
Asperger's: the IT industry's dark secret - rlm
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/spec/CE96C5C608138FABCC25747000784BD0
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tptacek
"What Jeremy is not good at is suffering fools in the workplace or dealing
with the endless bureaucracy of the modern corporation. If someone is wrong —
if their idea just plain won't work — he says so, simply states the fact. That
frankness causes all manner of upset in the office, he's discovered. [...]
Jeremy has high-functioning autism (HFA)."

Yes. Clearly. Jeremy has a mental illness.

The public school system repeatedly tried to "diagnose" my son with Aspergers.
His handwriting is awful, and the only way they can secure OT to deal with it
is to assign him an IEP, which is a formal assessment that something is
"fundably" wrong with him. "Luckily" for him, my son is also shy and doesn't
like loud noises. Shy? Issues with sensory overload? Bad handwriting? Autism!

What I've learned from this is that nobody has a fucking clue what any of this
stuff means. There's an "epidemic" of autism being reported in the media, and,
what do I know, maybe there really is something to it. But what there also is
is a broad class of behaviors (not disorders --- BEHAVIORS) that will be
diagnosed as "Autism Spectrum Disorders" when people don't know what else to
do with them.

~~~
pragmatic
To play devil's advocate, why does the school system have to deal with your
son? A teacher makes a very low salary and can barely handle an overloaded
classroom the way it is. Handling a child with behavior issues is the last
thing they need.

Now considering that my son has "sensory issues" and my nephew is autistic,
I'm in a position to make that argument.

I have a problem with dumping my child on the state and saying "here you go,
deal with him." I understand your frustration but to assign blame to the
school is a bit over the top.

Get your family doctor to make a referral to a children's behavioral
specialist (a medical doctor trained in the field). Find out if there really
is a problem.

You may also benefit from some counseling. My wife works with children (early
head start) and has had several with Asperger's and Autism disorders. The
parent go through a grieving process and can be very hostile to suggestions
that their child has a problem.

It's been very difficult for us but with therapy (OT and PT) things have
improved greatly. It's too bad my nephew's parents waited so long to get him
help. He's finally speaking at age 4.

~~~
tptacek
I fully agree with you. We took care of the handwriting on our own. This stuff
came to a head in 1st grade; he's going into 4th and doing great. He is, among
other things, more social than I was when I was his age.

What I object to is the school's attempt to tag my son's record with a totally
unscientific assessment of "autism" in order to make their system work better
with my son.

Is there real autism out there? Of course there is. But there is also a lot of
bullshit autism.

~~~
timr
I can relate. My parents have always taken great pleasure in telling my
girlfriends how I was "diagnosed" as mentally retarded in the first grade (I
already knew how to read at a 4th grade level, and they mistook my boredom for
something else).

But hey...someday you'll be able to take some pleasure from this. Whenever
your son does something stupid as a teenager (and he will), you can just trot
it out as evidence that _"the teachers were right all along"_. Works like
magic. ;-)

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coglethorpe
I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the
syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category.

Of course now I'm like Peter Griffin on Family Guy when he tested as
"retarded" I have an excuse to blame all my quirks on, be they symptoms
Asperger's or not. Walking down the hall with my fly open? If someone calls me
on it I just say "Hey, get off of my case! I'm nearly autistic!"*

*Note: I don't actually do that. :-)

~~~
edw519
_I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the
syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category._

I just found the wired test and also scored just below the threshold. I had no
idea.

OTOH, I dressed as Rainman at last year's 80's themed Haloween party. There
were 3 Devo groups and 6 Palmer girls, but I was the only Rainman. I didn't
even have to act. I should have known something was up.

Kmart sucks.

Definitely.

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menloparkbum
Is this really a "dark secret?" I feel like people have been going on about IT
& Asperger's for years. Also, wasn't this exact same article published in a
different paper about a year ago? edit - 2 months ago, i guess.

~~~
astine
Yes, it was. And it was posted here as well. I remember reading it.

Also, I know that ESR mentioned Asperger's in IT at least a decade ago you are
right about it being pretty old hat.

That said, it's still an interesting discussion.

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maurycy
This secret was already exposed twice:
<http://searchyc.com/submissions/dark+secret>

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sanj
My wife, who spent time around heaps of social workers, starting creating a
list of vocations and which psychiatric disorders that might _help_ them.

Asperger's: engineers/coders

Narcissism: politicians

Egotism: CEOs

Lawyers: OCD

others?

