71–80 of 178 posts
I'd thought that by living indoors and in otherwise controlled environments that there's not really much evolutionary pressure in any particular direction. Higher intelligence isn't a specific requirement to have (many) children live healthy lives.
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Einstein seemed to have absolutely no problems with his social life. Newton on the other hand lived and died alone, possibly a virgin.
That’s called masking. I have level 1 ASD and rated pretty high in masking when tested. I show up the way I’m expected to show up. I don’t let people see what it costs me. I deal with that later in private.
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Or "there's a fine line between genius and insanity".
It’s kind of rude to equate autism with “insanity”, but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.
I'm diagnosed as autistic and I am therefore more qualified than you to classify what is rude and what isn't rude to autistic people. I think misrepresenting what he actually said is what is rude, not what he in actuality said.
Two things I see as required for cutting edge math or physics are intellectual humility and a lot of intuitive feeling for how to approach problems. Another way to say this would be not missing the forest for the trees.
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both tho…
I find this part to be a really strong highlight of our change in perception of autism and what it means to be "autistic" or "on the spectrum."
Perhaps due to the broadening of the spectrum or just an odd association with success and spectrum attributes, we now strongly associate intelligence with spectrum. Historically - perhaps due to a narrower definition of autism - the inverse was true. It's understood now to not have much strong correlation with IQ at all, but apply fairly distributed in a way similar to general population, certainly not skewed one way or the other in a strong way.
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Is there now? High functioning autism exists, but autism in general doesn't seem to give any advantage to general intelligence. And the low end of functioning in autism is really, really low.
An observation I've made is that the most people ("the general population") will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals. I.e.: They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back even if the instructions are total nonsense or impossible to physically implement. It's a rare breed (1-2%) of the population that will actively push back, insist on facts, and stick to only the…
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In Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now. Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
Never being married did however.
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Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now. Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
Never being married did however.