Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
psyche.co
psyche.co
As we explained in a recent review paper, researchers have repeatedly found evidence that Autistic individuals are, on average, more consistent, less biased, and more rational than non-autistic individuals in a variety of contexts.
Specifically, many Autistic people seem to be less susceptible to cognitive biases, and therefore better able to make judgments and reach decisions in a more traditionally ‘rational’ manner.
Interesting if true; it could indicate that at least mild Autism is a beneficial adaptation. Though those biases probably came about for good reasons, it could be they've become obsolete and are no longer worth it.
The same kind of logical, exacting thinking necessary for mastery of physical systems is in tension with the kinds of thinking used in social games. Some brains are better at one than the other — and we have disorders at both extremes.
I’ve always wondered if autism and dyscalclia are something of “polar opposites”.
Thanks!
"Autism Spectrum" is a deliberately vague term that has been created and stretched to bring a variety of minor social and emotional functional differences under the general label of "autism". As far as I can tell, in the US the major purpose of this has been to divert special education funding from severely impaired children to less-impaired children from higher socioeconomic strata, and it has been very effective in doing so.
So to directly answer your questions, "Asperger's" (or whatever substitute term you find acceptable -- I'm perfectly fine with a substitute) is very useful to distinguish people with minor social and emotional functional differences -- those people who are, for example, able to hold down a tech job and post about autistic politics to Hacker News -- from highly impaired people such as my daughter who will never hold a job and whose verbal skills are at a three year old level.
These distinctions are vitally important to ensure that appropriate funding goes to these highly impaired children rather than being siphoned away to children of well-connected or politically savvy parents who are fully capable of succeeding in the mainstream educational system without aid.
There are plenty of people who the diagnosis of Asperger's who will never hold down a job. I'd hardly consider it "minor" even if it is relative to your daughter.
I am autistic, btw. An Autist. An Aspie. High-functioning. So's my brother. So's my father. None of us give a toss about these terms, but the subject of our traits and our getting on in society remains of interest.
Asperger was never a member of the Nazi party.
I invite everyone here who has stood up against a murderous totalitarian dictatorship at the likely cost of their life to tell us how Asperger should have done better.
> now everything falls under the Autism Spectrum
This is only true in the US. And people who were previously diagnosed as Aspergers retain that diagnosis, even in the US.
I don't think they are. Plenty of autistic people are bad at maths (you just don't meet these people in engineering circles!), and plenty of "social butterflies" are good at it.
If you try to walk across the desert without drinking water you will be dead in two days. That's not "the long run."
If you carry water and salt with you, you can make it a week or more, but not if you strategize poorly: walking during the day instead of at night will deplete your water much more rapidly, and if you treat your canteen carelessly you will lose the water. If you have the knowledge to navigate to places with drinkable water along the way, or the knowledge and materials to distill water from crushed plants, you can make it for months, longer if you brought food or can find it. (Me, I caught and ate raw grasshoppers.) You cannot emotionally manipulate the desert; you cannot trick it; it will not treat you more gently because you beg it for mercy. Rationality (knowledge, skill, heedfulness, and above all epistemic humility) is your only hope. It's no guarantee, because a rattlesnake or a hailstone may strike you at random, but it's your only hope.
It's not just the desert. The same is true of the ocean, of mushroom hunting, of wasp's nests, and of the frozen North with its alpine sweetvetch. Nature's ways are subtle and merciless, but they are amenable to understanding, and rationality permits you to order your life in harmony with them and thus survive and prosper a little while; though not, as you say, in the long run.
The whole world is like this, all except for tiny special contexts humans have created where the ruthless laws of Nature are suspended a little bit, where mercy and humanity and fellow-feeling hold sway.
I can also recommend reading about alpine sweetvetch.
There's no "merely" social consensus, quite on the contrary, the social consensus has always dominated all the things that matter; being exiled from the tribe was effectively a death sentence even if the tribe did not directly kill you, and a dominant position in the tribe gains larger benefits than dominating against the real world, both in a hunter-gatherer environment and in modern society.
But everything in your second paragraph is incorrect. Even before the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for banished people to find a new place to live, either as hermits or as part of a new tribe; the outlawing and persecution of individual refugees and "stateless persons" is a Late Modern aberration. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, a subordinate position in a tribe like Japan that is very "dominant against the real world" gains larger benefits than a dominant position in a tribe like the Wola that is much less "dominant against the real world". For example, as a Japanese person, you live twice as long, you probably won't get raped, you are at no risk of being executed for witchcraft if you fall from favor, and if at some point the two tribes come into armed conflict, the Wola will be entirely at the mercy of the Japanese.
