Re gaining greater insight by learning something that doesn't come naturally to you, I recall reading an interview with an elite swimmer, who at the time was considered to have the best butterfly stroke in the world. She said she could never coach anyone, because it came so naturally to her she had no idea what she was doing that others weren't. Conversely, my impression is that good football coaches are more likely to have been mediocre players than great ones. (Though that could be just because there are more mediocre players.)
I had a similar experience growing up. I never fit in. Social skills and relatability were just mystifying to me, and I had absolutely no interest in the typical "teenage girl" pursuits, much preferring to ride my horse or play with Legos. As a pre-teen I was obsessed with dinosaurs and would constantly correct my teachers on their pronunciation of dinosaur names or whatever. I was one of those annoying straight A students that never had to work very hard to learn anything and outperformed virtually everyone on any metric. Unlike the male Aspies however I was very athletic and excelled in sports as well as academics. I had very few friends and was bullied quite a bit.
Fortunately or unfortunately for me I've always been horse-obsessed, and that has driven much of my life, first as a professional rider with success in competitions on a national level, then as a trainer and teacher. Teaching forced me to improve my social skills, and in true Aspie fashion I've spent a ton of time researching different teaching methods and watching elite coaches give lessons, in addition to studying the sports psychology, behavioral theory, among other relevant topics.
One of the great trolls of our time, who in a short tweet folds sophisticated layers upon layers of trolling, struggled to understand sarcasm? Astonishing.
One thing about normie social skills is that they plateau. Like you kind of have an idea what's going on so you don't ask questions that go deeper and see the incentives at play. Like you I have no instinct for social queues, so I have to rely on first principles. There is no plateau when you do this, you can generate much better insights, the issue becomes speed can you do it in real time. Mostly, yes, but less so the more novel the situation. Work is rarely novel.
I caused my trouble early in my career for telling the truth, which was often inconvenient. When I think about this incidences, there was no time I was wrong, not even a little. It made me toxic. Now at the top levels of a very large company, I wield the truth like a weapon and deploy it when it's to my advantage. But it's a super power, and those without it can only be effective if the socially acceptable way to do their jobs happens to also be effective in that specific instance, they won't improvise if things aren't working, they'll double down and do the normal thing even harder. Thus most people at most companies are stunningly ineffective when something changes.
Have been learning into the weird for a while now. Confidence is always going to trump pathetic attempts to fit in, yet you can still be punished for arrogance. You’re right about passion and emotional distance. A lot of it has to deal with how people will reject you for being passionate in this era, which leads to a defense of emotional numbing.
I’m incredibly autistic for Miami and pretty autistic for NYC, but in SF people think I’m neurotypical because of how autistic they are. I’m into fashion and music so they’ll assume I’m a neurotypical, but they’ll also ramble on about highly advanced AI concepts to me, assuming I understand their every word because their mind is their social reality.
Have you studied autism in different geographical regions? Since in Miami I was diagnosed as Asperger’s yet in SF I was told by a professional I did not meet the full criteria, I believe it’s much harder to get an autism diagnosis in SF than anywhere else in America. It all has me curious if any of this is even valid on a wider scale or just managerial social organizing. Isn’t any nerd or even artist going to present as autistic in the South?
Also, isn’t “masking” a term invented by autistic people to explain what “regular” people describe as “adapting?” What exactly is the mask? Being polite and getting off the podium? That’s masking? I suppose…
My sense these days is that the criteria for Asperger's describe a list of *challenges* that some people face and that for others are entirely trivial. Some who are challenged by them eventually conquer most of them; some conquer zero of them.
The first guy I knew who told me had Asperger's was a machinist in his 50s who had never learned any social skills. Everything he said was the most boring sentence you had heard in your life, and he had zero understanding of facial expressions, body language, or subtext. He also had obsessions of the "bus schedules" variety, which he liked to talk about.
So for a long time, whenever people talked about being "on the spectrum", I figured they were lying or exaggerating, since they were clearly a lot more socially adept than that guy. But now I'm getting there are people who were even weirder than me and my nerdy childhood friends but who still managed to learn a lot more social skills than my machinist acquaintance. He's just an example of a guy who faced a lot of Asperger's-related challenges and apparently overcame zero of them.
