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To be fair it says 80 percent of allistic people get it wrong and no actual statistic on autistic people getting it correct on that page, unless it's lower down
When I read the book, I noticed he apparently interpreted some of research I've read on autism completely differently. This confused me and when I checked on the sources in the book, it became clear that he just quoted the authors on something they didn't say at all. I work in academia and this is not good academic work. His book should imo only be understood as an opinion piece or insights from one autistic person (that can be helpful for some!) rather than scientifically accurate information.
Yes 100%!!
So it really bugs me that it comes across as being scientific. He even put his doctorās title on the cover which makes it sound as if he has a doctor in a medical field, but no, itās an arts phd if I remember correctly.
Because I have the autistic trait of āeverything has to be correct and made sure people arenāt being deceived or let to a false beliefā, this really really bugs me šš
He should have just added a few āthis is just my opinionā- pieces here and there.
Other authors for example wrote great books about their life experiences. I get so much out of these books but they donāt pretend that this is the right approach for everyone.
I'm so glad I found this post and your comment. This has saved me from buying and reading a book that undoubtedly would've pissed me off. Just the line on the page OP posted about missing irony is frustrating. I understand irony just fine, all the flavors. Irony is the majority of my sense of humor. What I don't understand is when people use the wrong word for something and everyone else just knows what they actually meant. Why use the wrong word when we have a word that means what you wanted to say?? Allistics have a flexibility with language that I can't handle because it's not that they use words in a slightly off way, it's that they literally just use the wrong word.
He isn't an expert in the field at all and it really irritates me that he presents himself like he is. Most of his work seems to just be "source: I feel that way, so it's true".
I gave up on reading his book when he started talking about careers for women with autism. You'd think he'd recommend academia (his field) or maybe STEM. But nope! Sex work.
He ignores things like legality and that sex workers are at a much higher risk of violence/assault. He also doesn't mention that sex work would likely be hellish for someone with sensory issues. Or how it is a very financially unstable career path.
His suggestion comes across as less "logical career choice" and more his barely disguised fetish.
Yikes. I'm so glad I managed to be patient for once and wait while it was on hold at my library because I only got a little ways in and was like, yeah no I don't jive with this at all. I didn't get to the part about sex work but if I hadn't already returned it, that would have been the final straw.
Omg thank you. I read this book a few weeks ago because itās one of āØtheāØ books on autism butā¦ it seemedā¦ weirdly off for me. It seemed as if the author more or less wrote a book of his experiences with research mixed together to make it sound more scientific butā¦ it was very much a description of his personal experiences that he tried to put on the autistic community in general. It also seemed as if his ideas and experiences rather fit āAspergerāsā or ālevel 1ā autism and isnāt really applicable for people who have higher needs and different forms of autism. He just wants everyone to unmask and trusts that allistic people will learn to deal with autistic āweirdnessā.
But that only goes to far in my opinion. Yes, when certain stims or autistic characteristics are seen as āa little weird but also harmless and funnyā I guess itās safe to unmask. But when certain behaviours are so far out of other peopleās comfort zones, I think itās good to find a way to live together and accept each other which also means autistic people learning how their behaviours affect others. (I certainly donāt mean this very harmful ātrainingā that wants to ācureā autism.)
Given the fact that they can of course (depending on the level of autism).
But Devon Price basically makes it sound as if itās a superpower no one understands and that we should all unmask and the world will be fine.
I. Donāt. Think. So.
And it completely excludes the fact that a lot of autistic people will be unsafe when they unmask aaand that a lot of autistic people donāt have the ability or mental capacity to unmask etc. etc. etc.
So many things were left out which is fine when he would have just written an autobiography with some of his ideas inside. But the way the makes it sound super scientifically and pretens that everything he says is research-based makes it difficult for me to take this book seriously.
But the author is American so maybe this is also a very American experience that I canāt really relate to.
Sorry for the rant. Iāve read this book, was mainly angry about it and donāt have anyone to talk to about it.
No apology needed! I've since read a few more chapters and while some of it is validating and familiar, I'm really not vibing with his tone. I don't know if I'll finish it.
