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As time goes on, i am more and more convinced i am neurodirevergent, but it's unclear in what way. (My wife is an educational psychologist and agrees with this).
Then again, i think just like the "there's no average pilot" story (https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages/article_e3231734-e5da-5bf5-9496-a34e52d60bd9.html), i don't think we can point at any individual and say "that is what neurotypical is".
Some of us have labels for some of our traits. Other traits don't have a label yet.
@demofox I also love the "there is no average pilot" story.
By our nature, humans like to categorize things, find patterns in the noise that is life. And to do that there always has to be some level of creating some "typical" idealized version of whatever is in that category we've created to represent it.
But we're also very bad at recognizing that representation we've created is just that ... a personal creation, not reality.
@demofox I remember one of the big pushes a decade or two ago for helping "normies" understand autism was trying to get the idea that neuro diversity was a spectrum, not a line. There wasn't neurotypical on one end and neurodivergent on the other. A radial chart of different traits that one may have more or less of certain kinds of aptitudes and compulsions.
But people have managed to misunderstand that representation as well.
@demofox People assume "well, those are all bad things that autistic / neurodivergent people have. I'm normal, so I'm a point at the center."
But that's wrong. There is no center, because the radial chart was also a simplification. But even if we stick with that, no one sits perfectly at the center. Everyone is a lumpy circle within the spectrum with our own compulsions and aptitudes.
I'd not really thought of linking it to the "no average pilot" story, but it fits really well.
= 
log
) @demofox
Weirdo! Just kidding; me too.
In fact, this makes it clear that the supposed majority of neurotypicals doesn't exist. What we have instead is a lot of people who are better able to conform, and either hide their discomfort doing so, or indeed are more comfortable with it.
Although not a psychologist, I've been studying psychology my whole life, and these topics are clearly not what most researchers have looked at. Nor is it easy to examine any of them that don't stick out like a sore thumb.
@demofox I have a bunch of traits that are typically attributed to neurodivergence, though when listening to stories of other neurodivergent people I realise that my situation is milder by orders is magnitude. Still, for a large part of my life I've been wondering whether I'm not neurodivergent or I was just extremely lucky for my whole life.
Amazing! I'd never heard of the average pilot.
I guess this is a consequence of the simple fact that, as the dimensionality of a representational space increases linearly, the number of representational states increases exponentially. (Think of going from one to two dimensions, a line segment becomes a square whose area is an exponential fraction of the total area.)
Also, regarding the actual topic. I was diagnosed ASD 2 years ago and omg did it change the way I think about myself and the people around me.