I’ve noticed these things all my life. Even as a young child I would point such things out and others would have trouble seeing it. Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense.
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.
I have this with grammar. When I read modern websites, articles, papers, emails from HR, etc. with their sloppy English and comma-splices everywhere, it annoys me way too much and it's a real challenge to push on through and keep reading.
It feels like walking through a maze, with an uneven floor and bad lighting, full of dead-ends, compared to walking down a pleasant, well-lit corridor.
I used to write some of the worst English out there. Then I became part in a streamers community, where proper English grammar was encouraged/enforced. (Well, more like having to at least try to write proper English, there was quite a bit of leeway) Ever since then, I get incredibly annoyed at people just writing "liek this and not giving an crap about proper grammar or punctuation this makes text harder to read then necessary"
Same. Also I get annoyed when pointing out (in good manner) misspellings, bad grammar, or technical inaccuracies gets called out as pedantry or policing, especially here on HN. Sure, it's not the end of the world - but the reason we have a nice place here is, in big part, because enough people care to set certain quality expectations. When that erodes, so do nice things.
This is spot-on. HR is bad, but at least writing is not their main job, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
My main concern is the writing I see coming out of the Public Relations and Communications departments. Writing is not exactly tangential to those fields.
Maybe it’s related to how we (government, industry) used to routinely make great instructional videos and other learning materials, but are now largely terrible at it.
I suspect it’s all connected to the rise of a professional management class, rather than promotion through the ranks, and management by people who’ve done the work. Nobody who’s in a position to demand better or to make sure the right people are in the right roles, actually knows WTF they’re doing outside of a spreadsheet and PowerPoint.
It feels like there is a whole lot more cronyism and nepotism than I remember 20 years ago.
I am observing a lot of people in high paying jobs who don't have a clue how to do even the basics of their job (like being able to type proficiently in a job that requires written documentation).
This one is a bit more reasonable (to me at least). It seems to be an internet/texting convention that messages ending with a period are more formal/serious or potentially angry/irritated, whereas messages without a period are lighter/more fun. As an example:
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes”
Vs
“Have you taken the dog out?”
“Yes.”
The second comes across as the responder being potentially irritated at the asker. I believe that this comes down to the amount of effort required to type the reply; adding a period is making the explicit choice to do so, whereas not doing so is the default. This isn’t the case for sentences in the middle of a multi-sentence answer, since a separator is needed anyways. But I find myself not adding a period even at the end of multi-sentence messages, and I automatically read any message ending with a period with a different tone than one which does not.
Maybe I’m just nuts though, that’s always an option. But with text being such a relatively limited medium for conveying emotion in short messages, I think this is a reasonable solution.
I have this with spelling. Even a fractional glance at a poster/billboard/sign, without focusing my eyes on it, and certainly without reading a single word ... any misspelled word triggers a flag in my brain sort of "pinging" me with the precise location of the misspelled word.
The grocer's apostrophe (which I will argue should be called the grocers'(1) apostrophe, since there are many offending grocers) is the bane of my existence
(1) My phone absolutely tried to correct that back to "grocer's"
If you want to make your existence slightly more irritating: Learn German and move to Germany. There the possessive s ending is written without an apostrophe - but there is an equivalent which then falsely writes the possessive with an apostrophe - the so-called Deppenapostroph (idiot's apostrophe).
What annoys me most about German vs English is that German has lots of English loanwords ending in "y" (e.g. "Party"), but it's officially not allowed to use the plural form that would be correct in English, e.g. "Parties" - you have to write "Partys". As a bonus, you could try using "Party's", but that would be incorrect again...
Well, it is "a baker's dozen", right? Not "all the bakers' dozens". Since the phrase incorporates a reference to a single individual, as a representative concept for all bakers.
So "the grocer's apostrophe" makes sense as a phrase referring to a typical individual grocer with a typical atypical apostrophe, standing in as a representative for all grocers and all their darned grocers' apostrophes.
Humans brains are pattern recognition machines. It’s how you are able to read efficiently, why you enjoy music, and why you are able to say “this alley seems shifty, best not enter it.”
Most people are able to naturally filter out most of it. You’re just a little less equipped to. People with ADHD have similar problems.
Psychedelics remove most of those filters, causing someone’s brain to get the raw data including all the anomalies in the processing, which makes patterns (visual and mental) both suddenly much more apparent and do weird things :)
My overconfident understanding is that "regular people" notice a "regular" amount, but let themselves forget about or ignore a "regular" amount of what they found. People with Autism are less able to let go of what they find, and often struggle with over-stimulation from it. People with ADHD start at an under-stimulated baseline, are instinctively looking for too much, and often overcompensate; which leads to a similar over-stimulation.
I'm autistic and I see patterns and issues with misaligned patterns which cause psychic pain. Also phase issues with sound because it feels physically painful.
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily
All the time, and I learned to not care a lot, even like some; for instance there's a lot of (mostly abstract, surrealism) art which does all the things wrong on that front but which is extremely enjoyable to me. Same weird way with music: exact 4/4 stuff is mostly boring, often even annoying, but give me funky off-beat stuff, chaos and noise and it brings a smile to my face.
There's only one thing which I can't shake off and that's lines which are meant to be, but aren't eaxcatly, parallel or right angles. Can keep staring at those. Especially when they are like very close to being correct but look like they're off (for like 1mm over 1m). Not the first time I actually get up and take a ruler to verify.
But then there is the intentional curvature in ancient stone columns, where ther the pillar is neither a perfect cylinder nor even a perfect cone, and it's on purpose because actual perfect forms don't look right to humans.
Like one part of the article shows the Apple logo in a circle, and the correct centering is not to have all points on the logo equidistant from the circle, but to allow the leaf to go a lot closer than the rest.
Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.
>Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.
Very much in line with being neurodivergent.
Sounds more like autism than ADHD, but it's hard for me to tell, 'cause I'm both[1].
Also autistic, I have this very much with displays. I can’t understand how people can stand LCD televisions. They usually have non-uniform brightness which is super distracting.
I was about to write: As someone late-diagnosed[1] with ADHD[2] and discovering they're autistic, ... -
>Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense.
...yup. This is what I was a about to write.
>I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.
The answers to that are no and yes, that's the blessing and the curse of autism.
Seeking and recognizing patterns is one of the defining traits.
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.