Extrapolating how I work

Here’s what I do. I make it up as I go along. I bullshit, if you like.

Kids with AS are often referred to as Little Professors, and it’s easy to see why. When it comes to subjects that they are interested in, they can talk at you all day about it. They appear to know everything there is to know about the subject. The things is, generally they don’t. They make stuff up, and extrapolate, yet present everything with that same confidence that makes you think that they know what they are talking about.

I did this as a kid, and as an adult, I still do. The reason is that this is the way I learnt to do things, and I never really appreciated until recently that it might not always be the right thing to do.

Thus, when I get carried away I’ll embellish things that I say with facts and figures that sound right, but are actually made up. I feel justified in doing so, because in my head, the extrapolation of data that I do know, into something that might be true is valid. I know that’s going to sound wrong and illogical to many people, but, well, that’s just the way it is, and there’s no point in me trying to deny it.

Much of the time my extrapolation causes no harm, but from time to time I’ll do it with someone who knows more than me about a subject, and I’ll simply end up looking foolish at best. At worst, I’ll get thought of as a bullshitter and will lose the trust of that person.

There are of course positive aspects to this too – sometimes my extrapolation isn’t bullshit, and allows me to make connections I’d not previously seen, or to take a leap of faith about something. When it works this way, it’s one of the most useful of my AS traits.

The above behaviour is well documented in AS literature, but the reason behind it isn’t. I’ve been wondering why I approach knowledge in this way, and I think I may have found an answer.

It all boils down to how I learnt to cope with my invisible and undiagnosed AS, and in particular with social interaction. As a child, I copied how other kids interacted. I had to do this to fit in, because I had little in the way of natural ability with social interaction. The sophistication in a lot of social interaction didn’t make sense to me then, and a good deal of it doesn’t make sense to me now, although I’ve learnt over the years to rationalise what I see, and to disguise my lack of understanding.

So, as a child, I spent a good deal of time observing other children, and then recreating what I saw in order to make sense of it. At first, much of this recreation was in my head. I tried to understand what I should say and do, by replaying the interactions of myself and my peers in my head. Eventually, my take on these events was replayed – when faced with a social scenario I acted out what I thought would be appropriate responses, based on what I’d seen my peers doing.

This is the key, I think: When I didn’t understand the expected responses in social situations, I watched what people did, and stored away the responses to use later. Faced with a similar scenario at a later date, I extrapolated a response from the data I had available.

There’s that word again – extrapolate.

Extrapolating data to camouflage my weakness in social interaction worked well, and I use it to this day.

Perhaps the reason that I sometimes pass off extrapolated bullshit when presenting knowledge is simply because extrapolation of data was how I learnt to cope with my poor social skills as a child. I made up answers to my social problems based on the data I’d gathered through observation of my peers, just like I present made up data as fact when I get carried away.

This article, of course, is also based on an extrapolation of data, and as such could equally well be bullshit. Is it? Well, I don’t think so. I think this falls into the category of making connections and leaps of faith. I hope you agree.

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