Show HN: Autism Simulator
autism-simulator.vercel.appTHE WORST! Why can't we just work?! Do stuff, make money, get the f- out.
It's a job, not a religion.
It’s my personal escapism from the everydayness of existence.
For others it's a calling.
Nothing wrong with either - I just think it's worth being aware that people have different motivations.
He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.
E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person
The social bits are how most people build A and B
Humans are social creatures. We can't live in a vacuum nor on our own without support from other humans (i.e., food production).
Now, if other people do need corporate staged social games in order to build that up for themselves, then that’s ok for them, but why is that considered the norm? Why are they required? Why is it up to the neurodivergent person to exhaust themselves for them? Why is it considered normal for someone in a “People team” to ignore the needs of some of the people? I don’t see why other people’s needs are inherently more important than mine.
I don't know it has to be that way at all. There's probably lots of room for compromise. The "people team" would need to both know about the need and care enough to try to take it into account
There's no polite way to tell such individuals to f- off, of course, and it's often expected.
It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
No alcohol.
Also look at your environment and its stressors. Moving out was one of the best things I did for my mental health.
My food can touch without me melting down, so I'd consider it a win. This is not medical advice.
There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.
Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.
I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.
Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.
Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.
Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?
IE, medication can be hit-or-miss. Did I (as the person in the game) go to a pill pusher and thus the medication causes more problems then it helps? Or, is the medication something where the benefits outweigh the consequences?
As many other people in this thread point out, there is no "medication for autism," so I assumed that it was a case of poorly prescribed medication from a pill pusher and didn't take it the first time I played.
Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).
I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-
“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”
Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.
And I know of some taking ADHD meds for their co-morbid ADHD (autists have a higher probability for ADHD).
From the complaints I've heard from friends, those sound like pretty typical side effects for SSRIs. (Bupropion OTOH is both a stimulant and an antidepressant, and may be more effective for people with comorbidity ADHD and depression; the POV character should talk to their psychiatrist)
Having had other close experiences for the med balancing for someone with bpd and a complex host of other disorders - most of the times neurological med families are just trialed until one sticks and the specific efficacy and side effects of each can vary wildly from person to person. Brains are really complex and we don't really have an understanding of the method of action (specifically - why the med works - what it is changing in brain chemistry and why that has the impact we observe) of most neurological meds.
We even still struggle to comprehend specific biological markers linked to certain disorders - probably in part due to the fact that we're categorizing those disorders by wide swathes of symptoms.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250927031224.h...
Consider how many people cannot even know what ycombinator is.
Harsh as this sounds, this is the truth.
don't forget the vaccines and tylenol, RFK Jr
autism predates the widespread use of plastic by generations
The Nazis had already holocausted autistic people.
There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.
The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.
There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.
Every waking moment on the spectrum
thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful
saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
I'm arguing that directly and asserting that web sites like the one posted are exactly the kind of things that make it easy for people to do that because they are relatable to basically everybody.
It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic.
Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum.
If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition?
(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
But what people consistently misunderstand is that there is a fundamental dichotomy at the diagnostic level. Speaking from the perspective of the DSM, which I prefer because it's at least concrete and has medical relevance in North America, you meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder ("on the spectrum") or you do not ("not on the spectrum").
In other words, the diagnostic criteria themselves do not constitute a spectrum, especially not a linear one. Maybe people are confusing this with the DSM's three levels of support needs.
1. Different autistic people may vary in which symptoms are most severe while all still being autistic.
2. Different autistic people may vary in the overall severity of all symptoms and how much it impacts their quality of life. (At the same time, there is still a distinct cut off where you are not considered to have autism if it doesn't manifest significantly in your life.)
The latter point is why "Asperger's" is now simply lumped in with ASD. But that tends to obscure the former point which is also important.
Perhaps "cluster" would have been better, but here we are.
No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic.
The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism.
Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
This is faulty logic. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean every single human is on the spectrum.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
Believing that "too many" autistic people are using it as an excuse - an entire category of people - is bigotry.
I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
That, too, has its own problems.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?
What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom.
I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day.
It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting.
Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".
> There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
It’s a problem when our definition of “normal” is the blended combination of every more outgoing and more successful person we see combined into one composite super-person.
Most people don’t do anything like a party committee. Most people don’t go to networking events and of those who do, many don’t network or socialize much. Most parents don’t call three times per day.
Yet it’s easy to see (or imagine) all of these behaviors and mentally blend them up into a composite idea of what “normal” means in a way that is far from average.
I see this a lot in students self-diagnosing with ADHD right now: Their mental model of “normal” is actually more like a 99th percentile studying and self-discipline machine, not a typical student. The way they describe “normal” or neurotypical people is more like superheroes with super abilities who have infinite motivation to study for 8 hours per day after cleaning their house to spotless precision and never touching their phone for a break. They have mentally erased the average person from their minds and replaced it with a hypothetical super person who doesn’t exist.
While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
Well, I guess the simulator did a good job spreading awareness that it is like that for some?
I have ADHD and while I'm medicated I cannot fathom some of the struggles or decisions that unmedicated me makes... like I struggle to have empathy for unmedicated me.
I imagine without such deep personal experience it would be much harder or impossible to understand or empathize.
Or that's how I imagine it at least
I don't have Autism, and none of those things apply to me.
- One scenario had a team unboxing an espresso machine and making too much noice by using it, clinking cups and laughing. The options were to put on noise canceling headphones, find a different desk away from the noise, or just endure it. Personally I'd take a break and go join them, and I don't even like coffee.
- The scenario where the user is in a room with a PM and a couple other people debating the tone of copy on a website, and the conversation is meandering without clear turns (iirc): there were only options to essentially hurry the conversation along or not participate at all, but IRL I'd join in with the other three debating the tone and just generally be bullshitting/sidetracking/meandering the conversation because I like to talk to people.
- The scenario where somebody comes up and asks for a new feature without clear acceptance criteria: the options were to turn to the computer and type out acceptance criteria in front of the person (which feels passive aggressive to me); tell them you'll do it; or ask them to schedule time with you to hammer out the criteria. I would've just chatted with them right there about the feature they wanted, let them know that XYZ is what I think the acceptance criteria is at the end of the conversation, and if that's wrong they'd correct me.
Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.
It very likely is!
I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
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