Even in the first paragraph, though, there is a significant error. You say, "Starving or not starving... procreation... [and] changing the world in various ways [mostly] depend on how many other people you can motivate to go along with your plans." But in fact they do not. These things depend jointly on whether you get teamwork on plans, a social question, and on whether the plans are any good in the first place, a rational question. This is what sunk the Great Leap Forward: Mao was suffering from the delusion that you so clearly expressed here. He evidently motivated people to go along with his plans to an almost unprecedented degree, but many objective, non-social aspects of the plans (notably backyard smelting, the Four Pests campaign, deep plowing, and close planting) were destined to produce catastrophe, especially if they were executed thoroughly. The greatest famine in human history was the predictable consequence, killing some 40 million people.
The industrial revolution was a consequence of Galileo's rebellion against this subjectivist view: he dared to look through his telescope at the real world and believe what he saw, despite its incompatibility with the socially constructed virtual reality of his time. It took some time, but Italy paid for its rejection of Galileo with centuries of penury and destitution. Ultimately Galileo influenced the external world, as you say, far more than the crabbed Inquisitors who persecuted him.
I stand with Galileo and against Mao. Will you join me?
Using your example of Galileo, his effectiveness in propagating his science was severely limited by a scientifically irrelevant feud with church officials. Had he been more politically savvy, he would have been able to avoid tying the scientific issues with the personal conflict, and would not have provoked the church into this conflict - IMHO what we have in historical evidence indicates that it was perfectly plausible for him to get the church to support his position, which would have supported both his personal interests and the general progress of science, but he failed at that due to his personal qualities w.r.t. social aspects.
I don't think a Galileo who spent much of his time acquiring political savvy and currying allies would have been able to make the progress he did make. Such a Galileo might have simply decided not to believe what he saw through the telescope, or to keep quiet about it. The Church had already burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for possessing the writings of Erasmus, and there are many other such stories: Bach was imprisoned for refusing to resign from his Kapellmeister post; Swartz committed suicide to escape imprisonment for downloading too many academic papers; Turing committed suicide to escape persecution for being openly gay; Newton lived to a ripe old age but certainly had a life full of interpersonal conflict; Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs while awaiting trial for treason.
Fundamentally, rationality is insubordinate, and social graces frequently demand dishonesty, so that those who most love the truth are never those who get along best with others.
And those are my heroes, not Donald Trump or Mao Zedong.
There's a better-written essay on this topic at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-....
> The Galileo affair (Italian: il processo a Galileo Galilei) began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo was prosecuted for his support of heliocentrism, the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe. ...
> Galileo's discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, and in 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be "formally heretical." Galileo went on to propose a theory of tides in 1616, and of comets in 1619; he argued that the tides were evidence for the motion of the Earth.
> In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which defended heliocentrism, and was immensely popular. Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633 and found him "vehemently suspect of heresy" sentenced him to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642. At that point, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas after the trial.
The rest of the article provides an even more thoroughgoing rejection of the confused ideas in the comment to which I am regrettably replying; the atom of truth in it is that, 16 years after first being prosecuted, he included the new Pope's own counterarguments in his book along with a rebuttal, which displeased the Pope, who had previously favored Galileo.
1: https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you...
More autistic isn’t the same a ‘severe’.
If you think it’s possible to make the same point without reference to a disease, then by all means do so.
The difference of course between our two analogies, is that a tumor like autism is something that has been observed by people and not constructed by them, and we do not know much the reason why some tumors are benign and some not and we do not know much the reason why some people with autism are severely disabled and some not. But we do know why some scooters have electric motors and some do not.
In fact it may be that at some point in the future the autism spectrum will be broken up and be identified as several different disabilities, lets say Preboscot's behavioral pattern for those with a range of light autistic behaviors and Ternobyni's syndrome for those with what we would describe as heavy autism today and in that imagined future these different disabilities do not have any actual connection to each other but just manifest in some similar symptoms, the same way that diamonds and clear quartz might have some similarities in appearance.
But until that imagined future comes to pass we live in a present where the the extremes of the autism spectrum are still defined as autism.