Richard, I had immediately classified you as “probably autistic” after reading a few of your essays. I’m probably autistic as well so I can recognize someone who is one of us.
Have you read “Warriors and Worriers”? It explains a lot about female behavior. I wish I had read it as a teenager, because as a probably-autistic girl I found interactions with other girls even more baffling than with boys. At least sometimes the boys would let me drone on about dinosaurs or the Civil War; but I had no female friends because I really could not crack the code there. I put a lot of effort into trying to learn how to blend and eventually was able to make some friends, but only after I met people as odd as I was.
My son, now 12, took 2 years when he was a toddler to learn the symbolic meaning of a person pointing (to an object). Social graces might as well be Trisolaran weather prediction for him at this point. His inner thoughts are like neutrinos, no doubt present and constantly moving, but nearly undetectable. Except irritants, those are the vector along which I can most clearly see his preferences.
Every rung on the ladder of understanding the world has been a grueling challenge. And there are many, many rungs to climb before he can live an independent life.
He’s my boy, and there is absolutely no doubt that he has medium spectrum autism. As do most of his classmates, some of whom are less functional at life-support basics than he is (closer to full spectrum autism). Basically everybody on my side of his genetic family is a nuclear engineer (4), physicist (several) or founder, and my wife was a chemist before FT motherhood. During the last 10 years, no one in our families has self-diagnosed themselves as autistic. None of us would attribute our various quirks to autism, because now we all have a very clear picture now of what genuine autism looks like in practice.
He can do math, and makes progress at it. The typical response that I have heard nearly 500 times over the last 10 years is “oh that’s wonderful, he’ll probably be a {dev, scientist,etc}.” Advice to people engaging in conversation with the parent of an autistic kid: expressing optimism is fine, but only if it’s calibrated. When I say he can do math, it does not mean calculus or calculating eigenvalues or transformations in Minkowski space. Arithmetic, fractions, and pre-algebra. Because of the amount of struggle that it takes from him and all of us teaching him, I am immensely proud that he can do some math.
With due respect to the many many people who use the word autism as a descriptor, no. Find a different word. Because fully expressed autism is a vastly more powerful condition than what you have been afflicted with. It does no one any good, and in particular does a severe disservice to the people hobbled profoundly by autism, to use that one as a catch-all. AMA and DSM authors, kiss my ass. Personally I think Aspie is a useful descriptor for the type and degree of cognitive challenge and social understanding impact that you’ve described.
Beautifully put. Just wouldn't be so cavalier about denying "normal people" passions. Most ARE passionate about their most important relationships in their lives (kids, family, etc.).
As you somewhat mentioned, it is trendy to self-diagnose autism on the right, and trendy to self-diagnose every mental disorder on the left. The majority of free personality tests, whether propagated through the internet or otherwise, are incentivised to tell you are unique.
In the case of mild autism, being excessively male-brained, people who according to the traits you listed are on the spectrum, could just be a regular amount of male-brained, and the supposed normal people might just be more effeminate males. Without proper surveying of the general population, this could all be observability bias.
I think you and I are similar in the processing of social interactions and learning them mechanistically. I had poor social skills until I read several books on the subject, am highly irritated by background sound/music/TV, and primarily enjoy work which involves understanding and optimizing a system.
That said, in my experience, non-mechanistic high-social-skill people, do not have as much of a hidden understanding of social dynamics as many perceive. They have social status either through beauty, or organizational status, that causes others to perceive them as having been right in a social interaction where two people played it differently. The "good" social skills people for the most part, do not actually have higher social perception. People don't say it, but I think a lot of pretty girls who may also be nice, get given a pass as having good social skills, when in reality people are just giving them generous grading.
One final autism presenting personality trait I would argue for is high disagreeability. People are perceived as having poor social skills for arguing an unpopular position unsuccessfully, but the same judgement isn't passed un the much more common occurrence of people throwing out poorly structured arguments for popular positions.
