(this is based on / expanded from a response I wrote to a tweet that was talking about how autistic people struggle in the world because the world follows unwritten rules that are more important than the written ones.)

I think most autistic people should invest more in understanding the unwritten rules. it can be cruel and unfair, but it's important to know how to interact with it. and it's actually a really interesting system to map out, with its own rhyme and reason.

it's entirely understandable that people feel burned by bad past experiences, and to have learned helplessness from bullying or other unfair treatment. this kind of thing leaves a scar and can make it feel viscerally hopeless.

but it still feels defeatist to just throw up one's hands and say "it's too complicated." yes, it's complicated and fuzzy and initially unintuitive and takes years to master. so is ML research. the point of being intelligent is that you are good at finding patterns and learning things, and there's nothing truly fundamentally different about the unwritten rules of social interaction.

I see people taking examples of weird unintuitive social rules all the time and, tbh, none of them are truly that complicated compared to like, language learning, or ML stuff? like, memorizing lots of arbitrary rules is just part of learning literally any intellectual discipline. not to mention that there often is actually underlying structure that you can reason about.

imo one other reason this happens is that complaining is fun! a bit of a digression: to build on the language learning analogy, I love to complain about e.g how deranged the kanji system is in Japanese. it makes for an entertaining story to explain that each kanji maps onto between two and a zillion very distinct possible pronunciations, and that it's entirely context dependent on the phrase, with lots of strange exceptions and so on that you just kind of have to memorize. but honestly, when I reflect on my experience as a Chinese speaker, I notice that that even though Chinese characters, unlike Japanese, map to a unique pronunciation 99% of the time, I still think of the conceptual atomic unit of Chinese as being groups of characters, and it's actually really easy for me to forget that two different words actually contain the same character. (like imagine if "pter" were a single character in words like helicopter and pterodactyl both contain "pter", but you'd probably think of "helicopter" as an atomic unit with its own unique identity). 

so while it's fun to complain about Japanese, it actually isn't as bad as it sounds to learn it, and it actually does fit the shape of the human brain quite well. i think this is basically the right way to think about learning unwritten rules in social interaction as well. it takes lots of effort and practice, some things like accents are a ton of work to fix, and it's obviously hard to become as fluent in it as a native speaker, but you can get pretty damn good even if you get started later in life if you truly care a lot.