Could we stop with the Asperger's fetishism? The vast majority of people in technical fields do not have any autism spectrum disorders. The vast majority of people who are jerks do not have any autism spectrum disorders, either. Most people who act like jerks (in both technical and non-technical fields) are just that: jerks.
Autism-type disorders don't just manifest as asshole behavior, and certainly not as just snarky inconsiderate behavior. They affect interpersonal interactions in general.
Saying that jerks in tech fields have autism spectrum disorders makes as much sense as saying MBAs have sociopathic disorders. "When I hurt my coworker's feelings, it's because I'm autistic. When my boss hurts mine, it's because he's a psychopath." Yeah right.
I didn't limit my comment to Asperger's syndrome, and at no point was I making excuses. My point is that saying "You're a jerk" is not a solution to the problem, whether it's caused by ASD, psychopathy, whatever. If you had read and considered my final paragraph, you would see that I did propose a solution.
Edit 2: My suggestion of a "pragmatic mental model" of others' emotions is influenced by the existence those who are able to learn to read emotion by analyzing facial expressions (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630989).
You didn't limit it to Asperger's but you basically limited it to Asperger's-like syndromes. (i.e. "due to the way their brains are wired".) References to bullying and whatever else are superfluous when you're basically chalking it up to equivalent syndromes (regardless of the particular names).
And yes, there are some individuals who legitimately have Asperger's or some other disorder that affects their interactions. However, this is a rarity, and it's unhealthy that our industry talks about these things as if they are the normal case. It does the industry a disservice when we accept inappropriate behavior and don't call it out as inappropriate and unacceptable. Most people who act like jerks do not have any kind of diagnosable disorder. In fact, most people who act like jerks are just normal people who are not normally jerks, but occasionally act that way for various reasons.
I disagree that your proposal is meaningful. I say this partly because you didn't actually propose anything concrete, but mostly because this is only useful for someone who wants to change the way they interact. This requires that these people admit that their behavior is inappropriate, so we should start there. Then we can move to conversation about how to change if they agree that they should.
Imagine if we were having this conversation about racism or sexism. Would you be dismissing the behavior as a result of a syndrome or bullying or whatever? Would you propose that we should be suggesting a "pragmatic mental model"?
As for the "fundamental attribution error", you're just as guilty as anyone else. "He's doing that because he's got Asperger's" is no more situational than "He's doing that because he's a jerk". A situational explanation might involve the anonymization of Internet interactions or the dehumanization that comes from discussing a person's code vs the person.
You didn't limit it to Asperger's but you basically limited it to Asperger's-like syndromes. (i.e. "due to the way their brains are wired".)
Only aspies have wires in their brains? ;-) I mean "wired" in a more general sense: one's predispositions, preferences, learned behaviors, adaptations, instincts, acquired skills, etc. I'm making the assertion that people who are drawn to computers, especially those who began at a young age, have differently wired brains from the population average, and that this preference for computing fields may be associated with reduced capacity for empathy. Whether it's due to developmental or congenital causes is irrelevant.
This requires that these people admit that their behavior is inappropriate, so we should start there.
You're already talking about someone who is acting like a jerk. Becoming confrontational is the last thing I would expect to convince anyone to want to change their behavior, much less a "jerk."
Imagine if we were having this conversation about racism or sexism. Would you be dismissing the behavior as a result of a syndrome or bullying or whatever? Would you propose that we should be suggesting a "pragmatic mental model"?
"Dismissing" isn't the right word. Again you seem to assume that I intend to excuse inappropriate behavior and that I expect it to continue. That is not the case. I am proposing a more rational, less reactive approach to persuading people to be more considerate. And I would indeed make a similar proposal if we were discussing undesirable behavior against a legally protected class, vs. a piece of code.
Is this a new analog of Godwin's law? If you wouldn't talk about it w/r/t race or sex or gender, you can't talk about it at all?
As for the "fundamental attribution error", you're just as guilty as anyone else. "He's doing that because he's got Asperger's" is no more situational than "He's doing that because he's a jerk". A situational explanation might involve the anonymization of Internet interactions or the dehumanization that comes from discussing a person's code vs the person.
I would consider those to be less situational explanations, at least the way you've worded them. I've avoided reading the original tweets at issue, so all I'm aware of is that the metaphor of bleeding eyes was used, which is common and inoffensive among nerds. If anything, that suggests that the original offender wasn't "being a jerk," but rather unaware that they were interacting in a space in which their metaphors would be interpreted differently than they expected.
>I'm making the assertion that people who are drawn to computers, especially those who began at a young age, have differently wired brains from the population average, and that this preference for computing fields may be associated with reduced capacity for empathy.
And I'm saying that this is not true. Sure, there some very small proportion of the computing industry that have trouble with empathy, but there is a very small proportion of the population in general that has this problem. Even if the computing field had twice as many people with this issue as the general population, it would still be a small portion of the overall computing field. (And I seriously doubt that it's twice the average. I've never seen anything substantive demonstrating that it is more prevalent at all.)
> You're already talking about someone who is acting like a jerk. Becoming confrontational is the last thing I would expect to convince anyone to want to change their behavior, much less a "jerk."
First, there are many different levels of "confrontation". Telling someone that they've hurt your feelings can be viewed as confrontational, but is much different than yelling at someone and calling them an asshole. Second, if someone is unwilling to acknowledge that their behavior is inappropriate, they are certainly not going to try to change. Someone who sees no problem with their behavior sees no reason to alter it.
> "Dismissing" isn't the right word. Again you seem to assume that I intend to excuse inappropriate behavior and that I expect it to continue. That is not the case. I am proposing a more rational, less reactive approach to persuading people to be more considerate.
You're proposing that we concede that asshole behaviors by people in the tech world are largely due to an inability to empathize. I don't think there's any basis in fact for this claim, so this can not inform an rational approach to resolving the problem.
> a piece of code.
Code doesn't have feelings, and the inappropriate behavior was not toward the code.
> Is this a new analog of Godwin's law? If you wouldn't talk about it w/r/t race or sex or gender, you can't talk about it at all?
Is every metaphor now somehow a meta-invocation of Godwin's law?
Let's talk about racism, though. It's absolutely true that there are people with syndromes (e.g. Tourette's) who shout racial slurs because of their diseases. It is not, however, useful to bring up Tourette's in a conversation about racism, because while it does explain why a tiny portion of society might appear racist to the uninformed, it says nothing at all about the actual issue, because the vast, vast majority of racists do not have Tourette's.
> I would consider those to be less situational explanations, at least the way you've worded them.
You think that explanations that involve situational context are less situational than explanations that are entirely internal to personality? I really don't understand how you can make this claim.
> I've avoided reading the original tweets at issue, so all I'm aware of is that the metaphor of bleeding eyes was used, which is common and inoffensive among nerds.
It's common. That doesn't make it inoffensive. If I say that your clothes are making my eyes bleed, then I'm telling you that your clothes are horrible to a level that has caused me physical damage. This is offensive.
Autism-type disorders don't just manifest as asshole behavior, and certainly not as just snarky inconsiderate behavior. They affect interpersonal interactions in general.
Saying that jerks in tech fields have autism spectrum disorders makes as much sense as saying MBAs have sociopathic disorders. "When I hurt my coworker's feelings, it's because I'm autistic. When my boss hurts mine, it's because he's a psychopath." Yeah right.