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Communication is hard for everyone. There is a set of techniques originally created by and for NTs (I believe) called "Active Listening" that is meant to reduce the communications failures that are a routine part of dialog between people.

A part of active listening is being attentive to nonverbal cues--this could be difficult for some people on the spectrum.

But another big part of active listening is to verify the listener's understanding of the speaker's message. This is achieved by the listener repeating the message back to the speaker as a verifying question. Usually this is a paraphrased version of the speaker's words, focused on the key message, and the verification question is very direct.

For example, in an earlier post in this thread, InThisTogether wrote:

"You can't, really, but you can make logical guesses. It's kind of like being a detective and searching for clues."

If I wanted to verify my understanding of these sentences, I would say something like:

"You are agreeing with cubedemon that it's impossible to read people's minds and advocating using contextual cues to infer probable meaning, is that correct? "

InthisTogether continued:

"Using those cues, you create a hypothesis which you can test against. "

If I wanted to verify my understanding of this statement using active listening technique, I would ask:

"I understand that you are advocating using questions to test the accuracy of the guesses you have made in interpreting the language of others, is that right?"

In analyzing language using logic, I think it's important to think of words as variables, not constants. Because it would take a lot of work to assign precise meanings to each word in each verbal expression, the exact meaning of communications is often very unclear.

Rather than thinking that you must accept the speaker's axioms to understand his or her speech, it might be useful to focus on verifying that you have correctly understood their assignment of meaning to specific words and phrases.

In the anecdote about the programming class, for example, a key part of the miscommunication was the interpretation of the "equality sign" as an indicator of a mathematical equation, when it was being used as an assignment operator token in code. Asking a verifying question about this understanding would probably have simplified transmission of the "assignment operator" idea from the teacher to the student.

I am by no means an expert in this, but I think using the verification techniques of "active listening" technique could be a helpful addition to your logical parsing of the language of others, cubedemon.

You do really well when you are explaining anecdotes, like the story about your mother. \Most people, however, do not follow mathematicians or philosophers, and lose your train of thought when you bring those subjects up (this may vary depending on the particular job.) They don't have the background (I have a little background and sometimes it takes me a while to parse the logic and math.)

Doesn't sound weird to me at all: sounds like an AS special interest. Just yesterday, I was talking to someone about the chemical formation of gluten and he asked me what my science background was. I explained that food was my hobby and he asked how long it took to learn that...I said I found out about it a year or two ago?

NTs really don't get special interests. You should have seen his face, he just could not resolve the cognitive dissonance of a PTA Mom talking about food chemistry.

The issue is that NTs don't tend to go in depth on things, and we lose them if we go too far in the things that fascinate us (I really didn't need to be explaining gluten at the time, I could - and probably should - have just said "you need special flour to make noodles."