The article even gives a better example here: casually 
    introducing yourself to the CEO and making a joke. 

    [...] How am I supposed to know which authorities it's 
    okay to make jokes with? 

Well, it's a good example.... but not in the way you or the author necessarily intend.

The answer is right there in front of you: you don't fucking know!

You -- spectrum or no spectrum -- don't know who you can joke around with until you actually know them. Humor is hard, even for comedians, and successful humor relies on some kind of rapport or shared sensibility between parties.

Walking up to a stranger, CEO or otherwise, and cracking a joke immediately is actually fairly bizarre behavior and there's a good chance the joke is going to fall flat. Also sometimes you'll get lucky and make a friend for life or something, but it's a total dice roll and it is frankly an idiot move to risk your professional standing on it. I think that's a thing you can just learn and memorize whether you're on the spectrum or not.

That said, I as a lowly engineer have successfully joked around with a lot of C-level types at large-ish companies.

More than anything else, circumstances matter. Is this a social situation? Are you interrupting them? Are you introducing yourself out of the blue and expecting them to laugh at a joke like a total weirdo? These things matter.

Assuming you're actually interacting in a social situation...

As a general rule they love to laugh and pal around like normal humans. Getting along with people and being personable is actually a pretty big asset when it comes to climbing the ladder and more often than not these people have it. If you're skilled at humor you'll know how to feel out what kind of humor they're gonna laugh at and which kinds of humor are safe. If you're not good at humor and intuiting things, just fucking know that and play it safe.

Oh, goodness, you hit the nail on the head.

I use pattern matching in my head to develop patterns for specific people!

Sometimes, that's not worth it, so I just don't care, and that's what people notice.

I am likely a bit "on the spectrum myself" but have also had pretty good success socially in general. I was a super awkward kid and then worked hard on it. Maybe my self-assessment is off, I dunno.

But anyway....

    I use pattern matching in my head to develop patterns for specific people!

I don't know if this is, in principle, that different from what neurotypicals do? I think it's typically harder for those on the spectrum, perhaps especially so when it comes to initial encounters. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying?

I'm not sure what you're asking, so I'll go into detail.

With initial encounters, I use patterns learned in the military: be excessively polite, speak only when spoken to, listen and observe.

It's a pattern set that is designed to offend as few people as possible.

(I do have different starting pattern sets for different things, such as one for church where the military one would seem weird, but point being, I use carefully-crafted starting sets.)

If I don't interact with a person much, I'll keep using the same pattern set with them.

But if I interact with a person enough, I get an idea of what they want, and I start developing a custom pattern set for that person.

Example: I'll call people "sir" or "ma'am" by default. But my wife...hates that. So I never call her that. Ever. Not even when she's mad at me, and I fall back on excessive politeness.

Having custom pattern sets can help me deal with a boss, or a difficult neighbor.

The neighbor is a good example. She and I have different politics. So I will only make small talk and will not engage in controversial conversation topics with her. And I will end conversations quickly.

> How am I supposed to know which authorities it's okay to make jokes with?

With experience over time.

I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger (don’t take that as a value judgement, just a statement). The way this looks to the rest of us is “how would I know which predator will attack me and which will not?” - and for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly.

> I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger

You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".

Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.

> for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly

This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.

Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.

    And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is 
    and is not appropriate is one big stochastic 
    experiment that lasts your entire life

This is heartbreakingly true.

But for the specific case of this hypothetical example, and the slightly more generalized example of "what kind of humor might appeal to strangers to whom I've just introduced myself" it's actually kind of an easy lesson.

The answer is that you have to know somebody before you know what kind of humor is going to be cool with them.

And the answer is also that interrupting strangers to tell them jokes or even to simply say "hello" is likely to be rude, unless it's an social situation as opposed to just like, stopping your CEO in the hallway at 2PM on a Tuesday.

Those are the sorts of lessons everybody has to learn, autism or no. As somebody who's probably a bit on the spectrum himself I understand the struggle to an extent, but also it feels like the actually relevant lessons here in this specific case are pretty learnable even if we might learn them the hard way at first.