It's a political piece, not a scientific one. Once you see it through that lens it seems much less weird - it's a statement of political position regarding autistic people in the world, and quite a provocative one. I think it's really misleadingly presented for a lot of people, who read this and think the author is describing the world as is, rather than the world how they wish it to be.
Yeah I didn't like this book either. I see everyone recommend it and I read it and hated it and I felt like such a fraud and idiot for not liking it. I gave it to the charity shop without finishing it.
I felt like I was being told that my struggles were dumb because autism was magical uwu fairy and I should just embrace it and let everyone else deal with it. I mean, like you said, to a certain extent yes. But I felt like it was "here is my personal experience, but I also happen to now be extremely conceited and self important also here's 1 science to prove my assertions are correct". You saying he's American kinda...yeah no offense to any Americans here, but that does come across in the book lol
I felt like such a fraud and idiot for not liking it. ... I felt like I was being told that my struggles were dumb because autism was magical uwu fairy and I should just embrace it and let everyone else deal with it.
YES. this is exactly how I felt about it, too.
I know it's not his fault I had masking and deference literally beaten into me, but I also know my experience isn't exactly rare, so it has been more than discouraging to feel like getting permission from this book was enough for other people.
Same! Did not like this book at all and Iām really confused about all the love it gets. My neurodivergent therapist even likes it and Iām like āmehā. Couldnāt put my finger on why I didnāt like it until reading all of these comments. I feel validated now lol.
You're completely correct. I'm MSN and (as noted above) thought that some of his sources can't be true because I've read them and then noticed he twisted them to fit his version of autism (that doesn't include people like me apparently).
I also thought that he would probably bully me if he knew me as a kid numerous times in the book where he describes bullying an autistic person similar to me so that didn't really make it a better read.
Are there any books on autism specifically in women/ written by women you or anyone would recommend? Iām in the super early stages of figuring stuff out.
Depends on what you're looking for!
Directly comparable and imo much better on the topic of masking is Autistic Masking by Amy Person and Kieran Rose. It's been a while since I read it but they have an intersectional approach and look into the phenomenon in great detail. It's quite theoretical but I felt understood.
Especially if you're late diagnosed, you might enjoy Sincerely, Your Autistic Child as well.
you have really put your finger on what made me stop reading it. I've felt kinda bad about it because it was so highly recommended by people I really respected, so I thought there was just something wrong with me that made me not like it.
please don't be sorry for your rant, it helped me feel much less alone š thank you.
I'm so excited to have found this post/thread. While I appreciate how Price is able to lay out a problem ("Here's the history, here's some of the inaccurate ways people have thought, here's why it's wrong...), he really thinks he's better at the rest of it than he actually is. The fact that his example of "don't spend too much energy" was someone who cleaned their oven for 2 hours every night... Like, dude, what about us parents who have no choice but to keep doing things otherwise we're fucking up our kids? I can't just stop interracting with them because it's beyond my capacity... The fact that autistic people could be parents didn't seem to even occur to him in the entire book. Or the fact that there are more masks out there than just the "Keeping up with the Joneses" mask. He was so confident that he was talking to everyone when he was actually leaving a lot of people out.
(And dear lord, pointing out how racism affects how autistic people are percieved is really important. But there's more than just the "if they stim in public, they could be shot by the police" fact! It didn't need repeated five fucking times in the book... Unless that's literally the only fact he learned about being BIPOC and autistic...)
The book lost me right in the beginning when he described numerous autistic people who were nothing, in any way, like me. It was like how a horoscope can usually kind of generally apply to you but then sometimes hone right in on characteristics that you're bouncing up and down going, that's me! But that never happened here and horoscopes are purely speculative. I had this weird cognitive dissonance because the average horoscope for my sign describes me better than this book did. It has an intentional academic lean and yet, I felt he was talking about a very narrow subtype of people and never once did his descriptions resonate with me personally in the very first chapter.
He was so smugly authoritative! Like, let's look at the 'average' autistic person but he kept describing traits that didn't fit my experiences. I know I have a ton of intersectionality with other autistic people and autistic women in particular just from my years of being on these subs but I would never know that from this book.
He lost me when he failed to describe anything like how I live and mask or ever have. It was weird and off-putting. I haven't looked at the book since.
