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I was getting my flu vaccine the other day and the nurse asked me why I checked “I don’t know” in response to the question “Is the patient sick?”
She seemed genuinely annoyed when I told her that the only two truthful answers to “Are you sick?” are “Yes” and “I don’t know”.
If the question had asked “Is the patient showing any symptoms of illness?” it would have been a different story, but I answered the question as asked.
I’ve had some of my family get annoyed at me for a similar thing lol. If someone asks me if I’d do something in a hypothetical scenario, I basically always answer with “probably” or “probably not”. I just feel like no matter how certain I feel I would do something in some given situation that I’ve never experienced, I can’t know 100% unless it were to actually happen, so answering as if I’m sure would be incorrect of me.
Finally, some people who incorporate a bit of epistemology into their lives. Y’all are my people.
i went in for a surgery a couple of years ago. receptionist asks if I’ve had covid. i say i don’t know. receptionist looks at me like im trying to be funny. i specify that i haven’t had symptomatic covid. receptionist asks me again if I’ve had covid. my partner tells me to stop being difficult. receptionist rolls their eyes. as far as i was aware you can have covid without symptoms, so i really think answering ‘no’ is dangerously arrogant. or at least foolishly naive.
My trick for this is to replace “I don’t know” with “not to my knowledge” or “not as far as I know”.
Same sentiment, but much less pushback from others.
This is the way. “I don’t know” could imply you haven’t even thought about it, while “Not to my knowledge” implies you know but may be wrong.
Saying that and adding a small smile and a quick laugh does wonders
“Have you ever committed a felony?”
“Not to my knowledge, ha ha”
Meanwhile, I’ve never had Covid and whenever i tell this to medical receptionists they’re like “you’ve never been symptomatic” 😂 every time! You can’t win
Have you done repeated tests, alternatively taken antibody tests (for covid19 proteins not in the vaccines)? (because this is a thread about being pedantic)
Yes, I kept various taking tests weekly for years until it finally got too expensive. I still have only been sick once since 2019, got a cold in 2025. N95 mask nearly everywhere, nearly all the time.
I’m in a couple different academic studies for possible covid resistance, but I keep telling them I don’t think there’s anything biologically keeping me from getting covid, it’s just the masking + forsaking society.
“too literal” is inherently subjective. Too literal to whom? What if my friends group is also neurodivergent as fuck, does this invalidate me then because it’s the new neurotypical?
I conclude that we need tests for what’s usually thought off as “normies”. If they know about their rhetorical precision deficits surely they can get therapy to solve that issue and integrate better into society.
I’ve been told many times I’m too literal. They are wrong, I am appropriately literal. However, it is something people tell me.
Enough that people tell you that you’re too literal.
But also, this isn’t an age or disagree question, it’s a does this happen question.
but it literally is “agree to disagree” tho. If they didn’t want it to be, they should’ve used those words! 😤
but what about people who don’t even have irl social interaction?
The most “fun” ones are the control questions askinging you exactly the opposite of something you’ve been already asked.
Except inversion also reverses subtext so your honest answer has to be different than just the opposite of the previous answer you have. But if the two answers are not a perfect mirror, you might trigger too many control questions and not get diagnosed. What should you do? AAAAAAAAAAAAAH
this is so incredibly true. it’s ridiculous.
All online tests are basically
Test: from 1 to 5, how much X do you feel?
You: 4/5
Test results: You are 75% X
You: so true
You can always tell immediately which question confirms your preconceptions, so you can never answer genuinely. It’s all confirmation bias.
This is all amplified by the fact that if you are taking the test, you already think that you are the thing in the test (in this case, autistic).
P.S. this includes mbti tests. Don’t let their sciency looks deceive you. It’s all confirmation bias, all fake.
Myers Briggs is complete pseudoscience, if it helps. Literally nonsense made up whole cloth by some mother and daughter
You mean astrology for MBAs?
Some people think autism means taking everything literally but that’s actually kleptomania
People don’t tell you that. It would be rude. It would probably be someone else on the spectrum tactlessly telling you, if anyone. However, self-realization that you took many comments literally and embarassed yourself or screwed something up is why you tick that box “yes”.