Internet autism is just not having the looks, status, or verbal skills to be seen as correct, when disagreeing with someone who does.
I had a somewhat similar experience. Didn't understand why most people didn't seem to like me so I would study the different types of people in my class and monitor their interactions. I realized quickly that I couldn't learn anything from the very charismatic kids, they were just born with traits that people liked, so I focused on the kids who got made fun of sometimes but never bullied. I came up with strategies for what to do when someone made fun of me and spent hours reviewing the pros and cons of each tactic.
Long story short, today people consider me an exceptionally likeable person. I was able to go from below average likeability to above average because I cared about improving and because I had to learn concepts more deeply to use them and they didn't come naturally. So yeah, I know what you mean.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if scientists have a high rate of autistic tendencies, which is why they can hyper focus on proving if one thing is true or not. I think a little bit of autism can be a big advantage, which is probably why it's becoming more prevalent in the information age, when the ability to run fast and throw heavy objects has never been less important. On the other hand, we can all see the enormous disadvantage with having too much autism.
I was diagnosed in my 40's. Everything you wrote about your childhood rings true for me as well. How my autism expressed itself was by a weird desire to get to the bottom of things. In college I baked bread, collected windfall fruit and made wine, and grew and pickled my own vegetables. I taught myself "sheep to shawl"; taking a raw fleece, cleaning it, spinning and dying it with local plants, and finally weaving it on a loom I built as an art major. I've kept that up all my life, doing a deep dive into something specific and then on to the next thing. It's been a strange life, but I wouldn't trade it for a normal one!
"Plus, they’re needlessly cruel, always telling you that you’re a “nice guy” that other women would be lucky to have, even though they never let you sleep with them or even lick their boobs."
This thinking is wrong more because of the similarities between men and women than the differences. Just ask any young male expressing thoughts like this how he'd react if propositioned by a girl/woman who was a very pleasant person but he found extremely physically unattractive.
Re gaining greater insight by learning something that doesn't come naturally to you, I recall reading an interview with an elite swimmer, who at the time was considered to have the best butterfly stroke in the world. She said she could never coach anyone, because it came so naturally to her she had no idea what she was doing that others weren't. Conversely, my impression is that good football coaches are more likely to have been mediocre players than great ones. (Though that could be just because there are more mediocre players.)
I had a similar experience growing up. I never fit in. Social skills and relatability were just mystifying to me, and I had absolutely no interest in the typical "teenage girl" pursuits, much preferring to ride my horse or play with Legos. As a pre-teen I was obsessed with dinosaurs and would constantly correct my teachers on their pronunciation of dinosaur names or whatever. I was one of those annoying straight A students that never had to work very hard to learn anything and outperformed virtually everyone on any metric. Unlike the male Aspies however I was very athletic and excelled in sports as well as academics. I had very few friends and was bullied quite a bit.
Fortunately or unfortunately for me I've always been horse-obsessed, and that has driven much of my life, first as a professional rider with success in competitions on a national level, then as a trainer and teacher. Teaching forced me to improve my social skills, and in true Aspie fashion I've spent a ton of time researching different teaching methods and watching elite coaches give lessons, in addition to studying the sports psychology, behavioral theory, among other relevant topics.
One of the great trolls of our time, who in a short tweet folds sophisticated layers upon layers of trolling, struggled to understand sarcasm? Astonishing.
One thing about normie social skills is that they plateau. Like you kind of have an idea what's going on so you don't ask questions that go deeper and see the incentives at play. Like you I have no instinct for social queues, so I have to rely on first principles. There is no plateau when you do this, you can generate much better insights, the issue becomes speed can you do it in real time. Mostly, yes, but less so the more novel the situation. Work is rarely novel.
I caused my trouble early in my career for telling the truth, which was often inconvenient. When I think about this incidences, there was no time I was wrong, not even a little. It made me toxic. Now at the top levels of a very large company, I wield the truth like a weapon and deploy it when it's to my advantage. But it's a super power, and those without it can only be effective if the socially acceptable way to do their jobs happens to also be effective in that specific instance, they won't improvise if things aren't working, they'll double down and do the normal thing even harder. Thus most people at most companies are stunningly ineffective when something changes.
