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Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

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Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#171

Post by PeterisP »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #47
rajin444 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an autistic coworker who could not understand using pronouns outside of the already established ones (he/she). She was otherwise very “progressive” but didn’t consider herself such. It had to do with he/she mapping to (99% of the time) defined biological features. It was a very awkward lunch.

Judging from how I was changing my opinion on similar matters when I was growing up, I guess she simply lacks the insight into why someone would feel the need to reject the established pronouns - she probably doesn't feel that need herself, so she doesn't have any frame of reference to be able to consider that until someone explains it to her, which makes her naturally gravitate towards seemingly unambiguous and clea…

The argument about gender (and pronouns) being an arbitrary social construct does not imply that it's the individual's unilateral choice - the fact that naming people and referring to them is a social construct means that the social consensus determines how people will be addressed and the individual does not get a veto vote - e.g. if someone asserts that their identity requires them to be called Your Majesty, the society will simply ignore that demand. So the demand for non-standard pronouns essentially is up to the society; someone may want others to use e.g. xe/xir, but it does not necessarily mean that this desire has to be honored, that is an arbitrary social construct which can plausibly be different in different subcommunities; in some communities these pronouns fit the social construct and it's mandatory to use them, in other communities it goes against the social construct and it's considered unreasonable to demand that they get used.

There are many other parallels - e.g. the criteria for using (and expecting/demanding of use) of formal vs informal "You" in many languages, the expectation on how mandatory it is to use specific prefixes or honorifics (Sir/Ms/Dr), etc; and in all those cases it's an arbitrary social construct and the wishes of the individual can be and are shunned whenever they go beyond what the locally prevailing social norms require.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#172

Post by bitwize »

m_fayer wrote: post #67
seba_dos1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad stereotype. It's far more common for autistic people to have the ability to relate emotionally to others cranked up to overwhelming levels (hyper-empathy), which makes them avoid situations that require relating to others out of severe stress it's usually causing on them - leading to other people perceiving them as unempathetic.

I almost wonder if empathy is the right word then, maybe this would best be described as something like "susceptibility to emotional contagion." Empathy as commonly defined includes an impulse to comfort and stand by, as opposed to avoidance.

Empathy has a performative component to neurotypicals. If you are not acting as though you are empathizing, you have "no empathy" and are thus a strange form of psychopath. Actual psychopaths can pass the performative part of neurotypical empathy with flying colors because they are excellent maskers and mirrorers -- that is, of course, when they can be bothered to try at all.

Neurotypical psychology is deep, complex, and fascinating. They devote significant brainpower to constantly evaluating and testing other people's behavior against a constantly evolving set of rules in order to ascertain whether they are a member of the neurotypical's tribe or ingroup. The rules have to change and evolve because ingroup members will be able to predict how they will change, and so catch any outgroupers who have heretofore successfully infiltrated the ingroup. It's like you have a monster CPU with a lot of cores, and then devote half (or more!) of those cores to the world's most elaborate DRM scheme. We benefit because much of that CPU power is in us freed to do other exciting things, like programming or particle physics; but we also suffer because most of the people around us cannot attest that we are legitimate humans running a legitimate copy of the human OS.

Relatedly, I love Japan and I love the Japanese people but... Japanese society has one of the most elaborate, impenetrable set of social rules in the world. If you want to know why hikikomori are such a thing there, it's simple, really: so many more people are frustrated with their failure to conform to the elaborate ruleset it takes to simply be Japanese and tired of being flagged as impostors in that game of Among Us that they simply give up and withdraw into whatever brings them comfort.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#173

Post by Groxx »

mherrmann wrote: post #15
akvadrako wrote: post #3

It takes a while to get to the point, but this is what the page is about: As we explained in a recent review paper, researchers have repeatedly found evidence that Autistic individuals are, on average, more consistent, less biased, and more rational than non-autistic individuals in a variety of contexts. Specifically, many Autistic people seem to be less susceptible to cognitive biases, and therefore better able to m…

