When did you first start worrying for humankind?

https://theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com/p/when-did-you-first-start-worrying

by MaysonL • 1 year ago

7 4 1 year ago

theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com

I freaked out in uhh 1996 I guess, thinking American imperialism was on some horrific terrible imperialist down spiral, being the worst baddies the world could imagine.

That didn't happen. America First is much much much much worse. The total cooption of the system & denigration of the legislative into passive useless yes men has been far worse, far more ghastly than the imperialism I feared.

bayesianbot• 1 year ago

Right after I started first grade, and later again when we learned about democracy.

I'm autistic, and just before first grade I found a science/physics book and I was absolutely amazed. I spent all my days reading, thinking about the universe and trying to understand the stuff, and I was imagining that I'll go to school and me and my friends would study science after school, as who wouldn't want to? Learning scientific method also gave me relief, as I was always struggling with thoughts if I'm wrong about anything I believe as I had no ways to confirm - like half my day was spent thinking "could I be wrong on X", but now finally I could perform tests to adjust my confidence.

When the school started, I was amazed to find out nobody wanted to learn science and the scientific method, they did not care at all. But much stranger was that people didn't care at all if they're correct or not. If somebody told me I'm wrong about something and I couldn't 100% confirm which one of us is wrong, I'd lose my sleep and spend hours / days trying to confirm the validity of our claims. But when I told people I can prove them wrong, and I have the books I can show so they don't need to trust me at all - it just never mattered. They wouldn't spend five minutes proving themselves wrong, they'd just look at me like I'm insane and continued their day without giving it another thought. It was mind-blowing, compared to my constant crippling self-doubt.

So when we studied democracy, my first thought is that some evil greedy people will be using this feature of humans to tell them what they want to hear while taking advantage of them, and that new technology will make it easier to surveil people and also to make massive global damage compared to localized tragedies.

Obviously I thought I was wrong, like I always did. The humanity has survived for a long time, and I'm just observing a tiny slice, would be really unlikely to be born just at the time when brown hits the fan. But nowadays it feels like I was way more correct than I could even have imagined at the time..

ben30• 1 year ago

What you've described perfectly captures the fundamental difference in how many autistic minds approach truth and knowledge compared to neurotypical thinking patterns. This isn't about intelligence but about different operating systems with distinct priorities.

For many of us on the spectrum, uncertainty about factual correctness creates genuine distress. We experience "epistemic anxiety" - that intense need to resolve contradictions and establish what's objectively true. The scientific method becomes a lifeline precisely because it offers a systematic approach to establishing reliable knowledge.

What you observed in your classmates wasn't necessarily indifference to truth but a different relationship with it. Neurotypical social cognition often prioritizes social harmony, identity maintenance, and emotional comfort over factual precision. Being "wrong" for many people triggers social rather than epistemic anxiety.

Some practical advice from my experience:

1. Recognize that for most people, beliefs serve multiple functions beyond accuracy - they signal group membership, maintain self-image, and provide emotional comfort.

2. When sharing information that contradicts someone's view, frame it as an addition rather than a correction: "I recently learned something interesting about this" rather than "Actually, you're wrong."

3. Accept that you cannot make others value epistemic accuracy as intensely as you do. This was one of my hardest lessons.

4. Find your intellectual community. There are others here on hacker news who share your commitment to truth-seeking - they're often in fields like science, philosophy, or engineering.

5. Your heightened concern for factual accuracy is a strength. Many world-changing innovations and discoveries came from minds that couldn't tolerate the cognitive dissonance of an incorrect model.

blankx32• 1 year ago

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When did you first start worrying for humankind?

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