Last updated on November 26, 2023
Podcast 042; Season 4, Episode 6; October 6, 2020
Being correct matters a lot to me. When I don’t know something for certain, I look it up in a book or online. Like many autistics, there are topics about which I am passionate, leading me to collect a lot of books. A lot of books.
I cannot tolerate people who don’t try to verify information or intentionally fabricate supposed knowledge. Admit when you don’t know something and do some research.
Impatient with Ignorance
Welcome to The Autistic Me Podcast. I am Christopher Scott Wyatt, speaking as The Autistic Me.
I have little patience for liars, cheats, or the willfully ignorant.
It’s easy to understand why autistics wouldn’t like dishonesty. Many of us are black-and-white thinkers, with inflexible ethical systems that function like flowcharts. We struggle when there isn’t clear good or bad, especially when we have to weigh two bad choices.
You lie, I hold it against you. You cheat, I hold it against you.
Yes, I have learned to adjust to the social nuances of white lies — a little bit — but I don’t like them.
I’m the driver people find annoying: I try to stay close to the speed limit. I try to follow the rules. My daughters know that I watch the speed limit indicator on our GPS navigation screen. They also notice when the indicator turns red.
Rules help me process the world.
And then, there’s ignorance.
How does ignorance fit into my ethical system? I consider willful ignorance wrong. It leads to believing and saying things that are demonstrably false. You might as well be a liar if you’re going to make up your own facts.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
We all have met a Cliff Clavin from Cheers. Cliffie’s the know-it-all who cannot be bothered to check anything. He’s the expert in all areas, with absolutely no knowledge. The embodiment of the Dunning–Kruger effect: too ignorant and too average to realize how obvious the ignorance is to others.
I use “him” because most of the willfully ignorant I’ve met are men. They are loud, pushy, and often bullies in the workplace. Too many are mid-level managers. I’m not sure how this even happens, but it does.
Don’t get me wrong. I recognize my perceptions are not data. I know my experiences have contributed to a presumption that I’m more likely to encounter a male know-it-all in my workplaces.
Some scientific studies suggest the Dunning-Kruger effect is more likely among the privileged in a community. People in authority or people who have the trappings of success assume their special talents are why they are that the top of social structures. Somehow, those born into wealth or privilege assume they would have earned that status regardless of luck. That sure sounds like a lot of middle managers to me.
Curiously, those scoring well on standardized tests were the most likely to express doubts and insecurities about their own abilities. The “smart” were less likely to express certainty about their conclusions than the average members in a group.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger gave pop-psychologists quite a bit to write about.
Later studies have challenged the premise of the Dunning-Kruger effect, showing that groups are pretty good at judging their overall expertise. But, that might be an effect of crowdsourcing or group pressure to be accurate.
A Need for Accuracy and Information
This is considered poor etiquette to say, but I am a good test taker and highly educated. I completed two graduate degrees with honors. I score well on IQ tests and most other exams. Using the metrics researchers use (and I know those metrics are flawed), I am gifted. Yes, I was in Mensa, and I didn’t enjoy it.
In previous blog posts and podcasts, I’ve mentioned that I have a lot of insecurities about my abilities and my intelligence. I consider myself a pretender, an imposter accidentally allowed into academia. Nothing I’ve done in life has earned me the life I have.
Other autistics I’ve met express the same sense of being an outsider. We share the same imposter syndrome when we have even the slightest bit of success.
We are used to being told we are wrong about a lot of things. We’re wrong about social signals. We misunderstand social norms. We make one mistake after another. It’s not uncommon for autistic teens and adults to develop anxiety and depression as a result.
All that doubt leads us to check, double-check, and triple check ourselves.
We don’t like being ignorant. Listen to the interviews I’ve done for The Autistic Me Podcast. The other autistics appearing with me don’t want to be wrong about anything they say or repeat. As one told me, we cite our sources because we assume nobody will trust us.
If I read something, I double-check its sources. I scroll to the bottom of Wiki articles to follow the source links, to verify the content. When I was young, I fell in love with encyclopedias and dictionaries. I hope my daughters come to love reference books, too.
My wife and I own enough books that there are ten and 12-foot tall bookcases in three of the rooms of our house. There are bookcases in the family area, bookcases in the girls’ bedrooms, bookcases in the entry hallway because we ran out of space. We hope to buy semi-custom bookcases next year so we can unpack yet more boxes of books.
When I watch an interesting documentary, I seek out books on the topic. While I exercise, I watch a lot of non-fiction programming. I listen to podcasts, too. You can never know too much about as many things as possible.
In the ancient days of 1990s personal computing, I had CD-ROM dictionaries and encyclopedias on hand. My early Palm Pilot purchases included dictionaries on memory cards.
I am obsessed with Google Scholar. Check and double-check. If a news story mentions a study, I look for the original study in a peer-reviewed journal.
Information is at out fingertips (or voice command). I search for things on my phone or laptop constantly while watching television. Anything that crosses my mind becomes a search. If I believe something in a film doesn’t match the book, I check. If an actor seems familiar, I check. Watching documentaries, I look for even more information.
If I’m driving and hear something on the radio, I will ask my iPhone to tell me more.
There is no excuse for ignorance today. None at all.
If you don’t know something, pause and look it up on a reliable website. It’s not that hard to master searching on Google and Bing.
On the first day of class, I usually tell my students I’m not an expert on most topics. When I don’t know something, I admit it. And then, I obsessively try to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.
I cannot comprehend not seeking out more information on almost any topic. I’ve looked up some pretty odd things because my ignorance upset me.
