Comment by kingkawn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingkawn | Hacker News Reader

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I think that the primary symptom of what is being called autism in this case is the belief that others are better at handling social interaction. The autistic's commitment to this belief is the cultural milieu they develop for themselves.

I hear you, it is more of a glimmer of a thought than something that I have worked out well, and I gladly welcome your explanation as to why I am off-base!

It feels though that the elaborateness of this self-identity is a sign that the person is actually quite typical, but somehow their ability to perform critical analysis has been turned viciously against their own behavior because of a few early formative experiences becoming the archetype of all socialization.

In short then it is the scrutiny they are subjecting themselves to that is the problem.

Their commitment to furthering the development of this self-identity is of course all good, free to choose their lives as they see them. If they are in fact in social pain about the state they discover themselves in I would suggest to them that what they consider to be discovery is instead creation. And creation carries no inherent obligations, and they are much freer than the story they have learned to tell would permit them to admit.

I'm still not sure what your point is.

Mild autism (what we're talking about here), in many ways, is (to use a tech analogy) like missing SSL offloading when everyone else has it.

You can still talk SSL, by manually doing it on the CPU, but it bogs down the CPU with crypto and becomes overwhelming if you're trying to do other things at the same time.

You're also not going to be as efficient at SSL, which means you can get overwhelmed by just trying to manage SSL if there's many connections at once.

Recognizing that difference -- that there is a difference in how you're processing those things -- is the first step to doing it better.

Autistic people are literally wired differently: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688328/

(Also, note that the paper uses the phrase "typically developing" to denote non-Autistic people.)

Again I believe that it is the concept of not achieving typicality that is the driving force of continuously deepening the autistic's state of alienation, even when typicality itself is an abstract "average" state that no person actually embodies.

edit: Just wanted to add, I'm not saying that autistics are not clearly at the avant-garde edges of personality, I am just suggesting that the source of the difference is created by the autistic's self-understanding.

That's a great analogy.

I understand where you are coming from, but this is a bit like saying "the primary symptom of dyslexia is the belief others are better at reading".

MRI studies have shown fundamental differences in the mental wiring in autistic brains. Lack of social perception/awareness is a widely recognized trait in people with autism spectrum disorders.

how do you know it isn't a result of the belief that I am bad at reading that makes me worse and worse at it, and rewires my brain to reflect this perceived environment?

Because science; believe it or not, scientists aren't that stupid, they've thought of all of that and tested for it to ensure their conclusions are correct. Your two seconds of thought on the subject don't come close to how much thinking has been put into the issue by thousands of people over many decades of effort to understand these things.

All within certain cultural modes, all to confirm certain paths they are already headed down. The collapse of the ability to communicate across cultures doesn't bother you? Doesn't make you question whether or not this approach that we've all been patting ourselves on the back for while so many are lost to its blind spots may actually not be the right solution, no matter how deep our investment in it goes?

The arrogance of assuming that you are correct because what you argue has references that you appreciate is much greater than me trying to develop an idea that permits a new approach to an old problem.

Seems to me you simply fail to grasp the nature of science. You think science doesn't question it's assumptions and biases, you don't understand science. Science is a process for validating the validity of ideas, any ideas from any culture, the process has no cultural bias and no blind spots. You aren't developing an idea that permits a new approach, you're simply assuming simple questions haven't been looked at because you lack any depth of understanding about what's already been studied and don't realize your questions are simplistic and unoriginal. They assume wrongly that scientists are ignorant and didn't think to check something as simple as basic correlation vs causatiion.

I do understand science. What I do not understand is using it to make claims far beyond its abilities and then retreating into its self-certainty when challenged.

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