allistic vs autistic communication #
(Excuse me while I blur a lot of nuance and lean shamelessly on stereotypes. Jfc, there sure is a lot of disclaimers here, sorry.)
Autistic people often bond (that is, establish shared group identity and relative placements in the social system) by finding shared special interests, comparing knowledge sets (via infodumping), and highlighting particularly unique or fascinating bits discovered within the special interest system. This process often involves a lot of precise technical exchange, and while it's good to be as efficient as possible, it's of course going to involve some overlap with one another's knowledge graph.
Allistic people communicate completely differently. Utterances are exchanges of information, yes, but more importantly, they are gestures within a language game that presumes a shared cultural context. The specific precise meaning of words is far less important than their directional reference this shared context. When one gestures, another gestures in a similar direction, indicating understanding. The combination of these gestures results in a mutual dependence on one another to discover meaning together, and can establish which depends more on the other, which is more often setting the direction and which following, and so on.
The autistic communication style of infodumping, mistranslated into allistic communication modes, communicates that we think we are smarter than the other party, that we are incorrectly dismissing their ability to contribute (by giving them information that they already have), and when we say exactly and only what we mean, it sends them into a tailspin of trying to figure out what we meant!
People think the same way that they communicate. (Communication is, after all, a bit like thinking in a different form.) This "gesture at a cultural context-web and circle around until you get to a truth approximation" is actually quite effective at a lot of things, and most allistic people do it instinctively. On the other hand, reasoning ethics from first principles and then adopting them with your whole soul might seem superior, but it has some pretty nasty failure modes. (Qv, every pop culture villain who's convinced they're Actually The Hero.)