Have been learning into the weird for a while now. Confidence is always going to trump pathetic attempts to fit in, yet you can still be punished for arrogance. You’re right about passion and emotional distance. A lot of it has to deal with how people will reject you for being passionate in this era, which leads to a defense of emotional numbing.
I’m incredibly autistic for Miami and pretty autistic for NYC, but in SF people think I’m neurotypical because of how autistic they are. I’m into fashion and music so they’ll assume I’m a neurotypical, but they’ll also ramble on about highly advanced AI concepts to me, assuming I understand their every word because their mind is their social reality.
Have you studied autism in different geographical regions? Since in Miami I was diagnosed as Asperger’s yet in SF I was told by a professional I did not meet the full criteria, I believe it’s much harder to get an autism diagnosis in SF than anywhere else in America. It all has me curious if any of this is even valid on a wider scale or just managerial social organizing. Isn’t any nerd or even artist going to present as autistic in the South?
Also, isn’t “masking” a term invented by autistic people to explain what “regular” people describe as “adapting?” What exactly is the mask? Being polite and getting off the podium? That’s masking? I suppose…
Thank you!
90% of this I would have written verbatim as my own life story, had I had the articulation and insight you have.
Am going to read this atleast 10 times, if not more
My sense these days is that the criteria for Asperger's describe a list of *challenges* that some people face and that for others are entirely trivial. Some who are challenged by them eventually conquer most of them; some conquer zero of them.
The first guy I knew who told me had Asperger's was a machinist in his 50s who had never learned any social skills. Everything he said was the most boring sentence you had heard in your life, and he had zero understanding of facial expressions, body language, or subtext. He also had obsessions of the "bus schedules" variety, which he liked to talk about.
So for a long time, whenever people talked about being "on the spectrum", I figured they were lying or exaggerating, since they were clearly a lot more socially adept than that guy. But now I'm getting there are people who were even weirder than me and my nerdy childhood friends but who still managed to learn a lot more social skills than my machinist acquaintance. He's just an example of a guy who faced a lot of Asperger's-related challenges and apparently overcame zero of them.
Richard, I had immediately classified you as “probably autistic” after reading a few of your essays. I’m probably autistic as well so I can recognize someone who is one of us.
Have you read “Warriors and Worriers”? It explains a lot about female behavior. I wish I had read it as a teenager, because as a probably-autistic girl I found interactions with other girls even more baffling than with boys. At least sometimes the boys would let me drone on about dinosaurs or the Civil War; but I had no female friends because I really could not crack the code there. I put a lot of effort into trying to learn how to blend and eventually was able to make some friends, but only after I met people as odd as I was.
A professor in his last class before retiring explained to us that only half of what they teach is true and they don't know which half.
My son, now 12, took 2 years when he was a toddler to learn the symbolic meaning of a person pointing (to an object). Social graces might as well be Trisolaran weather prediction for him at this point. His inner thoughts are like neutrinos, no doubt present and constantly moving, but nearly undetectable. Except irritants, those are the vector along which I can most clearly see his preferences.
Every rung on the ladder of understanding the world has been a grueling challenge. And there are many, many rungs to climb before he can live an independent life.
He’s my boy, and there is absolutely no doubt that he has medium spectrum autism. As do most of his classmates, some of whom are less functional at life-support basics than he is (closer to full spectrum autism). Basically everybody on my side of his genetic family is a nuclear engineer (4), physicist (several) or founder, and my wife was a chemist before FT motherhood. During the last 10 years, no one in our families has self-diagnosed themselves as autistic. None of us would attribute our various quirks to autism, because now we all have a very clear picture now of what genuine autism looks like in practice.
He can do math, and makes progress at it. The typical response that I have heard nearly 500 times over the last 10 years is “oh that’s wonderful, he’ll probably be a {dev, scientist,etc}.” Advice to people engaging in conversation with the parent of an autistic kid: expressing optimism is fine, but only if it’s calibrated. When I say he can do math, it does not mean calculus or calculating eigenvalues or transformations in Minkowski space. Arithmetic, fractions, and pre-algebra. Because of the amount of struggle that it takes from him and all of us teaching him, I am immensely proud that he can do some math.
