I don’t think you have to be autistic to have a passion for something and realise that the only way you’ll pass that knowledge on is via written text.
Before the printing press the only way to copy a book was by hand. Do you think the people doing it were odd or just pragmatic?
I feel like Lemmy so broadly applies autism that it’d be neurodivergent not to be autistic.
Totally agree here. It’s not just a Lemmy thing though, it’s an internet culture thing at this point and it bothers me. People who happen to be really into some niche thing doesn’t automatically make you neurodivergent or autistic at all.
It’s the new OCD.
Thank you. I get super OCD about people using these terms so loosely.
eh I have moderate to severe, clinically diagnosed OCD and I didn’t mind it getting bandied about thusly.
I’m not neurodivergent but I think its a great way to signal inclusivity despite much of it coming off as cringe “autism is a super power”. Bit of cringe is a small price to pay to protect more vulnerable.
I mean, there’s passion for something and there’s hyper-specific, extremely deep niches. I think it’s common to be into plants and nature and science and such, but to devote eight full volumes to ferns specifically is just… very specific.
I recently had a conversation like this with an autistic person, and their perspective was interesting.
I have a lot of strange niche interests that other people seem to think I know a lot about. An autistic person and her autistic friends thought I might be autistic too, which I took as a compliment because I interpreted it as them saying they think I’m like them.
I don’t think I’m autistic, but I’m not bothered by the possibility, so I suggested we both take an online autism test. As we took it, the differences were apparent before we even finished.
I had no issues answering the questions and found them very easy. She struggled to know what they meant and what the “correct” answer was. I finished in about a third of the time that it took her. When the results came in, I barely scored on the autism possibility scale while she scored very high as likely autistic. Her mind was kind of blown because it reframed what she thought a neurotypical experience was like.
After more discussions with her, I realized she had a bit of a prejudice against what she interpreted as neurotypical qualities, but in my opinion, those were just the qualities that make up someone who is either kind of a jerk or just callous. As we’ve known each other longer, she has been amazed at my ability to let arguments go, do gross tasks without a problem, not fixate on things that bother me, and a host of other abilities that she struggles with, even though she also notices that I am passionate about certain subjects and tuned in to how I act most of the time.
The thing I think some people on the spectrum don’t realize is that it is possible for a neurotypical person to learn and display positive qualities that are associated with autism. The reason why autism is considered a disability, in my opinion, is that it is harder for an autistic person to learn and display neurotypical qualities (though not impossible).
So, if I were a fern guy, I think it would be totally possible for me to write an eight volume series about them single-handedly. The trick is that I would have to want to, and it would not be something that I was fixated on, but rather something that I chose and endured to the end for.
The counterpoint here is that many neurodivergents managed to fit in way more and that they are actually a natural evolved important subgroup of a human society.
What you are saying is not wrong but at some point we did evolve mass production and consumerism catered to majorities making everyone else stand out more and eventually be considered disabled as modern society no longer needed their strengths and the misaligned creating new challenges,
This creates a feedback loop where people also avoid being seen doing non-typical behaviour and called others out for it.
The more our general knowledge grew the more unnecessary it appeared for anyone to specialise in subjects where books where already available and if they want to eat they ought to be working in the factory rather then have their head up in the clouds.
This is a good point, but the point still stands that not everyone in science is neurodivergent. There are plenty neurotypical people currently doing similar work to this because they developed an interest and an area of expertise.
EO Wilson didn’t have autism, and dude wrote a massive book IDing every known ant genus based on morphology. Some people just go hard
The social niche thing makes the most sense IMO. The autistic guy who prefers being alone was probably Jim the game warden who was more than happy to murder any trespassers and even the Lord listened to when it came to matters of the land. Rather than bob who knows a lot about nature and is about two steps away from having a meltdown at his job at McDonalds.
I mean they definitely were special, one way or another
His momma clearly got into some of that pre-industrial Tylenol! 🤡
Chewed too much willow bark
That’s salicin a compound that the body converts to salicylic acid which is the precursor to aspirin.
Still too much pain relief. You see, if you simply torture women enough, all their children either come out perfectly or die for … reasons…
Wholesome, all-natural home remedies!
with autism like that, the circumcision took the whole dick
The encyclopedia itself is Ferns: British and Exotic by E. J. Lowe. It’s in public domain now. A PDF scan is available on the Internet Archive.
Ferns were such a big deal in victorian Britain (and British culture/ empire), it was like their pokemon.
You could say they went down a…puts on sunglasses…FernGully.
Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhh
The thing is, back in the day, you couldn’t just look up ferns on the internet, you actually had to go looking for information on ferns specifically, and it’s very likely that after a lot of really annoying visits to various libraries looking through botany textbooks, an author (or a group of authors) decided they were going to collate everything they found about ferns and stick it in one collection.
So when someone else comes along and goes “I need to know something about a very specific fern”, the librarian can go “You want that 8 volume encyclopedia on ferns over there” because they know that it has every single fern on the planet in there, and you don’t need to spend 8 hours looking through every botany textbook and making the room smell like cheap coffee.
What I’m saying is it was probably done out of spite, not genuine interest.
Whoever wrote this post has never talked to someone in a PhD program with autism.
there are two kind of people in PhD programs, autistic, and undiagnosed.
Nah, you also have abundance of ADHD folks that are hyper focused on the only subject that they care about, or anxiety disorder folks who are worried about not achieving a goal.
And let’s admit it, also a few are neurotypical and genuinely enjoy university academia. They thrive in that environment & dread the day it ends because there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing.
100%
Just mocking OP’s stupid post. There is an abundance of neurodivergent people who successfully go super deep on academic pursuits. Many would argue that they came prewired with a cheating code for deep specialization in a field.
if they did they never would have wrote the article because they’d still be there having a firehose of information blasted at them.
with the titanic amount of fern species, you’re bound to have alot of material.
I love how the last one is bigger, as if he wanted to add more but not enough for another book
It’s like Stephen King stretching the ending because he can’t bear to finish.
I need this.
I am in this image and I resent the implication.
Did your mom take Tylenol too?
Not a lot. Just compulsively before coitus
Whatever kills the headache. My mom liked to crush the extra strength into her wine every evening.
Idk a single sane human being who’s ever said anything remotely close to “everyone in the past was neurotypical”. Who is OP quoting?!
You must not be around older conservative people much.
ADHD? Back in my day, we called that a child that needed to be spanked! Rabble rabble rabble…
I’m not American so this particular party line hasn’t infected our mentally and emotionally challenged folks… not yet at least, lol.
Consider yourself lucky!
I’m in the UK and don’t agree with Western imperialism and their anti-humanist rhetoric so, while I’m comparatively lucky, I don’t think the country has more than two decades before going full MAGA and forcing me to leave it. It is the same stock of people with the same half-baked ideologies, after all. 😭
That’s probably accurate. We should all move somewhere better.
