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> "The internet has kind of killed my 'autistic pride,' so to speak," says Gillmer. "The constant use of it as an insult makes me want to hide it, so I tend to not bring it up unless it feels like I'm not communicating properly." I cannot for the life of me understand why I see "aspie" or "spergy" used as insults on both reddit and tumblr.
With all the discrimination and bullying going around, I think it is good that someone has something nice to say about autistic programmers. Like Ian Murdock who founded Debian and recently committed suicide had Asperger's Syndrome. Despite obvious impressive technical skills, life probably wasn't easy for him. Most companies favor hiring average programmers that fit the mold over "weird people" even if they are amaz…
> I can say that almost all rapists are men. Obviously that doesn't mean that all men are rapists, it means that the probability that a given rapist is a man is very high. You can't determine the probability of an individual like that, at least without more data. I can say that almost all the people who contract HIV are african american or men who have sex with men, that does not mean that the probability of any give…
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This is a healthy attitude I think. Like anything, autism comes with trade-offs.
Trade-offs. The negatives of autism are pretty clear; what are the advantages?
Some people with very real impairments are against being cured, while some people with mild ones want a cure. And yes, being able to have an opinion and not constantly wanting to rip your skin off means you've avoided some bad outcomes: they probably want a cure.
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Ironically, it's Jobs that has all of the typical Aspy traits, not Woz—right down to deciding on one set of clothes and sticking to it. If you actually read an S. Jobs bio and are familiar with Aspy traits, he's a textbook case. What confuses people (if they are confused) is that most people with Aspergers are not artistic, don't like speaking in front of crowds, or running teams. However, it makes a ton of sense if…
Autism is complicated. Asberger originally labeled people with these traits as people with "psychopathic autism". I don't think Jobs was heavy on the nerdy side of the autism spectrum. More likely on the psychopathic side - I don't mean this in a bad way. Just trying to analyse things.
Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field.
Meanwhile, most Aspies can't even maintain eye contact (let alone herd cats). Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude".
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Thanks for the comments, I don't find many people who are into this stuff AND don't have cartoonish views of people on the spectrum. I wanted to share this next bit because you seem like you might appreciate it. At least it took me awhile to figure it out. :) In my experience, Myers Briggs is most helpful if you think of all eight attributes as independent capabilities each person can have, and then rate each on a sc…
Interesting. That is actually quite helpful. My fiance is INFJ and Aspergers, and I am ENTJ and not Aspergers. She gets excited and blurts things out, where as my excitement builds as my mental model of something does.
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He wrote FAT on an airplane. Make of that what you will.
Sounds very dramatic and something a narcissist would come up with.
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Autism is complicated. Asberger originally labeled people with these traits as people with "psychopathic autism". I don't think Jobs was heavy on the nerdy side of the autism spectrum. More likely on the psychopathic side - I don't mean this in a bad way. Just trying to analyse things.
I've both read the Isaacson bio and been diagnosed with Asperger's. I strongly disagree (with erichocean) that Jobs was on the Autism Spectrum. Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field. Meanw…
And yet, on the Wikipedia page for Asperger Syndrome[0], the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found. Strange.
From Wikipedia:
> Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's, is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.
Jobs did have "significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication". Everyone who worked with him thought he was an asshole, he pissed off even his friends (e.g. Woz), and had an extremely difficult time in normal roles with his first wife and child, etc. In person, Jobs was a hot mess. Of course, this—by itself—is insufficient. Lots of normals are assholes, too.
The real tell for Jobs is the second requirement: restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Jobs had that like crazy, right down to wearing the same clothes for—literally—decades. The history of Pixar actually has better information on Jobs (oddly enough), including a lot of his extremely non-normal behaviors that fall into this second category.
People who are just sociopaths don't have "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests". In fact, they appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact). Jobs couldn't even begin to fake "normal"—and didn't try.
People are confused about Jobs because he could manipulate groups, and was, generally, successful. The Aspie types you find in tech are usually of the variety you mention: won't look people in the eyes. Jobs was definitely not that.
FWIW It's easy to confuse a sociopath and a non-engineer Aspie, because both have less empathy for normal people than is typical. You can tell them apart easily though: sociopaths also have less empathy for archetypal people, whereas Aspies (like Jobs) have more empathy than is typical for people and situations matching archetypes. This can be extremely frustrating to those closest to them, who (legitimately) are upset that they care so deeply for archetypal things, but can seemingly ignore the very real hurting of, say, their daughter who is right in front of them.
Incidentally, the ability to strongly relate to archetypes, IMO, is why Jobs (and others like him in, say, film) are successful. It allowed him to focus on what is truly important to a huge swath of people and ignore small details that are only important to the few people near them. (This is Jobs legendary ability to "focus".) Normals, in my experience, have a very hard time doing that precisely because they can so easily empathize with anyone.
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We can't just "consider autism an advantage in programming jobs." It's not. The majority of programmers are not autistic and there are large parts of programming jobs which are very difficult for autistic people to cope with. At best, autism is less of a disadvantage in programming than in other jobs. That's why it makes sense to focus on programming as a field for autistic individuals to move towards, though in prac…
Honestly I feel like having an Aspie Spectrum diagnosis is like a badge of honor to some people in Silicon Valley.