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Comment by throwaway91111 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't read too much into individual examples. However, in composite, these little tests do reveal how people think overall.

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I often default to taking people literally. Because of that, people who don't like me sometimes suggest I am autistic as a faux polite way of publicly calling me a social retard.

Although ASD individuals are prone to being very literal, I have observed two other types of people who tend to do that.

The first are people from low context cultures, where you say what you mean and mean what you say. Except for certain aspects of military intelligence and information security, military culture is generally like this. My father and ex husband were both career military. So, I tend towards being blunt and direct. Some people find this refreshing. Others find it abhorrent.

The other group of people that I have observed as tending to be very literal and taking people at their word is people with PhDs. Less educated people routinely leap to conclusions that are rooted in personal bias. People with sufficient education tend to consider only the facts in evidence. They aren't stupid and they aren't unaware of the fact that there may be additional facts not currently in evidence. But they are less prone to shitty, prejudiced behaviors that are the lifeblood of sexism, racism, etc.

So, I am not at all confident that the way ASD individuals think is a) unique to them or b) evidence of mental defect.

I am highly skeptical of the degree to which all sorts of differences get labeled and medicalized and framed as a defect. They used to do this to homosexuals. IIRC, homosexuality is no longer officially listed as a mental disorder (aka form of insanity).

So, while I know that a battery of tests can cast light on certain things, I still fail to see why this specific test is seen as indicative of being on the spectrum.

I was under the impression that the primary characteristic is social; that is, you need to have some sort of difficulty in social situations to qualify at all for "autism". I would not imagine that these tests would be the line between "autistic" and "socionormal" (probably not the right term) but between "autism" and some other diagnosis.

So perhaps the problem here is either a) I'm missing something with respect to autism diagnosis or b) they shouldn't be portraying this as crucial evidence in public discourse, which is what i think you've been arguing for. Is this a good understanding?

I might add i agree; I think certain fields attractive a different way of thinking that overlaps heavily with the autistic spectrum.

A tldr of what I think is that the world has radically changed in the last 100 years and society has become openly hostile to people in ways that are more problematic for some people than others. Rather than wondering what the hell has happened at scale that the world is so problematic for so many people to navigate, we hand out diagnoses to those having the most trouble. It is a form of washing our hands of responsibility for shitting on people (at the societal level).

There is an autism "epidemic." So, either something has happened at scale to cause a sudden and dramatic increase in basically birth defects (which appears to be true, actually) or society is less people friendly in critical ways or both. Yet, we don't say "Shit! We have poisoned the environment and it is causing our babies to be defective! We need to fix this!" And we also don't say "Shit! What the fuck is wrong with the world that so many perfectly normal people cannot function in it?" No, we say "You, as an individual, are defective and you, as an individual, needs to try harder to fit in. Don't expect the world to be too accommodating."

Which must be some new record for politely telling people "Fuck you and the horse you road in on" with plausible deniability.

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