Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autism and Invention Are Connected

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 178 posts

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#61

Post by epiphanitus »

PlugTunin wrote: post #21

Interesting read. Minor point of clarification: It's noted that many autistic folks struggle with empathy. There are two dimensions to empathy, cognitive and affective . Cognitive is more about perspective taking, or reading the feelings / intentions of others, while affective is the ability to share/understand the emotions of others, and respond appropriately. Putting aside that the two may overlap, it's often the c…

Put more simply, there is a big difference between the capacity to care about other people's feelings, and the capacity to understand them.

Some understand but do not care, whereas some care but do not understand. It dovetails really well with creativity but it can introduce many challenges in life.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#63

Post by dnissley »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #20
mhh__ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler explanation: People don't read the article. Why do you think people complain about titles so much even though they really don't matter

The worst issue with this is that titles are generally picked by different people than those writing the article, and are sometimes only tangentially related to its content.

On the other hand: Most articles are pretty fluffy and don't bring much to the table, and so are just an invitation to discuss the topic at hand in the comments at what is usually a far greater depth than the original story.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#64

Post by yissp »

PlugTunin wrote: post #21

Interesting read. Minor point of clarification: It's noted that many autistic folks struggle with empathy. There are two dimensions to empathy, cognitive and affective . Cognitive is more about perspective taking, or reading the feelings / intentions of others, while affective is the ability to share/understand the emotions of others, and respond appropriately. Putting aside that the two may overlap, it's often the c…

Would cognitive empathy not be prerequisite to affective empathy? How can you share in another person's emotions if you're not able to recognize them in the first place?

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#65

Post by hnracer »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #60
hnracer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a large part of the picture but it's also possibly partly genetic when it comes to the science and tech fields. I'm talking about interest and not competence. Women tend to self select out of science and tech in richer societies where they have the freedom to do so, and self select into disciplines that serve the empathic personality better. There are persuasive studies on that topic.

A significant factor seems to be that the way (not only STEM) academia is currently organized means that women have to pick between a career or having any children (at ages favorable to childbearing): https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522 And I kind of have the impression that the situation here actually got worse during the last decades?

I'm also talking about regular career choices (not academia) that only involve a three or four year undergraduate degree. Women self select out of technical pursuits (CS) and self select into more verbal or empathic areas (Law or Medicine, and an even more extreme example being liberal arts) even though such areas might entail even more study than CS. This self selection is magnified when women have more choice and freedom. Women in software is more common the more poor a country is.

I mean it's not only career choices where such gender differences manifest, we also see it in the choices that young children make. The burden of proof is on the camp that proposes that it's entirely sociological since the extant empirical evidence, along multiple independent lines, contradicts it.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#66

Post by dleslie »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #19
dleslie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that concept is the implied outcome that once media is paid for by readers it will no longer engage in undesirable practices for revenue, like advertorials and shock content; but this is somewhat of a myth. Those shady practices were common before the Internet, and they'll be common even if media returns to a subscription service model. What you need is a well-funded, and non-profit public news media. It's no…

Hmm, any examples of journalist-owned media engaging in such practices? I can think of at least 6 of them who don't (and don't have ads either).

I'd give examples of independent journalists, particularly vloggers, who produce shock content of questionable merit, or who regularly publish promoted content; but I think you can identify them yourself.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#67

Post by the_cat_kittles »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #58
verisimilidude wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I was diagnosed with Asperger's later in life. I received this diagnosis after I already had a successful career, happy marriage, and house full of kids. Not much of a hindrance, right? On the other hand, my brother suffers a much more severe form of autism. He does hold a profession job in finance. But he otherwise requires a full-time caretaker, tons of medication and understanding, etc. No friends. He's not s…

I too received a probable-diagnosis later in life. (It was part of neuro-psych testing to look for ADD, so they didn't run the specific test battery used for Asperger.) In many ways my life has been just fine: steady well-paying employment, wonderful wife and kids, etc. So as with you, being (probably) somewhere on the spectrum isn't correlated with a crappy life. But... I've also had some unusual personality traits…

can you go into a little more detail about what results allowed them to conclude you were probably aspergers, and what the personality traits that you previously felt guilty for were?

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#68

Post by k__ »

PlugTunin wrote: post #21

Interesting read. Minor point of clarification: It's noted that many autistic folks struggle with empathy. There are two dimensions to empathy, cognitive and affective . Cognitive is more about perspective taking, or reading the feelings / intentions of others, while affective is the ability to share/understand the emotions of others, and respond appropriately. Putting aside that the two may overlap, it's often the c…

I lack the affective ability, but I would say that it's not distinct from my cognitive ability.

I say to myself I can "understand it", but if I can't feel it, I didn't really understand anything.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#69

Post by Threeve303 »

For something with such a large spectrum, it doesn't make sense to assign broad generalizations. The lack of empathy in particular is almost too close to implying criminality as a common occurrence. Code perhaps?

Some people play the social games more than others and if you're not interested in playing along, you're labelled as the 'other'. Then all of the negative stuff builds from there and it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Positive generalizations are harmful too, like it being a super power or you're going to be a wealthy inventor.

Autism would be just one factor among many for all of these things.

Re: Autism and Invention Are Connected

#70

Post by SubiculumCode »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #45
lumberjack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most (like 90% or more) autistic people are low functioning. But they are completely invisible to people like you. When you hear the word you think of the border line cases that fall under the label "high functioning autism". But the author is not limiting himself to just these borderline cases.

Do you have any data for this distribution? This is the first time I've heard someone suggest any particular shape to this distribution, much less that it's shaped as you suggest.

I published this paper recently (1) in Biological Psychiatry. I bring it up only because unlike most neuroimaging research, we are able to image children at all levels of disability (since we image them while asleep). We argue that the idea that there is early brain overgrowth in autism followed by a period of regression or normalization of brain volume does not appear to be true, and the apparent differences in cross-sectional research are due to biases in most studies against including harder to image individuals with autism. In any case, intellectual disability is not 90% but it is quite substantial.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462145

Post reply on HN