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'm a professional dressage (equestrian discipline) rider and instructor for over 20 years, and have had a similar experience. Many of the best dressage riders are not the best instructors, because riding well and teaching well aren't quite the same skillset. I also think elite riders don't tend to think about teaching much, they're much more focused on themselves and spend very little time dissecting their skill in a way that they could impart their knowledge to others.
In high school I got a perfect score on ACT/SAT multiple times. My classmates would ask me how they could do better, too. Never knew how to answer that. Choose the right answer more often, I guess?
Yeah, this brings back memories early in my career of a co-worker offering to pay me money to tutor him in the GMAT for business school. I tried my best, we sat down one time and both of us quickly realized it wasn't going to work.
I was always better at verbal on every standardized test I took, and that seems the tougher part to teach. Unless you're some sort of math wizard who just stares at an algebra or geometry problem and knows the answer, you're probably using the same basic steps as everyone else, just more quickly and accurately, maybe mentally doing certain steps that other people have to write out. You can at least "show your work" in terms of how you solved problems.
But for verbal, it's basically, "learn 2 read, noob", I don't know what to tell you. There's no work to show. For vocab-oriented problems, there are some suggested lists to memorize. The GMAT didn't have any vocab though, IIRC.
I eventually realized that the answer is "practice." If you like reading, you do it a lot, so you get more practice and get better at it. I encourage people who ask me to find something, anything they enjoy reading, and read it.
100%. In nuclear power plant training school I saw people who were one bad test away from flunking out who were great at teaching concepts to their classmates. The guys with the best test scores were terrible teachers, everything just came naturally to them.
This is probably true. My husband is an amazing mountain biker, but when he was trying to teach me how to ride he was hopeless. I’d say “well, how do I get over that obstacle” and he’d say “you just hit it with aggression!” and he’d make some sort of motion with his body. It made no sense to me so I found some other guy to explain it to me. My husband is such a natural athlete that all these things are just instinctual for him. He also has way better social skills than I do, so he had to explain a lot of interactions to me as well. Two of our kids are on the spectrum so I guess they got it from me.
After college I felt this way at my sales job(s). I’m just such an elaborate communicator and intelligent individual that can’t be replicated. I made over six figures at 22 years old but can’t work in a structured environment. Being on time and “working hard” are irrelevant. The owners of the company made millions over 4 years of me working on and off. No scams. No lies. I made over six figures but was used. Plus, my managers were abusive about me being on time and looking like I’m working. I’m going back to school to
Become a lawyer and my family thinks I’m not a success cuz I’m 26 and In poverty. I don’t think most people my age will come close to success. The only reason why i will is cuz im supposed to be rich and powerful and don’t really see material items as success.
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.
I've heard animal interests are pretty common among female Aspies, you get the maternal aspects without the social stuff.
Horses are also metaphors for masculinity, as many people have said--they're big, strong, fast, and have to be tamed, but you never really control them.
Wow. So much horse content in these posts. There is a famous autistic author who is an expert with horses and large animals. I forget her name but will google it now.
SHe's an expert on animal behavior generally - she's totally changed the US meat industry with her insights (by convincing McDonald's etc. that her views were correct). Her work on autism is fantastic as well - she did a great interview on Jordan Peterson's podcast (and actually pretty much is the only person he's interviewed who forced him to let the interviewee talk more than him). There's also a very nice movie (called "Temple Grandin") about her life.
She would be a terrific person for RH to interview.
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…
The regional differences I have noticed between the south and the northeast are that if you have any inclination towards the arts or humanities in the deep south, at least as a male, you'd be considered effeminate, which is a synonym for homosexual in a working-class context, which also means you will be classified as weird or otherwise persona non grata.
A big difference in places where you mainly interact with the professional classes, especially the big cities, is that they are less inclined to see trait neuroticism as indicative of behavioral abnormality because they are more open to social differences like sexual orientation or stereotypical behaviors relate to one's sex. There is also much less mixing between the professional and working classes in big cities because they literally do not speak the same language anymore, which just reinforces the echo chambers.
I've thought about that quite a bit. What's normal depends on where you are, right? In the land of autists the semi-autist is normie.
I don't know if it's 'their mind their social reality' as it's 'everyone around me loves to talk about this shit so why not'? That's 'normal' over there.
Masking? Not stimming (if you do), not talking about your interests, not blurting out the truth even if it's offensive...there are others I'm sure. I figured out a rule of 'never talk about something you're passionate about in person' and later 'don't explore anything you're passionate about because you might talk about it too much and weird people out', which got me through adolescence but had other side effects.
