• PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    I bet the sailors were equally thrilled that this random guy was looking out for them. It’s nice to know someone’s waiting for you.

  • zante@lemmy.wtf
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    2 months ago

    I’m not an expert in autism, but I’m not keen on what seems to be claiming every ‘nerdy’ hobby as an autistic trait ?

    Educate me

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Potentially unpopular opinion - the term “autism” and “ASD” have expanded way beyond their original clinical meaning. It doesn’t help that even the official definition is so broad as to be useless. Add to that the cooption by the Tiktok culture to describe any “quirky” behavior, and you get the current situation where it’s hard to find a person that doesn’t exhibit at least some “autistic” traits

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The term “neurodiverse” (or as a friend calls it “neurospicy”) came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other “conditions”. They also tend to blur into each other.

        Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn’t naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.

        Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It’s both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find “normal” to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it’s disproportionately common. We’re not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.

        ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It’s annoying when it’s overused in media, as a catch all term.

        • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I mean we ARE a lot more common than uneducated people think. They have the “autism = unable to speak or walk normally” mentality instead of that one kid who likes to draw and listen to music.

          • cynar@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.

            Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.

      • Warjac@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        People often accuse me of being Autistic and it infuriates me to no end. I don’t care if I am or not I don’t give a shit about knowing. I’m perfectly fine without the label and I’ll keep being fine.

        I hate that so often we are encouraged to label ourselves in society and that just as often people seek these labels to fit in, gain community or otherwise make themselves more interesting by incorporating some quirky or less than common fact about themselves as a whole personality trait.

        I am finding more and more that neruodivergent labels are becoming the new version of houses in basic removed Astrology.

        • Szyler@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          It’s not wanting a label, it’s struggling to fit in and being tired of it. Finding people like yourself is how you fit in, and if you fit with some people and they have a label, you checkup on it yourself and find an explanation of why you didn’t fit in in the first place.

          If you feel you fit in without knowing who you might fit in with, that is great, and you don’t need to have a label. But some people find it easier to find like minded people if they match labeles.

          • Warjac@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            So it’s a social crutch they can lean on to find community? I’m pretty sure I mentioned something like that in my comment.

    • tjsauce@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s not so much the choice of hobby, but the degree of obsession, being so intense that even the participant admits that it’s illogical, yet partakes for the emotional fulfillment.

    • TheSambassador@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I think this kinda thing is more in response to people who believe that autism/ADHD/neurodivergence in general is some new thing that never existed in the past. There’s a lot of historical behavior that could be explained.

    • Warjac@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The insinuation here is the obsessive behavior. The text calls it a madness so I’m guessing it was a sudden occurrence.

      I’m not an expert on Autism or other mental situations like ADHD mind you but it seems pretty likely Thrasyllus became hyper fixated on boats one day and he basically became a harbor manager for it much like you see other hobbyists become conductors or train line engineers for toy trains and that before the very modern diagnosis of Autism came about these people were considered strange until the behavior could in some part be explained by neurodivergent behaviors/tendencies.

    • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      You need to see it in context with the other diagnostic criteria. Also, it needs to be a special interest, not just a hobby.

      And the main one, people seek out diagnoses because they run into problems.

    • Katrisia@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      People on the autism spectrum can get really absorbed by their special interests. It seems that this Greek man suffered a brief delusion (being owner of all those ships). Delusions are not part of autism, but the way he categorized the ships and took care of the entries is reminiscent of autistic exhaustive or meticulous behavior.

      About the hobbies, not every hobby is a sign of ASD, but there are hobbies that have a bigger proportion of autistic individuals compared to others. Collecting trains has become a meme and a stereotype, but there are others. If you see someone with a train collection, they are not necessarily autistic, of course. But if they have a train collection, records of every change within the collection, books about the hobby, etc., you’d have the right to be suspicious.

      Disclaimer: I speak from my experience with loved ones with ASD. I hope I’m not misrepresenting anything.

