@hellomiakoda ‘s thread about visual imagination reminded me of something I realized yesterday. I was talking to my wife about taking things apart as a kid, to see what’s inside and how I hate electronics as a field of technology. I don’t hate the devices and their functionality. I hate the way electronics work.
Let me elaborate.
As a child, I was very interested in how devices worked and liked to open things up, take them apart and put them back together. With mechanical devices, this has always been easy for me because I can see how the parts move and interact with each other, thus I can see their function and make sense of the whole thing easily. It is fixable if something isn’t destroyed but only misaligned for example, and I can readily identify what can’t be fixed without a new part.
Then one day, I opened up my first small fm radio. It was the biggest disappointment of my life up to that point. There were no moving parts with discernible functions. Nothing made sense because I couldn’t watch how they worked. I could see the components but they were completely opaque to me as to what their individual and collective functions were.
I remember feeling so utterly cheated. The world had invented something that I couldn’t figure out, by myself, as a six year old, and therefore I hated it.
I still find electronics boring to the extreme, even though I learned enough about the field to understand how they work. No visibly moving parts (electrons don’t count), nothing to look at, nothing to keep my interest going.
@CynAq@hellomiakoda@actuallyautistic The first time I took the case off of a pc (getting the case off is the hardest part; putting it back on is the hardest part), I was terribly disappointed by a lack of magic - it was just...parts. So, yeah, I get that.
I spent my working life in electronics, hardware and software. And I loved it. We can't see electrons, but we can't see air or emotion either. There are plenty of things in our wonderful and glorious world that we cannot apprehend with any ease.
The thing that gave me the most pleasure was design, another thing that is not immediately visible or obvious.
I sympathise with your frustration, but perhaps life's just like that, sometimes?
@PatternChaser@CynAq@hellomiakoda@actuallyautistic I can't say I have issues with non visible phenomena. It's nice to be able to, but it's not necessary.
I like how computers are logical, though. Loops, conditional logic, and arrays make intuitive sense to me. Programming languages tend to be unambiguous in contrast to natural language, which is ambiguous and paradoxical (eg, you can devise sentences that seem to make sense but actually make no sense at all).
What is anathema to me us when there's a million exceptions to a million different rules and then exceptions to the exceptions. Sadly, this occurs frequently in business processes and procedures of which I am exposed to every day 😢
Thankfully, it is rare for most natural science and engineering.
@marytzu@PatternChaser@hellomiakoda@actuallyautistic that’s very interesting because I don’t even feel like programming languages are languages at all, but an approximation of the mechanisms of machinery in word form, because they are so rigid and structured. I can use them in a limited capacity, because I find them too boring to pursue further than a strictly need to know basis.
On the other hand, I actually like the ambiguity and flexibility of human language. I enjoy exploring the different strategies different languages use to convey ideas and the nuances they contain. I love how some sentences can only be said but can’t be written, because they depend only on some subtle difference in intonation which isn’t marked down in written language.
I feel like this is not very common among autists as most seem to report having difficulty with these properties of human language but I just find them fascinating.
This doesn’t mean that I find it easy to talk (or write) to people because that brings in the interpretation of the parties into question, and that reduces the practicality. But I see that as a social problem rather than technical. I like languages separate from the social problems of the people who use them, if that makes sense.
It's likely under-reported, since one would expect linguistic autists to mask better, on average. Especially if you get to the level of idioms, pragmatics and phatics. Once you know all of that, the workarounds for social interactions are mere applications of that knowledge.
I can speak English with almost native fluency and inflection, and I’m obviously native in my native language, and I can speak two others at a beginner level.
Honestly, I made a choice as a young man to put all of my linguistic efforts into my native and second “native” language, which took quite a bit of effort and didn’t leave time and energy to learn others at a deep level. Especially considering I am interested in too many complex subjects and was going through grad school as and undiagnosed autistic person.
I would definitely like to learn a few more but my perfectionism makes the prospect a little too scary.
@CynAq@marytzu@hellomiakoda@actuallyautistic
I love language, as you do, although my command of it extends only to English, with a smattering of Welsh, French, German, and the usual (and ancient) European tongues.
I also celebrate the poetic madness that is the English language, and mourn what Americans have done to their own language, where losing the spelling eccentricities also loses pointers to the history and origin of the word.
@CynAq@hellomiakoda@actuallyautistic I'm not really likely to run into this because since very early I loved software way more than hardware. Probably also to do with my poor motor skills. At some point I got myself an Ouya mostly so I could improve my motor skills actually. Still an amazing console.
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