#also while yes my brainweird does often give me the compulsion to be Fucking Correct Definitely

[howdydoodydodis]

I see where you’re coming from! Context does matter a lot here, and that’s one of the reasons why I find the “sharks are smooth” prank funny where other “innocent” lies or insistence on falsehoods is frustrating.

I grew up with a big loud family of engineers with autistic traits if not autism itself. We split hairs and argued over semantics ALL the time, and those kinds of verbal spars are still something that happens with me and the people I’m closest with. Sometimes that sort of pedantic nitpicking is a fun kind of playfighting, but like physical playfighting sometimes it goes too far and becomes frustrating and hurtful when one or both of us begins to get too caught up in the weeds of who’s right. The biggest difference that takes it from fun to infuriating is when I can’t tell that it’s playful.

That’s why the “sharks are smooth” never bothered me, even though I otherwise relate: the troll made it increasingly transparent that his “evidence” was coming from made up, badly photoshopped stuff. People who kept coming back to argue repeatedly and putting a lot of time into correcting him even in such a long-standing and public refusal to see the light on a clear factual matter made it a little bit more clear that it was a troll.

I don’t think people who offered one comment, or even a second comment with a source, especially near the beginning of the thread, should be targeted for being “annoying” because that does disproportionally hurt autistic people. But the thread DID ensnare some people who are of the unhealthy personality type where they HAVE to be right. Learning to recognize when someone won’t change their views and when to stop putting effort into an argument is a skill that both neurotypical and autistic people can learn. So I can’t blame anyone (especially a neurodivergent person) for being “oh let me offer a helpful correction,” but there’s definitely a limit where the doggedness in trying to correct someone who refuses to listen does become funny (and a little sad) regardless of the corrector’s intent (or neurodivergency imo). It’d be a different story if one individual was gaslighting another individual about sharks being smooth, and if the whole debate wasn’t public, and if the troll hadn’t given clearly doctored evidence.

Not to say that you “should” find the joke funny or anything! And the fact that their skin is teeth IS fucking cool as hell! I wish that had been a viral part of that meme…

But maybe I just found it amusing to look into a dark mirror and remind myself how it looks from the outside when I try to be the one who’s RIGHT goddammit! I’ve certainly fallen into the trap before… in more subtle contexts of course, but still :p

The joke about smooth sharks has never been funny to me, partially because "insisting on something wrong and making fun of the other person for trying to correct you" was constantly used against me when I was an (autistic) kid and as a teenager I often assumed people were arbitrarily lying to me when they made innocuous statements. I was afraid to respond sincerely to anything and often ignored advice and information people gave me because of the chance it could be a joke at my expense.

It's even more grating in this case because people explicitly say they think the joke detects and entraps people who are already "annoying" and "need to be the smartest person in the room."

(Never mind that the "outcome" is entirely contingent on subtle differences in context and how social rules in the exchange were followed; the person that said honey is made by putting bees in a bee grinder got ridiculed even though they were doing the same thing—confidently asserting something stupid on the internet.)

The other reason I hate the "sharks are smooth" joke is that it obscures the reality that sharks are literally covered in teeth. They evolved from teeth, they are morphologically teeth. TEETH