A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

I didn't clarify my point sufficiently, we ended up "talking past each other" a bit because of this.

I'm not referring to people within the hard sciences having arguments! That happens, but like you said, typically for good and valid reasons.

I was referring to the general population of office workers and the like, outside of the highly-selective Silicon Valley startup bubble that many HN readers might find themselves in.

> many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush

I'm not on the spectrum, but I do appreciate "direct" communication!

More to the point, you seem to be in the bubble I mentioned, so you may not even be aware of what a typical large corporate or government office worker's experience is like.

In my $dayjob I regularly see objectively bad projects moving forwards effortlessly with zero resistance. I see dozens of supposedly important people just "going with the flow" and nodding in agreement with their superiors because they're terrified of taking an objective stance against the "tribe leader". There are zero pointed questions asked. No technical analysis of any kind. No objective metrics or numbers, ever. No graphs. No charts. Nothing you might recognise as "science".

Just a few weeks ago I was in a meeting where they were presenting a new network security design that had already been signed off and approved for implementation by dozens of senior leaders including the CIO, CTO, CISO, etc...

This multi-million dollar project was already in motion for six months, and I was the only one to ask pointed questions: "Won't routing all outbound traffic via another cloud provider tank network performance? Won't that result in hairpin networking where we go out and back in to talk to ourselves? Won't this break out server-to-server firewall rules? What about egress bandwidth costs, have they been estimated? Has anyone tested any of this?"

"No, we didn't test it, the vendor selling it to us assured us it was good, its in the top right Gartner magic quadrant, and it has been signed off, so there's no concerns."

Translated: "Authority, authority, authority."

This is what the "rest of the world" is like, the vast majority of the general population out there working in typical jobs.

You yourself said you know "many autists". You're in the 5% highly selected weird corner of the world, probably a startup or something akin to it.

Personally I have been hurt because a condition that I suffer from and that probably about 5% of people suffer from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

This is something I came to understand at the age of 51 where my ability to benefit from that knowledge is limited. I got a psych eval circa 1978 which I'm told was a good quality eval at the time -- they had no idea what I had but knowing what I know now I can attack it with a highlighter and line it up with Meehl's work that was published in 1962 but failed (and still fails) to be translated into practice.

Given that 5-10% of people have this condition, some will be misdiagnosed as "autistic", others will not be diagnosed at all. Kids with my condition will have to wait another 45 years for answers and I blame the "autism" epidemic.

And don't get me started on the other fashionable neurodivergence by which the children of the rich and powerful can get performance enhancing drugs and extra time on the test.

>Andersen suggests that a tradeoff exists in predictive processing, where giving higher weight to prediction errors prevents the detection of false patterns (i.e. apophenia) at the cost of being unable to detect higher level patterns, and giving lower weight to prediction errors allows for the detection of higher level patterns at the cost of occasionally detecting patterns that don't exist, as in delusions and hallucinations that occur in schizotypy.

Personally: I focus on the anhedonia because ime the other schizotypists* (&, less commonly, diagnosed autists) seem to have it, and, as I might have mentioned before, negative affect in combo with some other traits tends to attract bullies/certain sadists/karens/well just friggin identarians and not fellow autists/schizos whatever :)

(*As far as I'm concerned the founding stoics were simply rationalizing their anhedonia, so they needed rich and powerful patrons to take that practice to the masses. Former-day VC and unis, as it were)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418765