "rigid thinking", it's starting to look as though neurotypicals commenting on autistics is a case of "Every accusation is a confession".
Well yes!!
This is a series of threads I'm doing on "is it really a deficit?"
So.... There will be more to come
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@KatyElphinstone @jessica I think the distinction there is that it wasn't grey. It was "no, it's black and white, in a specific arrangement. If you look at it properly they're clearly separated."
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@KatyElphinstone I wonder if that's what allows my brain to model the flow of code! I've been coding in a very limited programming language that doesn't support exceptions being caught after the fact really, so I have to preemptively know all the potential failure modes and either design such that they don't occur or else slip in explicit guards for them. I'm literally mapping the flow of execution through conditional statements and the parameters that I have either in my head or in the code itself and try to think about places it could go wrong. Often I'll be thinking of these things before I've ever written a line of it.
It sounds like a great skill.
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@KatyElphinstone *Quantified* uncertainty is certainly easier to handle!
I'm a vocal composer, and as a white cis man (at least to a first approximation) I have all sorts of anxiety about being perceived to be making unfair demands on singers who aren't.
But what counts as this anyway? It's very contextual!
So my writing is overwhelmingly for specific individual singers, who can meet my clarity-seeking demands by explaining what their voices can and can't do, and where there is uncertainty - e.g. in how long one can sing between breaths, which is quite contextually variable - can make *that* clear.
And while classical singers tend to get prescriptive "fach" vocal labels - and are most of the singers who can meet my certainty-seeking demands probably for precisely that reason of having a career-defining label based on these specifics - I don't think about which of these labels fit, at least not on the level of "this is a lyric mezzo I will write a lyric mezzo piece." (One of my muses *did* end up shifting fach soon after I wrote for her - and my pattern detection made me half-anticipate it! - but I wrote for the specific parameters I was given, including stretching her in a specific direction she figured she'd need for her soon-to-be-former fach...)
So I can reliably write things that people I write for will happily sing and sing well. The *social perception* aspect is far more difficult for me to handle, because I can't quantify "how likely is it that people think I'm a cis man sexualising female-coded voices because I'm drawn to warm low notes and floaty ethereal high ones?" (Which I am... For the same sensory reasons I'm sex-averse...)
If the uncertainty is explicit to a working model (in this case, of What Voice X Can Do), I can account for it. If it's rooted in the unpredictability of NT thoughts, not so much...
I've really enjoyed this - thank you! I feel like I've learned a lot.
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@KatyElphinstone I wonder if that's what allows my brain to model the flow of code! I've been coding in a very limited programming language that doesn't support exceptions being caught after the fact really, so I have to preemptively know all the potential failure modes and either design such that they don't occur or else slip in explicit guards for them. I'm literally mapping the flow of execution through conditional statements and the parameters that I have either in my head or in the code itself and try to think about places it could go wrong. Often I'll be thinking of these things before I've ever written a line of it.
@x0 @KatyElphinstone
I was in grade 5 when I first learned programming. Our teacher taught us his own class outside of school hours which was at about a grade 10 level. Most of the students struggled with it, but it just came naturally to me. He'd tell us our assignment and it was like a flowchart generated itself in my head. Even then I'd say that I thought "algorithmically". I think that it's a tragedy that my subsequent schooling never built upon that. -
Orwell, G. (1946) “Politics and the English Language”
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
- Shows how vague language protects cruelty & frames clarity as resistance to manipulation.Pellicano, E. & Burr, D. (2012) Bayesian explanation of autistic perception (UCL record)
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476122/
- A Bayesian framing of autistic perception showing how priors and uncertainty differ in shaping experience.End of refs.
@KatyElphinstone Thank you so much for this thread!
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@KatyElphinstone Thank you so much for this thread!
Glad it struck home
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Karvelis, P. et al. (2018) Bayesian visual integration and autistic traits (open access, PMC)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5966274/
- Tests autistic traits in Bayesian integration and links traits to stronger perception via more precise sensory information.Li, J. et al. (2014) moral judgement and cooperation in autism (open access, PMC)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945921/
- Relates moral judgements in autism to cooperation behaviour in a game context.more below
@KatyElphinstone Karvelis et al is excellent, the first time I've ever seen research backing this specific trait, thank you!
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@KatyElphinstone @autistics Between "theory of mind deficits", "restricted interests", and now "rigid thinking", it's starting to look as though neurotypicals commenting on autistics is a case of "Every accusation is a confession".
@dedicto @KatyElphinstone @autistics everything I've heard about autistic people from neurotypicals is something more true of them. E.g. once someone around me said autism is just when someone thinks they're always right, or something like that. I, as an autistic person who's very frustrated with that behavior from neurotypicals, suggested that that's true of most people who are not autistic. Everyone laughed at me as if they had just discovered that I'm autistic and I was still in the dark
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@KatyElphinstone @jessica Maybe she meant "all or nothing"?
Sentences like "Yes, the planet is dying, but think of the share holders", or "Yes, we should save the environment, but actually doing anything is inconvenient, so maybe not?" just don't sit right for anyone thinking this through.
