Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper • Hacker News Board

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#111

Post by loriverkutya » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

yenwel wrote: post #72

I think high functioning autism is just a DSM-isation (label as disease) of people with high introversion, neurotism and/or disagreeableness. Read "The silent power of introverts" by Susan Cain. People are people. We all evolved traits to fill our biological niche. Highly vocal people with little fears (extraverted and neurotypical) are just that: more "confident" and vocal about how great they are. Corporate sociopa…

>> I think high functioning autism is just a DSM-isation (label as disease) of people with high introversion, neurotism and/or disagreeableness. Read "The silent power of introverts" by Susan Cain.

Because you never met an extroverted autist or you were not aware. I am lucky enough to know one. Also, autism is not labeled as a disease but as a developmental disorder.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#112

Post by chaoticmass » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

I've never been given an ASD diagnosis, but have wondered if I was on the spectrum. Regardless, I've struggled with reading faces, and generally just being weird/awkward in social situations. One thing that really helped me though was my first job where I worked retail selling computers. Initially the hardest part was approaching people. Once I approached someone and they seemed interested in a PC or Laptop it was easy, I just had to talk to them about one of my favorite topics (computers). I ended up being one of the top sales associates, and this gave me confidence to be more outgoing and social outside of work.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#113

Post by vinceguidry » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #110

vinceguidry wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My best improvements came through improving my knowledge about psychology. Studying psychology gives you more cognitive resources, allowing your brain to wrap itself better around certain concepts. I think it's easy for intellectual types to put too much emphasis on cognitive development and they need to be encouraged to actually develop their limbic system. The cognitive wants to get better, constantly constantly…

> The cognitive wants to get better, constantly constantly better. The limbic wants harmony. I also have had the experience of being prideful of the capacity to be emotional. Over time I've been able to gradually cede the compulsion of the cognitive to allow the limbic to do its job. It makes life much, much, much simpler, to be able to turn off the need to constantly understand everything. At the risk of sounding li…

The technique of choice for this is catharsis. This is why watching and reading tragic media is so useful to people. It's tailor made to engage the limbic system. Watching people deal with really awful situations primes the mind to release emotional energy and engages neural pathways that aren't often active.

Mindfulness is useful for when you have uncontrolled emotions flooding your forebrain and making it difficult for you to function. Forcing your mind to watch the processes as they're happening allows the forebrain to come up with novel ways to make sense of what the rest of the brain is doing.

You want to release, then integrate emotion. Catharsis, then mindfulness.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#114

Post by baron_x » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #109

baron_x wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Ulysses S Grant, also the 18th President of United States. Fun fact, they both went to West Point and Lee graduated 2nd in his class whereas Grant was an average student at best, but during the civil war, Grant was the better tactician by most accounts and was willing to take heavy losses. Grant was an alcoholic and his presidency was riddled with corruption and his reputation was damaged by the Lost Cause rev…

I didn't say he was a monster. I said he was considered to be at the time that he was General during the Civil War. I chose that wording carefully. In a nutshell, my understanding of the war is that Lee was a brilliant strategist and tactician and the primary advantage the North had was numbers of soldiers. Grant did not hesitate to use the only advantage he had, resulting in a high number of deaths to gain the upper…

Sorry, I wasn't trying to imply you called him a monster. I was agreeing with you that he was a brilliant wartime soldier and fared poorly in almost all other areas of life, but as a person he gets treated a bit unfairly by some historians.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#115

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

baron_x wrote: post #114

DoreenMichele wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say he was a monster. I said he was considered to be at the time that he was General during the Civil War. I chose that wording carefully. In a nutshell, my understanding of the war is that Lee was a brilliant strategist and tactician and the primary advantage the North had was numbers of soldiers. Grant did not hesitate to use the only advantage he had, resulting in a high number of deaths to gain the upper…

Sorry, I wasn't trying to imply you called him a monster. I was agreeing with you that he was a brilliant wartime soldier and fared poorly in almost all other areas of life, but as a person he gets treated a bit unfairly by some historians.

Talking on the internet is hard. It's all good. I overall liked your comment.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#116

Post by baron_x » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #71

baron_x wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Ulysses S Grant, also the 18th President of United States. Fun fact, they both went to West Point and Lee graduated 2nd in his class whereas Grant was an average student at best, but during the civil war, Grant was the better tactician by most accounts and was willing to take heavy losses. Grant was an alcoholic and his presidency was riddled with corruption and his reputation was damaged by the Lost Cause rev…

Grant was probably a better strategist (or at least he understood his advantages and how to make use of them), but I've never seen it seriously suggested that he was a brilliant tactician. Relentless might be the best description of Grant. There's very little brilliance in the Overland Campaign of 1864; the primary thing that set Grant apart was that he continued pressing on after being bloodied, rather than scurryin…

I agree with the north's advantage being in numbers and resources, but I think it's more complicated than him trying to batter down Lee with it. This image of Grant throwing lives away needlessly comes from the Overland campaign in the war, and it was a complex situation with both of them probing for advantage and Grant eventually pushing him into a siege. Lee lost initiative and wasn't able to recover from that. Sherman, another Union General was able to go into the deep south after that and destroy the south's ability to fight leading to a surrender. I think strategically, he was able to out-perform Lee which no other Union general was able to do in the civil war, which was pretty different from how wars were fought up until that point.

Comments on this post lays it out in much more detail.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1uabom/grant...

