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NancyLebovitz comments on Good things to have learned.... - Less Wrong Discussion
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Learn to write instructions clearly.
There are a lot of jobs in which you will have to tell other people how to do things. These include teaching, management, and many technical fields. When a programmer writes API documentation, or a scientist writes up a design for an experiment, they are giving instructions. When a manager explains to a new hire what they are expected to do on the job, they are giving instructions.
Ordinary good writing skills are part of this. If you write sentences with ambiguous grammar, or use pronouns without clear referents, your reader is going to have a hard time. ("Separate the red part from the blue part. Then throw it in the fire." Which part gets thrown in the fire?)
But that's just part of it. Instructions have to be relevant to what the reader is trying to do. API documentation shouldn't discuss internal details that the user can't interact with. Instructions have to be accurate. If your manager tells you that the job requires doing X, Y, and Z, but then you get dinged on your review for spending any time doing Y, something is amiss. Instructions have to be adequately complete. If a scientific paper says "we centrifuged the mixture for 10 minutes at a moderate speed," that's not gonna fly unless "moderate speed" means something very specific.
Maybe various sorts of modeling other people's points of view should be included.
Neurotypicals are assumed to have a theory of mind, but I think a lot of people can pass the "does someone else know where the treat is just because you do" test without getting much farther.
I don't think neurotype has all that much to do with it. The illusion of transparency is a thing; so is the expert blind spot, or what I sometimes think of as "the professor fallacy" or "the promoted-to-management fallacy" — the mistake that just because I am good at doing X myself, that I must therefore be good at instructing people in how to do X.
What I was trying to say was that the capacity of neurotypicals to model other people's minds is apt to be wildly overestimated, both for themselves and for other neurotypicals..