Oh, how impressively convenient. Suddenly, you have several doctors available to establish your credibility in an online argument, and apparently I am supposed to accept your claims without question. How remarkably convenient that your medical history becomes relevant precisely when you need it to win an argument with a stranger on the internet.

I have absolutely no reason to believe your claims simply because you make them, and even if every word you said were true, your alleged autism diagnosis changes absolutely nothing about the argument. It does not make your opinions more accurate, your reasoning more sound, or your insults more intelligent. Autism is not an argument-winning credential.

Your argument about the odds of encountering four autistic people online is equally ridiculous. The internet is a self-selecting environment, and people with shared interests and experiences naturally congregate in online communities. The likelihood of encountering autistic people on Reddit or Lemmy is obviously not equivalent to the likelihood of encountering them in a random sample of the general population. That is basic sampling bias.

For context, the CDC's latest published surveillance data identified autism in approximately 1 in 31 eight-year-old children across its 16 monitoring sites in 2022. That is roughly 3.2%, not some astronomical proportion of the population. However, there is no reliable scientific statistic establishing how many people who self-identify as autistic without a formal diagnosis are actually autistic. Anyone pretending otherwise is inventing numbers to support a preconceived conclusion. https://www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research

And here is the truly amusing part: when you cannot make a convincing argument against someone, your immediate instinct is to speculate that they are autistic. You have apparently decided that autism is a convenient explanation for anyone whose opinions you dislike. That says considerably more about your own prejudices and your inability to engage with an argument than it does about the person you are attacking.

People can have unusual personalities, social difficulties, obsessive interests, awkward communication styles, or any number of personal quirks without necessarily meeting the diagnostic criteria for autism. Conversely, autistic people do not all present identically. A diagnosis requires an appropriate clinical assessment, not a collection of stereotypes assembled by someone who thinks they can diagnose strangers through a comment section.

So let me make this exceptionally simple for you: I do not need to establish whether you are autistic, neurotypical, or anything else to evaluate the quality of your argument. Your personality and your medical history are irrelevant to whether your reasoning holds up.

You, on the other hand, seem so desperate to discredit someone who disagrees with you that you have resorted to armchair diagnosis and personal insults. That is not evidence of superior intelligence. It is what people do when they have run out of substantive points to make.

Next time, try addressing the actual argument instead of inventing psychological explanations for the person making it. You might discover that you have something worth contributing after all.

Why not? It does you no harm to be kind to others. Life is a lot better when you are kind and others are kind in return.

wait no

Lemmy users are not a monolith. They are people from across the world. They cannot be classed into one specific type.

I sent you a message. I hope you read it.