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#117

Post by mockingbirdy » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #108

mockingbirdy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASD is an element of Cluster B personality disorders. > how different ASD is from Cluster B is therefore like saying "how different a football is from balls". Did you mean "ASD is different from Borderline (problems with emotional regulation, panic attacks, ...), Histrionic (egocentric, seeking attention) and Narcissistic (egotistic, abusive, ...) personality disorders" in the sense that those result from trauma?

ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) is definitely not classed as a Cluster B personality disorder. You may be mistaking ASD for ASPD, Antisocial Personality Disorder, of which psychopathy is a variant. Sociopathy is not defined in the DSM-IV or DSM-5.

Yes, meant APD - wrong abbreviation. Sociopathy and psychopathy are not explicitly listed, but APD captures many of the symptoms (psychopaths are a subset of people with APD).

Now your comment makes a lot more sense. I agree. There was a time when people thought that the mother is responsible for autism in their child (through their behavior) which was a huge injustice. I also think that autism is fundamentally different to personality disorders (except psychopathy which is an extreme form of APD that has biological roots AFAIK).

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#118

Post by mockingbirdy » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #113

Fnoord wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cognitive wants to get better, constantly constantly better. The limbic wants harmony. I also have had the experience of being prideful of the capacity to be emotional. Over time I've been able to gradually cede the compulsion of the cognitive to allow the limbic to do its job. It makes life much, much, much simpler, to be able to turn off the need to constantly understand everything. At the risk of sounding li…

The technique of choice for this is catharsis. This is why watching and reading tragic media is so useful to people. It's tailor made to engage the limbic system. Watching people deal with really awful situations primes the mind to release emotional energy and engages neural pathways that aren't often active. Mindfulness is useful for when you have uncontrolled emotions flooding your forebrain and making it difficult…

Ok. I will watch Hachiko and use the resulting sentimentality to train my limbic system and its connection with my neocortex. I will try to feel something.

I've heard that many people get tears while watching it, although many people don't score high on standardized psychopathy tests.

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#119

Post by TangoTrotFox » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

Fnoord wrote: post #101

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, people are different. Attributing differences to disorders is not productive, and tends to lead to things such as medication and expensive treatment and therapy when such things are not only unnecessary but absurd and can even be harmful - especially in the longrun. It's reminiscent of various 'treatments' for homosexuality in the earlier years of psychology/psychiatry, which by the way does not mean t…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17590856 This post answers yours clearly: it is a spectrum. > I think a reasonable definition would be a disorder Homosexuality is not a disorder according to ICD or DSM. Autism is a development disorder. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder. Disorders cannot be cured, and cannot be treated either. One can learn to cope with them, but it cannot go away like a traditional disease.…

Homosexuality was considered a disorder by the DSM until 1973, which is what I was alluding to with my comment. And like most actions in psychology and psychiatry there was no scientific logic behind the decision to add it, or to remove it. It was simply proposed as a motion to the board of the American Psychiatry Association, and passed. Of course I'm not suggesting homosexuality is a disorder, but rather that their entire process of determining what is or is not a disorder has a very tenuous connection with science.

And this perhaps generalizes to these fields in general. The entire fields of psychology and psychiatry are currently in crisis in that their studies and research in general is now, more often than not, deeply flawed. I'm sure you aware of this [4] study which showed some 61% of major psychological studies published in reputable journals did not yield the results claimed when replicated. Follow up results from different researchers have corroborated this issue. One of the responses from the psychologists and psychiatrists involved in the unreproducible studies was to complain that they didn't use the nearly identical samples - for instance using students in e.g. Germany instead of students in New York. However that is a rather direct acknowledgement that these studies do not generalize in any way. But if they don't, then these fields are in no way producing science, let alone actionable science.

A very related issue here is the medicating of people. A recent study indicated that some 17% [1] of Americans are consuming psychiatric drugs. That number nearly doubled in a decade, yet the science on these drugs is very questionable. In recent trials upwards of 80% of SSRI's effects were explained by placebo alone. [2] That number should be doubly surprising as the side effects of SSRIs are, by contrast, very real and tend to undermine double blind studies. And the longterm effects are looking quite dire as well. This is all made more problematic by a pharmaceutical industry that sponsors research more aimed at them making money than on improving healthfulness of people. Emphasizing this is the fact that more than 50% [3] of preclinical medical trials also have results that were later found to be unreproducible.

[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[2] - http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[3] - http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

[4] - https://www.nature.com/news/first-results-from-psychology-s-...

Re: Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper

#120

Post by vinceguidry » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

mockingbirdy wrote: post #118

vinceguidry wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technique of choice for this is catharsis. This is why watching and reading tragic media is so useful to people. It's tailor made to engage the limbic system. Watching people deal with really awful situations primes the mind to release emotional energy and engages neural pathways that aren't often active. Mindfulness is useful for when you have uncontrolled emotions flooding your forebrain and making it difficult…

Ok. I will watch Hachiko and use the resulting sentimentality to train my limbic system and its connection with my neocortex. I will try to feel something. I've heard that many people get tears while watching it, although many people don't score high on standardized psychopathy tests.

You may get results out of repetition. When I was a kid, I remember reading and rereading the same books over and over again, and really getting to know the characters and the storyline. You experience each new watching / reading in a different way, bypassing the cognitive mind a little bit by not giving it as much work to do. You'll get more limbic immersion this way.