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    There’s still people into boats, but it’s not very popular compared to trains/planes/cars. Which is kinda strange, there has never been a time with more shipping traffic. Maybe because ports these days are fairly inaccessible to observers

    • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I used to live in an industrial city with one of the biggest inland ports in the world. The rivers are a pretty popular hangout spot. People get some portable grills and chairs and just watch the ships go by. I feel like they are a bit less interesting then old ships tho.

      • Wrench@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        And numerous. A new ship docking would set a town into a flurry, bringing in trade and money for services. Now at today’s scale of everything, one ship is meaningless unless it’s something like a giant tourist ship to a small tourist town.

    • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Where i grew up we could see tanker ships anchored in the bay. I would have loved to get familiar with them but we never stayed there long enough and i don’t know if i would have seen the same ship twice anyway

  • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It wasn’t till education and office jobs became more common that autistic people started separating from what they were seen as being “oh yeah joe, hes a tad off but gets his work done and he’s nice” to instead where you’re told to stay in a room all day and do this annoying thing.

    A few hundred years ago there wasn’t as much to overwhelm autistic folks compared to todays cities and technology. Also the repetitive farmwork (ex. churning butter) is something autistic people excell at as they can zone out and just vibe.

    I heard this quote that really makes it obvious, “how come dyslexic people didn’t exist until widespread literacy?”

    • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Capitalism and our employment based, market fundamentalist society has a funny way of identifying and singling out group who are aren’t AS profitable as they might otherwise be.

    • Wrench@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      That’s a pretty rosy interpretation. Another would be that, unless you were wealthy, no one really gave a shit. I’m sure a lot of autistic people just died in the gutters because they weren’t able to find steady employment.

      I’m sure plenty were able to contribute to family trades like farming, etc. But human history is full of death and despair.

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      the interesting thing about dyslexia, is that its different in every language and the rates are similar but lean in different directions for different languages making it hard to detect and diagnose. But mostly because dyslexia is a written language reading and writing situation, its only recently in human history that so many people can read and write.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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    2 months ago

    Seems like they could have just gave him a job keeping track of all the boats and then everyone could be happy…

  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    That “in this way” is doing a lot of work here. I wonder if doctors were better at mental health (or at least that specific doctor was), or if “in this way” meant they beat him until he agreed to stop liking ships?

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 months ago

      “What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings.”

      The past is often an ugly place. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  • WolfdadCigarette@threads.net@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Wait, isn’t train autism less about the arrival or departure of the train and more anbout enjoying the mechanics of a gargantuan piece of machinery in motion? Or can people experience it in multiple different ways? I’ve just now realized that I know very little about this particular special interest.

    • Repple (she/her)@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I am no expert on train autism (I have uh, Star Trek autism?) but I feel like it’s a super diverse group. From massive model setups to the people in Japan who have amazing train driving simulator setups, to the people who know absolutely everything about the history and operation of the New York subway system, and I feel like I’ve certainly seen timetables be a part of it.

      Edit: just writing that made me want to get into trains, it sounds so fun, dammit.

      • grysbok@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        I’ve started listening to the podcast “Well, there’s your problem”, which covers engineering disasters. I swear, 2 out of 3 episodes devolve into talking about trains. It’s great. The three hosts are all wicked into trains. Even the 9/11 podcast had a bit of a seque into talking about the WTC subway station.

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      As with many ND hobbies. It sprawls out in almost as many ways as people who do it.

      Some love the massive powerful machinery that is a locomotive. Others are obsessed with the timings and predictability. Still others love the organisational side of things.

      It even overlaps with the model train interest groups. Recreating aspects of the train network, based on their own interests.

      ND hobbyists are a bit like cats in many ways. There’s not much pack drive. We tend to wander and explore interests in our own way, independent of the labels that get applied. It can be broadly grouped, but has a lot of spread.

    • RotSteinFinke@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      I think “train autism” means train spotting (the hobby, not the movie). In the hobby, you observe trains and write down their model and/or serial number in a notebook. The goal is to get a full set of trains of a certain kind, or operated by a company. Nowadays the community also posts photos on the internet, but for a long time, they were known as the guys comparing their notebooks with nothing but numbers.