I hope that my explanation is acceptable to you, and if you feel a need to morally elevate yourself over others via the sport of internet commenting you pick another target as the night has just started where I am, and my severely disabled autistic child sometimes only lets me have a few hours of sleep as it is, I would at least like to spend the time before he wakes up and wants to jump about relaxing instead of in meaningless argumentation.
You say people at the “extremes” are disabled, but that’s not true, because there are “extreme” savants who are not disabled.
Nobody is disputing that there are autistic people who are disabled, the claim is simply that autism doesn’t always mean disability.
If a person can't e.g. talk to someone to buy food, and the huge majority of people can, then they have a problem. That's not severe - it might be not perfectly accomondating, but it's reasonable. And of cource society does try to help in many ways (consulting, people being understanding, parents, school experts, medicine, etc)
cystic fibrosis used to be under the (all-encompassing) umbrella "chronic fatigue" because, well, they were chronically fatigued. when its niche finally gained enough data to escape the umbrella, diagnosis and treatment greatly accelerated. of course, you'd expect that once a cause is identified, but umbrellas tend to contain many totally unrelated sub-causes with wildly different subtleties that just happen to fit a vague description that matches others.
Higher resolution (of concepts) is better.
Autism isn't some reasoning superpower, it's just a difference in processing stimuli.
I would agree with your characterisation as a difference in processing stimuli.
Highly logical, no breaking down in a fit of misery, less susceptible to loneliness, very useful for times when you're stuck in a survival situation.
My main trigger is light — too bright, bad color, too much flicker, all of which can cause me to get “irrationally” angry in a conversation about any mundane topic. I’m not really that passionate about most of the things I get overwhelmed by, so my heightened emotional state because of some sensory stimulus is not useful.
All my anger/sadness tells me is that it’s bright and I need to either put on some sunglasses or turn off the lights. I have learned over time not to blow up at other people about it because it’s not their fault, and they’ll think that I think it is if I have a meltdown in front of them.
Maybe it's like smell, where there are many bad scents and even if it didn't impact my survival I wouldn't want to live without the sense, and I should indulge more. The only concrete thing I've learned is that significantly reducing my caffeine intake helps but also distracts.
Right, and thinking something is delicious includes an impulse to eat rather than avoid, but lots of people still avoid food they think is delicious in order to diet. When empathy becomes too strong then it starts hurting you as a person a lot every time you see someone who has problems, so you learn to predict and avoid those situations, or you might even learn to fear them since the empathy creates too much agony in you. Empathy is just a feeling, your rational part can still work around it.
Neurotypical psychology is deep, complex, and fascinating. They devote significant brainpower to constantly evaluating and testing other people's behavior against a constantly evolving set of rules in order to ascertain whether they are a member of the neurotypical's tribe or ingroup. The rules have to change and evolve because ingroup members will be able to predict how they will change, and so catch any outgroupers who have heretofore successfully infiltrated the ingroup. It's like you have a monster CPU with a lot of cores, and then devote half (or more!) of those cores to the world's most elaborate DRM scheme. We benefit because much of that CPU power is in us freed to do other exciting things, like programming or particle physics; but we also suffer because most of the people around us cannot attest that we are legitimate humans running a legitimate copy of the human OS.
Relatedly, I love Japan and I love the Japanese people but... Japanese society has one of the most elaborate, impenetrable set of social rules in the world. If you want to know why hikikomori are such a thing there, it's simple, really: so many more people are frustrated with their failure to conform to the elaborate ruleset it takes to simply be Japanese and tired of being flagged as impostors in that game of Among Us that they simply give up and withdraw into whatever brings them comfort.
I would have thought the main performance bottle neck to social calibration would be the unspoken mind-reading requirement that seems to be prevalent in American society.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but from what I know of Japanese society is that it's pretty blunt in its expectations. So there isn't this "mental searching tax" to make the "right" social choice that seems to be de riguer in the States. Everyday behavior in Japanese society has explicit procedures that don't change all that much.
As I understand it, social failure in Japan is result of one of two things: The inability/lack of interest to follow these procedures (e.g. hikikomori, non-conformists, etc.), or following these procedures but with mistaken assumptions as to how the consequences would turn out (e.g. "herbivore" salarymen who have done everything right, but are unable to find wives like their fathers could)
Japanese society is not really safe harbor for Japanese on the spectrum. It is, however, quite gracious to foreigners. As a foreigner no one will say anything to you, for instance, if you use the wrong honorific or something; most will be impressed that you can speak the language at all.