You can also get into the whole gender thing. I've seen the argument the whole gender/title IX/manly men are bad/asking a girl out is harassment situation is an attempt to optimize society for moderate female autists at the expense of male ones, but I can't remember where. (It occasionally bites real female autists in the ass hard because they actually believe all the rhetoric about 'inclusion' and 'tolerance' and think they're safe.)
I don't think it's about going or resisting the flow. The way I think about it through the metaphor of navigating social situations like navigating a city. So you're sitting on a bench and you decide you are hungry. You know the city and you head to your regular spot, but the sidewalk is closed. "Adapting" means you cross the road. Not adapting could mean you decide you'll go to the hamburger joint down the road instead. Either way, you're changing your actions with a full understanding of what your options are and how each one will change the situation.
The aspie is like a mountain man, they're sitting on the bench and are hungry, so they start going in a random direction looking for food. They reach the roadblock and they're like what is this thing? Should I go over it? They try that but people start giving them dirty looks. So they head off in another direction. All this time they're looking for a deer and they're passing tons of restaurants because they don't know what they are. "Masking" means you learn these rules like hopping roadblocks bad and that some buildings have food in them. Eventually you develop an algorithm which leads to you getting fed with high probability. At that point you can barely function as a member of society, but that's not the ability to do adaptation like the city dweller can.
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.
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.
Not to be insensitive, but maybe he's just bad at math? I mean a lot of people can't do calculus or even fractions. Not making any gains in the subject without a lot of struggle is pretty much the norm.
I get the impression that clinicians have replaced "Asperger's syndrome", which is highly descriptive and useful, with "High functioning Autism", which is not, because Hans Asperger has been cancelled. I think he was Nazi-adjacent or something. I agree with you! Calling people like Richard and me "autistic" is a disservice to people like your son.
No. Dr. Asperger was a fairly active Nazi. Not only did he benefit professionally from the mass expulsion of Jews from medicine to get his promotion to directorship of the Curative Education Clinic at twenty-eight years old (as well as benefitting from picking up on research left off by two Jewish colleagues of his named Frankl and Weiss whom were forced to abandon their work when they fled to the US in '38); he also participated extensively in the Nazis child euthanasia program. He might well've been responsible for dozens of murders:
That said, I still agree it was a mistake to drop the term Asperger's syndrome from the DSM-5. Horrible though his crimes were, the term itself is nonetheless widely understood by the public, many of whom probably don't even know it was named after a real person, and Dr. Asperger made a meaningful contribution to advancing a better understanding and treatment of ASD, even with it taking near half a century for his paper to be translated to English.
To your point, we've found that people respond differently to our son depending on which word they know, autistic or aspergers. Aspergers is, sadly, increasingly less known as a term, but generally we prefer it because the word autism conjures exactly as you describe, something more debilitating. Our son is undeniably different, people see it right away, but he isn't stupid. But the minute the word autism is used, I've seen people go from treating him as merely eccentric to downright stupid.
There were originally two types of autism described in the early 20th century: Asperger's syndrome, which we're all familiar with, and Kanner's syndrome, which is classic autism. They are qualitatively different. It doesn't do anyone any good to confuse them. Temple Grandin seems to have Kanner's from what I've read of her work.
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.
As an adult aspie woman with no female friends today, I might go read this book myself. When a girl, I could hang out with the boys all right, but as a woman I find it entirely understandable and right that I should be in the woman group that always seems to form at parties and not the man group (men who are married, after all). However, this leads to great boredom and even loneliness - I hate parties now. A guide to woman sure would help!
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.).
"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.
"Just ask any young male expressing thoughts like this how he'd react if proposituoned by a girl/woman who was a very pleasant person but he found extremely unattractive."
This is a worthless example. Men pay money to have sex with women we find unattractive, and don't find any woman to be both very pleasant and extremely unattractive. Women don't even want to have sex with most of the men they do find attractive, and they find far fewer men attractive than men do women.
If you wanna tell young men something useful, you'd be better off being honest that unless they're at least around the top two standard deviations of hotness, or at least above-average in personal charm, they need to focus more on getting good at something and earning money and resources if they wanna get girls. Men won't be helped by being told stories that fall apart with a slight breeze.
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!
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'm a professional dressage (equestrian discipline) rider and instructor for over 20 years, and have had a similar experience. Many of the best dressage riders are not the best instructors, because riding well and teaching well aren't quite the same skillset. I also think elite riders don't tend to think about teaching much, they're much more focused on themselves and spend very little time dissecting their skill in a way that they could impart their knowledge to others.
