I would have to imagine excellent fine motor control and really shit aim 😅
Honestly they did pretty well until the lower section
I’m not an expert in autism, but I’m not keen on what seems to be claiming every ‘nerdy’ hobby as an autistic trait ?
Educate me
People on the autism spectrum can get really absorbed by their special interests. It seems that this Greek man suffered a brief delusion (being owner of all those ships). Delusions are not part of autism, but the way he categorized the ships and took care of the entries is reminiscent of autistic exhaustive or meticulous behavior.
About the hobbies, not every hobby is a sign of ASD, but there are hobbies that have a bigger proportion of autistic individuals compared to others. Collecting trains has become a meme and a stereotype, but there are others. If you see someone with a train collection, they are not necessarily autistic, of course. But if they have a train collection, records of every change within the collection, books about the hobby, etc., you'd have the right to be suspicious.
Disclaimer: I speak from my experience with loved ones with ASD. I hope I'm not misrepresenting anything.
Potentially unpopular opinion - the term "autism" and "ASD" have expanded way beyond their original clinical meaning. It doesn't help that even the official definition is so broad as to be useless. Add to that the cooption by the Tiktok culture to describe any "quirky" behavior, and you get the current situation where it's hard to find a person that doesn't exhibit at least some "autistic" traits
The term "neurodiverse" (or as a friend calls it "neurospicy") came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other "conditions". They also tend to blur into each other.
Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn't naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.
Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It's both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find "normal" to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it's disproportionately common. We're not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.
ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It's annoying when it's overused in media, as a catch all term.
I mean we ARE a lot more common than uneducated people think. They have the "autism = unable to speak or walk normally" mentality instead of that one kid who likes to draw and listen to music.
We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.
Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.
People often accuse me of being Autistic and it infuriates me to no end. I don't care if I am or not I don't give a shit about knowing. I'm perfectly fine without the label and I'll keep being fine.
I hate that so often we are encouraged to label ourselves in society and that just as often people seek these labels to fit in, gain community or otherwise make themselves more interesting by incorporating some quirky or less than common fact about themselves as a whole personality trait.
I am finding more and more that neruodivergent labels are becoming the new version of houses in basic bitch Astrology.
It's not wanting a label, it's struggling to fit in and being tired of it. Finding people like yourself is how you fit in, and if you fit with some people and they have a label, you checkup on it yourself and find an explanation of why you didn't fit in in the first place.
If you feel you fit in without knowing who you might fit in with, that is great, and you don't need to have a label. But some people find it easier to find like minded people if they match labeles.
So it's a social crutch they can lean on to find community? I'm pretty sure I mentioned something like that in my comment.
It's not so much the choice of hobby, but the degree of obsession, being so intense that even the participant admits that it's illogical, yet partakes for the emotional fulfillment.
I think this kinda thing is more in response to people who believe that autism/ADHD/neurodivergence in general is some new thing that never existed in the past. There's a lot of historical behavior that could be explained.
The insinuation here is the obsessive behavior. The text calls it a madness so I'm guessing it was a sudden occurrence.
I'm not an expert on Autism or other mental situations like ADHD mind you but it seems pretty likely Thrasyllus became hyper fixated on boats one day and he basically became a harbor manager for it much like you see other hobbyists become conductors or train line engineers for toy trains and that before the very modern diagnosis of Autism came about these people were considered strange until the behavior could in some part be explained by neurodivergent behaviors/tendencies.
You need to see it in context with the other diagnostic criteria. Also, it needs to be a special interest, not just a hobby.
And the main one, people seek out diagnoses because they run into problems.
I bet the sailors were equally thrilled that this random guy was looking out for them. It's nice to know someone's waiting for you.
There's still people into boats, but it's not very popular compared to trains/planes/cars. Which is kinda strange, there has never been a time with more shipping traffic. Maybe because ports these days are fairly inaccessible to observers
I used to live in an industrial city with one of the biggest inland ports in the world. The rivers are a pretty popular hangout spot. People get some portable grills and chairs and just watch the ships go by. I feel like they are a bit less interesting then old ships tho.
And numerous. A new ship docking would set a town into a flurry, bringing in trade and money for services. Now at today's scale of everything, one ship is meaningless unless it's something like a giant tourist ship to a small tourist town.
Where i grew up we could see tanker ships anchored in the bay. I would have loved to get familiar with them but we never stayed there long enough and i don't know if i would have seen the same ship twice anyway
Super yachts in particular have a dedicated fan base, god knows why as most of them are monstrosities more in common with cruise ships than sailing vessels.
Pretty easy to track them online using their AIS transmitter too: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4
Seems like they could have just gave him a job keeping track of all the boats and then everyone could be happy...
It wasn't till education and office jobs became more common that autistic people started separating from what they were seen as being "oh yeah joe, hes a tad off but gets his work done and he's nice" to instead where you're told to stay in a room all day and do this annoying thing.
A few hundred years ago there wasn't as much to overwhelm autistic folks compared to todays cities and technology. Also the repetitive farmwork (ex. churning butter) is something autistic people excell at as they can zone out and just vibe.
I heard this quote that really makes it obvious, "how come dyslexic people didn't exist until widespread literacy?"
Capitalism and our employment based, market fundamentalist society has a funny way of identifying and singling out group who are aren't AS profitable as they might otherwise be.