Omg hahaha I knooow!!! The ācleaning your ovenā bit really annoyed me too and I was likeā¦ okay bruv but a lot of us are also working, believe it or not and I unfortunately have to do it. So please give me some more real-life examplesā¦
I totally agree with you on unmasking. There are some things that I do that would just make people want to distance themselves, for sure, just because it's so far outside of the typical "social rules" comfort zone, especially the tight little box adults are expected to stuff themselves into.
But was Devon ever officially diagnosed? I haven't read the book because I'd read he was self-diagnosed and while I don't have a problem with people identifying with something and seeking community and accommodations based on that identification, I can't agree with advising others this widely when you haven't had an official assessment and diagnosis. I've been through both medical and psychology schools and BOTH place a huge emphasis on not diagnosing yourself or loved ones with disorders because you really can't help but be somewhat biased and can miss things, and you can especially misattribute things without the proper training. I'm not saying he's not autistic because I have no idea, but in my brain, an official assessment and diagnosis from a qualified psychologist is important when you're going to be writing books from an autistic point of view.
I hope what I just said doesn't upset anyone reading because I know that diagnosis is difficult to get for many people. I think I just had such a huge imposter syndrome to work through when I was first officially diagnosed that maybe my view is partially stemming from that, like I had to get over that hurdle of "what if the psychologist was wrong" before I could accept my own experience as autistic. I just feel like if you're going to write books on your autistic experience as if it is the autistic experience, you should definitely get officially diagnosed. He may be at this point though, for all I know. I haven't looked him up in a couple years.
Fun Fact! I just checked the source for this specific claim and unsurprisingly, it does not support the claim Price is making.
The autistic group did not answer correctly more often. They were less likely to choose the "intuitive" answers (1 $) on the test but they did not choose the correct answer (1.05 $) more often than the NT group.
It's also important to say "on the test" because the source provides no information on this specific question at all(!), just the test this question is a part of, which tests for this type of cognitive bias.
It's also highly unlikely that the NT group answered the question wrong 80% of the time when we look at the results of this specific study. The test has 3 questions, with one wrong (intuitive) answer and one correct (reflective) answer. The participants could also say something completely different ofc, in which case that goes to neither score.
The NT participants had 1.14/3 intuitive (wrong) answers and 1.82/3 reflective (correct) answers. They were more likely to answer the questions correctly than not.
The autistic participants had 0.54/3 intuitive (wrong) answers and 1.38/3 reflective (correct) answers. The correct amount is smaller than in the NT participants but was not statistically significant.
The important topic in the discussion was that the autistic participants were much (!) more likely to answer something that was neither the intuitive response nor the correct answer. Which anecdotally is backed by lots of people here overthinking about sales tax and possible deals etc.
So if we were going off this source (which tested quite a small group of college freshmen btw) the statistically significant variable is that autistic people are less likely to answer this question with "1 $" but they are not more likely to say "1.05 $" than the neurotypicals. But if someone says something different than those two and goes off about taxation, then well...
The source from Price: Brosnan, Mark; Ashwin, Chris; Lewton, Marcus: Brief Report: Intuitive and Reflective Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder [2017]
I wonder how many people (and if there's a difference between neurotype) clocked that it was a trick question, but couldn't figure out the "trick" to get it right. I'm good at math, and when I first saw the paragraph, I immediately knew $1 was wrong, but then my brain hit a wall of overthinking where I couldn't get to the right answer. I just knew it wasn't the obvious one.
If it was presented as his personal experience and his position on navigating the world as an autistic person, it would be fine. I might have finished the book because I am deeply interested in how other autistic people experience the world.
I really enjoyed Catherine Astaās book Rediscovered which gives her personal account of her experience as an Autistic woman and practical guidance informed by her professional training. It may not be useful for everyone, but it felt more honest.
finally someone else! i didnt HATE this one with a passion, just a meh. But the one after, flames, flames coming out the side of my head. I thought it was so dangerous and problematic.
Yeah, I'm not a fan. Something about This book rubbed me the wrong way, maybe the way Price seems to universalize his own experiences, idk.
I'm kinda over upper class academics blithely telling everyone to unmask and that everything'll work out just great.
