lew-basnight:

Reading an interesting book (actually it’s an essay bound and printed, it’s like 60 pages) about rhetoric and communications in the “post-truth” world, and it’s got an interesting discussion of bullshit. Bullshit is not lying— to lie means your know a truth and are invested in convincing people it’s not true. Bullshit is just saying whatever gets you what you want, and it’s much harder to confront. Because it doesn’t matter if you “disprove” bullshit. It’s conditional to the circumstances in which you’re saying it, and if you’ve already swayed your crowd then it doesn’t matter if it’s true of not

This is kinda what I’m getting at when I talked about autopilot and the allistic sociality – there’s this whole way of like communicatively interacting with people that doesn’t involve consciously choosing words and thoughts that have to be logically reasoned out, it’s kind of like how other characters in dreams have dialogue that had to be generated by your brain somehow, and as far as I can tell it’s mediated by a feedback loop where you ~through woo~ read how it’s being recieved by your audience and lock on to that as a guidance beam?

Anyway its increasingly clear to me that’s what great salesmen and Casanovas (or even Smoove B R&B-cheese characters) are tapping into.

I think a thing is if girls aren’t interested they don’t take it as seduction, and if they are I seem to get bonus points because it seems authentic rather than running a play?

And possibly the allistic thing is a bicameral mind thing where the social like, XO is distinct from and not directly “heard” by the captain? Only in my case both of them are descended from the same old personality holding the roles together so the XO has much more command experience than usual?

I honestly think a lot of what it is, just so much of the social stuff is generalized back to going up to people and pressing the action button, and with a lot of girls that seems to map to “seduce”.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

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?

Like I have no idea what the mechanism is here. Is it just checking for the most ideal moment I’m likely to get, or the first time I cross some threshold such as to expect it be well-received? Can I fake it into false starts with local maxima? To be determined.

Also one thing is like, the shit I do without volitional awareness seems to benefit from the normally conscious skills I’ve trained up, the thing is over three and a half decades in autistic mode the thing I trained up was making sense, so even the most batshit stuff I pull out of my ass will turn out to hang together in a logical sense?

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

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?

Like I have no idea what the mechanism is here. Is it just checking for the most ideal moment I’m likely to get, or the first time I cross some threshold such as to expect it be well-received? Can I fake it into false starts with local maxima? To be determined.

Suddenly struck by what an autistic way of thought this investigation into not being autistic is proceeding under

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?

kontextmaschine:

lealhound:

going to be losing my mind about this forever. neurotypical people don’t know why other people do things EITHER!!!! they are operating on VIBES. diagnose u with NO VIBES DISEASE

Honestly yes, since Covid spread to my brain and gave me a new personality and I only then realized the old one had been autistic by contrast, I don’t fully know why I do things sometimes and just operate on vibes.

Like logical reasoning is still done with the same structures and procedures, but especially social stuff – I had always been like “is everyone else aware of information they’re picking up from some other frequency?”

And like, they are definitely – now I am – picking up that frequency but weirdly we’re not becoming aware of any information from it, it’s like it goes from input to informing our own behavior without ever surfacing into consciousness.

Allistic stuff is actually a lot like that - like, if I want to go up and have a conversation with someone I don’t have to consciously decide on a subject, and figure something to say about it, and a particular approach to open with, and precisely when to time it for, instead ifs just like an adventure game – I choose TALK with GIRL and that stuff just sorts itself out.

Well maybe even better cause the classic trope is undercutting a smooth talker by drawing attention to the way the things they say do not cohere in a logical view but I have decades of experience of approaching conversation from an exclusively “what actually makes sense here?” standpoint and drawing on that experience I can make sure my patter holds together even if I don’t entirely know what it’s gonna be until it comes out of my mouth.

lealhound:

going to be losing my mind about this forever. neurotypical people don’t know why other people do things EITHER!!!! they are operating on VIBES. diagnose u with NO VIBES DISEASE

Honestly yes, since Covid spread to my brain and gave me a new personality and I only then realized the old one had been autistic by contrast, I don’t fully know why I do things sometimes and just operate on vibes.