Why can’t other people pause to check themselves before making a claim or repeating something that seems unbelievable? How can they state supposed “facts” that I assume most people recognize immediately as wrong?
Dunning and Kruger would likely answer that the openly ignorant don’t believe they are mistaken.
Although I assume everyone instantly recognizes the mistakes or the outright fabrications of a Cliffie, the reality is that few other people are confident enough to challenge these statements.
Enter the autistic’s lack of social self-monitoring. When we know something is incorrect, we’re that one person in the room likely to speak up. And we might not stop to consider how it appears to correct a classmate, colleague, manager, or teacher.
I have questioned statements by teachers, colleagues, and supervisors. Usually, I’ll try to remember to ask, “Are you sure about that?” But, sometimes, I know the statement was wrong, even if I don’t happen to know the correct answer. “That doesn’t sound right. Can we check on that?”
Even if not offering a correction, but asking if the statement is correct, that’s likely to offend the speaker. In fact, it seems more likely than when you are able to offer the correct information. “Really? So what is the right information?”
Thankfully, there are phones and computers. “Let’s check. I could be wrong,” seems like a safe response, but it doesn’t always defuse the situation.
And what if the autistic is the expert in the room, or online, regarding the topic?
When we latch onto a topic of interest, we become obsessive. Maybe that’s not the best word for it, but it is the most accurate.
Let me explain before I get back to my impatience with ignorance.
Autistic Protectors of Facts
Autistics sometimes forget that we immerse ourselves in our fascinations. Though I don’t assume everyone shares my interests, I forget that most people aren’t interested in my favorite topics.
Other autistics confirm they will start lecturing to others without realizing their doing so. Someone makes a mistake or even asks a polite question and off we go.
All those books in our house? Many come from wanting to know all I could about a topic. I have more books on some topics than the local library and certainly more than the local bookstores.
Philosophy books are packed and stacked onto 11 shelves. Double-stacking is common. And not all philosophy, or I’d need an entire room. No, my interests are narrower. The books cover phenomenology and existentialism, along with biographies of the major figures.
Next to philosophy are shelves of books on world religions. We have an extensive collection of works on mythology, too.
Economics? I have yet another bookcase dedicated to the topic. The field of economics isn’t limited to finance, something I explain to anyone raising the subject. Economics is the study of allocating scarce resources. Macro, micro, behavioral economics, texts on statistics and statistical modeling. Data are certainly an obsession for me.
And then there’s my fascination with books and print. I have a massive, and apparently valuable, collection of books on typography, graphic design, and the history of printing technologies. The academic collection I co-edited is on typography and typefaces.
We also have an entire bookcase dedicated to linguistics, writing, and editing. It’s fun to learn about word origins and how English grammar evolved. As a writer, I’m interested in playwriting and screenwriting, so I have a library worth of books on writing for stage and screen.
I do not pretend to be immersed in other topics in quite the same way as I am with philosophy, religion, economics, graphic design, and writing. I am particularly interested in how these fields overlap, which they do in fascinating ways throughout history.
All those books, on a relatively narrow set of subjects, reflect my passion for those areas. I care about the topics and want people to be accurate when discussing them.
Yes, I can be pedantic. A passionate pedagogue, often with an unwilling audience.
I’ve met autistics with encyclopedic knowledge of topics both expected and unexpected.
Several know sports trivia and statistics for the entire history of a sport, usually baseball for some reason. However, one seemed to know every major professional sports league, and not merely those in the United States. I asked if he watched cricket or Australian football. Nope. It was all about the statistics. Turns out, he didn’t even like sports, just the data.
Movies? I know autistics who could tell you the entire filmographies of Disney and Pixar. One young woman can list most of the Academy Award winners in several categories, dating back the start of the awards.
Each of us with a special area of interests feels compelled to “set the record straight” when we hear or read an error. This impulse to correct isn’t about the person making the mistake, either. We care about the topic, and tend to view our roles as protectors of the topic. We’re guardians and defenders, trying to stop misinformation before it spreads.
Discussing our need to correct misinformation, other autistics and I agree that it causes distress when we hear something said in error. When a factual error is the result of willful ignorance or outright fabrication… we get angry.
Our distress and anger seem unreasonable to other people. We will keep correcting the information again and again if we know the facts. We struggle to give up and walk away from Cliffie at the bar arguing with us over our special interest.
I get caught up in this trap far too easily and too often.
People misuse terminology from specialized disciplines. When you’re an academic and hear one of your profession’s words misused, you want to educated others.
In economics, all the terminology seems to be misused, especially during political campaigns. Socialism, capitalism, and market are just the most obvious examples of words misused. In typography, people have confused fonts for typefaces thanks to computer applications misusing the terms. It’s a lost cause, but I still fight to defend the distinct meanings.
And I have a degree in rhetoric. Just try explaining that rhetoric doesn’t mean manipulative language. It means the study of persuasion and debate, not bombastic speech.
I waste too much energy trying to fix ignorance that isn’t going to be fixed.
All that energy is only reminding people that I’m socially awkward and strangely emotional about a handful of topics.
There is one topic about which most autistics seem to share a passion: autism.
We will correct people and try to educate them, even against their wills. We want the world to understand autism isn’t one thing, one type of person, or even one group of people. We get passionate trying to explain ourselves.
Our impatience with ignorance comes with a price. We antagonize others, supposedly, and end up alienating ourselves.
But at least on the topic of autism, we’re justified in not walking away.
I am Christopher Scott Wyatt, speaking as The Autistic Me.
Remember that we are on Facebook, @AutisticMe on Twitter, and, of course, we have The Autistic Me blog, which is easy to find using Google or Bing.
Thank you for listening.
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