I’ll be honest: a push to finish my book proposal draft this week is leaving me depleted. Typically, I’d pull an idea from my running notebook and develop it into a full post. But right now, I don’t have the energy.

So I’m trying something different.

I have plenty of bubbling thoughts. Rather than skip this week, why not share a few informal ideas? Maybe you’re a little tired of the long slog too, and would welcome a few bite-size pieces in lieu of a full candy bar.

Subscribe now

What’s a “writer”?

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I thought there were only a few kinds of writers: journalists, poets, and, mostly, book authors. My sense of the word leaned heavily toward that last category, because that’s what I consumed. Writer, to me, was just a more casual, breezy term for author, unless some qualifier indicated otherwise (eg, songwriter). So writer = author, which in my mind meant you wrote books: fiction, which I mostly read, or biography, which I sometimes read—or the more boring (to me then) and blurry category of nonfiction books.

Obviously, that was a child’s idea and not at all correct. But even now, I find myself puzzled by the label writer. As I grew up and realized writer could mean anything from advice columnist to film reviewer to cultural critic to creator of TV episodes, I felt… I don’t know, frustrated at the imprecision? Those jobs demand wildly different processes and skills. Why should the primary label we use be based on how their work is shared?

In a related sense, scientists are writers. Their findings don’t mean much if they aren’t written in papers and published. Philosophers are writers. Lawyers are writers. Legislators are writers. Judges are writers.

Recently, I saw someone complain that Substack is just made up of writers reading each others’ writing. Their point was that there isn’t a separate group of people consuming content, but I was more interested in their starting premise. We’re all writers here? I don’t think so. I see philosophers, marketers, historians, people summarizing complicated science. Am I a writer? I don’t consider myself one. I do writing, but I’m not a writer.

Maybe that person’s Substack experience is limited to literary types. Or, more likely, they think the mere act of producing writing makes you a writer. They’re not alone. And sure, in the strictest sense. But writing is just a medium for sharing ideas. Talking is another. Imagine Substack as an ancient forum, where in one corner someone’s critiquing the latest temple, in another someone’s spinning gossip, and in another someone’s sharing food preparation techniques. Would we call them all talkers?

But there’s no need to go back in time. Sticking with the present, should we group TV hosts, telemarketers, sports announcers, and therapists under the umbrella term talkers?

If I had to describe what I do here, it’s not primarily writing. That’s the mode but not the purpose. Mainly, I’m analyzing—and researching, collecting, connecting. I put thoughts into writing because that’s my preferred way of sharing them. But maybe calling myself an analyzer is no better than writer.

Last night I started watching River, an old BBC crime series. The main character, a detective played by Stellan Skarsgård, is grieving the death of his partner on the police force. He delivers this brief monologue before walking out on his therapist:

Therapist: Even if you were just colleagues, there was love…

Skarsgård’s character: In books and films and plays it’s always so compelling, so complex. There should be more than one word for love. I’ve seen love that kills, and I’ve seen love that redeems. I’ve seen love that believes in the guilty, and love that saves the bereaved. What we will do for love. Die for it even.

He’s right. There are so many kinds of love: parental love, romantic love, Platonic love, self love, neighborly love, divine love. For a concept so fundamental to our lives, why is there just one word—love—to which we affix adjectives, rather than different terms entirely?

The register is different, of course (though I’d be heartily amused to watch a therapeutic monologue on this topic), but I feel the same about writer: one word, too many referents, all tenuously grouped together.

Leave a comment

Autistic people researching autism

Something that’s consistently amused me since my diagnosis is this: there’s a kind of person, grouped under the label autism by virtue of certain shared traits, whose mind naturally turns toward deep, focused exploration.

And what do many of us point that focus toward? Autism itself.

So you end up with a community of people who are unusually motivated to research things as a hobby, working to understand the very cognition or “disorder” they’ve been told they have. It’s not just that autistic people know their experience; it’s that they are uniquely driven, by their mental orientation, to research and systematize it.

What’s the right analogy? I keep fumbling for one. People with unusual strength and a propensity to lift things, who happen to be born in a rocky landscape? No, that’s terrible. But you get the idea (maybe).

This is why I see autism-focused subreddits as invaluable data troves. Autistic people offering firsthand insights into their own experience, motivated by a drive to understand, reflect, and synthesize. It’s an extraordinary record. I’ve often wondered why researchers don’t scrape those archives as datasets, unleashing large language models to map connections and point to new focuses of research.

My intuition is that autistic people are on the frontlines of understanding their own condition, coalescing around traits that research hasn’t yet—but will eventually—confirm. That happened with monotropic focus, which was first theorized by autistic autism researcher Dinah Murray and others. I suspect it will happen, too, with concepts like social object permanence (which has also been identified in connection with ADHD, as Hanna Keiner pointed out to me; she also introduced me to Dinah Murray).