With due respect to the many many people who use the word autism as a descriptor, no. Find a different word. Because fully expressed autism is a vastly more powerful condition than what you have been afflicted with. It does no one any good, and in particular does a severe disservice to the people hobbled profoundly by autism, to use that one as a catch-all. AMA and DSM authors, kiss my ass. Personally I think Aspie is a useful descriptor for the type and degree of cognitive challenge and social understanding impact that you’ve described.
Beautifully put. Just wouldn't be so cavalier about denying "normal people" passions. Most ARE passionate about their most important relationships in their lives (kids, family, etc.).
As you somewhat mentioned, it is trendy to self-diagnose autism on the right, and trendy to self-diagnose every mental disorder on the left. The majority of free personality tests, whether propagated through the internet or otherwise, are incentivised to tell you are unique.
In the case of mild autism, being excessively male-brained, people who according to the traits you listed are on the spectrum, could just be a regular amount of male-brained, and the supposed normal people might just be more effeminate males. Without proper surveying of the general population, this could all be observability bias.
I think you and I are similar in the processing of social interactions and learning them mechanistically. I had poor social skills until I read several books on the subject, am highly irritated by background sound/music/TV, and primarily enjoy work which involves understanding and optimizing a system.
That said, in my experience, non-mechanistic high-social-skill people, do not have as much of a hidden understanding of social dynamics as many perceive. They have social status either through beauty, or organizational status, that causes others to perceive them as having been right in a social interaction where two people played it differently. The "good" social skills people for the most part, do not actually have higher social perception. People don't say it, but I think a lot of pretty girls who may also be nice, get given a pass as having good social skills, when in reality people are just giving them generous grading.
One final autism presenting personality trait I would argue for is high disagreeability. People are perceived as having poor social skills for arguing an unpopular position unsuccessfully, but the same judgement isn't passed un the much more common occurrence of people throwing out poorly structured arguments for popular positions.
Internet autism is just not having the looks, status, or verbal skills to be seen as correct, when disagreeing with someone who does.
I had a somewhat similar experience. Didn't understand why most people didn't seem to like me so I would study the different types of people in my class and monitor their interactions. I realized quickly that I couldn't learn anything from the very charismatic kids, they were just born with traits that people liked, so I focused on the kids who got made fun of sometimes but never bullied. I came up with strategies for what to do when someone made fun of me and spent hours reviewing the pros and cons of each tactic.
Long story short, today people consider me an exceptionally likeable person. I was able to go from below average likeability to above average because I cared about improving and because I had to learn concepts more deeply to use them and they didn't come naturally. So yeah, I know what you mean.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if scientists have a high rate of autistic tendencies, which is why they can hyper focus on proving if one thing is true or not. I think a little bit of autism can be a big advantage, which is probably why it's becoming more prevalent in the information age, when the ability to run fast and throw heavy objects has never been less important. On the other hand, we can all see the enormous disadvantage with having too much autism.
I was diagnosed in my 40's. Everything you wrote about your childhood rings true for me as well. How my autism expressed itself was by a weird desire to get to the bottom of things. In college I baked bread, collected windfall fruit and made wine, and grew and pickled my own vegetables. I taught myself "sheep to shawl"; taking a raw fleece, cleaning it, spinning and dying it with local plants, and finally weaving it on a loom I built as an art major. I've kept that up all my life, doing a deep dive into something specific and then on to the next thing. It's been a strange life, but I wouldn't trade it for a normal one!
This guy’s a national treasure.
"Plus, they’re needlessly cruel, always telling you that you’re a “nice guy” that other women would be lucky to have, even though they never let you sleep with them or even lick their boobs."
This thinking is wrong more because of the similarities between men and women than the differences. Just ask any young male expressing thoughts like this how he'd react if propositioned by a girl/woman who was a very pleasant person but he found extremely physically unattractive.