The Autism Article

Our thoughts about the famous Cracked.com.

Re: The Autism Article

Postby Jeckel » Mon Mar 23, 2015 5:17 am

I've know one or more people that match up with each of the characters in BBT and I have on many, many, multiple occasions heard people on Cracked and around the internet who have said the same thing.

No tv show is truly realistic, but the characters in BBT are hardly offensively off-base misrepresentations.


And isn't "Sherlock from A Show Definitely Not Named for the Main Character" a reference to Elementary? Never watched the show, so can't really say, but that is what I took it to mean.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby AdricDePsycho » Mon Mar 23, 2015 5:59 am

Well Tesseract, humor is subjective, so I won't argue over your opinion over the show. We can agree to disagree over it.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby Delta Jim » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:34 am

Tesseracts wrote:I wonder where this "fact" that autistic people don't get humor comes from. It might be one of those things where one study showed evidence that autistic people don't get humor 20 years ago and it's been cited so often it's believed to be fact.


Autistic people occasionally don't understand the intent of humor, making it hard to share humor with others. They get the joke, just not how to relay it to others. Obviously this isn't 100% across the board. There are quite a few people on this site alone who are on the Autistic Spectrum and are quite capable of being funny.

Also, low functioning autistic people may have trouble even getting jokes in the first place.

So, to put it simply, it's just people partially quoting things until it becomes "common knowledge".
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby EstebanColberto » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:51 am

I think the main reason people hate on the show so much is just that it's really popular and a lot of people just don't find it funny. When people have already decided to hate something, they find more reasons to hate on it and the only place where they can vent their hate is on the internet. It's really hard to find someone, for me, in real life that can't stand BBT or Family Guy, but the internet is full of people that hate both shows.

I've just noticed that when it's something we like, say Indiana Jones, when we spot a huge plothole, like him being dragged underwater by a submarine for longer than it's humanly possible to survive, we're ok with that cause we liked the movie overall, but Crystal Skull was a bad movie, and people can't suspend their disbelief enough for nuke the fridge scene.

I've noticed that people that hate the nerd stereotypes in BBT are usually ok with them in The IT Crowd cause the IT Crowd is much more funny to them.

Back to the autism thing. Do they actually say House and Sherlock are autistic. I never watched House religiously, but he never came off as autistic to me. He seemed to just be a cynical jackass who happened to be a genius, but his behavior probably comes from a combination of a superiority complex and his drug abuse. I think people have started using autism as a synonym for smart, but not all smart people are autistic. Sometimes I see these lists of people the self-diagnosed community passes around of people they claim have Asperger's which include eccentric geniuses like Isaac Newton, who we can only guess was autistic judging by historical records, and even Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson is a smart man and all, but I highly doubt he has Asperger's. Being smart is just a characteristic that many people with it have, it's not a synonym for really smart guy.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby OrangeEyebrows » Mon Mar 23, 2015 7:36 am

EstebanColberto wrote:not all smart people are autistic.


And not all autistic people are smart. By a long shot. I don't know what the stats are for Aspergers and high-functioning autism, but moderate to severe autism is frequently comorbid with all sorts of learning difficulties and developmental delays.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby sunglasses » Mon Mar 23, 2015 1:13 pm

Jeckel wrote:I've know one or more people that match up with each of the characters in BBT and I have on many, many, multiple occasions heard people on Cracked and around the internet who have said the same thing.

No tv show is truly realistic, but the characters in BBT are hardly offensively off-base misrepresentations.


And isn't "Sherlock from A Show Definitely Not Named for the Main Character" a reference to Elementary? Never watched the show, so can't really say, but that is what I took it to mean.


Not sure if serious but it refers to Sherlock, the BBC show.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby AdricDePsycho » Mon Mar 23, 2015 4:59 pm

I always figured that Nikola Tesla was aspie. Oh, and I mentioned in the article that a few cartoon characters might be autistic...of course I got it from TV Tropes. If you're not dead all along/a time lord/something to do with Haruhi Suzimiya, you're aspie.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:06 pm

I still stand by my claim that Shiina Mashiro from Sakurasou is the best representation of Autism. She's neglectful of morning routine, has major NVLD, lacks social skills, doesn't see any point to a lot of things that neurotypical people seem to do ritualisticly, doesn't understand the concept of paying for things, sends mail to her own boarding house, and has very narrow interests. She's still tethered to the whole "all autistics are genius savants" trope though, as she is a genius painter and is a mangaka, but everything else is a pretty accurate depicton.

