The rational man as a concept is still used nowadays as often as it is, that itself is a proof that the concept is as broken as it can be. The modern consumer economy is based on irrationality.
Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
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Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#82ADHD people have a different calculus that affects their project management.
NonA-DHD typically respond to deadlines with increased urgency, commitment, and re-factoring assessments.
ADHD may respond to deadlines by abandoning tasks and starting new extraneous tasks.
Is that rational? It’s what happens, and since it is such a dramatic and consequential difference, it warrants a reconsideration of the meaning of the term “rational”, and it’s limitations.
ADHD isn’t an isolated minority. It’s a transient condition in a significant number of people, prevalent enough in the population to make economic text books about monolithic “rationality” unfit for purpose.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#83Basically theres a fundamental trade off between the ebb and flow of social interaction and cohesion, which follows predefined and implicit rules, and then the autistic ability to actually be objective/think rationally without being clouded by norms
Yeah, that's pretty much my take on it as well.
Everyone says they want rationality and unbiased thinking, but don't really care if it takes extra effort or time. This threw me for years. When I would point out gaps or mention hidden assumptions I would get dismissed almost every time.
Like just because you have data to back up your point/idea doesn't mean your point is right. That's NOT what data-driven actually means. No, what people want is numbers to add to make a story seem more trustworthy.
Once I started treating "rational" or "data-driven" like a buzz word everything made sense.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#84It 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…
> Though those biases probably came about for good reasons, it could be they've become obsolete and are no longer worth it. I suspect (but don’t know how to test the hypothesis) that cognitive biases are why human learning can produce good results with dramatically less data than machine learning. More rational, yes, when you get there; but harder to learn at all.
thing is, those cognitive biases are themselves the result of eons of learning via evolutionary optimization
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#85ADHD people have a different calculus that affects their project management. NonA-DHD typically respond to deadlines with increased urgency, commitment, and re-factoring assessments. ADHD may respond to deadlines by abandoning tasks and starting new extraneous tasks. Is that rational? It’s what happens, and since it is such a dramatic and consequential difference, it warrants a reconsideration of the meaning of the t…
Rationality isn't whatever people do. Biases are whatever people don't do optimally that they would, if they were perfectly rational.
Various subgroups can have different responses, but rationality is its own ideal, regardless of what people do.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"For me, it only "clicked" once I understood that gender and sexuality are completely arbitrary and subjective social constructs that try to describe a whole spectrum of multidimensional behaviors and (potentially repressed) feelings, so there's little point in trying to objectively categorize them - it's all about the subjective impression of the person themself" Sex is a fundamental property of living organisms; it…
Sex and gender are different things. Neither is easily defined in a strict unambiguous manner, despite what we might be taught in high school biology.
To be clear, this isn’t a political view point, it’s a scientific view point, there’s no singularly accepted way of defining sex in human. Unfortunately nature has this amazing ability to conjure up exceptions to every seemingly reasonable definition of male/female, and it doesn’t give two shits about our desire to arrange the world into neat little categories.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/gender-benders-and-s...
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example of such utility? Frankly, I don't see it - in my opinion, the best options are either not having genderized pronouns at all (and that's the option I'd actually prefer), or expressing the whole range of identities with them. Going somewhere in the middle is nothing more than just asking for dissonance to happen, which isn't useful.
Sure, the current utility is that most people do currently comfortably fit into the binary. We should introduce language to account for people that don't, and if demographics shifted such that most people didn't feel like the current binary fit them then we should adjust, but currently the majority of the population is happily self identifying within the binary and it's a great shortcut for them to communicate some a…
It's true that most people fit into binary, but I don't really see how that's relevant.
1) If we assume that it's essential to genderize pronouns, it doesn't really matter what the majority fits into because existence of other options does not influence that majority at all. The only case where it matters is when someone doesn't fit. The utility remains unaffected (in fact, it actually is increased because of better expressivity).
2) If we assume that it's not necessary to genderize pronouns, then it may be argued that we're losing some information that the vast majority of people was comfortably fitting into - but I don't really understand why do we actually need that information. When I refer to other people, it's extremely rare that I do it in a context that requires me to mention their gender identity (or even what do they have between their legs). In those rare cases where it's actually relevant, I wouldn't mind having to express it explicitly at all, so overall the utility seems dubious.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#88It 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…
As somebody who sits upon the autistic scale, I personally have a deep rooted ethic of fairness, even if it means I yield an advantage, I'm just as uncomfortable being unfairly treated as I am being over fairly treated and to empathize I just look at the others position as if that was mine and how would I feel about that, at least that is how I empathize. Also tend towards common sense slanted bluntness over diplomat…
Yup!
One time during an exit interview I pointed out (some concrete feedback they could take action on, aaah, how naive of me) how bad the DevOps team had it (80+ hour weeks, constant weekend work, all hours on call, etc) as one of my reasons for leaving and the CEO could NOT understand why I would care about this at all. His response was about how our team (BI) had it so good, which we did, so why would that matter!
He literally could not understand that I had empathy for another team and it affected my perception of the company.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know that people aren't perfectly rational. The point of the article is that autistic people tend to be more rational on average than neurotypicals. The emotional weight that affects neurotypicals and causes them to fall into biases more often (on average) doesn't apply as often (on average); an autistic person will be less likely to behave differently when confronted with "80% fat free" vs "20% fat", to borrow an…
That's likely because (many) autistic people (myself included) have to learn to function with emotional regulation issues largely by second-guessing them. So the 'gut feeling' a neurotypical would tend to go with gets overridden by subsequent analysis in the autistic individual, in their attempt to 'calm the storm'. In my case, this causes me to 'throw out' most political hyperbole. Unfortunately, if the shit really…
Could be; was just pointing out that the parent maybe wasn't really speaking to the point of the article.
Still, I find stuff like this super interesting. It helps dislodge the narrative that autism is a problem or disease, something that needs 'fixing', rather than just being different.
Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
#90It 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
Weren't they just saying that the spectrum isn't a measure of severity, not that one can't talk about severity separately.