Conflict Between Neurotypes #

The Double Empathy Problem describes the way that two people of different neurotypes are likely to misunderstand one another. It highlights the observable truth that autistic people do not, in fact, "lack empathy", but rather they lack empathy for allistic people they cannot understand, and that allistic people exhibit the same lack of empathy for autistic people.

Studies have shown that this breakdown is in fact not typically due to autistic cognitive shortcomings, but rather a lack of reciprocity that all humans exhibit towards those who are unlike them. The critical difference, and the reason why it appears to allistic people that autists have a social deficit, is that autists are simply a minority.

Variances in occult communication grammars play a major factor in this lack of reciprocity.

Let's go through the identified rules of allistic versus autistic communication, and see where they lead our conversations astray.

Remember, neither is better or worse than the other. Autistic communication is my style, so of course I find it more natural. And allistic communication is more common, simply because the vast majority of people are not autistic.

But all human communication is a series of moves in a language game defined by the players. It is interesting to examine and study the games, but we should not delude ourselves into believing that there is any objectively "correct" way to communicate, apart from what works for the communicators.

Comparing the Rulesets #

1. Motivation

   Autistic: Motivations are explicit.

   Allistic: No unmotivated utterances.

2. Status and Care

   Autistic: Correct knowledge is everyone's responsibility.

   Allistic: All motivations regard social status.

3. Grammar and Assembly

   Autistic: Grammar is relevant.

   Allistic: No negations.

4. Meaning

   Autistic: Symbols carry their assigned meaning.

   Allistic: Speaking a name invokes its vibes.

Motivations #

In allistic communication, every utterance is presumed to be indicative of a motivation apart from that contained by the speech act itself. In autistic communication, the motivation of any speech act is assumed to be explicitly visible in the utterance itself.

This leads to conflict both because allistic people infer motivations that do not exist (or become troubled and confused when they fail to find such motivations), and also because autists both fail to infer motivations that allistics intend to communicate, and inadvertently communicate motivations that are inaccurate.

As an autistic person, one of the most perplexing conflicts is when someone asks a reasonable question, which you answer plainly, and they get upset, saying "Do you really think that's what I wanted to know?" as if you've called them stupid.

A close second is when I want to request or convey some piece of information, and my allistic conversation partner seemingly cannot avoid engaging in completely unrelated things. "What time are we leaving?" invites the answer "If you need to get there sooner, we can go earlier", which was not the question! The more I try to clarify that I just want the information, they more they assure me that any time I want to leave is fine, if I'm in such a hurry, we can leave right now, jeez!

The exasperated display (jeez!) is a reaction to a perceived status attack. By asking when we're leaving, I'm calling attention to the time of departure, which is taken as an indication that I want to leave soon. By rejecting the assurance that my desire will be respected, I'm rejecting a social bid for alliance.

Because allistic communicators are typically all engaged in largely the same manner with the social status hierarchy of a given situation, they are all likely to make the same assumptions about the social motivations of any given utterance, provided that they are part of the same social group hierarchy.

However, if your baselevel assumption is that we use words that mean things, to send the message that we intend, then a question like "is there a difference between the drinks in the living room, and the drinks in the refrigerator" is completely baffling. Even if I am mindful to consider pragmatics, it's just an impossibly convoluted riddle unless we start from the assumption that everything is regarding status, deference, and hierarchy.

Status and Care #

Allistic communication is a nearly constant exchange of status, to show that the speaker is or isn't a threat to the other's status, to suss out who is higher status than the other and thus must be deferred to, to establish the many varied layers of group affiliations and rivalries between parties, and so on.

On the other hand, autistic people tend to be far less concerned with social status than allistic people. We are largely oblivious to it.

Sometimes this works to our benefit! After all, "unaware of social status" can be a great way to signal confidence and security within allistic circles, which can come across as a person who is powerful and safe.

However, far more often, this backfires, as rules of deference are dependent on social hierarchy context.

