So one take-away from the personality change maybe making me unautistic is that the antonym of "ask culture" isn't guess...
So one take-away from the personality change maybe making me unautistic is that the antonym of “ask culture” isn’t guess culture, they’re not (now I’m not) guessing, there really is some sort of interpersonal signal they’re (we’re) picking up.
But it’s not like an information-carrying signal, or at least one that gets delivered to the consciousness, it’s not like as if where before I’d be like “oh I want to make a romantic move but I don’t know the right moment” I pay attention to the signal and it tells me what the right moment is and so I can decide to do it then.
What it is is that being attuned to this signal, I will make that move at some point that happens to be the ideal moment, without ever having specifically considered and decided on that.
I dunno, maybe this is what instinct is? Whereas previously I had thought of it in terms of information (like “this is the moment”) arriving without any obvious source that would then serve as an input to the same conscious decisionmaking process?
I guess I’d say it’s like driving an automatic transmission – you’re absolutely still the driver, but there’s a bunch of stuff you used to have to do manually – choosing to execute a particular maneuver at a particular time – that the mechanism now takes care of itself.
A difference being that I like stick shifts because direct control lets me shift at useful times the mechanism wouldn’t pick up on – engine braking, downshifting into turns or to pass – but the automatic mechanism here seems to shift me usefully in situations I’d have no clue what to do with myself.
for me it’s the difference between improvising on an instrument and trying to consciously think about where the notes should go, with my dysfunction being an overreliance on the ‘should’ (and total lack of interest in most people under most conditions, bc under most conditions i’m masking, which you can’t improvise with)
nerd subcultures where it’s common to “not have social skills” in an autistic way are, ime, dominated by people groomed practically from birth by the cold war gifted education-industrial complex for middling STEM positions, which grooming involves inculcating the exact type of timid, authoritarian-follower, compute-for-someone-else state of mind that can’t improvise. krummholzing people into office job shapes
Yeah I remember a classmate whose dad had been skipped ahead two grades For The Cold War, when I showed up in the '80s the gifted programs were still Jonathan Livingston Seagull '70s idealistic, but by middle school in the '90s they were already a mix of Actually Bright, Dad Owns a Dealership, and Both Parents are Nervous College Graduates. No actively stupid ones from the latter two.