Star Trek urgently needs ND character to mentor Data

So, my man (autistic) is into science fiction, me (ADHD) not so much, but anyway today my man decided he was going to watch Star Trek and I happen to be around (usually I’m not) and watch with him.

It was that episode when the ship goes to be desinfected (I don’t remember the name of the episode) and Data mentions he created a sub-routine (wtv that is) for small talk and decides to listen to every conversation happening in that room and at some point he and the other guy (already forgot the name) start to talk about everything possible and I think it was Troi and Riker ask how can someone talk about nothing for so long. I’m like wdym about nothing? Small talk is about nothing!! Someone need to rewrite that series and give a proper mentor to that computer ASAP.

I can imagine a conversation going something like this:

Data: I’m trying to understand humans ND character I just made up: good luck on that bruh tell me later how did it go. I have been trying to do that for insert character age here years and no success… Data: wait… but you are human, how can you not understand humans? ND Char: oh boy this is going to be a long talk, but long story short what you are trying to understand is neurotypical humans, neurodivergent humans like me, are a totally different story, everyday I wake up and wonder if I’m the same species as Neurotypicals… Anyway do you like to read? Here is a list of books about this subject…

Data after reading them all: holy shit, understanding humans was already complicated when I thought there was only one type of humans and now… this… I’m never going to understand humans! ND Char: I just gave up Data: but then how are you supposed to know what to say and when and how and…? ND Char: welcome to the ND side of humanity bro! Why do you think so many of us are into coding? It’s just ones and zeros, not gesticulates to neurotypical humans being neurotypical all that mess…. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to be just and android? Because I think you are about to short circuit …

30 comments

You say NDs are often into coding...
... but you also don't know what a subroutine is?
Data is just saying he programmed himself with a new feature, a new set of functions that grant him a new capability: 'small talk.'
... The entire point of Troi and Riker making the small talk joke is that Data missed the point of small talk.
Also... Data is the ND person/analog, Data is playing the part of the high functioning autistic person, of the 'eccentric genius' who has great knowledge of complex academic subjects, but has fundamentally difficulty with what NTs consider basic social skills.
His approach is naive and overly literal: Oh, small talk must just be a category or style of human interactions, I'll just quickly make a giant study with available information and pop out a decent facsimile or emulation of 'small talk'.
... But results in Data coming across as a try-hard, a poser, a cariacature.
Data's approach is fundamentally flawed: He missed the actual core of interpersonal social and emotional dynamics, concepts like equivalent reciprocity, how to assess a person's body language and tone, how to gauge a person's level of interest, how situational context works, how to recover from and apologize for an unintentional insult, how to know when you are being percieved as being annoying or having overstayed your welcome...
...most importantly, Data doesn't have emotions, he doesn't have a gut feeling, he himself does not possess all these non formally logical thought influencing fuzzy-logic processes that NTs/most humans have at such a fundamental level that they often are not even conscious of how they work.
For that reason, he will often come across as odd or phony or inapprooriate to many humans... he'd have to have all of that, integrate it with the rest of his personality/systems, and then 'small talk' would basically just emerge without much effort.
To use autistic/ND terminology, Data just tried to hastily construct another kind of mask or persona for a different kind of social ettiquette, and it did not go well.
I say this all as an autistic person who has often found more in common with 'android' type characters in fiction than other characters, and who has often been called a vulcan, robot, computer or android, sometimes as a compliment, sometimes as an insult.
Anyway... if you do ever watch more TNG, there are a fair number of plots that revolve around Data longing to experience emotions, and then actually having emotions via basically being upgraded with another hardware component ... literally, an 'emotion chip', which is basically a far more complex, advanced, experimental and buggy piece of hardware ... initially it basically makes Data manic/depressive bipolar, totally overwhelming him, and it takes him quite a lot of time and effort to learn how to control his emotions...
Kind of like how an autistic person acts after having been far too stressed for too long and then suffers a 'burn-out'.
- Giving a bot an emotion chip and no mood stabilizers? That’s going to go well (not)! How many people did I killed while having his manic episodes?
  And also apparently at some point he has a daughter and tries to raise her according to what he read on books about parenting…. Written by Neurotypicals… for Neurotypicals… no wonder she short circuited 🤦🏻‍♀️
  Oh well I guess it must have been what was available at the time, I was born in 1990 so I don’t remember much of what life was like in the 90s 🤷🏻‍♀️
  
  ... How would chemical mood stabilizers function ... in a computer brain?
  Would you give lithium or abilify or haldol... to ChatGPT? To a boston dynamics robot?
  The entire point is that Data... is an android, he is a machine, he is mechanical and robotic components made to outwardly resemble a human, but he doesn't have a human brain or human metabolic pathways/processes.
  His... his 'daughter' is also an android, and part of the point of that plot line is to illustrate how... at the time, and still today, it is difficult to access useful parenting guides and advice or neurodivergent children, and how neurodivergent parents can also need their own approach to parenting in general.
  In the case of Data and Lal, they are... basically wholly unique in the entire Star Trek universe... so there are no manuals or guides that apply to them.
  Again, this mirrors, with some hyperbole, how difficult it is for ND parents and children to find actually effective, useful and not harmful advice, as they are a very small proportion of wider society and are widely misunderstood.
  