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Re: The Autism Article

Postby PSTN » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:34 pm

I don't watch The Big Bang Theory often, but some members of my family do (and my grandpa freaking loves it). I don't find it (and I don't think anybody would argue that it is) gut-bustingly hilarious, but it's gotten some chuckles out of me, and it has the added bonus of not expecting me to watch every previous episode four times and read the show creators blog before I watch a new episode. I can just sit down and turn it on, often in the middle of an episode, and know what's going on.

The Big Bang Theory is like the Wal-Mart of shows, it's not great, but it's acceptable, easy, and ubiquitous. I think there's a lot of people who don't like it because they think it doesn't "deserve" to be as popular as it is. Just like how you'll hear people ragging on Katy Perry, or Taylor Swift. Like, who cares? If other people like something that you don't, what difference does it make?

Also, I remember hearing that Mayim Bialik is anti-vax, just to tie this post back to the original topic.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby MisterKrinkle » Mon Mar 23, 2015 6:35 pm

In regards to BBT, a comparison I saw somewhere sums it up for me perfectly.
"Big Bang Theory is dumb jokes about smart people, while Arrested Development is smart jokes about dumb people."
I can handle dumb jokes, but I require a bit of ludicrousness to find it funny.

Now, in regards to the subject matter of the article itself; I find it strange that people can deal with all sorts of varying personalities but as soon as someone has asbergers or whatever it's suddenly "weird" or "creepy". Like I'm a giant irreverent asshole (or misanthrope, misanthrope is a nice word) and people get along with me just fine for the most part. People aren't really that different, autism or not.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby NathanLoiselle » Mon Mar 23, 2015 7:04 pm

EstebanColberto wrote:not all smart people are autistic.


YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH!
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby Matt the Czar » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:09 am

Holy crap. sarcasm italics! Where can I get those?
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby cmsellers » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:25 am

Sorry for coming late to the party. I didn't really want to rush my response to this, because I very nearly started my post with "This article has made me retroactively question everything Robert Evans has ever ghostwritten. Good job Cracked; you just ruined Robert Evans." Then I read some of the points, and realized it's another case of "Title Guy: you really need to seek professional help."

Point being, I wanted to think more carefully than usual about what I wrote. So, point, by (mostly-spoiled-on-account-of-length) point:

6. Autism in Media
Not really
Chuck Lorre explicitly states that Sheldon Cooper is not intended to be autistic. However he based the character off of people he knows, and the fact that everybody recognizes that he has autism indicates that Lorre based him off someone who also had autism, and did a pretty good job portraying him. Sheldon Cooper's personality resembles mine in high school, and certain family members still claim that I resemble him.

His being successful in his career is also realistic. As far as I can tell, academia and computer science are the only non-manual labor, autism-friendly fields out there. I blew my final interview for grad school this year in all sorts of ways, and still got accepted with full financial support. I don't know if they've figured out I have autism, but like Chuck Lorre, I'm sure they've seen all my quirks before. The real world is not nearly so forgiving, unless like computer science, they need people better than they need people who don't make their coworkers uncomfortable.


5. Autism speaks
Yes
When I was part of a couple online "autistic pride" forums in high school, Autism Speaks was the devil, because they wanted to get rid of our wonderful gift. It was only a few years later before I I realized that I would happily trade my exceptional memory and analytic ability for the ability not to fuck up dates and job interviews. When I realized that autism is not a "gift," I decided that I'm probably misjudged Autism Speaks.

Yet somehow, Autism Speaks continued to make me really uncomfortable. I used to think it was because their literature focuses on how much autism sucks for the family members of autism. By ignoring the difficulties of being autistic, they come across as not viewing us as people. Now I have a much better reason for disliking them. A cure for autism is likely a pipe dream (at least until we have some major advances in genetic therapy), and the fact that they're dedicating all their money on that rather than on support services for people struggling in the hear and now demonstrates quite clearly that they're a shitty charity.