When an autist speaks up to correct a mistake, it is often taken as an attack. We are upsetting the social order by engaging in "one-upsmanship" or "well, actualyism". These are often fair cricitisms; there are cases were getting the high level picture in place is more important than everyone agreeing on all the details.

This is the origin of the "You just always have to be right!" complaint that so many autists hear repeatedly throughout our lives.

From the autistic point of view, I need us all to always be right, isn't that the point? Do you want us to be wrong?

But from the allistic point of view, the social status of being "the one who is right" is far more relevant than the truth value of any particular statement, and insisting on correcting mistakes strikes them as a grab at unearned status, rather than the status-neutral act of care and consideration.

Assigned Meaning, Grammar, and Assembly #

In autistic communication, symbols carry the meaning that they are assigned, either for use within a specific context (for example, jargon or techical terms) or more broadly, using a conventional definition. These meanings can be negated, flipped around, or assembled, according to fairly well defined grammatical rules that make up the language.

Allistic communication is much more top-down. A word may pick up a specific connotation or strong emotional valence, and will "invoke" that emotional context when it is used, regardless of any negation or reassignment that might be applied!

For example, imagine if you worked at an office job, and a colleague came to you saying that they were frustrated by the way that the team was filing documents. In the course of trying to gain clarity about their request, you say "So, just to make sure I understand your complaint--"

At which point, they cut you off, slightly raising their voice and becoming visibly irate, and say "I'm not COMPLAINING, I'm just saying we need to do it DIFFERENTLY!"

This is, of course, extremely confusing. By definition, a "complaint" is literally just a statement of a thing that one would prefer to be other than what it is.

What might be going on?

• They are coming to you with a need. This puts them in a vulnerable position, because their social status needs to be high enough to be granted this request, and can take a hit if it is not.
• You are trying to remain calm and listen respectfully. However, because you're not immediately validating their threatened status, it seems like you are positioning yourself as an authority of higher status, likely to deliver a social injury.
• You use the word "complaint", which has the emotional connotation of a petulant, childish, "entitled" person, who does not deserve whatever it is they are asking for.

And so, they lose it, and lash out in fear at the perceived social attack.

Top Down, Bottom Up #

This post could be an entire book, if I attempted to catalog every communication challenge that autistic people face with agonizing regularity. As I'm too lazy for that task, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply this model to their future conversations, in the hopes that it can be illuminating.

What emerges from the comparison of these rules and a few common miscommunication patterns, is reflective of top-down versus bottom-up approaches. For the autistic communicator, communication follows a more or less predictable bottom-up script:

1. Mentally identify an observation, a piece of information that needs to be shared, a playful reference that's relevant to the situation, whatever. Something that we would benefit by communicating.
2. Assemble an utterance in your language, out of words that combine to mean that thing you're trying to communicate it.
3. Say the thing.
4. The listener interprets the word, and now knows the thing, gets the joke, is aware of the observation, whatever.

However, allistic communication moves in a more top-down wholistic manner:

1. Awareness of social status, and a desire to take some action regarding that status. (Establish a rapport, trounce a rival, assist an ally, evade a threat, etc.)
2. Identify key concepts vaguely in the area of the intended message.
3. Make small communication moves, checking in on the response of the recipient to ensure the intended emotional target is reached, and adjusting as needed.

It is not quite accurate to say that one is more or less "precise" than the other, but autistic communication starts from the individual "atoms" of utterances, and assembles them linguistically, whereas allistic communication tends to start from the emotional intent, and makes small moves to continually adjust in that direction.

That is, autistic communication is based on a bottom-up model of assembling meaningful tokens into utterances to precisely express communicative intent about a shared reality, whereas allistic communication is a top-down model of assuming that everyone's main fixation is social status and using topic keywords to collaboratively gesture towards a shared social equilibrium.

Differences in Collaboration #

This top-down/bottom-up divergence also sheds light on the differences in collaborative meaning-making and discovery between allistic and autistic communicators.