In high school I got a perfect score on ACT/SAT multiple times. My classmates would ask me how they could do better, too. Never knew how to answer that. Choose the right answer more often, I guess?
Yeah, this brings back memories early in my career of a co-worker offering to pay me money to tutor him in the GMAT for business school. I tried my best, we sat down one time and both of us quickly realized it wasn't going to work.
I was always better at verbal on every standardized test I took, and that seems the tougher part to teach. Unless you're some sort of math wizard who just stares at an algebra or geometry problem and knows the answer, you're probably using the same basic steps as everyone else, just more quickly and accurately, maybe mentally doing certain steps that other people have to write out. You can at least "show your work" in terms of how you solved problems.
But for verbal, it's basically, "learn 2 read, noob", I don't know what to tell you. There's no work to show. For vocab-oriented problems, there are some suggested lists to memorize. The GMAT didn't have any vocab though, IIRC.
I eventually realized that the answer is "practice." If you like reading, you do it a lot, so you get more practice and get better at it. I encourage people who ask me to find something, anything they enjoy reading, and read it.
100%. In nuclear power plant training school I saw people who were one bad test away from flunking out who were great at teaching concepts to their classmates. The guys with the best test scores were terrible teachers, everything just came naturally to them.
This is probably true. My husband is an amazing mountain biker, but when he was trying to teach me how to ride he was hopeless. I’d say “well, how do I get over that obstacle” and he’d say “you just hit it with aggression!” and he’d make some sort of motion with his body. It made no sense to me so I found some other guy to explain it to me. My husband is such a natural athlete that all these things are just instinctual for him. He also has way better social skills than I do, so he had to explain a lot of interactions to me as well. Two of our kids are on the spectrum so I guess they got it from me.
After college I felt this way at my sales job(s). I’m just such an elaborate communicator and intelligent individual that can’t be replicated. I made over six figures at 22 years old but can’t work in a structured environment. Being on time and “working hard” are irrelevant. The owners of the company made millions over 4 years of me working on and off. No scams. No lies. I made over six figures but was used. Plus, my managers were abusive about me being on time and looking like I’m working. I’m going back to school to
Become a lawyer and my family thinks I’m not a success cuz I’m 26 and In poverty. I don’t think most people my age will come close to success. The only reason why i will is cuz im supposed to be rich and powerful and don’t really see material items as success.
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.
Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear from women with Aspie traits, who are relatively rare and less visible.
I've heard animal interests are pretty common among female Aspies, you get the maternal aspects without the social stuff.
Horses are also metaphors for masculinity, as many people have said--they're big, strong, fast, and have to be tamed, but you never really control them.
Wow. So much horse content in these posts. There is a famous autistic author who is an expert with horses and large animals. I forget her name but will google it now.
Temple Grandin.
SHe's an expert on animal behavior generally - she's totally changed the US meat industry with her insights (by convincing McDonald's etc. that her views were correct). Her work on autism is fantastic as well - she did a great interview on Jordan Peterson's podcast (and actually pretty much is the only person he's interviewed who forced him to let the interviewee talk more than him). There's also a very nice movie (called "Temple Grandin") about her life.
She would be a terrific person for RH to interview.
Never heard of this person, I’ll try to look into her.
Her website: https://www.templegrandin.com
She was diagnosed early with Kanner's autism, I recall. Fascinating woman.
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.
That statement doesn't sound very astonishing at all...wait a second...
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…
The regional differences I have noticed between the south and the northeast are that if you have any inclination towards the arts or humanities in the deep south, at least as a male, you'd be considered effeminate, which is a synonym for homosexual in a working-class context, which also means you will be classified as weird or otherwise persona non grata.
A big difference in places where you mainly interact with the professional classes, especially the big cities, is that they are less inclined to see trait neuroticism as indicative of behavioral abnormality because they are more open to social differences like sexual orientation or stereotypical behaviors relate to one's sex. There is also much less mixing between the professional and working classes in big cities because they literally do not speak the same language anymore, which just reinforces the echo chambers.
I've thought about that quite a bit. What's normal depends on where you are, right? In the land of autists the semi-autist is normie.
I don't know if it's 'their mind their social reality' as it's 'everyone around me loves to talk about this shit so why not'? That's 'normal' over there.
Masking? Not stimming (if you do), not talking about your interests, not blurting out the truth even if it's offensive...there are others I'm sure. I figured out a rule of 'never talk about something you're passionate about in person' and later 'don't explore anything you're passionate about because you might talk about it too much and weird people out', which got me through adolescence but had other side effects.
