Speaking as someone who’s a. a technical writer, and b. on the spectrum, I 100% agree that the wording of most autism self-assessment schemas sucks, but fixing that is also a legitimately hard problem. Identifying neurotypes boils down to identifying habitual patterns of behaviour, and one of the frequent hallmarks of autism is having difficulty generalising from anecdotal observations to identify trends. The upshot is that an autism self-assessment that wants to be useful to its target audience is very often going to find itself in the position of trying to explain what a habitual pattern of behaviour is to someone for whom the only discernible patterns are “Every Time Forever Without Exception” and “A Series of Isolated Incidents”.
(Like, yes, obviously we should be putting in the work to do it right, but framing a question like “do you often have difficulty identifying patterns in sets of observations?” in such a way that the majority of people for whom the answer is “yes” will actually answer “yes” is, to put it lightly, a non-trivial challenge!)
and so that it also catches people whose autism manifests as noticing *more* patterns than the people around them do
Well, there’s the trick – being “better” at spotting patterns doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have difficulty identifying patterns if you struggle to distinguish the patterns which are meaningful from the weird coincidences. There’s a reason that folks on the autism spectrum are often prone to getting sucked into conspiracy theories.
I think the only reason I HAVEN’T been sucked into a conspiracy theory yet (probably? if I was believing in any untrue conspiracies I wouldn’t know it, would I?) …is because my pattern-recognition is so insanely overactive
because (hypothetical example) when someone shows me a pile of assorted facts that prove, very convincingly, that Elvis is actually Bigfoot sneaking autism vaccines into Halloween candy, I’ll just shoot back a reinterpretation of the same facts that, equally convincingly, proves that their mom is a reincarnation of Colonel Sanders and has raised them to be the Second Coming of Jar Jar Binks, and that none of us can tell “real” connections from made-up ones