Once you've been living and working in Japan for some time and have started to assimilate, though, you are on and you've got to perform the appropriate rituals or people will start to think you're being aggressively rude.
So as a Japanese person you are tasked with not only following the rituals, but also sussing out from the vaguest of cues what your friends, family, potential mate, etc. are thinking because they're following the rituals too instead of engaging in explicit communication.
Regrettably, I had to learn a lot of this by reading; I don't have a lot of personal experience with this because I'm a Westerner. The Japanese are generally more willing to be open with foreigners because of the relative lack of social repercussions for honesty with foreigners than with Japanese. They don't have to be "on", they don't have to actively be Japanese in front of us and that makes for some interesting and refreshing barside conversation, lol.
[0] Earlier negative stereotypes of Japanese as being "sneaky" and untrustworthy are partially rooted in this sort of thing. They mask their true intentions to avoid embarrassment, but to Americans it looks like they're trying to trick or defraud us. And they see us as loud, pushy bulls in china shops who are unable to handle delicate affairs with any nuance, even if we're well-meaning.
This is not a fact. It’s a now discredited stereotype.
There seems to be a great bundling going on, where people with a wide range of various problems gets bundled under large umbrella terms like "ADHD" or "Autism". Before Autism and Asperger was different, now they are the same etc. and some even argue that ADHD and Autism are the same thing.
Edit: Btw, there was one stereotype that was never true, that Autists didn't have empathy. Autists always felt empathy. What they were said to lack was the ability to read people, not feel empathy for people. Not being able to read people can be said to reduce "a person's ability to relate emotionally and socially to themselves and others", so that statement wasn't wrong with the old definition/understanding.
That’s not a fact. It’s a now discredited stereotype.
I suspect (but don’t know how to test the hypothesis) that cognitive biases are why human learning can produce good results with dramatically less data than machine learning. More rational, yes, when you get there; but harder to learn at all.
You might like the book "Simple Heuristics that make us smart" which explores this idea
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Heuristics-That-Make-Smart/dp/...
Also tend towards common sense slanted bluntness over diplomatic word dancing more than not and with that, Greta Thunberg does some good examples of that.
One finally aspect, my thinking is more wider in scope still as a child and with that, will happily ask that awkward question and equally see things from a perspective others tend to overlook.
One time during an exit interview I pointed out (some concrete feedback they could take action on, aaah, how naive of me) how bad the DevOps team had it (80+ hour weeks, constant weekend work, all hours on call, etc) as one of my reasons for leaving and the CEO could NOT understand why I would care about this at all. His response was about how our team (BI) had it so good, which we did, so why would that matter!
He literally could not understand that I had empathy for another team and it affected my perception of the company.
My coworkers were sympathetic or empathetic, but would just shrug and agree saying there were “culture problems”.
The only “autistic” part would be the degree I cared compared to people around me. This was where it sunk in that my moral scale wasn’t relative like most people’s.
Not picking on you or your post, but it's interesting that we still consider this an adaptation. What if this is humanity's natural state and allistics are the adaptation?
The neocortex handles rational thinking and reasoning, so an increased reliance on it would put autism further from evolutionary predecessors. Also, you would expect the ratios of allistics:autistic to be reversed as well.
Also, as a mildly autistic person, I don't believe autism would be a beneficial trait in the wild. I would probably be fine, but some of my tendencies would lessen my likelihood of survival.
So it's hard to imagine what it would look like in other primates.
Like these[1] loners in slime mold colonies. We don't even know if these kinds of variation are common or not. Autism-like variations might be like this or it could be human specific.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/slime-molds-sh...
Actually this seems unlikely given the sequence of evolution. But...
Here is a spoof of Allistic Spectrum Disorder imagined as if it affected a small minority of people (trigger warning for those obsessed with status).
From [nonexistent] DSM-VI: Hyper-Social (Allistic) Spectrum Disorder
HSSD is a syndrome in which there is an over-focus on social phenomena at the expense of other aspects of the world. Contrast with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which is in many ways the opposite.
Diagnosis: Any 5 of the following are present:
Inability to express self clearly; use of ambiguous and vague language; discomfort with clear language
Obsessive interest in knowing personal details of acquaintances or strangers e.g. celebrities, or even fictional characters
Unfounded belief in being able to read other people's minds, in particular to know if someone is lying or not.
Difficulty in thinking in a systematic logical way, e.g. to do math or program computers
Tendency to try to bend and stretch rules for no obvious reason. Discomfort with accurately following instructions and processes.