~~~
ComputerGuru
OCD also applies to coders - speaking from experience here. You haven't seen
truly refactored code until you've seen somebody with OCD try to infinitely
refine it :)

~~~
jrockway
I disagree, people with OCD tend to write terrible code. They want their code
to show all the details, but hiding details is what programming is all about.
OCD people will make your project very late as they worry about all the
special cases that aren't.

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ComputerGuru
Online Asperger's test: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html>

Pressing "Calculate Score" though will show you the source code of the Perl
script instead of calculating your results - however the code is easy to
follow :)

My score: 24.

~~~
hugh
Also, the scoring system is shown below the test, so you don't even have to
press the button or read the code.

The scoring system annoyed me, because it turned out that the time I'd spent
soul-searching about whether I "strongly agreed" or only "somewhat agreed"
with certain statements was a complete waste. Do I _definitely_ agree that I'm
not very good at remembering phone numbers, or only _slightly_ agree?

An odd question: "I am fascinated by dates". Which kind of dates are we
talking about here? It's possible that your interpretation of that question is
an Asperger's test on its own.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Same here. 0 or 1? WTF!

But what do you mean by the dates reference? I understood that to mean "what
happened on this day," spotting patterns in dates, knowing ahead of time what
date things will happen, etc?

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pragmatic
I saw this at least a month ago. Is this a reprint or am I losing it?

The date on the article is Monday, 23 June, 2008. However my super IT
Aperger's power gives me total recall abilities so I know I saw this before.

~~~
pragmatic
I knew it:
[http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9072119)

The author must have gotten married she's now Tracy Mayor Framingham instead
of Tracy Mayor. Apparently you can then reprint all of your old articles.

~~~
tptacek
Nice catch!

------
LPTS
People who are concerned this is a fad have some legitimate concerns.

But, they are at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This
diagnosis opens up an incredibly insightful way of understanding much of human
culture, history, and art. It is pretty easy to link up certain archetypes to
aspergers syndrome. The Romantic Hero, for example, or the Shaman both read
like descriptions of Asperger's as manifested in a certain societal context.
This could partly be because storytellers often are Aspergian themselves and
the characteristic identity diffusion leads Aspergian people both create
idolized versions of themselves, study their world intently, and project
themselves (and their aspergian traits) onto the stories of their culture. The
greek god Hermes often presents as Aspergian (in that he is concerned with
information, started technology, in the form of music, as an infant, relates
to travel, never stays in the same place, etc). The lack of concern for
societal norms maps perfectly onto the trickster's taboo breaking. Jesus at
twelve in the temple speaking to priests as an authority mirrors Dr. Hans
Asperger's description of his patients as "little professors". It's fractally
recursive throughout human history.

This concept also cast light deep into the edifice of academic philosophy, in
that many philosophers had asperger's syndrome and changed philosophies about
the same time in their lives. Kant developed transcendental Idealism.
Wittgenstein abandoned his picture theory of words. Etc. This correlates with
a change in Asperger's whereby around age 40 the Aspergian or autistic aspects
soften, and some measure of reciprocity is added to the personality, and
relates to observed changes in the brain. Understanding Wittgenstein's picture
theory in light of the difficulties of aspergers illuminates both aspergers
and the reasons Wittgenstein's theory was the way it was. At a meta level, one
of the next tasks in at least AI and consciousness studies, will be to
disentangle autistic and non autistic theories about consciousness. This could
also shed light into AI, because Aspergian or Autistic people doing AI with an
impaired theory of other minds won't succeed, and will make certain
characteristic errors in their reasoning rooted in the way Asperger's projects
onto their academic work.

Some people say that everyone is a unique little snowflake and so special and
that these boxes can't be applied easily or posthumously and blah blah. Those
people are idiots. You are not a unique little snowflake, and are not special.
Without exception (for any 'you') You are an instantiation of the same
patterns that millions of other people instantiate, with a few superficial
differences you probably confuse for a unique and indescribable soul, and it's
easy for the right person to put you in a box and label you (and manipulate
the hell out of you if they want, eg, advertising and marketing). Asperger's
and HFA present distinctly. You actually can make pretty valid diagnosis of
something so characteristic even posthumously. We shouldn't avoid interpreting
history this way because it destroys peoples pathetic illusion's that they are
special and impossible to pin down.

This is the kind of thing where understanding it at the surface will be
deceiving, but understanding deeply will be illuminating. The way most people
understand this is wrong, but understanding Asperger's as it relates to human
culture will enhance most people's understanding of the world deeply.