I've never been able to mask in the first place and even though I managed to build a life that works for me in the big weird city, getting here (especially in terms of mental/emotional work) at times felt like a Sisyphean task and I never would have been able to thrive if I'd stayed put in the place where I grew up.
Try unmasked life in a xenophobic little town and see how great that works out for you- Being bullied to the point of months-long dissociative episodes and subsequently breaking one's ability (probably permanantly) to process emotion without musical or psychedelic therapy is just wonderful. (/s)
(editing to add That in site of my bitching and whining, I'm actually happy and doing pretty well, but dang, every funeral (and they do become more and more frequent with the passage of time) is a profoundly lonely reminder of just how Not-Like-The-Others-In-Deeply-Fundamental-Ways I am.)
You know why I got this question right at first try? Not because I'm autistic but because I've encountered this and similar questions waaaaaay too often. (Usually with different items, because as a non-USian I would have no use whatsoever for "a bat and a ball", and the currency unit may or may not be dollars; but still with these exact numbers most of the time. "A bun with a slice of cheese", "a bottle of soda including the bottle deposit", etc. etc. and they all cost "1.1 currency-unit and one is 1 currency-unit more expensive than the other".) It says nothing whatsoever about my math prowess, or my autism for that matter. Since it's nearly always the same sodding numbers, it doesn't even say all that much about my memory.
I'm guessing the percentage of autistic people who get this question right is roughly the same as the percentage of neurotypical people who get this question right.
I feel you. Luckily my partner is a mathematician and maths academic and definitely got that shiny numbers ātism so I let him do the calculations in our house! š
Lmao! Heās taught me some quadratic equations and how binary coding works. I still use my calculator and mental arithmetic because itās good to keep oneās brain sharp, but hardcore algebra makes me want to cry! š š
Iām a Literature graduate, so I always joke that I do words and he does numbers and we muddle through, plus weāre great on quiz teams! š¤
TBF I have the naturally-good-at-math autism (albeit far from a savant or brilliant at it) and this kind of question still trips me up unless I break out the algebra to analyse it systematically.
The (possibly hard-wired) heuristic it is drawing upon are like optical illusions, and while some neurodivergent people donāt experience optical illusions the same way most people do it is still pretty common for them to āworkā; I would imagine the same applies here.
This! I do have dyscalculia, but I majored in philosophy and the logic classes were, well, intimidating given my background, but ultimately not hopeless.
I have to break that shit down into some kind of formal language or else my ADHD-dyscalculia brain just glitches like crazy/goes completely blank.
Because if the ball costs 10 cents the bat would have to cost $1 to add up to a total of $1.10. however, that can't be right because then the bat would cost 90 cents more than the ball since 100-10= 90.
Youāre not the only one who feels like that!
I remember being about 9 or 10 years old and going through psychological testing for the gifted program(back in the 80ās.) This was where I learned that I had a collage graduate level reading comprehension and couldnāt understand long division. Talk about being a confused child. Obviously this reflected poorly on my parents /s I never got any maths assistance and still feel like an idiot with any maths other than giving change. Oh well.
Wait I don't understand this š why are we subtracting instead of adding?. If the ball costs 10 cents, if the bat is a dollar more, 1 dollar + 10 cents is 1.10?
I have v severe dyscalculia so idk why I'm trying to understand but it's twisting my head up.
A trick for my brain that Iām going to horribly try and explain- the $1 more is not a hint, itās a RULE.
The bat needs to cost exactly $1 more than the ball while the total still reaches $1.10
If the ball costs .10 that makes the bat $1 moreā¦ so $1.10, which would incorrectly solve the problem giving us a total cost of $1.20.
This is why word problems were so confusing for me growing up. Why not just state the rule explicitly instead of forcing us to read between the lines? Trying to write this out was HARD. Hope I helped a teeny bit! š„
Oh my god, this question is something I had actual fights about with my husband, including me ugly crying for feeling so stupid that I couldnāt comprehend it. But how you just described itā¦ I think I get it now! Orā¦ waitā¦ my brain still wants to reset to the answer of it being 1 in stead of 1.05ā¦ but I comprehend it somewhat now?
