Disclaimer About Our Methods

Background

As we were writing the next post and doing research, it struck us that a small disclaimer is in order. A disclaimer that will correctly frame our methods and models.

Due to our learning accessibility needs, as we are twice-exceptional AuDHD with sensory processing issues as well as beyond the curve interests while at the same time struggling with purely theoretical explanations, as well as not having had access to parental guidance in any meaningful or reliable way, traditional education has never been well-suited for us. As a result of that, we have had to adopt autodidacticism and commit to self-teaching as a means to learn the topics we needed to learn.

One example is how we taught ourselves to speak English merely by watching BBC and gaining a vocabulary and skill in language in a secondary language that is comparable to native/fluent speakers.

Furthermore, most traditional literature has not been able to keep our attention. While traditional literature is less of a challenge now that we are “properly” medicated, our preferred methods still rest in autodidacticism and self-directed analysis.

You bet your ass we’re all alike… We’ve been spoon fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… The bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

Source: Hackers Manifesto

Because of the way that our minds work and our general thirst for knowledge, we had to develop our own methods of analysis, reflection and ultimately synthesis to be able to on-board knowledge on an intuitive level. The synthesis aspect is perhaps one of the more important methods.

Because to know a thing is to find the simplest abstraction that you can convey to another person.

Because while a person might not understand the intricacies of internet routing, they can understand country and area codes in telephony number plans, or the taxonomy of life, or the Dewey Decimal Classification.

On the abstract level, these are all practical organizational systems that use some sort of tree-based grouping system to convey information about where a general group of information can be located, with increasing specificity leading up to a particular endpoint.

This level of synthesis creates a blueprint that can then be transposed onto new information, as it arises.

Because much like Hollywood uses somewhere between 4-7, just 7, or was it 5, 12 or 36?! base plots for movies. There are a lot more cross-domain similarities out in the world than one might expect, and knowing the underlying concepts will allow us to communicate more effectively.

And effective communication is a key survival strategy for people with childhood/developmental trauma.

Conclusion

Because we have always learned outside of the system, we have always taken an analysis first approach and, consequently, we have always ignored traditional knowledge. Like many other neurodivergent persons, we have found Wikipedia to have been a blessing that has allowed to find our ways around information that would have otherwise been gatekept by traditional education or otherwise have been hidden away as too structured.

This has all resulted in that we have always applied an analysis first and check for existing/matching concepts and terms later approach.

In these works, when we use existing terms to talk about concepts, it will be because these terms best convey the meaning of those concepts, in a common vocabulary. But we will have generally abstracted to the use of these methods and frameworks independently of their prior existence.

Our thinking has always been extra-colonial, even when we never realized or had terms for it.