Autism

Autistic person here:

Yep, you got it.

Its complex consistent pattern creation, its fixation on details/components.

And you're right to point out how its much more complicated than 'oh they do this thing so they must be autistic'.

But I will push back slightly against the 'ground up' thinking framework.

Its not so much that it needs to be details -> small concepts -> big concepts... its that the framework needs to be consistent and well defined, without exceptions or vaugeries.

Autistic people can totally understand something, starting from a big picture perspective, if you actually explain all the mechanistic concepts, from the top down to the bottom.

What neurotypicals often do is just forget to explain edges cases, ignore contradictions that they don't even realize are present, because they don't evaluate the concepts for potential contradictions that thoroughly.

That's the strength of the neurotypical thinking mode: its faster, less mentally taxing, less stressful. Less rigorous and accurate, but its faster, and works in most common cases. A 'good enough' heuristic.

Thats why autistic people often struggle with socializing: They're getting a whole bunch of different feedback from different people with different personalities who have different uses and meanings for the same words, who have different opinions about what is or is not appropriate in what kind of situation/context, who have different kinds of facial expressions, body language, tone shifts, etc.

This is very hard to consolidate into a consistent, stable, detailed, non-contradicting framework for how to socialize, because everyone is actually 'playing' by slightly different rules... but neurotypicals do not realize the extent to which that is true.

What is much easier to do, for an autist, is to model a single person's 'social rules', or a small group of similar people's 'social rules'.

We call that 'masking'.

Then you just switch masks, switch social etiquette rules, when you are around a different group.

Its easier to have a few, smaller, consistent models of socializing, than it is to try and ... consolidate them into a sort of grand, unified, totally consistent socializing framework.

... Because when you try to do that, you realize more and more contradictions.

I am convinced that to get a phd and do science, you are better off being autistic.

But... stacking blocks... you know, with just letters or numbers or simple shapes on them?

That's been a very common thing kids do, with very common toys for like, 100 years.

Also, the entire point of toys, from a child development perspective, is to allow for the kid to develop their creative potential, to discover new conceptual and physical concepts.

The idea of 'an intended mode of play' is... kinda stupid, from an evaluation standpoint?

Unless you're testing specifically for 'ability to consistently follow instructions'?

That might have some use in diagnosing ADHD, but not Autism. They're different things, different behavior sets/spectra, and do not always present themselves at the same time: You can be just Autistic or just ADHD.

In fact, following directions extremely literally, dutifully, and consistently would potentially be an indicator of Autism, while also being a contraindicator for ADHD.

But anyway, from a child development standpoint, the whole point of toys is to discover how to have fun with them, to develop new mental and physical skills while doing so.

It really doesn't make any sense to associate simply stacking things with autism, unless maybe its taken to extreme levels of determination and effort to sort things into categories, sets of categories, or create genuienly complex, consistent patterns, or spend so much time at it that it shows signs of fixation, almost as if they're addicted to it.

I'm going with "neurotypicals broadly continue to not actually understand neurodivergence at all, because they literally can't think that way, so they continue to inaccurately attribute to neurodivergence overly simplified stereotypes".