Hell, yes, we do need to do whatever it takes to save the environment. Seeing that as non-negotiable and not wanting to tone it down for the sake of profit or convenience would be perceived as "inflexible black and white thinking" by anyone who has a "more flexible" view of the situation and weighs profit or convenience against long term survivability.
Weighing the pros and cons of saving the environment and deciding that nothing is worth causing even more destruction seems reasonable to me, but is of course as "black and white" as it can get.
@everythingalsocan @KatyElphinstone @jessica
I was thinking on these lines as well. I can probably be described as "black-and-white" when I have taken an ethical stand that shows high congruence with my moral principles (emphasis on "high congruence"... I will have likely evaluated it across multiple fronts), or if it is logically sound, with high consistency across multiple "models" of understanding the world.
I do change my mind if I'm shown some effort to demonstrate that a different opinion would have higher congruence with observations of reality and moral stands. Then I will need time to think (i.e. "run the new opinion through a couple of models").
If people wants a quick change of mind just to appease, or with no clear reason, no, sorry, I've put a lot of energy and thought into this. I expect the same in return.
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2: Probability thinking and autism.
There’s growing discussion in cognitive science that many autistic people:
- Prefer system-level pattern detection
- Track contingencies more explicitly
- Think in conditional structures (“if X, then Y”)
- Notice statistical irregularitiesThat isn’t black-and-white thinking.
That’s model-based reasoning.If anything, it can tolerate uncertainty better, because uncertainty is explicitly modeled rather than socially smoothed over.
️Modern religeous bigoted insistence on eliminating differences has covered up what humanity already knew and crippled our shamans.
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@KatyElphinstone Karvelis et al is excellent, the first time I've ever seen research backing this specific trait, thank you!
Yes, I also found that study super interesting.
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@dedicto @KatyElphinstone @autistics everything I've heard about autistic people from neurotypicals is something more true of them. E.g. once someone around me said autism is just when someone thinks they're always right, or something like that. I, as an autistic person who's very frustrated with that behavior from neurotypicals, suggested that that's true of most people who are not autistic. Everyone laughed at me as if they had just discovered that I'm autistic and I was still in the dark
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@jessica @KatyElphinstone You know what does produce black-and-white thinking?
Abuse.
"You/they did a bad thing. Therefore you/they are a bad person, and therefore everything you/they think or do is bad." Or the inverse with goodness.
And going back to the truism that there are no Autistics without trauma ... could this be the reason for the stereotype?
I wonder if this is relevant to something I found quite life-changing for me recently.
I'd been so puzzled by people I care for might do unkind things. It didn't make sense... and how could I relate to them, if that was them?
Then I read about internal family systems and Yung's work on the 'shards' of the psyche - and how subconscious parts can influence a person without them being aware of it at all.
This helped me to not mentally 'throw them out,' so to speak.
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I wonder if this is relevant to something I found quite life-changing for me recently.
I'd been so puzzled by people I care for might do unkind things. It didn't make sense... and how could I relate to them, if that was them?
Then I read about internal family systems and Yung's work on the 'shards' of the psyche - and how subconscious parts can influence a person without them being aware of it at all.
This helped me to not mentally 'throw them out,' so to speak.
There being a logical explanation changed everything for me.
Up until that point I'd been quite 'black and white' about people (i.e. "if they can behave like that, then I was wrong about them, and I don't want to ever be close to them again").
I've become more compassionate, and also more aware about healing (literally, making 'whole' again) - both in others and myself.
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7. We can be a bit like pattern-seeking missiles.
8. When new evidence comes to light, we’re generally adaptable – even if it takes a minute.
9. That said, we may dig in our heels about things (like change) when we’re anxious or scared.
10. We like gathering data, and interactions that are a true exchange of information.
But none of this amounts to cognitive rigidity or ‘black and white’ thinking
️@KatyElphinstone Another way of phrasing most points on this list is not being ok with passively accepting gas lighting, double speech, reality dodging, and other slight of hand tricks, just to pick cheap and shallow status points in some deceitful social networking game.
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@KatyElphinstone sure. But a great way to trick people into thinking it's not black and white (which isn't a bad thing) is to tell them even when most unreasonable that their point is valid from their perspective.
Because it actually is. Their opinions and theories may seem incoherent and nonsensical from one's own perspective, but since their brains have produced those results they must make sense to them.
Humility helps also. To every theory there are theoretically infinite alternative theories that may also be true. So thinking one's own perspective is the only one valid is not very smart. Instead adopting a "I think it's like this or that" while also maintaining that that can never be the last truth (since it cannot) is a very good way to make people actually listen without alienating them.
It's just like there are no lies, just misunderstandings. If someone seems to not tell the truth, we just don't understand what they're saying. It's like a code that needs to be deciphered in order to understand what they actually mean, even if it seems that they are deliberately deceiving: They do it for a reason. Find out that reason and one can tell what's actually behind those words.
Psychological analysis is a great way to get to know people.
Well, indeed! And if you look at the relational model of quantum physics it seems that literal reality is based on relationships, perspectives, and probabilities.
So reality is literally different from their perspective. Which will nest and converge with a bunch of other realities that you, by definition, don't have access to.
So I really agree about the humility 🥰