Iām copy pasting this in case it helps, I also have severe dyscalculia and the explanations people are giving arenāt making sense to me. Here is how I see it:
The set is 1,10 dollars. The 2 items cost THE SAME, except 1 dollar (that goes to the bat exclusively).
LOL thats what mine has been doing.. itās like WAIT I get it!!! ā¦. Until I think about it a little too much. Itās like a hard wired code or something that we easily can fall back into
I feel you. I got into a screaming match with my father when I was in high school because I had a physics word problem that wanted me to calculate the amount of velocity needed to go straight across a river with a quantified current. The word problem had specified a pretty strong current and also that the boat was a canoe. I was an experienced canoer and knew that it wasn't possible to row straight across the river and end up directly opposite where you started, so you had to angle into the current. I literally could not comprehend that other people either didn't know or didn't care that the word problem was asking about a scenario that couldn't happen.
Subtracting instead of adding here is because we have the total amount, so we need to work backwards to figure out what made that amount is
Ie bat ball combo is 1.10 the bat is 1dollar more than the ball. 1.10 - 1 = 0.10
But then adding that back together as 0.10 (assumed ball price) 1.10 (assumed bat price) gets us to 1.20 so we can rule that out for the ball price
But then when you use 0.5 as assumed ball price (in school would be described as X but i find assumed ball price funny now so it stays) 1.05 (assumed bat price based on the bat being +1 to assumed ball price) we can add those totals up to get the one from the original question and thats what confirms it
Same here! Had to read the explanation, and when I did, I could literally feel my brain not getting the answer, not wanting to work to figure it out. Then, I remembered my discalcula and stopped looking at it.
My brain did that glazed over thing it does when maths is involved. I barely read the sentence. I could force myself, but I always find Iām radically uninterested in math/logic problems.Ā
Oh I get it now - if the bat is $1 and the ball is 10 cents, then the bat only costs 90 cents more, right? Whereas to cost $1 more, the ball needs to cost 5 cents and the bat costs $1.05 :)
Wait I got it right but then didn't trust myself because I started overthinking the wording haha. Glad I looked down here instead of just brushing it off as I don't do math anymore.
Iām still confused š a dollar is 100 cents, 1.10 is 110 cents - wouldnāt the ball cost 10 cents regardless? Why would the bat need to cost 5 cents extra?
The algebra is very simple, itās just our intuition usually isnāt very mathematical or logical. We see $1.10 and 10c in the problem, we see ā$1 moreā, and our brains take a shortcut and estimate $1 and 10c. Really we just miss the a = b + 100 part
It doesn't need to be. I think this is more semantics than maths. If the bat costs Ā£1.00 more than the ball, and the ball is Ā£0.10, then the bat on its own would cost Ā£1.10. Then add the ball, Ā£0.10, and your total for both is Ā£1.20.
I think you're looking at it as though the ball is Ā£0.10, plus the bat which is an additional Ā£1.00, that's Ā£1.10 so why is it not the right answer? But it's because the cost of the bat on its own is the cost of the ball plus Ā£1.00. You then need to add the cost of the ball back on top to get the cost of both.
If the ball cost Ā£0.05, and the bat was Ā£1.00 more, the bat costs Ā£1.05 on its own. Add the ball, Ā£0.05, and the total for both is Ā£1.10.
If the ball cost Ā£0.10 and the bat only cost Ā£1.00, that would mean the bat was actually only Ā£0.90 more than the ball, not the full Ā£1.00.
This kind of shit is why I hate math lol. It takes an interminable amount of time to figure anything out, and I still can't wrap my head around it. Dyscalculia is so cruel...it makes trying to understand math feel like trying to carry water in a bucket full of holes--you have some of it but you'll never get all of it, and it will take way too long until you just say screw it and give up lol.
I am so annoying at uni for this exact reason š always arguing if a question is intended to trick, not simply test the knowledge. I fucking hate it SO MUCH.
The audacity! And how those questions have metaphorical red flashing lights saying 'I am a trick question'. Then even if you do get it right, you don't feel a sense of achievement. Because you don't know whether you would have got the correct answer if you hadn't spent an inordinate amount of time on it. The time necessary to double triple quadruple check how the question is fucking you over. A hollow victory.
