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Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

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Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#91

Post by zozbot234 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #77
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…

>I am autistic, pretty much all of the people I know are autistic I'm not trying to tell you what words you should and shouldn't use; obviously in your circumstance it's a word more likely to cause a political schism and lead to misunderstandings. Most people, though, live in a NT-dominated culture where the terms "Aspergers" and "Autism" both carry extremely different connotations. One invokes images of an aloof pro…

> invokes images of a child that screams and shits themselves

This is a generalized problem with the self-proclaimed neurodiversity/"autism rights" movement, though. They do very well at expressing the wishes of reasonably high-functioning folks with autistic traits, but don't seem to relate to the kids who can't speak intelligibly and spend their time banging their head against the wall any better than everyone else. Saying that "we shouldn't talk about low vs. high functioning autism, because it's more complex than that" feels like a cop out.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#92

Post by ben_w »

riwsky wrote: post #84
ben_w wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No disagreement there! But, at the risk of cargo-culting, it might be interesting to see the effect of deliberately trying to reproduce such biases in an A.I.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#93

Post by karmakaze »

nicoburns wrote: post #39
rackjack wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I suspect the fact that Autism reduces a person's ability to relate emotionally and socially to themselves and others allows them to dedicate more brain power to thinking rationally. In a mild enough case, with a supportive tribe, they could be a useful advisor. No autistic members = tribe has trouble making good collective decisions. Too many autistic members = tribe can't collaborate. That's just my armchair…

Autistic people can have trouble accessing emotions, but a lot of the reason for that stereotype is just that they communicate their emotions and emotional reactions differently and/or that their emotional reactions to certain situations are different to those of neurotypical people: not that they're not actually feeling emotions at all.

Later in life I considered myself to be on the autistic spectrum as it explained many of my quirks. Growing up, I thought everyone was normal like me but less rational. Very recently I found out about Alexithymia, the inability to identify, describe or express one's own emotions, which actually nails it. Many of the outward interactions are similar but the internal experience is different. The best way I can describe my experiences is that the 'feeling' or even awareness of existence of an emotion lags, sometimes by hours, until it becomes sorted-out and conscious. I also don't much have emotional overloads other than being drained by certain forms of interactions that I'd chalked up to being introverted, which was odd because I'm very extroverted at times. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that I don't put effort into interacting emotionally outside my closest circles.

Maybe it's like smell, where there are many bad scents and even if it didn't impact my survival I wouldn't want to live without the sense, and I should indulge more. The only concrete thing I've learned is that significantly reducing my caffeine intake helps but also distracts.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#94

Post by solarmist »

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 conclusions significantly and I'd argue in most cases the added accuracy is of marginal value.

Basically, I believe a lot of those biases are shortcuts that give a good enough answer in significantly less time. I.e. Newton's method over actually computing derivatives.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#95

Post by steve_adams_86 »

wombatmobile wrote: post #82

ADHD 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…

Is it truly transient? I know some people "grow out of it", but it seems plenty of people are afflicted for life. Am I misunderstanding what transient means in this context?

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#96

Post by nomoreusernames »

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…

personally i think both are needed in the genepool. just as handicaps during a economic boom during peace time make the tribe learn about compassion, which has a group benefit for the offspring. nature is a higher order system. we are not the sums of our parts. most discoveries are mistakes or roadblocks in the path of another objective. like sperm the best approach is the shotgun approach. in space legless people use less space oxygen and food.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#97

Post by guerrilla »

mwigdahl wrote: post #70
georgestephanis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information do you feel can be communicated and understood with that moniker that is not served by Autism Spectrum? And why do you feel those distinctions (if any) merit a wholly distinct diagnosis?

I'll bite. "Autism Spectrum" is a deliberately vague term that has been created and stretched to bring a variety of minor social and emotional functional differences under the general label of "autism". As far as I can tell, in the US the major purpose of this has been to divert special education funding from severely impaired children to less-impaired children from higher socioeconomic strata, and it has been very e…

> I'm perfectly fine with a substitute) is very useful to distinguish people with minor social and emotional functional differences -- those people who are, for example, able to hold down a tech job and post about autistic politics to Hacker News -- from highly impaired people such as my daughter who will never hold a job and whose verbal skills are at a three year old level.

There are plenty of people who the diagnosis of Asperger's who will never hold down a job. I'd hardly consider it "minor" even if it is relative to your daughter.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#98

Post by Jensson »

rajin444 wrote: post #24
Puts wrote: post #17

The ironic part is that the non-autistic people wont trust autistic peoples valuable non-biased opinions because of their bias against non-conforming people.

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.

Most people agree with new pronouns etc due to peer pressure. You haven't convinced them rationally, rather you convince them that it costs more to fight the movement than just fall in line. But a person who needs rational reasons to change how they speak will be much harder to "convince", since they wont change anything until they fully buy into the new.

The peer pressured group might think they did properly think it through, but mostly all you need is an appeal to authority and they fall in line.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#99

Post by guerrilla »

TOMDM wrote: post #65
mherrmann wrote: post #16

My girlfriend was diagnosed with autism 3 weeks ago and we had a related conversation just today. She said she feels more open-minded / less biased than other people. I thought it was because her different experiences were invalidated by society throughout her life. But this makes it sound like there's more to it. Very interesting.

Well, if we consider different causal factors, your proposed cause could be just as valid as a direct genetic cause. It may be that the societal rejection autistic people face give them a perspective that enables a more rational worldview, or it could be directly caused by the autism itself. Interested to see studies that follow up on this.

> It may be that the societal rejection autistic people face give them a perspective that enables a more rational worldview, or it could be directly caused by the autism itself.

I think this would only work if all the other people who were also rejected (schizophrenics, bipolars, adhds, etc.) were also more rational and I don't think this is the case (or even close to being the case.) I'm guessing the researchers would have accounted for that.

Re: Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality

#100

Post by guerrilla »

cwkoss wrote: post #68

In psychology undergrad, I read about a study of anorexic people: they had people rate their own attractiveness, and had strangers rate their attractiveness. Normal population consistently rated themselves higher in attractiveness than strangers did on average. However, anorexic's self ratings were much closer to stranger-ratings. (May not be remembering this correctly and I assume this study was done in the 90s when…

> Some disorders are caused not by disconnection from reality, but rather too accurate a view of reality.

Yeah, I've heard this about depression. [1]

> Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

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