Many allists "think out loud", in conversation with another participant. In a top-down fashion, they might throw out a general "direction" concept, as an invitation for their communication partner to help them refine it towards clarity. That is, doing the same sort of "cast, then iterate" approach, but collaboratively.

Autists tend to be more bottom-up in our thinking, and this reflects in our communication as "speaking in paragraphs". That is, by the time the thought is ready for sharing, it's a construction with interlocking parts. We do want feedback! But feedback on a part of the building without seeing the whole, is unlikely to be useful.

So, there is an allistic person seeking feedback, and becoming frustrated by not getting engagement, while the autistic person is attempting to respectfully listen until they understand the message. In allistic terms this looks like a refusal to participate, "waiting to respond", which can be hostile and threatening, as it does not acknowledge or reinforce the social dynamic and connection. All the moreso because when they do respond, it's often to point out errors (correctness is everyone's responsibility), rather than just getting the intention.

Then when the autistic person speaks, they can get frustrated to meltdown by repeated interruptions that keep taking them off the topic at hand, which in allistic terms, appears to be an aggressive "holding the floor" approach to speaking.

Both parties are attempting to collaborate in the way that they know how, but these differences in approaches to meaning and understanding can often present significant obstacles without deliberate structured communication techniques.

Calls to Action #

This series attempts to identify and examine a model of how inter-neurotype communication fails, viewed through a lens of cultural subjectivity. I have endeavored to not assign blame or imply that either linguistic reasoning approach is better or worse than the other.

The question of responsibility for correcting communication gaps, however, is more interesting. All too often, it falls on the disadvantaged group to do the work of addressing the challenges they face, especially if that disadvantaged group is a minority in society. Those in a position of privilege do not feel the pain of the oppression they benefit from, and thus any request for accommodations can feel like oppression.

It is reasonable for autistic people to use this model to gain a deeper understanding of the communication challenges we face, including the ways in which allistic people will always fail to understand us. It is often a matter of survival for us to be able to manipulate their emotions and understand their self-delusions in order to simply be allowed to exist in the world. Sadly, they will usually not be willing or able to see this themselves.

While I do not believe we can expect to be met halfway, using the language of allistic communication to express our needs as autistic communicators can be quite effective. Hopefully the information in this series is useful, if only as a way to understand the confusing messages of a world where we are perpetual foreigners.

From part 2 in this series:

However, we equally are within our rights to demand that our communication styles are respected as well. We are more able to do that if we advocate for ourselves in terms that our audience will readily understand. Even as we may not accept the rightness of one neurotype being dominant, we must accept the actual fact that it is, if we are to survive and thrive in the real world.

So this raises the obvious question, how can one demand this, in the language of the allistic majority?

• Establish a shared goal of collaboration.
• Position ourself as the one in need, who is making a request. This boosts the social status of the allistic participant by allowing them to see themselves as the empowered party who deigns to stoop to our level.
• Speak in strictly positive requests and observations. Instead of telling them what to avoid, tell them what to do, and why it's helpful. Besides simply being less cognitive load by making positive requests, it also avoids the pitfalls of appearing critical.
• Avoid words with connotations implying disability, entitlement, or other "justifications" of your needs. Instead, focus on gratitude and positive impacts of the accommodations being requested.
• Identify the subject from a top-down direction, refining precision and checking in more frequently than seems necessary regarding emotional valence and understanding.

This is, of course, quite a lot of work, and it is emotional labor that frequently goes unrecognized. It is thus responsible to only engage in this degree of "neurotype translation" for the relationships and conversations that are most important, where masking carries the highest mental health costs.

For other scenarios, it can at least be useful to help understand what's going on, even if there's little we can reasonably do to fix the situation.

Further Discussion and Investigation #

I would love to hear from you if you find this model useful, or if you have anything to add to it.

Use the links at the top of this page, or hit me up on Discord, where I'm known as isaacs__.

Thanks #

I am extremely grateful to everyone who read early drafts of these posts and provided feedback. Communication is a team sport, and we get better together.

2025-11-24autismallismcommunciationoccult grammarthe quiet part out loudphilosophy