You can also get into the whole gender thing. I've seen the argument the whole gender/title IX/manly men are bad/asking a girl out is harassment situation is an attempt to optimize society for moderate female autists at the expense of male ones, but I can't remember where. (It occasionally bites real female autists in the ass hard because they actually believe all the rhetoric about 'inclusion' and 'tolerance' and think they're safe.)
I don't think it's about going or resisting the flow. The way I think about it through the metaphor of navigating social situations like navigating a city. So you're sitting on a bench and you decide you are hungry. You know the city and you head to your regular spot, but the sidewalk is closed. "Adapting" means you cross the road. Not adapting could mean you decide you'll go to the hamburger joint down the road instead. Either way, you're changing your actions with a full understanding of what your options are and how each one will change the situation.
The aspie is like a mountain man, they're sitting on the bench and are hungry, so they start going in a random direction looking for food. They reach the roadblock and they're like what is this thing? Should I go over it? They try that but people start giving them dirty looks. So they head off in another direction. All this time they're looking for a deer and they're passing tons of restaurants because they don't know what they are. "Masking" means you learn these rules like hopping roadblocks bad and that some buildings have food in them. Eventually you develop an algorithm which leads to you getting fed with high probability. At that point you can barely function as a member of society, but that's not the ability to do adaptation like the city dweller can.
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.
If he was able to have a lifelong career as a machinist then he overcame the most important problems with Autism.
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.
Not to be insensitive, but maybe he's just bad at math? I mean a lot of people can't do calculus or even fractions. Not making any gains in the subject without a lot of struggle is pretty much the norm.
I get the impression that clinicians have replaced "Asperger's syndrome", which is highly descriptive and useful, with "High functioning Autism", which is not, because Hans Asperger has been cancelled. I think he was Nazi-adjacent or something. I agree with you! Calling people like Richard and me "autistic" is a disservice to people like your son.
No. Dr. Asperger was a fairly active Nazi. Not only did he benefit professionally from the mass expulsion of Jews from medicine to get his promotion to directorship of the Curative Education Clinic at twenty-eight years old (as well as benefitting from picking up on research left off by two Jewish colleagues of his named Frankl and Weiss whom were forced to abandon their work when they fled to the US in '38); he also participated extensively in the Nazis child euthanasia program. He might well've been responsible for dozens of murders:
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0209-5
That said, I still agree it was a mistake to drop the term Asperger's syndrome from the DSM-5. Horrible though his crimes were, the term itself is nonetheless widely understood by the public, many of whom probably don't even know it was named after a real person, and Dr. Asperger made a meaningful contribution to advancing a better understanding and treatment of ASD, even with it taking near half a century for his paper to be translated to English.
Thank you so much! I had a very shallow understanding of the history.
I don't know anything about being Nazi-adjacent but it was always dumb to have two terms to describe the same thing so I'm glad we are down to one.
To your point, we've found that people respond differently to our son depending on which word they know, autistic or aspergers. Aspergers is, sadly, increasingly less known as a term, but generally we prefer it because the word autism conjures exactly as you describe, something more debilitating. Our son is undeniably different, people see it right away, but he isn't stupid. But the minute the word autism is used, I've seen people go from treating him as merely eccentric to downright stupid.
I don't think we need a different term, it's already understood that it is a spectrum and some are lower functioning than others.
There were originally two types of autism described in the early 20th century: Asperger's syndrome, which we're all familiar with, and Kanner's syndrome, which is classic autism. They are qualitatively different. It doesn't do anyone any good to confuse them. Temple Grandin seems to have Kanner's from what I've read of her work.
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
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.
As an adult aspie woman with no female friends today, I might go read this book myself. When a girl, I could hang out with the boys all right, but as a woman I find it entirely understandable and right that I should be in the woman group that always seems to form at parties and not the man group (men who are married, after all). However, this leads to great boredom and even loneliness - I hate parties now. A guide to woman sure would help!
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.
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.).
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.
"Just ask any young male expressing thoughts like this how he'd react if proposituoned by a girl/woman who was a very pleasant person but he found extremely unattractive."
This is a worthless example. Men pay money to have sex with women we find unattractive, and don't find any woman to be both very pleasant and extremely unattractive. Women don't even want to have sex with most of the men they do find attractive, and they find far fewer men attractive than men do women.
If you wanna tell young men something useful, you'd be better off being honest that unless they're at least around the top two standard deviations of hotness, or at least above-average in personal charm, they need to focus more on getting good at something and earning money and resources if they wanna get girls. Men won't be helped by being told stories that fall apart with a slight breeze.
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!