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A review by reclusivebookslug
An Outsider's Guide to Humans by Camilla Pang
informative
medium-paced
3.0
My expectations were too high I think. I related to the idea of the book so much -- as a fellow autistic woman, I too have wished there was a manual for how to be a person -- but I didn't connect with much of the book itself. In hindsight, this is to be expected. I've never been a hard science person.
Maybe it's just because I'm not familiar with most of the scientific topics discussed, but there also seemed to be some minor contradictions that bothered me in an admittedly nitpicky way. There were mind maps/diagrams to illustrate some concepts, which I usually love, but these ones were mostly incomprehensible to me, both because I can't read her handwriting and because I had trouble following the images themselves.
One thing I did get out of this is the idea of treating aspects of daily life as an experiment and in that context reframing failure as new data that will make future experiments run smoother. I enjoyed/related to some other parts of the book, such as how the section on thermodynamics explained perfectly why I have trouble with repeated/routine tasks, but nothing stuck out to me as new and useful concepts for me personally.
Maybe it's just because I'm not familiar with most of the scientific topics discussed, but there also seemed to be some minor contradictions that bothered me in an admittedly nitpicky way. There were mind maps/diagrams to illustrate some concepts, which I usually love, but these ones were mostly incomprehensible to me, both because I can't read her handwriting and because I had trouble following the images themselves.
One thing I did get out of this is the idea of treating aspects of daily life as an experiment and in that context reframing failure as new data that will make future experiments run smoother. I enjoyed/related to some other parts of the book, such as how the section on thermodynamics explained perfectly why I have trouble with repeated/routine tasks, but nothing stuck out to me as new and useful concepts for me personally.