This is profoundly true. Programming largely used to be a crazy pile of GOTO statements and "bad code". I shake my fist at today's programming!
The wild west days of things can be crazy but fun. Then the crowds and tax collectors come, laws are made, and now these little atomized commits that stitch together APIs is "programming".
It makes me think of other areas of life. Most of us show up at the boring, overlegislated, agile test driven development phase of things. Maybe it is good to look for the wild roots of anything.
Paper of various types and sizes, a good writing surface, an assortment of quality writing utensils, a three-hole punch, three ring binder, reusable sticky tabs, ruler, razor blade, more tea and things to chew on than can run out.
Anyone can point out that autistic, schizophrenic or very old people lack certain inhibitions. But it's downright fascinating to think it may be explained by dulled inhibitory neurons or hypersensitive "regular" ones. That could be an easy fix!
The sense I intended was that it may indeed be an easy fix, but second- third- etc- order effects may actually make us all worse off in ways we never considered.
> We fear he may not have focus for a long time for work
Maybe take a different approach and give structure to what he already does naturally instead of trying to force a more typical academic or professional life. You say he likes legos; think "lego artist" or "lego youtube channel" versus software developer. Or maybe there are other interests that he takes to naturally that have far more potential but are overlooked due to being unconventional.
> When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, with this advice you run the risk of shutting down some converstaions which may be important to one person, but not particularly to the other.
We should probably distinguish conversations that are about just something in general, and examples in the post, which are about potentially crucial/difficult challenges a person is having.
I may not be particularly interested in a problematic situation that someone may be having at work, but I know that by listening and showing genuine curiosity, I may be able to help them in their own understandin and reaching a potential positive outcome.
The wild west days of things can be crazy but fun. Then the crowds and tax collectors come, laws are made, and now these little atomized commits that stitch together APIs is "programming".
It makes me think of other areas of life. Most of us show up at the boring, overlegislated, agile test driven development phase of things. Maybe it is good to look for the wild roots of anything.