Forms beliefs based on the opinions of others rather than on facts and evidence Tendency to affiliate with groups and to align all opinions to the group
Frequently lies, mostly for social convenience (studies suggest 3-5 times a day)
Preoccupied with social status and “looking the part”
Focus on status symbols, and symbols of virtue and group affiliation
Focus on appearances more than underlying reality
Intolerance of diversity of opinion
Intolerance towards people who do not have HSSD
Spends large amounts of time on shallow “social” activities with little actual content. May lead to destructive activities such as substance abuse e.g. alcohol, and over-eating.
Lack of interest in mastering difficult, especially technical, subjects in depth Tendency to stare into people's eyes, and to believe that this gives great insight into the other person's mind. Usually unaware that this can create discomfort in the other person.
Tendency to think that staring into people's eyes demonstrates trustworthiness.
Think of the cartoons where the "nerds" are trying to fight/play sports and are trying to calculate optimal trajectories, etc. The additional rationality slows down coming to conclusions significantly and I'd argue in most cases the added accuracy is of marginal value.
Basically, I believe a lot of those biases are shortcuts that give a good enough answer in significantly less time. I.e. Newton's method over actually computing derivatives.
Suppose you're a judge in a contest. The contest has rules. If you apply the rules the same to all the contestants, that might be considered a disadvantage when you have the opportunity to apply the rules more favorably to your friends. Whereas the other guy who interprets the rules to favor his friends creates the expectation that the friends will return the favor someday.
But the advantage isn't always an advantage. If the other participants view you as biased then they won't even show up or pay entry fees anymore. Then there is no more contest and your friends lose even the possibility of winning.
It's kind of like asking if there's a disadvantage in not being a sociopath. Turns out, maybe not.
We still value people who strongly assert what they think is the correct answer quickly though and view that as a sign of intelligence (and to be fair it is, but its more about the intelligence of knowing how to convince rather than the intelligence of knowing what is correct).
This assumes that being less rational (and e.g. more passionate, optimistic, etc.) is not more beneficial, which might very well be the case.
Emotion is a known irrational effect on decision making, autism is often associated with the lack of emotion in certain contexts (or inability to understand the emotion). Having less of the thing that makes you irrational would make you more rational by default.
Similar to Charlie's Munger devotion in life isn't to be smart, it's to figure out how to not be dumb. How can you not be irrational? Don't let emotion impact your decision making.
* To be clear, I'm not saying those on the spectrum don't have emotions (they do), though in my experience it comes across quite differently. It feels more like "another factor to be analyzed", which can easily be disregarded in some contexts, than an "invisible hand" behind the scenes influencing decisions.
E.g. Certain professions instill in you biases. Or force you to pick them. Examples: police officers, medical, politicians, social workers. And I bet those are professions that people with degrees of autism avoid.
I am curious if the lack of bias exists in other conditions that end up acting in a short of unempathetic way (for different reasons as noted).
Many people with ASD put a lot of time and effort into learning and altering their natural behavior in order to better understand and interact in a way that is perceived as normal by nerutotypical people.
I'm hopeful the inverse will happen more over time as well, neurotypicals putting effort into learning and adjusting their own behavior to better interact with and understand autistic people.
Making it normal to include input from all neurotypes (as opposed to excluding) is a great step forwards.
You make it sound as if liking old movies should be cause for suspicion!
You wouldn’t need to qualify it otherwise.
Your comment doesn’t make you look stupid or casually dismissive.
He's definitely a weirdo at times but he's a good guy, (I mean that in a positive way, for instance he likes old movies and watches them constantly, but when he says a movie is good he has never been wrong)
as the way I originally wrote it:
He's definitely a weirdo at times, (I mean that in a positive way, for instance he likes old movies and watches them constantly, but when he says a movie is good he has never been wrong) but he's a good guy
The "but he's a good guy" never syntactically follows the information about the movies, it is always tied to my opinion that calling my friend a "movie fanatic" isn't a strong enough descriptor and he teeters on the verge of being weird about it.
I have a crazy anecdote like that too. My severely (barely verbal, had his own barely intelligible language) step brother would watch like a grand total of two movies on repeat. So many times that for a decade afterward you could say a single line from either movie, and I could finish the script for you.
Those two movies? Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Willow.
After a couple of decades of a break from being forced to watch them I finally did, and they're exemplary.