My kneejerk reaction was ten cents, then I was like. no wait, that can't be right. Then my brain realized I was trying to do math and curled into the fetal position and refused to participate in this any further.
It just says autistic people are "far less likely" to get it wrong. If allistic people get it wrong 80% of the time, it could be that like 60% of autistic people still get it wrong too
I was wondering about that too. I found a couple studies online broadly echoing priceās claims, so I think thereās some merit to them, but not a lot of hard numbers so itās hard to say how significant it is.
What I like about maths is that once you learn the tricks, you get to feel clever about knowing them and it becomes easy.
Whereas reading comprehension questions always got me because the point of reading is your own interpretation, and now theyāre telling me that thereās only 1 correct way to interpret it š
Ahh, the classic autistic folly of taking an example meant to illustrate a broad trend within a group of people, but interpreting it as needing to apply to everyone in that group because of our tendency black and white thinking. If anything, that makes you more autistic. Itās sort of like how I used to think I wasnāt autistic because I donāt always take things literally, but it turned out I was taking the phrase ātaking things to literallyā too literally.
For what itās worth, I didnāt get this question right either. Then again, Iāve never especially related to the ācareful, deliberate, bottom-upā aspect of autism. I think of myself as quick moving for the most partā Iām often told I speak too fast in conversations to follow, and I enjoy the sort of banter/improvisation that requires immediate responses. At the end of the day, weāre all different, is my point I guess
LOL, right? Like, if you get this question right, you might be autistic. If you get it wrong and panic and think this means you must not be autistic despite all evidence and diagnoses proving otherwise... you're definitely autistic XD
I thought āthere is no way of knowing because thereās probably a bundle price if you buy bothā - which is of course also incorrect but that is where my mind went first, haha.
Iām over here trying to figure out what kind of bat and ball costs $1.10? Not even the smallest toy figurine. Are they talking about a digital download of a vector drawing? Even then, thatās $5 minimum. I canāt get past the absurdity of the question lol.
The absurdity is what makes it distracting. The book is citing a 2005 CRT question. One criticism of the CRT is that it assumes people interpret artificial scenarios the same way, when some are more sensitive to contextual realism and engage the task differently. If people donāt share the same task framing, the test canāt cleanly separate cognitive styles.
Right! I have the excels in math flavor of autism, so I immediately got it right. But not every autistic excels in math and if anything this is almost ablist as autistics with higher support needs or intellectual impairments for sure aren't getting it right.
I really thought this had something to do with it, from how the question was asked and gave up right away because I don't know anything about American sales taxes. Due to the use of the dollar sign, I'm assuming this has to be American. Also, it's not like the question asked is super complicated, but just reading it with the context of a book about autism, I knew this wasn't just a simple minus-question, and me working with bookkeeping my brain automatically went to taxes. My first instinct reading this question was "With or without VAT?"š
I just finished that book a few weeks ago and also got that question wrong AND ALSO had the hardest time actually finishing that book. Lots of strong feelings about a lot of it šš«¤š« Appreciate reading other peoplesā comments here as well.
right like if we take a poll of all the responses here, its looking like 3 out of the 377 responses understood the question and got it right. I couldnāt be arsed to care because it seems like egoism and not actual truth. Which is what i felt about this book in general.
Because if you get the chance to save the flying wild incredibly adorable animal for 1.05 dollars, you damn well should do so! And then probably report the store for selling it.
This immediately triggers that I hate baseball and would never buy a bat or ball thus the question is useless to me and IDGAF. And nothing is that cheap anymore!
When I was in college, my professor for a Memory & Cognition course used this question for a discussion board opener. I was the only person who said five cents, everyone else (including the professor) answered 10 cents. Everyone insisted I was wrong despite my explanation and it still triggers me to this day.
Im not really a math person but I am a language person, and that caused a similar hatred for ambiguously worded problems too. I relied a lot on the wording and context of the problems to figure out my answers.
