Your point is unclear to me. Are we like chimps, or are we not?

jumping to a mad level of conclusions here to justify your discomfort with other people

> you'd just start any conversation with "hey, I'm autistic, so if I appear a bit weird..."

Then people will criticize you for making autism your whole identity.

Which is a silly point to make but people can be pricks. Not saying you gave bad advice, just saying, it a damned if you do, damned if you don't with some people. I think it is generally good to be open about it, if not just to filter out intolerant people faster.

My eyesight’s rubbish. I learn very little from looking at people’s eyes. I almost never remember eye colours. It just doesn’t register because I “don’t see it”.

I have to make a special effort to make eye contact, and when I do I feel like my “trying to see better” habits and postures make others uncomfortable. I’ve no idea what “normal eye contact” feels like.

I might also have some autism traits (I’m a coder, after all), so that feeds into it.. but even if I wasn’t coder/austistic, I’d be struggling in this domain.

I offer this as anecdata for your “everyone is different” suggestion.

I read a paper once about female celebs/models and eyesight. They tend to have poorer-than-average vision. The theory was than poor eyesight increased thier percieved eye contact with stangers. (They could not see the other person and so would not look away.) This made them more noticable by others, which is not a bad thing when trying to get jobs in entertainment. An other theory was that they needed to try harder to focus when talking to people at a distance, say at a casting call, resulting in more eye contact.

Also, at extreem low body fat you start to loose the pad of fat behind the eyes, resulting in that sunken look of many supermodels. This of course can reshape the back of the eye and impact vision.

I'm organizing a self help group for autistic/AuDHD/ADHD people and over the years I've realized that a lot of things that bother our members are based on interpretations of social contracts.

"Normal" people (whatever that means) tend to forget things quite quickly, and for us it's really hard when states change and contracts change. Meaning that if e.g. in a discussion 3 months ago we casually agreed upon "I do task X and you do task Y" then this will be the assumed state for autistic people until the end of time, because that's what we agreed upon.

When other people at work communicate their feelings, have a bad day and don't want to do those things, or are just lazy about it... Then this is a breach of a social contract. And dealing with those breaches of social contracts without getting very defensive about it is a huge problem for a lot of autistic people I've spoken with. We tend to spiral quickly into a defensive argument that won't help either involved parties and it tends to escalate into a "mudfight" instead of a rational debate.

I just wish that a lot of therapy would help prepare you for these situations of misunderstood (or misagreed upon) situations more. You can compensate for them to a small degree, but they put a lot of stress and burden on us because it's quite a big deal if the state of assumptions changes without having a discussional part in it.

Additionally, talking in conversations about the assumed outcome first before you get into detail helps a lot. Do you need emotional support? Do you want to feel that we are together in this? Do you need a practical solution? Do you need a change in what we agreed upon?

This way we can prepare much easier for what's about to come in the following discussion, and we realize it's not about critique and rather about finding a mutual compromise that both parties are happy with.

Also don't use sayings like "you always do X" or "you never do X" in those conversations when it is not always, because autistic people tend to interpret these as accusations very quickly because to us they sound excessive and are huge trigger points, because they are essentially lies.

If you say instead something like "I feel like you do never X" or even better "I feel like I am alone doing X, can you help me more with it in the future?" we can realize that it's more about the perception and how to improve our contributions, because we can keep the discussion about the actual topic underneath which is "How to balance each party's contributions to the task at hand".

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That's more like how the world is said to be working, but not how it actually works. There is a huge difference between how people express their tolerance and expectations and what they actually okay with, with no extra internal feelings. It really would be incredibly rude to say much more, and so it's not said, but it's all there in inside, coded in unspoken feelings and expectations.

I'd like to draw a parallel with disability. I don't think anyone in their right mind would express that they actively work against people with disabilities, and I'm sure most people would express support if asked directly. But this doesn't translate to actually accessible infrastructure and culture. That takes a lot of special work - and regulation actually, without which the work wouldn't have happened.

All this to say that intentions and expressions are a great first step, but there is much more to acceptance than that.

Hacker news (or social media in general) echo chamber