The “people tell me I’m X” type questions on shit like this always annoy me because like, what exactly are you trying to gauge with this question? Are you trying to determine what I’m like, or are you trying to determine what other people’s perception of me is? The way it’s worded would denote the latter but I’m not sure that’s in actuality what they’re going for. In any case, I don’t typically have people regularly telling me “you’re so [personality trait]” so most of the time if I answer honestly then the answer will usually be “completely disagree” but then that probably skews the test towards an inaccurate result if what they’re really trying to determine is “are you [personality trait]?”
They’re trying to figure out how you compare to other people. It’s terribly worded, but it’s something people who don’t take things literally would get. It’s also really weird because other mental health evaluations tend not to use that sort of potentially confusing language.
They should get some autists to write alternative versions of the questions.
V1 rewrite: “You often notice or have been told that you take things too literally.”
Nah, still too vague. How literal is too literal?
V2: “You often notice or have been told that you take things more literally than what was probably intended.”
Add ADD to the mix, and you go back and change this answer at least 7 times.
Autism tests are useless because I can already see which are the autistic answers and can manipulate the results either way.
Isn’t that true to an extent for all mental health quizzes? The question rather is, why would you want to manipulate the test? Usually it is in the persons best interest to answer as honestly as possible
It is, I once manipulated an IQ test by giving all the correct answers.
2D chess
Why would you?
To score Adderall, duh
Unironically, when I did my tests, I did complain to my psychologist about how some questions were “too open for interpretation”
Because they are, dammit. I remember taking a test that had like 50 questions and it seemed like I’d answer every single one of them differently if it provided more context in one way or the other.
There were two questions far away from each other probing for readiness to use violence which I thought would make an for odd result because I answered them “differently”. I filled in some more missing context, what else are you supposed to do to find an answer?
Well, apparently that just turned out to make my result unreliable.
I told my psychologist that the questions/answers were constructed so poorly that I had started to suspect that the real test was whether or not I would complain about them.
Part of the reason my therapist diagnosed me was because, when running a test like this, I was constantly asking questions to get clarification for the questions of the test because I couldn’t answer them correctly because of this.
Probably around 8th or 9th test question, my therapist was already certain of my diagnosis.
Recently I had a therapist ask if I experience cognitive distortions, but in a way where a literal interpretation would be asking if I hallucinate. I’m not autistic and I knew what she meant, but I did feel the need to be clear in my answer
Therapist: “do you suffer from distorted perception of reality?”
I, René Descartes: “don’t we all? How could anyone, anything trust their senses to accurately describe the infinite complexity of reality? All we can truly know for sure is that we think, therefore we are.”
Seriously, why do these assessments always say “People tell me [blank]”? I can speak about my own experiences! I don’t need someone to narrate my behavior like a sitcom!
Like I get that they’re trying to understand how you behave around other people, not how you behave in your own head, but at least phrase it as “People tell me or I believe people think I am [blank]”; because that’s how I’m forced to answer these questions anyways.
even better: i don’t fucking remember if people say some specific thing about me! Like how often do they expect people to say these highly specific things? Unless it’s said on a monthly or even weekly basis i struggle to believe that most people would remember it.
People dont tell me anything. They usually just get uncomfortable and walk away or become my lifelong friends, and nowhere inbetween. Something like a 200:1 ratio on that, though.
This should be part of the diagnostic criteria. I figured out when I was a kid - if I feel like I’m putting in all the effort for the friendship and the other person isn’t trying, then it’s not worth it. Chances are, I’m just annoying them and they’re trying to be polite. In reality, either we click immediately or we don’t click at all, and the difference is unmistakable. Finding a like-mind feels like a chemical reaction going off.
Or another way to put it, it’s like how two waves meeting can either amplify each other or completely cancel each other out. If we’re the same wavelength, we’ll both be riding high. If we’re too different, everything just kind of peters out.
My autistic ass says its like two Stand users from jojos, if that makes any sense. We attract each other and mesh well (or kill each other, i guess)