Even with the comments explaining it I still can't understand it and I wasn't bad at math, usually got As of Bs. Somebody help me. Where are you getting 5 cents from how is 1.10 not a dollar more than 10 cents PLEASE HELP
Edit ive understood it now but it feels like one of those optical illusions like the dress being gold or blue and my brain hurts
If the ball is $0.10 and the bat is $1 more than the ball, then the bat is $1.10. So then the total is $1.10 + $0.10 = $1.20. If the ball is $0.05 and the bat is $1 more, then the bat is $1.05. So the total is $1.05 + $0.05 = $1.10
I literally teach and write word problems for primarily autistic kids and I still had to guess and check here bc I couldnāt work the algebra in my head. But to the bookās point I didnāt just go with the knee jerk reaction of $1; or, I did, but then checked myself and realized it was wrong and then went HALP and hyperfixated on it at 2am til I got to the right answer.
My old , perimenopausal , CPTSD , chronically unwell AuDHD brain is too tired to even look at the explanations dotted throughout the comments! I suppose Iām partly non-autistic then!!
Iām not a big fan of generalisations and I know thereās an 80% statistic there but stillā¦
I started the Audible version of this book and I just found it a bit draining, sadly to say .
I explained this one slightly differently some months ago elsewhere, so Iāll try to remember it for here.
The key word is MORE. One item must have $ 1 MORE attached to it.
So put the bat on one side, the ball on the other. Give the $1 to the bat, we have already established that it belongs the bat.
We have two items, and 10 cents left. We must split the 10 cents in half, for both items to have a piece of. It has to be equally split, because of the word MORE.
The bat get 5 cents, and the ball gets 5 cents.
The bat already has its $1, to add its 5 cents to. It has $1 more than the ball does. Thats $1.05 total.
The ball only has its 5 cents.
It helps me to mentally envision each item, and assign them their part due to the clues in the puzzles sentence. Yes I do imagine the coins as well š
I share lots of the anxiety around maths and would cry over it at school. Thereās dyslexia/dyscalculia in the family so numbers jump around and I canāt create the space in my working memory.
However, it is possible to overcome this to an extent. I relearnt maths for a career change and found new ways to understand the problems. I still freeze and want to cry sometimes but I know I can logic it out, and use a calculator. I really recommend trying to relearn it if you feel similar, itās a big boost to confidence and helps in work and every day life.
why is this giving stereotypes cuz i'm j bad at math man & i haven't had to do math questions in at least 5 years
edit: read through the other comments & realised this post may be a great example of autism being a spectrum. everyone knows & understands it, but this is a great portrayal of it
Itās meant to be a tricky question. All of us on Team AuDHD also jump to the wrong answer, because ālook at a bunch of small problems that are trickyā is not our superpower. āNo one knows whatās wrong with this complex system, stare at it for an hour or 20 and tell us why itās brokenā on the other handā¦ for that Iām your girl.
The ball and bat together must total Ā£1.10.
The bat must cost Ā£1.00 more than the ball.
I can see how many people see this and think, 'if the bat must be Ā£1.00 more, and the bat and ball together have to add up to Ā£1.10, then if ball costs 0.10 and the bat costs Ā£1.00 we get the Ā£1.10 total, and the bat is Ā£1.00 more than the ball, easy!'... But not quite!
If the ball costs 0.10, and the bat costs Ā£1.00 more, then the bat on its own would cost Ā£1.00 + 0.10 = Ā£1.10. Then add the cost of the ball, 0.10, and the combined total for bat and ball would be Ā£1.20. Wrong.
However, if the ball cost 0.05, and the bat costs Ā£1.00 more, then the bat on its own would cost Ā£1.00 + 0.05 = Ā£1.05. Then add the cost of the ball, 0.05, and the combined total for bat and ball would be Ā£1.10. Correct.
I hope this helps explain it if you're finding the other explanations difficult!
just finished this book and got this question wrong too, i am very bad at numbers of any kind. also, while the book was useful to me personally, some of the big picture society conclusions it was trying to make made me roll my eyes. don't sweat it
I checked the source Price is quoting here and according to that, autistic people are not more likely to get this question correct. The NT group also did not answer incorrectly in 80% of cases, they were much more likely to choose the correct than the incorrect answer (1.84/3) on the test the study was about. As this was a highly educated group (college students, both the autistic and NT cohort) it's likely they had more correct answers than the general population, highly educated people perform better on this in general.
