Ask Lemmy

Being assertive

Empathy. Some people just have a brain for math and understand numbers in ways other people just never will. Others, like myself, have brains that are really good at understanding others, and we perceive and understand others with a facility some other people just can’t. It sounds pompous to say, because all human beings are at least somewhat skilled in this area, due to our species being highly social, but it’s still a cognitive speciality and some of us are innately better at it than others.

It can be frustrating too, because when other people don’t understand what you see in someone else, they question your decisions about them, and it can be hard to see why other people don’t see what you find obvious sometimes. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but I know people who can’t see that Donald Trump is a highly transparent narcissist. Even ones who didn’t vote for him and hate him for all the obvious reasons can’t see the personality disorder in him, and I find it so glaringly obvious that I sometimes just can’t fathom how anyone could miss it. But, if I really think about it, and I imagine what it might be like for a person who doesn’t have a natural talent for empathy, I can see how they just might not connect the dots and just see a bombastic, arrogant asshole, rather than the much more complex pattern of malignant narcissism that underlies that comparatively superficial persona.

Spatial awareness/reasoning. How far things are, where are we relative to this landmark, which direction are we headed, how to account for the moving shadows when choosing a place to settle down at the beach, and so on and so forth. It seems like people around me are utterly lost in space

Situational awareness.

Doing basic research on the people I vote for.

Math is the big one, and logic by extension. Everyone around me seems to have difficulty breaking problems or logical arguments down into relevant incremental steps. They either get distracted by irrelevant things, or can't figure out how the output of one step provides the input for the next.

Reading an article before offering an option.

Building stuff out of a pile of scrap.

Assembling flat pack furniture, bbqs, bicycles, snow blowers, cement mixers. Pretty easy to do but customers will pay a fee to the store to have the assembly done.

Being open to learning new things which may contradict previously held beliefs. I enjoy becoming more informed and having my ignorance diminished, but I find for the bulk of humanity most people do not want to know things - they want to be continually assured the things they hold true are true, regardless of the validity.

Executive function.

I don't know but it seems like a lot of people around me are just in a haze. Probably some of it is ADHD.

Not being on my phone at work.

Actually getting annoyed by ads to the point I do what I can to block them. I work with IT and yet a good number of my coworkers don't use any adblock at fucking all

Cold turkeying stuff. It's not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.

A lot of math things. It hasn't been nearly as lucrative as people assume.

I can stop hiccups the moment I notice I have them, usually after the second hiccup. It started as a conscious effort to change the breathing rhythm through diaphragmatic breathing, now is almost like a reflex action.

Being isolated. It's always confused me how much people complain about loneliness. I genuinely don't think I have ever felt that emotion before.

Using any sort of digital device. I've really never had a problem figuring out how they work and what needs to be done to fix them.

I read comments and someone said "math".

Now I remember that I have a this 9x9 times table in my brain lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_multiplication_table#The_Nine-nine_song_text_in_Chinese

Its like the PEMDAS thing, but its an entire multiplication table. I can recall the product of any [1 digit x 1 digit] within like 2 seconds. When I came to the US right after learning the 9x9, I found out my entire class has trouble doing the times table, and they were still learning it when I already had it memorized. They took longer than me to do multiplication. The teacher asked some kid a random [1 digit x 1 digit] and the kid just like sat in silence, I'm like: I KNOW THE ANSWER. I guess it makes sense... the "gaokao" there is a nightmare, overworking kids and rote memorization becomes norm in China. Depression also becomes norm and suicide rates go through the roof. I might've killed myself by now had I still be there.

Plumbing. I'm not a plumber and I'm not particularly good at it, but it's one of those things that most people won't even consider looking at.

Also, 3D visualization. I had a carpenter do the gutters on my house and I explicitly told him that the reason I didn't do them myself was that the eaves are slanted inwards so that the slope on the gutters would cause the gutters to go inwards when it goes downwards, and I was unsure what best practise was for that case, where to get the proper hangers for this or if we'd need to put a vertical board up first in order to make it work. He assured me that it'd be fine, having done many gutters before. When I got home, he had put ordinary hangers right on the slanted eaves, and the gutters were halfway under the roof at one end. He stood there scratching his head and tried to argue that the wall of the house was not straight, because he could simply not see any other reason for it to do that.

Driving without touching my phone.

Navigating UIs on PCs, Smartphones, Ticket Machines etc.

Popping their ears. I can "pop" my ears by opening my eustachian tubes on demand. I can even hold them open if I want to. Apparently a lot of people can't do that.

Computers just work around me. Steady the software and programs. I’m not in the tech or it field. I’m in retail management.

The amount of times people call me over only to say “well now it’s working but before it took me to some other screen”

“Glad I could help”

Talking to strangers. I'm always the person my introverted friends push to the front if the group has to say something. Ohh, and phone calls! I'm the designated "Can you call them please?" person.

Being able to see through fake people's masks. Like, people who appear nice and friendly on the surface, but are narcissistic snakes who will destroy you to benefit themselves. The people who everyone will swear "oh, they aren't like that."

It's so obvious to my wife and I, possibly because we're on the spectrum, but no one else sees it until one of us lays out all the supporting evidence that they are in fact like that.

Explaining difficult technical concepts to laypeople. Just gotta find the correct analogy.

Basic hygiene, sadly

What about something that everyone else thinks is easy but it's difficult for me?

Whistling. I'm fucking 35.

I can do an oil & filter(s) change and or a brake job on most normal cars pretty easy. Many people I know would have trouble with these.

I'm really good at finding flaws in things. It's not that I'm trying, I guess I just use things differently. A colleague of mine told me I should be a tester for product development to help find the problems when I asked him why some software worked the way it did. He just said, "I don't do it that way."

Consequently, I'm excellent at writing manuals because I always write them in such a way that no one will make the mistakes I did. The real bummer is I HATE WRITING MANUALS.

Being happy by myself.