It's not ableist to take issue with people who exclude qualitative considerations, especially considerations of human subjective experience and existence, from their reasoning. That's a very big and often dangerous flaw in reasoning that can cause a lot of problems, and that doesn't change even if autistic people have more of a tendency to fall into that sort of mistake. That just means it's a cognitive bias that's common for us just, like other cognitive biases (like e.g. the bandwagon fallacy) are more common for non-autistic people.
Here's my definition btw:
> it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.
As an old-school nerd and non-neurotypical person, I think that's both wrong and insulting. I have never felt targeted by the term "tech bro".
You could probably get at what people mean by it by starting with "person I dislike in tech" and asking exactly who they dislike and why. It's not because they write code.
That’s a good reference web page, thank you. It makes it much easier for me to understand what others mean by it in mainstream usage.
I’ve unfortunately had some different life experiences of people using the term in other ways, dissimilar to the stereotype on TVTropes… or at least I perceived it as so.
>At worst, it seems like anti-autism (e.g. “overly logical”).
I think fundamentally it's a combination of 1) arrogance in thinking they understand how the world works socially (and are very capable of solving problems that are fundamentally social), and 2) a complete lack of understanding of how the world works socially.
People hate them because at best they're idiots who achieve nothing and at worst their hardworking idiocy makes the world materially worse.
In particular, techbros tend to have a belief that social problems can be solved with technological solutions (e.g. the solution to the housing crisis is to design a construction technique with lower material/labor costs). The problem in this instance is that if they asked themselves "what is the root cause of the problem", instead of jumping straight into the technology (they commonly "disrupt" old technology by ignoring some particular prevailing wisdom, and frame ignoring said wisdom as "not being closed-minded" instead of as "being stupid and ignoring the lessons of the past" - which, to be fair, is occasionally true).
There's also a more explicitly political component, but saying "they have X politics which is stupid" is a great way to start a political flame-war so I think I'll skip that.
So tl;dr: technosolutionism, plus overconfidence on trying to solve social problems that they don't even understand, let alone have the ability to solve.
