Comment by cgio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgio | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe they were right? On a serious note, though, and I am diagnosed if it adds any value to my response; anecdotally, I tend to hold strong opinions only upon strict testing (usually internalised argumentation) and, therefore in such cases, maintain extreme bias when judging against alternative ideas. Furthermore, in many cases I will only speak if I have something to say. In that sense, if I understand I am wrong, it makes sense to just accept it and does not look necessary to communicate it. Similarly, in the realisation that the person I am having argument with will not be convinced, I may still not discuss further, even though I still think I am right, just because I do not see the value of convincing. Understandably, in the context of my previous statement, they might infer this as an indication of me being wrong. The last few years, I have started telling clearly that I am wrong, when I think I am, not because I think it adds any value, but because it looks like people are really passionate about proving themselves right to others, when I mostly just care about being right. Telling people you were wrong seems to make them happy and therefore more prone to accept your position in future disagreements.

that all sounds like well-functioning, pro-social behavior to me.

autism, like many "disorders", is keenly overdiagnosed, to create a sociopolitically-mediated norm from which deviance (like "high-functioning" autism) can be classified and, where desired, ostrasized, for the sake of control. it's a classic hammer looking for a nail issue, but with coercion as its central aim. biology is very unlike computers and populations of anything biological will exhibit a fascinating array of variance and an enormous range of biologically valid (but perhaps not sociopolitically valid) "normal".

> autism, like many "disorders", is keenly overdiagnosed, to create a sociopolitically-mediated norm from which deviance (like "high-functioning" autism) can be classified and, where desired, ostrasized, for the sake of control. it's a classic hammer looking for a nail issue, but with coercion as its central aim.

Relevant quote from The Jargon File (http://catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html):

"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’.

So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS — the status of caffeine as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer at 0.4-0.5%)."

the likes of foucault and nietzsche would be better source material than random internet opinion for this sort of thing. this is sociopolitical push-pull between the average and the relative outliers--as old as time, just with different jargon.

> the likes of foucault and nietzsche would be better source material than random internet opinion for this sort of thing

This is Hacker News. The Jargon File is a quite famous document of the hacker scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jargon_File&oldid...

i know what it is. it's still random internet opinion rather than academic research.

The medical field has been moving away from autism as a pathology to a more nuanced understanding of neurodiversity as a multidimensional spectrum. While stigma very much functions as a societal cudgel, a diagnosis can actually be extremely positive and liberating because:

- it gives access to a community of people that share your life's experiences. Seeing how alienating society can be to people on the spectrum, finally finding a peer group is life-changing.

- it allows us to put names on certain things we experience, and communicate those things to the people we interact with. Being able to frame some of my experiences and behaviours has resolved pretty much all the conflicts we used to have in my relationship.

- it deconstructs shame. We are now not just "lazy" or "stupid" or "creepy" or "weird" or "emotionless" or "stunted" or "distracted".

- it frames the fact that autism is a disability mostly as a problem with society not being accomodating to our neurological fabric, not the other way round. It allows us to ask for accomodation in a professional setting, for example

you're exactly describing medicalization, where relatively common human variation is pathologized so it can be separated and treated, without asking to what ends?

a diagnosis becomes an excuse for the inconvenience of having to deal with differences among ourselves. it's ok that we have to deal with discomfort and even (some) conflict. that's an essential part of life, otherwise we may as well be robots.

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