20 Comments

This is advice is spot on. Also. an area where I have to check my engagement (and I have a difficult time doing so in some instances). I am going to keep this and read several times over when I need a pep talk to remind me. And, by-the-way, I keep many of your well-thought-out and useful comments to keep me on track. Thank you Athena and I am happy to see you writing on this site.

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Thank you for reading my writing here

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I concur, and I'd like to add an observation along the same line : people are

projecting all the time. Their accusations are often revealing of *their* character.

As the saying goes "Whe Peter speaks of Paul, I learn more about Peter"

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I absolutely agree with this. I learn a great deal about people simply by how they speak to me about others.

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It took me 40 plus years of life to figure out exactly what you state here and it's so true. Unless it's someone important in your life, it's an absolute waste off time. I had to get to a point where I valued my time before I figured out not to waste it on people that don't really matter. It took 30 of those years to understand that they wouldn't listen, no matter if you have real facts to back you up or not. Although I didn't spend time on the internet until I was in my late 30s , where I was more frequently exposed to those type of people.

I wish someone would have pointed them out to me like you have done here, it would have saved me much wasted effort.

As it's usual you're right on point here.

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Since the last debating community website I belonged to closed, I've gradually dropped the habit of going out of my way to argue/debate with others on certain things anywhere near as much. It's not a typical preference of mine when it comes to communicating with others. It's more that I joined it by mistake (thinking it was a different online community type to the one it was), and then as it was an expectation of members there I got into the frequent habit. I thought I was helping to do good in (along with others) in trying to get certain theists who held certain religious beliefs to recognise their reasoning/logical thinking errors/how they'd been brainwashed into believing untrue things. On my part it was a waste of time though. No matter how much logic and facts I tried to use (along with others doing the same) it just did no good with these people. There was only ever one theist who joined that the approach seemed to help (I wasn't really involved there more others). But she was already in that mental place of questioning her beliefs being open minded. None of the others ever were.

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Beliefs have the habit of becoming entrenched. I am formulating a post about emotional responses as gut reactions, and when to question those responses.

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Look forward to seeing it.

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I just had to like that comment! :-) It's so true. To many times we just give up our valuable time to people who just wants to the fun of arguing.. - Not really listening, or interested in any knowledge or finding out something new, seeing from another perspective.. What a freaking waste of time! You go girl with your writings! Your spot on! :-)

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A waste of your time, and your brain cells

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As a neurotypical, I agree! On certain topics though I will push back even when I know it’s futile in terms of having them consider my point of view. I’ll state that I disagree and move on. I do this because I think it’s important to stand up and be counted on certain topics.

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I agree, I do that on some topics too. Especially where there are many reader, like Quora. Not sure how much good it does! The same questions get asked so often on Quora that it seems like people must rarely be actually reading what was written... I guess there are algorithms, but I bet they are designed to pull people in more than anything else. $$$$

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p.s. re. autism, there are people with a somewhat similar tone towards autistic Quora posters, to what is in Athena's quote; there are differences of course. But some people seem to hate any autistic who is not like "their nephew" who they are positive needs to be "cured"... they want to shut us up if we talk about positives of our particular autism, they cannot grapple with the concepts of many different neurotypes each having strengths and weaknesses; there must be "normal" or you're broken/dangerous/defective. ... Most researchers seem similar (though not as overtly vicious as what Athena posted) but not all thankfully.

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I have seen people like that, as well as someone that is currently writing about it in the most disparaging of terms. It baffles me on how people can have such a distaste for something that they have such limited (read no) understanding of.

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Ugh!!!

With some folks, my sense is that there is an assumption of a zero-sum game with whose issues are allowed to be considered real, perhaps they fear that their relatives won't get research funding and support resources.

There are a lot of other possibilities depending upon the people involved. Some people tend towards assuming people are trying to get out of work due to laziness or whatever too, and anecdotes supporting that are regularly provided via certain media sources that a sizeable chunk of my country listen to. Anecdotes trigger and reinforce emotional reactions.

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That is indeed an issue, and I agree, the algorithm is about the money.

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I can understand your reasoning on that

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This would be excellent advice for NT's as well though in my experience they frequently want to 'engage' for whatever reason

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I believe it is an emotional response.

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I think there's a typo in your opening statement, did you mean, approaching you, instead of your?

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