Just a few days ago, I came across a 2017 paper titled Whose Expertise Is It? Evidence for Autistic Adults as Critical Autism Experts. The authors argue that autistic people are more scientifically knowledgeable about autism than non-autistic people. That’s not exactly shocking, though maybe I overestimate how much people with other diagnoses know about those conditions.

Somewhat more interesting are other points: autistic adults were more likely to describe autism experientially, to frame it as a neutral difference, and to challenge the medical model. The paper concludes: “Autistic adults should be considered autism experts and involved as partners in autism research.”

I agree. But I come to that conclusion less from the somewhat obvious idea that autistic people will both understand and experience autism differently from non-autistic people, and more from this observation: autistic people are not only uniquely positioned to understand autism, they have a tendency to deeply research and synthesize autism as an intellectual hobby. That combination leads to novel insights.

I haven’t checked whether this argument has gained ground in research circles since the 2017 paper, though I know the idea of involving autistic people in study design is a repeat topic.

But I’m getting at something different. More a methodological point: don’t just study how autistic people behave in a controlled setting or what answers they give to itemized questionnaires. Study what they’re saying on their own time about their minds, their experiences, and their understandings of the world.

Subscribe now

Wittgenstein: the philosopher’s job

This one I’m really excited about. I hesitated to share it yet, though, because what I’m really saying at this stage is just: There’s this philosopher who argued something I find incredibly compelling.

I’m not a philosophy expert, not even an amateur. I’ve taken some college survey courses, but that’s it. I also have a terrible memory of my own experiences. So, appropriately discount the following statement: This is the only philosophical argument I’ve ever encountered where I immediately thought, yes, of course, absolutely.

Here’s the background. As a young student at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) took up the classic problems of philosophy. But later, his outlook radically shifted. So much that he posited the following: nearly all of philosophy, including his own earlier work, was based on false premises.

Questions like What is time? or What is the mind? were, he argued, flawed from the outset. The ordinary-language concepts of time and mind aren’t fixed, metaphysical objects. They’re manmade terms that evolved within specific social and linguistic contexts to help us communicate.

The problem, as he saw it, was that philosophers had been tricked by language into believing there were fundamental contradictions to resolve—like what’s the difference between the mind and the brain?

But imagine a language with only one word for both, say, brind. (It’s just clunky enough for Anglo-Saxon. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were already in Shakespeare.) In that language, you couldn’t even ask what the difference was between mind and brain. The question is impossible. This shows that these deep philosophical questions are contingent on human usage. They arise because of how we use language.

This was Wittgenstein’s revolutionary insight: there’s no universal, absolute principle philosophers can construct by pure intellect. All they can do is describe and compare.

To describe, philosophers must gather examples of how the relevant words are used in ordinary language. To compare, they must set those uses side by side. Only through that process does meaning emerge, and the meaning is bounded by that very exercise.

That’s critically important: the meaning illuminated through this process is limited to its context. So: you can’t study the word spice in ordinary usage and then apply that meaning to Frank Herbert’s Dune. Similarly, you can’t analyze the meaning of the bishop in chess by asking, What’s the religious significance of moving diagonally? But, Wittgenstein argued, philosophers had been falling into just such traps for millennia.

He did allow that certain shared human activities serve as anchors around which language develops. But those activities provide context, not universal truths.

And crucially, he wasn’t dismissing the role of science. Science deliberately defines terms—akin to the way bishop has a precise, rule-bound meaning in chess—to advance empirical investigation. Wittgenstein wouldn’t, for instance, argue that gravity is merely a language construct rather than a real phenomenon studied through observation and experiment.

Philosophy, in contrast with science, is abstract. It doesn’t produce empirical knowledge about the world but instead clarifies how we think and speak about it. His point is that philosophy can’t answer the question what is gravity? by deducing some metaphysical essence through reason and logic alone. Science escapes some of the traps Wittgenstein warned about (though not all) precisely because it formalizes language to serve specific investigative aims.

What excites me most about all this is, first, how intuitively right it feels. But second, I see echoes of it everywhere, beyond the philosophical context. That’s what I’m going to develop in the future.

“The problems are solved, not by coming up with new discoveries, but by assembling what we have long been familiar with,” Wittgenstein wrote. Yes.

(Bracing myself for people who actually know philosophy to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.)

Did you enjoy this post? Ways to support my work—for free!