4. Self-diagnosis
Without Title Guy's awesome powers of mislabling, this entry is so fucking obvious wouldn't even be a thing. Thinking you might have a disorder and going to a doctor to get an actual diagnosis is not self-diagnosis; it's a good idea. Self-diagnosis is going around and telling people you think you might be autistic because people suck and you don't want to deal with them.

3. Too much emotion
Maybe
I'm not sure about the argument that we're too overwhelmed with emotion to react. As a kid, when I got overwhelmed with positive emotion, I'd spin in circles; overwhelmed with positive emotion and I threw tantrums. As a teenager, negative emotion would cause me to either break down in tears or become selectively mute, and positive emotions caused me to speak in tongues. As an adult, I use speaking in gibberish as an outlet for both overwhelmingly positive and negative emotions.

I think the big issue is that we signals for conveying emotion are a learned social skill. They vary widely across cultures, and children learn how their culture deals with them by observation. I was explicitly taught how not to spin or throw tantrums, so I moved on to gibberish and crying. Crying was still seen as bad, so I was taught to repress negative feelings until I could talk them out, and somehow this lead to selective mutism. Nobody ever took a reason with my babbling gibberish for some reason, so eventually I learned to use that as an outlet for negative emotions as well.

I feel like that's a common approach to autistic kids: teaching them to control outwardly undesirable manifestations of those feelings. Since they don't tell us how to convey our feelings in small ways, we don't learn the proper way to convey that you're slightly sad, or very angry, or peculiarly aroused, and come across as robotic. It took about six years to teach me how to make small talk properly, and that's relatively straightforward; I don't think anybody would want to devote the time it would take to teaching autistic people how to use culturally-appropriate emotional body language.


2. Seeing the world differently
Indeed
I remember one case as a child, where I threw a tantrum because I said "one hundred plus another one is two hundred," and the counselor corrected me and told me it was "one hundred and one." She finally calmed me down by calling my mother who confirmed the counselor's mathematical reasoning, but I was still baffled, and the experience haunted me for years.

If you haven't figured it out yet, "another one" referred to "another one hundred," and I was using language in a way that was technically correct, but which no normal person would use because it's confusing.


1. Work
No shit
I would never tell a potential employer that I'm autistic prior to getting hired, and academia and computer science are the only situations I'd feel comfortable mentioning it afterwards.

I never had "Aurora shooter" comments, but I did have people say "I knew somebody with Asperger's Syndrome," and then proceed to describe somebody who would inevitably come across in the telling as a colossal asshole. I also got the impression that about half these "somebodies" were self-diagnosed emo kids. Of course since I was getting the description from somebody who had clearly had an unpleasant experience, it was almost certainly biased.

Unfortunately, merely not telling people you're autistic isn't enough. Up through high school, I has enough of the classical outward signs that people who'd even experience media depictions of Asperger's Syndrome could pick up on it. If I told them, the response would invariably be one of essentially "Oh, I kind of thought so."

By the start of college, I'd managed to learn to make small contact, and eye contact, and how to pretend that important conversations are all about the other person. Since my second year of college, nobody who hasn't worked extensively with autistic people has been able to guess that I'm autistic, and if I tell people, the response is usually "Oh, you' don't seem autistic." Unfortunately, hiding the obvious signs of autism means that I'm no longer obviously "other" at first glance. Thus when I get to know people, and the mask starts to slip, quite a lot of people start to notice that there's something odd about me.

Though I can't prove it; I'm pretty sure that I was fired from my first TESOL job mainly because my English boss found me really offputting and couldn't figure out why. (For some reason, I tend to make straight women more uncomfortable more quickly than I do than men and lesbians.) In other words: I've fallen into Uncanny Valley and can't get out.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby cmsellers » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:28 am

Matt the Czar wrote:Holy crap. sarcasm italics! Where can I get those?

From aviel, where else?
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David Wong wrote:7. "But this is the last non-terrible forum on the internet! The rest are full of trolls and Nazis!"

That's just not true at all.
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Re: The Autism Article

Postby Matt the Czar » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:33 am

cmsellers wrote:
Matt the Czar wrote:Holy crap. sarcasm italics! Where can I get those?

From aviel, where else?



These were TOTALLY needed!

Actually, they are quite useful

truthfully!
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