[VISION] Asperger-friendly communication

[John Harvey]

I posted, the other day, on another list (AVN), something that I intended to post here also, an invitation to participate in refining the underpinnings of a visionary conversation. After I did so, it was pointed out to me that our friends reading AVN and this list who aspire to be skeptics are by and large already suffering the effects of vaccines or other insults and contending with the cognitive and emotional limitations of Oppositional Defiance Disorder and other autism-spectrum disorders, particularly Asperger's syndrome.
Apparently that post was one that drew the attention of the pseudoskeptical brotherhood but was too abstract for analysis by those unable to deal with abstract concepts. This has perhaps done little to help them to see another point of view.
The blogs on vaccination and homoeopathy that are written by pseudoskeptics obviously affected by Asperger's -- Richard Dawkins, for instance, seems to kindly gather them into his fold -- suggest too that many aspiring skeptics affected by these disorders are without carers to explain things to them in terms that they can really do anything with, which is evidently why real evidence appears to pass them by unnoticed.
It seems to me that we're all in this together, both those able to process scientific and abstract concepts and to maintain a genuinely skeptical approach, and those beset by cognitive deficits. The attempt by "Skeptics" to exclude from medical conversations anybody truly skeptical (of vaccine claims, for instance) or who wishes to present evidence conflicting with their present views seems to be merely an understandable reaction to their own cognitive exclusion from higher-order discussions and from any empathetic comprehension of the effects of their actions on others.
As such, it deserves some compassion and an attempt to bridge the cognitive gap.
I'm as guilty as any party of failing to bridge it. As Mark Twain once wrote, "If I'd had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter".
I'll shortly post a version of that invitation that uses concrete terms for the benefit of our Skeptic friends on this list who, through no fault of their own, are contending with Asperger's syndrome and other deficits. After that I'll post the invitation in the original language, which, though it deals with the same concepts more abstractly, does so more briefly.
Cheers!
John
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"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."

-- Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, p. 249.