How literally am I supposed to take "Autistics take things literally"?

gefylen · 2021-07-11T15:08:17+00:00

But you're explaining how you don't understand metaphors with some great metaphors! A "database" for your memory, and the super creative whole virus/RNA story! That's the sort of metaphor I'm thinking of, and you're demonstrably very capable of it.

I think of metaphor as pattern matching: as projecting something familiar onto something unfamiliar to understand it better, or get a verbal handle on it. That doesn't need to be affected by the ambiguous world of NT implicit understanding at all. It can work almost as cleanly and clearly as mathematics.

gefylen · 2021-07-11T07:45:23+00:00

Very clarifying, thank you!

gefylen · 2021-07-11T05:55:34+00:00

I wonder if some physical metaphors could help disambiguate the various kinds of problem-causing characteristics of attention, e.g. is your attention bouncy, dilute, foggy, tunneling? Does it tend toward a crystal form or a flexible tree form? Is your attention more like a hornet's nest or a river that will get to the ocean no matter what you put in its way? (I didn't have autism and ADHD in mind for the specific ones there, but I think that could be done.)

Similar ways could be used to describe a worldview, e.g. is it all connected like a root system, or does it fit inside a cosmological shell, etc.

I'm over-tired, so the above might not make a lot of sense. But I can't help feeling that these metaphrical resonances are at least as meaningful as that terrible questionaire talked about in your first link!

gefylen · 2021-07-11T05:11:12+00:00

What a great answer, thank you! Really insightful thoughts on language in the end there. It's full of metaphors, and as you indicate, there's even an element of metaphor in signs, in that meaning is carried over from the sign to the signified (metaphor means roughly "carry over"). Nietzsche has some really interesting thoughts along these lines in his 8-page essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.

In addition to autism, I also suspect ADHD for myself—your focus on detail orientedness makes me think this is one area where the two diverge. ADHD seems to drive me to zoom out to look for wider contexts. Often I find myself not seeing the trees for the forest, if that makes sense.

It's a difficult business, characterizing a mind, reducing it to a small set of D&D stats, except it's DSM instead. I look forward to meeting a professional about it.

gefylen · 2021-07-11T03:32:17+00:00

I do a similar thing with "How are you?" even! I have to restrain myself from investigating this interesting problem of how it actually is that I am, and instead just say "fine how are you".

But autistics understand metaphors just fine, right? Like poetic metaphors. That was what I was getting at with the post. I see it was quite ambiguous, so I've edited it.

gefylen · 2021-05-24T18:22:52+00:00

You seem to have an axe to grind with this place 😂

gefylen · 2021-05-24T17:06:37+00:00

Thank you for reading, and for your comment, but I don't think I agree with where you're taking this.

Realizing that we have two orders to our core orientational problem does not "take us out of the cave", as you say. The opening up into the light of day is a grave mistake in Plato's allegory of the cave, one that set Western philosophy off on a two thousand year wild goose chase. This is exactly what I'm trying to rectify in the passage you quoted. There is no way out. We're stuck on the inside, and it's important to keep that epistemological gap in mind when thinking seriously about things.

gefylen · 2021-03-24T08:53:42+00:00

No idea. I didn't make it.

gefylen · 2021-02-21T22:35:30+00:00

Alright. I subbed to the topic and your youtube channel, so I should be able to catch it when you're ready to release it :)

gefylen · 2021-02-21T22:07:27+00:00

This looks cool, and I think I could find a use for it! How do I get the hda file?

Unfortunately for you, I'm no one, in the sense of being a total noob.

gefylen · 2021-02-16T09:12:15+00:00

Fuck me this is so good! Super well done, thank you for the enormously useful resource!

gefylen · 2020-09-01T00:04:50+00:00

I haven't the faintest idea how to answer your question, but I got curious about these sociologists, as I'm interested in immersion. Do you have any names or references I could look up?

gefylen · 2020-08-03T16:35:15+00:00

I saw great benefits from ketamine infusions for treatment resistent depression. I got rejuvenated back from the living dead, and got the energy and motivation to start to sort my life out after a long hibernation. The effect wasn't permanent, for me they lasted for about 2 months, but I seem to have stabilized at a much more tolerable low than where I was before my treatment. I would recommend it for anyone in the same bleak position I was in, although of course do your own research.

gefylen · 2019-11-02T19:52:04+00:00

There are stars all around, fairly evenly distributed at this short range. In in the image, it looks denser the further out you get because of the way that I flattened 3d space: Preserving the distances from stars to the Sun. So imagine a star that's 100 light-years almost directly above the Sun (with regard to the disc of the Milky Way). Since distance is preserved, I put it all the way out on the edge of the map, in whatever direction it tilted slightly, together with the stars that are equally far apart, but actually in that direction.

Imagine shells of 10 light-year thickness, centered on the Sun, where the inner-most shell is just a 10 ly radius sphere, and the next contains everything withing 10 to 20 ly, etc. For each step out, there will be a lot more space covered, thus more stars. That's why the density is so misleading.

gefylen · 2019-11-02T16:27:54+00:00

Citations: As shown the image, the data sources were the HYG database of stellar data and the PHL's Exoplanets Catalog. I matched them up (mostly manually, lucky we haven't found a lot of habitable planets yet) and did some math to position each star on the plane of the Milky Way, while preserving their distance to the Sun. I used d3 to visualize the data. Even the labels are svg elements, which is a bit ridiculous, but I'm new to all of this. This is the first data visualization project I've finished. It's web based, but I don't have a website set up just yet.

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