That's a pretty rosy interpretation. Another would be that, unless you were wealthy, no one really gave a shit. I'm sure a lot of autistic people just died in the gutters because they weren't able to find steady employment.
I'm sure plenty were able to contribute to family trades like farming, etc. But human history is full of death and despair.
the interesting thing about dyslexia, is that its different in every language and the rates are similar but lean in different directions for different languages making it hard to detect and diagnose. But mostly because dyslexia is a written language reading and writing situation, its only recently in human history that so many people can read and write.
That "in this way" is doing a lot of work here. I wonder if doctors were better at mental health (or at least that specific doctor was), or if "in this way" meant they beat him until he agreed to stop liking ships?
Are you kidding me? They'd* probably drill a hole into his skull drain some of the blood out of his brain or something, cover his body with leeches and sodomize him with a pillar of salt. Oh, you like boats too much? What you need a good drain and salting.
Well here's the full quote...
Thrasyllus from Aexone, the son of Pythodorus, once went so mad that he thought all the ships arriving at Piraeus were his own. He would register them, dispatch them, and manage their affairs. When they returned to port, he would welcome them with the kind of joy you might expect from someone who was really in charge of such great wealth. When ships were lost, he did not inquire after them, but he rejoiced at every one that was saved and recounted it with greatest delight. When his brother Crito came to visit from Sicily, he took him into custody, handed him over to a doctor, and put an end to his madness. Afterwards, Thrasyllus would tell the story, saying that he had never in his life been happier, for he felt not pain whatsoever, while the amount of pleasure he felt was overwhelming.’”
Oh, you meant the pillar...
Yeah, big conversion therapy vibes. Imagine seeing someone happy and thinking you have to cure them, and then when they remember how happy it made them, they get sad now.
I think we're missing a lot of details. Mania implies something pathologic is going on and it's affecting his life, like maybe he's not eating for a week because he is so obsessed with watching for ships. Yes, he's happy when they return, but that doesn't mean he's happy a majority of the time during these periods.
Yeah, that's what we call a disorder now. As in, some "autistic" or "obsessive" traits can be fairly common at very low levels, but we start calling them disorders when they severely impact your life. Like being physically unable to stop washing your hands 200 times in a row to the point of making yourself bleed, that's a disorder - but being unable to step on black tiles or odd steps on stairs is not severely impacting your life. Same reasoning for things like gambling or porn, it's an addiction only when it starts ruining you, your work, or your family life.
Not sure how damaging that could get for a train or ship lover, you could probably find workarounds for the "forgetting to eat" thing. Like packing a snack. Depends if the person is holding out for weeks on ends while they have other obligations to other people.
I don't know that the mania phrasing is that significant for a serious armchair diagnosis like that. As long as someone constantly stops to watch a ship passing by like they're under a spell, they could call it a mania, inspired by some god or another ; making lists for no reason could be enough for people to call you bonkers (even in the last couple centuries, you could still send people to an asylum for the dumbest assumptions). We're certainly missing details, but that could go either way, it's not enough to suspect something big beyond "people used to think basic mental health was the voices of gods."
Yes, he's happy when they return, but that doesn't mean he's happy a majority of the time during these periods.
He's making lists. He happy.
"What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
The past is often an ugly place. I wouldn't be surprised.
Wait, isn’t train autism less about the arrival or departure of the train and more anbout enjoying the mechanics of a gargantuan piece of machinery in motion? Or can people experience it in multiple different ways? I’ve just now realized that I know very little about this particular special interest.
I am no expert on train autism (I have uh, Star Trek autism?) but I feel like it’s a super diverse group. From massive model setups to the people in Japan who have amazing train driving simulator setups, to the people who know absolutely everything about the history and operation of the New York subway system, and I feel like I’ve certainly seen timetables be a part of it.
Edit: just writing that made me want to get into trains, it sounds so fun, dammit.
I've started listening to the podcast "Well, there's your problem", which covers engineering disasters. I swear, 2 out of 3 episodes devolve into talking about trains. It's great. The three hosts are all wicked into trains. Even the 9/11 podcast had a bit of a seque into talking about the WTC subway station.
I think "train autism" means train spotting (the hobby, not the movie). In the hobby, you observe trains and write down their model and/or serial number in a notebook. The goal is to get a full set of trains of a certain kind, or operated by a company. Nowadays the community also posts photos on the internet, but for a long time, they were known as the guys comparing their notebooks with nothing but numbers.
As with many ND hobbies. It sprawls out in almost as many ways as people who do it.
Some love the massive powerful machinery that is a locomotive. Others are obsessed with the timings and predictability. Still others love the organisational side of things.
It even overlaps with the model train interest groups. Recreating aspects of the train network, based on their own interests.
ND hobbyists are a bit like cats in many ways. There's not much pack drive. We tend to wander and explore interests in our own way, independent of the labels that get applied. It can be broadly grouped, but has a lot of spread.
Yes! In my circles it’s more prevalent than the train kind, but I live near the only aerospace school in the country so there’s some self selection.
Yes. I live directly in line with an airport's runway and can identify landing aircraft based on their sound. The best is when the city uses an Antonov An-2 to spray mosquito control chemicals from a height of 100 feet.