Like logical reasoning is still done with the same structures and procedures, but especially social stuff – I had always been like “is everyone else aware of information they’re picking up from some other frequency?”

And like, they are definitely – now I am – picking up that frequency but weirdly we’re not becoming aware of any information from it, it’s like it goes from input to informing our own behavior without ever surfacing into consciousness.

Allistic stuff is actually a lot like that - like, if I want to go up and have a conversation with someone I don’t have to consciously decide on a subject, and figure something to say about it, and a particular approach to open with, and precisely when to time it for, instead it’s just like an adventure game – I choose TALK with GIRL and that stuff just sorts itself out.

sighinastorm:

bananatwinky:

inside out (2015)

i regret drawing this

I regret you drawing this.

This is exactly how the old personality handled socialization, but with the new personality it’s like I click on someone and select “small talk” from the contextual menu, it’s nuts.

So something about coming to read/write vibes and not just content is I kind of assumed content was all there was, and if I hadn’t engaged with someone’s the circumstances just hadn’t been right. But now I’m realizing some people really are just vibes, and enough people are at least partially both that maybe their content doesn’t need to bear the full weight of personhood and what of it I saw before was a much larger share of the total and doesn’t imply further depths elsewhere.

And I still at least have the content-centric worldview I developed in youth, and so the upshot of all this is I feel much more contempt for humanity than the old personality ever did. Which is maybe why just as I become much more socially fluid I have damn near totally abandoned human contact.

Again, it’s ironic that I’m now more charming and socially self-validating and people react to me so much more positively and approvingly since the personality change when from my perspective I no longer assume value in people or feel bound by any prerational morality just as I become so much better at using them

So I never particularly thought of myself as socially incompetent; maybe socially weird, but in a way I largely attributed to undersocialization, growing up more directly after the Baby Boom time that all the adults had recalibrated their expectations around but not subsequently updated to grok we were no longer in a small town paper route world overrun with other kids to occupy ourselves with (and, you know, being alienated with freakish intelligence)

I realize since the personality change though that I just had no social instincts though, as Taylor Swift put it, I’ve never been a natural/all I [did was] try, try, try, and I had to actively cultivate social logic and pattern-matching.

And I did quite well, in fact. Got to the point where I had good enough models of “human”, and narrowing types thereof, that after not even too much exposure to you I could generate a reasonable model of your mind in particular and hypotheses on its internal state, and some idea of which stimuli you would react to differently if they were/were not true, and fluidly drop these sonar pings into conversation and observe the reactions and refine the model… if I focus on one particular friendly subject enough (and it helps a lot if I’m manic) I can essentially not only read their thoughts but by determining where in the thought process they are at any given point introduce perfectly timed interrupts and influences to direct their train of thought.

…and I kind of figured that’s what there was, and maybe a lot of people were just pretty content-free and superficial.

But how I realize this, why I’m suspecting in retrospect that the old personality was autistic is there apparently is just this whole other level of instinct to it I suddenly get, maybe “vibes” is right, I have no idea what bandwidth this information is being transmitted on, there’s nothing like the stimulus->response->interpretation->new hypothesis loop for me to be deriving it from, it really might be some evolutionary relic of social species before language.

And the thing is it’s not the same information. Like, I can’t read thoughts this way, I read motivations. I can just somehow tell what someone else wants – to get something, to be recognized in some particular way, to be in accordance with some structure, to maximize for some particular emotion or self-conception. And then work things so whatever I want comes across as a fulfillment of that.

For one thing this turns out to be a lot more useful in getting laid than any stuff with ideas.

For another, I guess the distinction here maps to a plot/character distinction in literature.

But more to point this information not being redundant means that I can get good reads on people’s thoughts and motivations, which combination seems a lot more useful in social situations than thoughts alone. I find myself confidently making plans on the understanding that their success at some point will need to involve recruiting a complete stranger and not being disappointed. It’s wild.