My kid has his times when he struggles. But then one day he picked up a Dr. Seuss book and read it out loud from beginning to end. He was two and I have no ideas when or how he learned to read.
My sister used to do that at an early age. Turned out she couldn't actually read but had simply memorized the book from having had it read so many times and even learnt the correct times to turn the pages over.
my son, 11, has autism, and we have many fantastic conversations, he likes to ponder all kinds of things, especially hypothetical semi impossible things. He eats up Kurzgesagt, https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell ( highly recommended ). He is very confused by social situations and spends a lot of time trying to work them out. He likes rules, and desperately wants to know the rules of social interactions with other kids. Today on our walk he was pondering what our experience would be like if we had eagle eyes and bats sonar navigation and whether can genetically modify ourselves to do so.
Sounds just like my son. He's also on the spectrum, loves Kurzgesagt, and has a million "what would you do if ..." questions about hypothetical scenarios. He's 9.
With the vocabulary changing from asperger to general "autism spectrum disorder" its a bit of a guess on my part, but in case it gets worse for him during puberty and the shoe fits i can highly recommend Atwoods complete guide to asperger. You might not figure out how social interactions work, but how you work is an open book you just have to look at.
In general, more selfreflection was a game changer for me, especially when it came to depression. Thinking about how being wrong would look like, especially despite you "knowing" to be right. So for example starting with a right conclusion but missing some shades of grey (or worse viewing it as black and white instead of a better and worse spectrum) leading you to drawing the wrong conclusions. So ego in form of cognitive biases and the traps they create, the limits of your brain and memory and all. The nice thing is, you can frame it as: at the end of the day, you do prefer being right over thinking you are right, right? After all, why would you willingly cling to a wrong conclusion?
Meditation (see sam harris waking up for a rational take on the topic) is also very helpful with all the tunnel vision and stress. Because the former can come with its own problems. Once you spend more brain power on analyzing situations and problems you loose sight of the actual boring problem you wanted to solve. Which leaves you stuck at trivial tasks. Or you develop "solutions" that you cant keep going day in and out.
edit: If he likes fantasy novels, he might want to check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel) once he is older. Despite the light vs dark its not classical fantasy. You see, there are others among us who are able to see the shades of grey of reality and channel power from that. The movies are a waste of time.
Allen Frances, who was chair of the DSM-IV [0], has said "Probably the biggest mistake we made in DSM-IV was including Asperger’s, a much milder form of autistic disorder with unclear boundaries to normal diversity, eccentricity and giftedness" [1] (my emphasis)
Of course, DSM-5 has merged Asperger's into ASD, but he'd say the same thing about ASD. His view on ASD: "The DSM-5 #Autism spectrum is even worse for the same reasons" [2]
I don't think you get the full picture from one little story, and everyones experience is different, but from my experience what is striking is that because they see the world differently, their observations are different and often when we hear novel observations of the world it seems really "intelligent". If you capture those moments in a story because they are interesting, you aren't capturing the other things, things like their stims (repetitive behaviors / noises), how they react to noisy scenarios, other people, physical sensations etc. Its just their observations of the world are often interesting, or even physical things that seem hard for us (like from early on once my son could write his full name, you could keep rotating the paper around while he writes it and he'd keep writing his name such that once rotated back the right way everything looked correct)
Maybe it's my autism, but I don't understand what's remarkable about this story. Clearly some people find it interesting or else it wouldn't have made it to the front page of HN. Can someone elaborate?
Stories don't have to be remarkable; this is a parent recording a moment in their and their child's life, something that they might otherwise forget or get lost in the mud of other memories jumbled together. I think it's quite cute.
Thanks, that's fantastic. I'm also autistic, and yes, this just looked like a transcript of a normal conversation, so I wasn't sure what the draw was. Your explanation cleared that up for me.
