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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to be callous to be a psycopath. And you don't need to be a psycopath to be callous. If you think someone is an a-hole, call the person an a-hole. Please leave diagnostics for professionals.

Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise.

Humans are complex and deep. And sometimes awful. There are more dimensions to a person than a good/bad guy or psycho/normal.

And with asperger - neurological diversity expands this space in ways it makes it very hard for neurotypicals to intuitively tell what the hell is going on.

Nobody is excused for bad manners. But not having any would not make person a psychopath.

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> Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise. . Small point of contention- people with high-functioning autism (aspergers pre DSM-5) generally understand and care how they are perceived, but still have difficulty interacting in social spaces. Depending on the individual, communication skills can vary wildly. This is one of the reasons suspected to be behind autism's extremely high co-morbidity with depression disorders.

>generally understand and care how they are perceived

Personally, I do care how I am percieved. I want to be a legitimately good person. However, we sometimes do things that make it look like we don't care what others think of us because it doesn't always occur to us that what we are doing isn't normal. Even when beforehand we think of what a normal and appropriate thing to do might be we could totally miss the mark and do something weird that gives the impression that we don't care.

Quite true, my expression was very clumsy.

I know very closely several diagnozed asperger spectrum persons - I should have written their behaviour may seem non-caring when in fact they may try their hardest to behave as neurotypical would and to act in the best manners they understand. But human interactions are really complex and difficult.

Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum.

I dated a woman on the Autism spectrum. This has been discussed in many books about Aspergers: People on the spectrum can resemble sociopaths and psychopaths on the surface. They are not. However, the appearance of insensitivity can often look like it to laypeople.

> Please leave diagnostics for professionals.

> asperger spectrum

This is no longer recognized in the DSM-5.

Asperger's is just the old name for it, it was split into autism and social communication disorder.

I don't know what that is. The world does not rotate (always) around US medical standards.

Asperger/autism - it's still a spectrum that's affected with neurological function.

So we are talking about neurologically distinct persons who may have been called in some instances as "being on the asperger spectrum".

What is the current accepted terminology for this neurological profile?

(I have close family diagnozed by neurologists 'on this spectrum' - and it is very much a specific neurological profile whatever we may call it).

But it was in DSM-IV. Are all of those people now cured?

No. But isn't it ironic for someone to complain about armchair psychologists and then start talking about a condition that's not even recognized anymore?

DSM-5 replaced everything with autism spectrum disorder.

No. But isn't it ironic for someone to complain about armchair psychologists and then start talking about a condition that's not even recognized anymore?

The way you put it sounded like the thing didn't even exist. Whereas, it was just a name change. If that wasn't deliberately misleading, it might as well have been. Someone who isn't familiar with these issues might have looked things up briefly, then concluded that someone was lying.

In my view, intellectual honesty demands taking care not to create such misleading situations, even at the cost of strongly "scoring a point." Especially at that cost!

And to elaborate on this the explanation I read stated that with DSM-IV you had a bunch of specific disorders with their respective checklists of symptoms which didn't accurately reflect variations between individuals and the overlapping symptoms. (Since its a spectrum). This led to situations where people didn't check enough boxes to be eligible for certain treatments that might benefit them because they were associated with a slightly different diagnosis than the one they had.

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