  So who ever created Data had the technology to create a emotion chip but not a mood stabilizers chip? How the hell am I supposed to know how to make one? Use the same code he used for the emotion chip, it should work. Anyway, human emotions, are destructive, unpredictable and explosive in their wors form, who ever wrote that plot didn’t use much of the brain thinking it would be a good idea to just dump emotions into a machine without anything to stabilize them.
  
  It's clear you don't have the necessary context to understand the plot. Data's character arc spans the entire show. The emotion chip is experimental, and something his original creator specifically didn't install at the time of his creation, because it wasn't ready. There's a prototype of Data as well, called Lore, who does have emotions, but become a violent psychopath. They can't just "make it work," and doing so would defeat the point of it as a plot device.
  
  So there is another bot who experimented the emotion chip and he went batshit crazy???? How predictable 😹😹😹😹 it’s almost like if you dump emotions on people and no means to control them they snap (means to control emotions can be emotional inteligence teaching since childhood, medication, or anything in between)
  
  So who ever created Data had the technology to create a emotion chip but not a mood stabilizers chip?
  Correct.
  Data is very nearly one of a kind, the most advanced artificial lifeform created by humans in Star Trek and if memory serves, so is the emotion chip, basically.
  The emotion chip is even more advanced, complex, and untested, unpredictable... hard to build a regulator for a thing that ... you have no idea if it will work, or what it will cause, and all previous versions of it have been... basically catastrophic failures.
  ( I am sure this is technically wrong in some way given the entitety of Star Trek lore/canon at this point but this is roughly accurate. )
  How the hell am I supposed to know how to make one?
  You're not.
  That is the point. It is far, far easier for humans to build a machine that can act as an encyclopedia, to even direct the motions of a humanoid robot... than it is to truly construct a machine analog for emotions and intuition.
  In the Star Trek lore, there is basically a single, solitary uber genius who is basically solely or mostly responsible for all advanced android tech, and, surprise, he's an eccentric, elusive genius/madman... basically nobody else has anywhere near his level of 'expertise'.
  Use the same code he used for the emotion chip, it should work.
  No, it would not.
  I don't know if you know much about actual AI research, but ... human emotions EDIT(and indeed, basically all other complex processes inside a human brain) do not operate according to the same kind of logic that computers excel at, extremely complex chains of extremely literal, black and white thinking.
  They are better described as heuristics, fuzzy logic, or perhaps one day by a fully detailed, one to one, neuron to neuron, molecule to molecule simulation of a human brain... but we are nowhere near that currently.
  The human brain is the most complicated thing us humans are aware of. It has more functional components than smaller galaxies have stars.
  It is absurdly complex, and we do not have a detailed and accurate model of exactly how it works.
  If... we did... then psychiatric medication would work perfectly, with no side effects.
  Not sure if you are aware of this but uh, there is kind of a big scandal/controversy going on within the field of psychiatry, after numerous recent studies have found that... SSRIs often do not actually effectively treat the things they are prescribed for, long term, in a way that is substantially different from placebo.
  They do definitely cause side effects and chemical dependency (addiction) though.
  Many are calling into question the soundness of the entire theoretical approach used to design and prescribe many kinds of medications... there are hardly any long term studies on the efficacy of these meds, and almost all studies are done by or paid for by the companies that can make absurd amounts of money off of them.
  Anyway, human emotions, are destructive, unpredictable and explosive in their wors form, who ever wrote that plot didn’t use much of the brain thinking it would be a good idea to just dump emotions into a machine without anything to stabilize them.
  Data himself seeks out the ability to have emotions... because that is the thing he lacks, that makes him ... only a fascimile of the people around him, but not truly the same, not truly able to be socially accepted.
  Its... basically a more tech-centric Pinnochio. He wants to be a real boy, to better understand his colleagues and friends... and finds the experience totally alien to what his existence has been before.
  
  The medication is not supposed to treat anything is supposed to stabilize people so they don’t off themselves or harm themselves and can function more os less trough life. It is done so because there is no treatment or cure for mental things, the medication is more of a patch rather than a fix, that’s why it if I drop my meds I go back to where I was when I started to take them.
  And also you say Data wants emotions to be more like his friends (because that worked out so well with the other prototype, apparently) but his friends (the ones I saw at least) are all very neurotypical to me, there is no one around to tell him to chill and that humans are not all that way and that he should stop obcessing about mimiquing others (masking) because humans are not all the same anyway and sometimes we don’t understand our own species anyway and that it’s ok for him to process things the way he processes. But I guess it’s just a tv show, I just took that scene about “talking about nothing” way too personally being ND myself married to another ND and watching a character apparently ND also being portrayed as not having “humanity” or “emotions” when he just processes them differently, like ND people do. 🤷🏻‍♀️
  
  So who ever created Data had the technology to create a emotion chip but not a mood stabilizers chip?
  The person who created the chip was deceived into installing it into the wrong android; it is entirely possible that if he had installed it himself into Data to begin with that there would have been fewer problems.
  
