Hacker News Reader

An autistic person can absolutely be good at that. It might not be intuitive, but that doesn't mean they can't be good at it.

> But more to the point, not everything is an attack on autistic people

No one said it was. I said it perpetuates a stereotype. I think that's different than an attack, personally. It's careless, not malicious.

But careless can still be irritating.

View on HN

Yes, an autistic person can train such, and learn to mask (autistic women are especially trained to mask). I suspect that is what happened here with Williams Syndrome, but that is merely my hypothesis. Are there brain scans such as MRI available of people with Williams Syndrone? Those might be interesting to compare.

They are not masking and pretending to be loveable and huggable -- it is very obviously different.

These two videos are by an interviewer who works with special needs kids/adults:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxZ7aZMFHPE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjlwtKAO6yw

As you can see it's also a physical development disorder, and it may bring to mind Downs syndrome more than autism (indeed, the young woman in the first video makes this comparison and understands the difference).

The thing it makes me want to ask a scientist is to what extent does Williams Syndrome change the mirror neurons or their processing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com