
ESR on autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness - arto
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060
======
arto
> Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and
> accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: not giving a shit about
> monkey social rituals.

> Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and
> status-maintainance activity. They have great difficulty sustaining interest
> in anything that won’t yield a near-immediate social reward. By an autist’s
> standards (or mine) they’re almost always running in a hamster wheel as fast
> as they can, not getting anywhere.

> The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status
> grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare
> for anything else. Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry
> required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total
> processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to
> spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.

~~~
mercer
As is often the case, I agree with the _how_ , but not necessarily with the
_why_. This is a nit I'm picking but I'm in a write-lots-of-words-because-why-
not mood.

It seems accurate, also looking at myself, that there are many benefits to the
fact that I don't care so much about status and the like, and instead spend
that time on long-term obsessions and interests (which might well be two
separate 'characteristics').

What strikes me as less accurate is that this is _caused_ by lacking
circuitry. Perhaps 'different circuitry' is a better way of putting it.
Whether this difference is deemed 'defective' is a matter of perspective.

The reason why I prefer 'different' is that based on my own experience (and
that of others), I do not lack in empathy. In fact, affective empathy is
probably stronger in me than with others. The reason why I often fail at
cognitive empathy, or why I need a lot of time to process and analyze a
situation to come to the right conclusion, is because my circuitry as a whole
seems to work a bit differently, so I come to the wrong conclusions if I apply
my own type of empathy.

A friend of mine is also mildly autistic. To outsiders, we might seem to
constantly talk over each other, be rude and critical, not show affection, and
generally lack in empathy.

But between us, the rudeness is perfectly acceptable, the criticism is fine if
we think it makes sense, the lack of physical affection is pleasant (or just
irrelevant), and while we might not _seem_ to take in the mutual info-dumps,
we generally will store it and refer to it later.

Furthermore, we most definitely show our own forms of empathy to each other!
Letting each other finish info-dumps that are not particularly interesting is
one of those things. We both don't ultimately care if the other is interested,
half the joy is just structuring verbally. And we know this about each other.
Plenty of other-mind thinking, I'd say. And if one or both of us has/have an
'autistic meltdown', we usually quickly move on because we understand that in
such moments we say and do things we don't mean to do - we are just in panic
mode. We might have a long theoretical conversation about it though while
hiding the fact that we are probably going to need some time to recover
emotionally (but ideally by ourselves).

And if we're being overly abstract and theoretical, somehow we often know
about each other when to stop and ask 'dude, is there some reason you are so
obsessed about this topic?', then talk about the thing that's going on, and
then both happily jump back to abstractions or gaming.