I know what you mean by "mild autism" but an article [1] that was recently discussed here [2] explains that "mild" vs. (say) "severe" does not quite capture the nuance of the condition. Just pointing it out here because I found it interesting. 1: https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682917

yeah, autism is very much an "umbrella term". we define it by the effects, not by any identifiable causes. there are still broad "less impacted" and "more impacted" cases, arguably a spectrum, but it's very very much not linear.

cystic fibrosis used to be under the (all-encompassing) umbrella "chronic fatigue" because, well, they were chronically fatigued. when its niche finally gained enough data to escape the umbrella, diagnosis and treatment greatly accelerated. of course, you'd expect that once a cause is identified, but umbrellas tend to contain many totally unrelated sub-causes with wildly different subtleties that just happen to fit a vague description that matches others.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#174

Post by alasdair_ »

fragmede wrote: post #59
fao_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry... are you arguing for a term that separates autistic people into "productive" and "non productive" that was created by a literal Nazi? I am autistic, pretty much all of the people I know are autistic, and even most of the people I know through my workplace are autistic (it's explicitly a neurodiverse workplace), and I've pretty much never seen anyone need to use the term "aspergers" in general conversation. As…

Pre-Godwinning the discussion doesn't raise discourse, it dumbs it down. Yes that's the history of the term but it was also the accepted term until after its removal from the DSM in 2013, and not everyone that grew up with that term is as plugged in as you and gotten the memo to moved over to the new term yet. It's fine to be angry at neurotypical people who use it as a slur, but you won't win many converts attacking…

It's not Godwinning something if the term is literally named after a Nazi and only came about directly as a result of a Nazi eugenics program.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#175

Post by PeterisP »

kragen wrote: post #169
PeterisP wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans and other primates are social animals, and pretty much all aspects of personal success and ability to influence the external world - survival and safety, access to nutrition, mates and other resources, and general power - are mostly determined by social factors, so "winning" at the social factors has been more important than what a single individual can achieve by exploiting the "real world" even since before…

Almost everything in your first paragraph is correct (though you accidentally capitalized "starving".) But everything in your second paragraph is incorrect. Even before the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for banished people to find a new place to live, either as hermits or as part of a new tribe; the outlawing and persecution of individual refugees and "stateless persons" is a Late Modern aberration. Since…

I'd argue that even in the horrific example of the Great Leap Forward, Mao and those who went with him mostly succeeded with their personal goals and ensured all kinds of long-term benefits to themselves granted by a higher social status in the party, while those who went against him and had better plans failed in all their goals, often starting with the primary goal of immediate survival. In this scenario having the better plan was not useful, and trying to execute it was not rational as it only hurt your interests.

Using your example of Galileo, his effectiveness in propagating his science was severely limited by a scientifically irrelevant feud with church officials. Had he been more politically savvy, he would have been able to avoid tying the scientific issues with the personal conflict, and would not have provoked the church into this conflict - IMHO what we have in historical evidence indicates that it was perfectly plausible for him to get the church to support his position, which would have supported both his personal interests and the general progress of science, but he failed at that due to his personal qualities w.r.t. social aspects.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#176

Post by kragen »

PeterisP wrote: post #175
kragen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything in your first paragraph is correct (though you accidentally capitalized "starving".) But everything in your second paragraph is incorrect. Even before the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for banished people to find a new place to live, either as hermits or as part of a new tribe; the outlawing and persecution of individual refugees and "stateless persons" is a Late Modern aberration. Since…

I'd argue that even in the horrific example of the Great Leap Forward, Mao and those who went with him mostly succeeded with their personal goals and ensured all kinds of long-term benefits to themselves granted by a higher social status in the party, while those who went against him and had better plans failed in all their goals, often starting with the primary goal of immediate survival. In this scenario having the…

Often that does happen in the short term, although in this particular case, it led to Mao losing control of the Party for six years and arguably delayed Mainland China's economic boom by 20 years. Certainly many of the people who tried to resist the Great Leap Forward died as a result, but so did many of the people who most enthusiastically practiced it.

