Facts and popular opinion are not always the same, and you’re supposed to be impartial. Reality is not a popularity contest. This is emblematic of an endemic problem. Your systematic avoidance of uncomfortable facts makes your version of reality sanitized to the point of harmful revisitionst history and outright propaganda. There are thousands of such articles that fall into this category.
Your response to Dore’s article is just the final example. The very fact that it’s pointless to tell you about some of the others because you’ll do what you want regardless and I have no recourse but to complain and keep my money, is another reason I will no longer donate.
Wiki, like so many other huge Internet systems, should be converted into a public utility. You’re a library in effect, and should not be subject to autocratic rule. You’ve been captured by the current ruling powers. You’re merely state media now, with none of the theoretical accountability that traditionally comes with being part of the state.
You will no longer be receiving funds from me. And I encourage all donors to withhold funds until such time that Wikipedia becomes a bastion of true impartiality as opposed to its facade, or fades from history.
Autism is still widely seen as mysterious, but it isn’t anymore. Monotropism is the answer. Gonna copy and paste the core bits for the TLDR crowd.
“When your theory only partially explains the phenomena being examined, you should keep looking for a better theory. When there are persistent threads left unexplained – such as the sensory differences so common among autistic people – you really need a more complete framework”
“In a nutshell, monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel.”
“This tendency follows naturally from monotropism. Whatever interest is most aroused in a monotropic mind tends to pull in a whole load of processing resources. That naturally makes it harder to change track, especially when you understand that the paths of our thoughts always leave an imprint in our minds, and autistic ones leave deeper grooves than they might in the average mind.”
“There is likely a developmental aspect to this: neural pathways that receive a lot of stimulation grow stronger, so perhaps autistic people are prone to long-term hyper-sensitivity in senses receiving intense attention, and under-sensitivity in channels we regularly tune out.”
“Interests are at the heart of the monotropism account, and have been present in characterizations of autism right from the start. Their near-absence from the more established theories of autism, and indeed the entire psychological literature on autism, is glaring.”
“Everyone’s passions are repetitive; that’s just in the nature of strong interests. When people talk about ‘restricted interests’ what they mostly seem to mean is that they can’t fathom our failure to be interested in things that seem important to them.”
“What is true is that our interests pull us in very strongly and persistently, compared with most people. It can be hard to think about anything else when we’re particularly invested in a topic, and hard to imagine how little other people might care about it. That can be a huge asset in many fields – intense focus is indispensible in science, maths, technology, music, art and philosophy, among others. Obviously autistic people are not the only ones capable of hyperfocus and persistent interests, but it is a common feature of the autistic psyche, and one that is too often squandered when workplaces and schools are not set up to allow it.”
“The biggest practical thing to take away from this is the importance of meeting the child, or adult, where they are. This is not an insight unique to the monotropism perspective, but nothing else I’ve seen demonstrates with such clarity why it’s so crucial. Treat interests as something to work with. Recognise what someone’s passionate about and learn how to become part of the attention tunnels which come with monotropic focus, rather than trying to just reach in and pull the person out of the flow states that are so important to us. Never pathologise ‘special interests’, and don’t assume that autistic interests are ‘restricted’ – there are plenty of ways to get us interested in new things, it’s just that they mostly involve taking existing interests and building on them.”
“Stability is a basic human need, and life as a monotropic person in a polytropic world is often unstable. It is deeply destabilising to be pulled out of an attention tunnel, to be regularly surprised by people’s actions, or to feel you are not being understood. Much of autistic behaviour can be seen as attempts to restore some kind of equilibrium.”
“Helping autistic people to maintain a sense of stability should be a priority for those around them. It’s widely understood that routines can often help autistic people, but I’m not sure it’s widely understood why. A lot of it is about minimising mental load: taking out things that we have to think about, so that we can maintain focus. Another big part of it is that changing plans involves such a mental shift that it’s exhausting. The ability to feel in control is central to all of this, and externally imposed routines sometimes backfire for that reason. Frustrations and anxiety about control can manifest in demand avoidance, meltdowns and shutdowns at times.”
“Different experiences in youth and throughout life, and particularly the different choices we make about where to focus our attention, are likely to account for a good chunk of the diversity of ways that autism can present.”
So yeah. I copy and pasted a lot, but I left a lot out. These are the bits that really resonated with me, and I resisted the urge to rewrite, add, and such because I wanted to keep this as brief as possible. If you want more, check out the link at the top.