  Nah I think Data would have gone batshit crazy also. From the comments I’ll understood the chip gets installed somewhere in the future and he still goes nuts anyways, he didn’t turn out psyco probably because he already had this whole “luggage” and life experience (if we can call that life idk), if the chip had been installed from the start he would have 🤯 like the other prototype
- Im on the ADHD side of the spectrum and 90% of time I also don’t understand the communication of my own species 🤷🏻‍♀️ when I was diagnosed I stopped trying because… burnout
  But coming back to the subject why the hell is data always asking “how did I do?” Why is he obcessed with what everyone thinks of him? That’s not very ND of him, because NDs usually don’t give a shit 😹
  
  ND... Neurodiversity... is an umbrella term, similar to how LGBTIQA+ or 'queer' are umbrella terms.
  ADHD, Autism, Schizophrenia, Down Syndrome, Dyslexia, Dyscalcula, Tourette Syndrome, OCD, Manic/Depressive Bipolar, etc... these are all distinct disorders/conditions that make a person's mind operate significantly differently from a person without any of them.
  You can of course have multiple conditions at the same time, and the term neurodiversity isn't a formally recognized medical term with a settled definition, different institutions and doctors will or will not include different conditions/disorders in their idea of what the neurodiversity umbrella captures under it.
  But... the different conditions/disorders that are considered neurodiverse... they are all distinct, with distinct behavior patterns.
  I don't think ADHD is ... part of 'the spectrum', that term is usually used in the context of the severity of Autism/Apsbergers (they've since been merged together into ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder) symptoms.
  I also don't know that 'burnout' is associated with ADHD. Its... not currently even widely recognized by doctors as a valid term to use in the context of Autism, though some have started using it and there is a push for wider acceptance amongst professionals... either way, its a bit different than the purely colloquial usage of 'burned out', it specifically relates to being overwhelmed by the kinds of things Autists struggle more with due to being Autistic.
  Basically, you have to score or be assessed as exhibiting a significant number of behavioral characterists, be high enough on 'the spectrum' to get formally diagnosed as having ASD such that it seriously impacts your life, makes you significantly different than non Autistic people... because basically everyone will probably exhibit mild Autistic behaviors at certain points of your life... but if they are persistent, and more severe, more impactful, you are Autistic.
  To go back to the LGBTQ comparison... if you just said 'I am queer', all that really indicates is that you're either not cisgender, or not straight, or not sexual at all, that you are somehow different from 'the norm'.
  ... But a trans lesbian is significantly different from a cis gay man, or an intersex pansexual, or an agender aromantic/asexual... just as an ADHD person is significantly different from an autistic person or someone with down syndrome.
  Finally, why is Data always asking 'how did I do?'
  Again, as an autist myself, especially as a kid, especially in the realm of social interactions... its quite common to just ask for feedback, as if you were asking a teacher to grade a math quiz or a paper.
  You want to learn, you want to improve this skill, you want to make sure you understood the context of a situation and interaction correctly, to make sure you did not incorrectly assume someone's intended meaning, or misread their emotional state.
  Data constantly asking for feedback on social interactions is again, another pretty common thing for higher functioning autistic people to do.
  Maybe not giving a shit is more common with your flavor of neurodiversity, ADHD, or maybe that is just your own personality trait independent of a condition/disorder...
  ...I don't know, I don't know you and I don't know as much about ADHD, but hopefully by me bringing this up significant difference between different types of neurodiversity, you can see that you can easily misunderstand and even offend people by just lumping all neurodiversity into an essentially homogenous blob of sameness with minor variations...
  When in reality its more like Neopolitan ice cream, or every distinct kind of skittle or taffy flavor or something.
  
  Burnout is associated with ADHD also. I took a ADHD / Autism test, not the internet ones, the real ones done with specialized professionals, the ADHD part scored as high as it gets and the autism came back inconclusive, apparently I have enough criteria to be considered autistic but since those criteria overlap with ADHD and I scored so high on ADHD no one knows what to do with me 😭
  
  A person can have ADHD and Autism at the same time, but they are distinct conditions, and a person with both is even more distinct.
  If your Autism score/result was 'inconclusive', that means you are not significantly Autistic so as to warrant that as a diagnosis, you didn't pass the threshold of persistent Autistic traits, they were not significant enough to class you as Autistic.
  Inconclusive is, in this context, the term that means... the test/evaluation did not clearly indicate you are autistic.
  Which means you have, apparently quite extreme, ADHD, and are not Autistic.
  You just have ADHD, which generally makes your treatment, therapy, coping skills, etc, more well defined and easier to procure/practice than someone with both Autism and ADHD... though if you are not exaggerating and truly did get the max ADHD score possible, that may be particularly challenging.
  I did some websearching and you are right that ADHD burnout is a thing, like Autistic bunout is a thing... but they work differently, they are provoked by different things, and then present somewhat differently as well.
- Im not a programmer, im a linguist, so no? I don’t know what the heck 90% of their technical language is.

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