I don't think a Galileo who spent much of his time acquiring political savvy and currying allies would have been able to make the progress he did make. Such a Galileo might have simply decided not to believe what he saw through the telescope, or to keep quiet about it. The Church had already burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for possessing the writings of Erasmus, and there are many other such stories: Bach was imprisoned for refusing to resign from his Kapellmeister post; Swartz committed suicide to escape imprisonment for downloading too many academic papers; Turing committed suicide to escape persecution for being openly gay; Newton lived to a ripe old age but certainly had a life full of interpersonal conflict; Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs while awaiting trial for treason.

Fundamentally, rationality is insubordinate, and social graces frequently demand dishonesty, so that those who most love the truth are never those who get along best with others.

And those are my heroes, not Donald Trump or Mao Zedong.

There's a better-written essay on this topic at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-....

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#177

Post by whatshisface »

zozbot234 wrote: post #165
whatshisface wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to say about low vs. high functioning autism? People with low functioning autism can't be helped by social movements about recognizing human diversity, they can be helped by medical research and support for their parents. High functioning autism probably can't be helped by social movements either (what's the plan, to talk everybody out of using the subconscious screening system that makes them not like…

> they can be helped by medical research and support for their parents. Many people in the "autism rights" movement oppose these things, often with strident rhetoric. They view any "medicalization" of the condition they happen to share with their lower-functioning fellows as inherently inhumane.

That sentence was in reference to helping low-functioning people with autism.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#178

Post by bryanrasmussen »

zepto wrote: post #122
guerrilla wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, well I can't agree to that part. It all depends on your goals and some people are less able to accomplish their own goals than others due to those traits from the spectrum. There's no need for conceiving of utility to others to speak of grades of functionality.

Sure, but the point is that the thing that is ‘severe’ isn’t ‘autism’. An autistic person can be severely disabled, but the disability is itself a trait they only some autistic people have, so it doesn’t make sense to call the disability ‘autism’.

well you can have a benign tumor or one that is killing you, by that theory we should say the one that is killing you shouldn't really be called a tumor.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#179

Post by zeckalpha »

coldtea wrote: post #130
Okx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also argues that severity of autism doesn't really make sense.

Well, if it leaves one unable to function effectively in society, or seriously hampered in that, it does make sense to differentiate from a less strong case.

That is a problem with society being severe, rather than the autistic individual

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#180

Post by AnthonyMouse »

solarmist wrote: post #94
akvadrako wrote: post #3

It takes a while to get to the point, but this is what the page is about: As we explained in a recent review paper, researchers have repeatedly found evidence that Autistic individuals are, on average, more consistent, less biased, and more rational than non-autistic individuals in a variety of contexts. Specifically, many Autistic people seem to be less susceptible to cognitive biases, and therefore better able to m…

I have what you would deem mild Autism and it CAN be a beneficial adaptation, but it's is highly context-dependent. I think it's only in the last couple of decades when that's become true, specifically information, knowledge work, or science. Think of the cartoons where the "nerds" are trying to fight/play sports and are trying to calculate optimal trajectories, etc. The additional rationality slows down coming to co…

I'm not sure it's so much about shortcuts.

Suppose you're a judge in a contest. The contest has rules. If you apply the rules the same to all the contestants, that might be considered a disadvantage when you have the opportunity to apply the rules more favorably to your friends. Whereas the other guy who interprets the rules to favor his friends creates the expectation that the friends will return the favor someday.

But the advantage isn't always an advantage. If the other participants view you as biased then they won't even show up or pay entry fees anymore. Then there is no more contest and your friends lose even the possibility of winning.

It's kind of like asking if there's a disadvantage in not being a sociopath. Turns out, maybe not.

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