1. Subscribe for regular updates and 2. Tap below to heart this post so others discover it.

Subscribe now

Looking for more to read? Check out these past posts:

• Evolutionary mismatch: just one part of the neurodivergence story

• "I can't make it sincere enough": Karen Read, Amanda Knox, and the performance of innocence

Share

Stay curious,

Laura

Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

This week my readings have been all over the place. Here’s what stood out:

On extroversion, backlash, and overlooking the individual

I read a phenomenal essay by Mara Wilson on being an extrovert, published in the Guardian last fall. It’s really a masterclass in form; it could be deconstructed to analyze the components of a rich personal essay.

One thing that struck me was Mara’s description of the negative backlash against extroverts after Susan Cain’s Quiet came out in 2012.

Quiet celebrated being an introvert, and many introvert-identifiers came out both to proclaim themselves and to essentially shit on extroverts.

Wilson describes how the discovery that “one of the most hated groups of people is, well, people-people” impacted her:

This, perhaps unsurprisingly, made me a little anxious. Did being an extrovert mean I was loud, obnoxious, pushy and just generally bad company by nature? That there was no way I could change? I’d embraced being an extrovert, but being disliked for who you are never feels good.

This seems like a well-worn trajectory. There’s a group that gets unfairly stereotyped or marginalized. They find their voice. And then some of those newfound voices are used to stereotype the people they believe had been oppressing them.

I see this happening within the neurodivergent community now against neurotypicals (shorthand, NTs). NTs are accused of being shallow, oblivious, two-faced, and worse.

Can’t the lesson be that we need to take each person as an individual, not as a representative of some group? And that we should more often give the benefit of the doubt, because as we autists know very well, what you see on the surface is (usually) not what’s happening on the inside.

Kierkegaard & whether he really jostled those people in Copenhagen that day

I finished reading the biography Kierkegaard: A Single Life, by Stephen Backhouse. It was a good introduction to Søren Kierkegaard but it didn’t go into the meat of his psyche, which is what I really wanted.

I found myself distracted by the book’s very detailed retellings of mundane events. This happens a lot when I read nonfiction. I wonder: how do they know that?

For instance, Backhouse relates an episode where two town fathers were perched at a cafe while people watching, and describes what happened next:

They did not see Søren coming, but as this odd man lurched by their table, arm outstretched to order his third coffee of the day to go with his fourth cigar, they would have been jostled.

So… I guess the author just imagined that the two men would have been seated at a specific Copenhagen cafe when a young Kierkegaard arrived there too, and that there would have been a physical run in?

Based on… what, exactly? Is there a record of all three frequenting this cafe at the time? Is there evidence that Søren had at least three coffees and four cigars daily, as mentioned?

My autistic literalism used to lead me to believe that there was actual evidence for every detail.

I now realize that’s impossible. Nonfiction works are rife with these sorts of imagined events even where the historical record is spotty. So they must be invented.

But in that case…

• What are the boundaries of poetic license in nonfiction?

• Is there an accepted approach that they teach in nonfiction writing courses, or is everyone OK if authors just wing it?

• How much of the detail we read in nonfiction is purely invented?

• Am I thinking about this only because I struggle with literalism, whereas most people clearly understand what’s factual and fictitious in nonfiction works?

The trouble is that most popular nonfiction omits footnotes, so I can’t parse what’s rooted in evidence and what’s mere invention.

And there’s no way I’m going to reverse engineer the historical record to solve these mysteries!

I need someone to explain how this aspect of nonfiction writing works.

The interplay between knowledge & “good” taste

The essay How to have good taste from The Common Reader came across my feed.

It argues that good taste is a function of knowledge: the more you consume a certain kind of creative work (novel, film, painting), the better you’ll hone your instinct for what’s good and what’s bad.

This is why, the essay argues, eventually people coalesce around certain works being good (like George Eliot or Chaucer, not Harry Potter), even though it’s a highly subjective inquiry. It’s a sharp and persuasive theory.

And it kinda relates to a theory I have, which is that to appreciate most masterworks, you must have knowledge of their historical context.

For instance, people don’t devour Robinson Crusoe even though it’s deemed a classic. That’s because thousands (millions?) of novels have been written since then and its innovative status is lost on us today.

Same with Renaissance paintings. To a casual observer they seem almost generic these days, but that’s because we don’t appreciate their innovations in perspective, subject matter, use of light, etc. We’re used to all that by now. If we were in the shoes of Renaissance spectators, we’d probably be gobsmacked.

Art historians can imagine what it was like to be a Renaissance-era spectator, given their understanding of history and context. They see the innovative techniques and therefore the immense value in the works.

The rest of us mostly just accept that these works are phenomenal because we’re told so (and because these works are put behind ropes in museums), without experiencing the phenomenal qualities firsthand. (Or, maybe I just have bad taste.)

Subscribe now

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these points — or about what you’ve been reading this week.

That’s all for now.

Warmly,

Laura