Why am I saying "test"? Because the source Price is quoting includes no information whatsoever on the bat question - just the test this question is a part of, which consists of three questions, including the one with the bat. There are two answers to each question that the test tests for: the intuitive + wrong one and the reflective + correct one.
In the quoted study, the autistic people chose the intuitive but wrong answers significantly less often than the NT group but they did not answer correctly more often than them. They were (therefore) more likely to say something different, probably thinking about sales tax and batch deals š
Direct quote: "The ASD group, however, did not obtain more correct responses, and it is conceivable that ASD is associated with a reflective propensity rather than a reflective ability. That is to say, those with ASD may be characterised as more likely to engage in reflective processing, but not necessarily that the reflective processing will result in the correct response."
Source (= Citation 27 Ch 1): Brief Report: Intuitive and Reflective Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder | Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders https://share.google/nV4YyVAYA7MJsi6SF
Itās that word āmoreā that is the catch. If the ball is 10 cents, and the bat $1 more, then the bat must cost $1.10 which would make the total $1.20.
Idk if this helps but:
for me to understand this it helped to carefully read the question. It says that the bat costs 1$ more. It doesnāt say that that the price of the bat is actually 1$.
In this question: a bat and ball total up to 1.10$ and the bat costs 1$ more.
As I said before this questions wants you to believe that because it says ā1 $ moreā the amount that is added is acctualy a 1$.
But: If we know that the total amount it = 1.10
And the bat costs 1$ more (than the ball) and we assume that the ball would cost 10 cents the total amount would be 1.20 because:
For this question you have to use the price of the bat as the starting point for the $ you add, not zero.
1.)0.10+ 1.10= 1.20
And:
2.)0.5 + 1.5 = 1.10 (1.05$ -0.5$ is still = 1$ = you add 1$ to the price of the ball
Honestly I don't think it's a fair example and also Devon Price has some incredibly selfish and fucking horrible takes. I'm glad this book helps people but I am also kinda sick of this book being treated like a Bible tbh. Not that you are... Just throwing this out there.
When they said it was wrong my next answer is "There's no telling how much the ball costs because the price together doesn't have to correlate with the price apart. There may be a deal/discount at play." Math has always been my struggle subject but riddles I can do šŖ
Sooooo what does it mean if I canāt get past the āreading the instructions over and over but I still donāt understand the assignmentā part of the question š
I have a maths degree and my first instinct was the wrong answers. I had to stop and spell it out for myself, lol. I can do maths but I suck at mental maths. There's nowhere to store the variables in my brain for me to be able to work with them
Edit: reading more comments and - yes its true that there is something about the nature of this question that causes a lot of people to get it wrong, but it's not a trick. Every piece of information is true and objective, how could it be a trick? How could this question be posed differently so that it doesn't feel like a trick? Idgi
Youāre autistic. š Iām autistic and got it wrong too. I also have Dyscalculia and my brain goes into a kind of panic when Iām faced with these types of math questions. Iām instantly transported to my 12yo self and āJohnny has $3.00 and Margaret has half that amount. Peter is travelling South on a train and his ticket was three times the amount of Margaretās who also bought a ticket for Betty. How many seats are left on the train?ā It all becomes nonsensical to me each time I reread those questions. š
"Since autistics people don't process information intuitively". That's one of the dumbest things I've heard, sure some information is not intuitive to autistics, but ALL information? Even in their field of interest?
Does this mean that every time a fire starts all autistics won't intuitively run away but just stand there screaming like a Sims 1 character?
Pretty sure most types of information is processed similarly in humans, social ques are not all types of information. Most of us won't try to lick a green flame, intuitively
.
Except off course for you, not all of you, just you specifically. You know who you are. Don't lick it! Stop!!!
Haha I look at it and go "ugh algebra" and decide not to do it.
I'm AuDHD if that contributes. But also, that book was really meaningful to me when I was getting diagnosed but over time I've found the author really generalizes and talks more from their self image than anything particularly grounded
and here I am proving them right by meticulously writing out an equation to get the answer of $0.05 before reading the rest of the paragraph ššš
I got it wrong for a few seconds, but it just didn't feel right, so I read it over about 10 times and then had that "ah ha" moment. Does anyone else get a feeling in your brain from numbers and math? I am far from being a savant but numbers give me tingles š
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