some real abuse of psychological terminology here. most clinically autistic people don't hold down jobs, certainly not professional roles, even if they have a high IQ
Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
91–100 of 172 posts
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe its neutral or slightly better in adulthood, but only if the autism isn't accompanied by other problems that frequently accompany autism, such as language disabilities and anxiety.
Asperger is nothing like Forrest Gump or the Rainman characters, BTW. It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver, or the Deer Hunter, or Rocky the Bum.
> It is like Holden Caulfield or Travis the Taxi Driver
> actually good to have
Something doesn't add up.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can't just "consider autism an advantage in programming jobs." It's not. The majority of programmers are not autistic and there are large parts of programming jobs which are very difficult for autistic people to cope with. At best, autism is less of a disadvantage in programming than in other jobs. That's why it makes sense to focus on programming as a field for autistic individuals to move towards, though in prac…
Honestly I feel like having an Aspie Spectrum diagnosis is like a badge of honor to some people in Silicon Valley.
Anywhere on the Internet. Plenty of people in online forums who claim to have Aspergers and thus smart and not care about socializing. Same thing as saying you're INTJ.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've both read the Isaacson bio and been diagnosed with Asperger's. I strongly disagree (with erichocean) that Jobs was on the Autism Spectrum. Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field. Meanw…
> Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude". And yet, on the Wikipedia page for Asperger Syndrome[0], the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found. Strange. From Wikipedia: > Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's, is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communicatio…
> whereas Aspies (like Jobs) have more empathy
Let me tell you a little about the ADI-R [0]. The clinician reads your biography, makes small talk, asks you to make up stories, watches for any abnormal behavior, et al. The madeup story of a NeuroTypical will include the emotions of other people. E.g. "My friends and I went to the beach, but we were sad because it rained, and Alice got mad because it was her only day off, etc".
An aspie's story will show ZERO AWARENESS of other people's emotions. Their entire world consists of PvE. Not because they have no sympathy for others' emotions, but because deciphering non-verbal cues is as opaque as deciphering an enigma. It's like the opposite of clairvoyance. Does that sound like empathy to you?
I agree that Jobs must have had empathy. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so successful at manipulation. It's just that he was such an asshole that he abused his knowledge of others' emotional states to gain leverage over them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Diagnostic_Interview
In what world does "social ineptitude" not map to "significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication"? This feels like one of those bifurcation situations where someone is like "I'm not fat, I just have a BMI of 9000".
> sociopaths (...) appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact).
Psychopaths are the ones who blend in. Sociopaths are pretty conspicuous.
> "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests"
Also fits OCD. We agree that Jobs was highly neuroatypical. But whatever his quirk, it's not autism.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've both read the Isaacson bio and been diagnosed with Asperger's. I strongly disagree (with erichocean) that Jobs was on the Autism Spectrum. Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field. Meanw…
> Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude". And yet, on the Wikipedia page for Asperger Syndrome[0], the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found. Strange. From Wikipedia: > Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's, is a developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communicatio…
> the phrase "social ineptitude" is nowhere to be found.
then you quote:
> > developmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction
Significant difficulties in social interaction sounds like social ineptitude to me.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
How about this:
> In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting
Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#97I'm not autistic, i just dont like you.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#98What's the myth that's being "dispelled"? I see the "Alex St. John's infamous PowerPoint" image, pasted in the article, as more valuable than the entire article. St John is harsh an direct, and seems to contain more objective true than the entire article. Maybe another trait related to high-IQ+autism is a profound disregard for political correctness. Is St.John diagnosed with autism? Maybe the part of the brain dedic…
St. John's perspective is, to be blunt, idiotic. I work in the game industry, and being effective as a programmer involves a lot of people skills and a lot of communication with other disciplines. It doesn't matter how technically brilliant you are if you can't sell people on your ideas or communicate effectively. If you were to go out of your way to hire emotionally stunted young people like St. John suggests you'd just end up with a miserable place to work.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#99Autism results from brain and metabolic damage. Autism is comorbid with a huge mess of other physiological problems and early death and is not at all associated with abstract reasoning ability. The idiot savant thing like with Rain Man is pretty much a myth.
Whatever happened to the eccentric "absent minded professor" stereotype? There has been a seemingly deliberate and strange conflation of eccentric introverts with sick people.
I do not believe "aspergers" exists and I do not think it has anything to do with autism. There's just a narrowing window of socially acceptable eccentricity in modern industrial societies. Behavior that would once attract a chuckle from the neighbors is now "see something, say something" type stuff.
I also think labels like schizophrenia and bipolar have expanded way beyond people who are measurably physically ill. Blood work can very strongly indicate these diseases. But mere eccentrics are being shoved under these labels. Welcome to Soviet America.
Re: Dispelling myths about the autistic programmer
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
There are a whole bunch of skills that go into being good at delivering working software. One such skill is remembering details of how lots of things work, and especially knowing when seemingly simple things will hit hidden stumbling blocks.
Obviously, there are a bunch of other skills required too, and some skills get a lot more respect than others.
One reading of the story is that Bill Gates, despite being six layers of management away from 'the coal face' of actually making the date functions work, knew about the 1904 Date System and why it was there; and that he was able to ask harder and harder questions until the project manager looked unprepared because he had a lot of the specific skill of remembering lots of details and stumbling blocks.
Obviously, an alternative reading of the story is that Gates didn't know those specifics about date handling in Lotus 123, and he was going to ask about something else (or maybe nothing at all) and it was only by random chance that made it look like he knew about this complicated detail.