WFRR is objectively incredible: https://medium.com/labjorfaap/who-framed-roger-rabbit-bumpin... as a production, and as work of art.
And Willow is one of the best fantasy epics ever made, IMHO.
He was maybe ~6 when WFRR came out on VHS could already spot a good movie. He's probably still mentally a poorly functioning 6 despite being 36 now, but there's a lot more to him than his obsession with Christmas. :)
I feel like in the years to come we're going to learn a lot from and benefit greatly from autistic folks. (I also might be one.)
Rather it's more a spectrum as in a spectrum of colors: there are a number of traits to autism, not all of which might be present in a person diagnosed with ASD so single-criteria tests like identify the emotions in these photographs, for example, don't really work as good diagnostic tools.
This article found with a quick Google search seems to sum up some of this reasonably well: https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisedu.org/what-is-meant-by-...
I think a better example to sunken cost bias could be found than this one as people usually pay more for trips that they prefer more in the first place.
If the question was "Which of these trips would you like to pay for twice?", then it's immediately obvious that the cheaper trip should be cancelled.
Choosing the one you'd rather go on right now shows a lack of planning. It seems less rational to me.
How can you infer that just from its price though? :P
Maybe a significant chunk of your motivation to visit city A was to see it covered in snow and do some winter sports, so if you cancel it now you'll likely have to wait a whole year to do it again?
Or maybe you booked these trips to see some bands playing life? What if the band playing in the cheaper city is less likely to play again within your reachable area in foreseeable future?
There's a huge amount of reasons why canceling the cheaper trip may not be the best option, and I believe noticing that is what the article was actually talking about.
On the other hand, the previous price is a signal that does provide some information about the differences between travel to A and travel to B and allows to make a better-than-chance decision than treating both options as equal.
> In this case, many people will cancel the cheaper trip regardless of which one they would prefer to go on
"All else" is explicitly not equal, there's a difference in preference for some reason other than price. This is not a puzzle with a correct answer, this is an example of specific behavior in specific cases observed in specific people who have all needed information available to them.
For a more concrete example - if you have bought a $10 and a $100 ticket, buying a second $10 ticket is, all else being equal, preferable to buying a second $100 ticket, regardless of how desirable either option is.
Not if you won't desire it anymore (or desire less) at later date. Or if you won't be able to take it at a later date at all (which influences desirability at present). Or when the price doesn't really matter, you'll be able to afford it anyway. Or in multitude of other circumstances that may be relevant to the given example that you may think about once you decide to not miss the point of that example anymore, since it's very far from implying that "all else is being equal" ;)
Of course there are situations where you can't or wouldn't want to buy the same thing at a later point in time, but in general you can. Starting with the assumption that you purchased both a $10 and a $100 ticket to two different events because you wish to experience both and further assuming that you can still experience both by purchasing a duplicate of one ticket which is available at the same price, as is generally the case, keeping the expensive ticket and buying a duplicate of the less expensive ticket is the rational choice. Without an explicit good reason to do otherwise, it is not an example of the sunk cost fallacy to reduce your future expenses by keeping the more expensive ticket.
Are trip prices "reasonably stable"? Isn't there actually a huge seasonal variance, last-minute offers and so on?
> Of course there are situations where you can't or wouldn't want to buy the same thing at a later point in time, but in general you can.
The example is about trips, which - at least in my experience - are usually chosen based on a huge set of variable incentives to go at specific time to a specific place.
Anyway, the article gives no reason to assume that "the circumstances in the future are essentially the same (ie equal) as they are now" - it actually gives a reason to assume that there are other incentives than the price and doesn't mention whether they change or not in the future - so we can't assume that they won't (and even if we could, it would still be irrelevant to the point it's trying to convey - all it talks about is that autistic people are apparently more likely to take those other circumstances into account, which can lead to a different outcome).
The whole purpose of this discussion is that the point that the article is trying to convey, that autistic people are more likely to consider other circumstances and are thus more logical because they avoid the sunk cost bias is incorrect, because this is not an example of the sunk cost bias. The non-refundable cost you sunk into two things in the past is relevant to the decision of which one to keep because you can use it to predict future prices. What the article claims most people do is in fact the rational approach, and what the article claims autistic people do is generally irrational, thus working against the thesis of their article.
Not enough information is given to make any choice, and there's no intention to give it, since this is not a puzzle. It has no correct answer. It just mentions that some non-financial motivations are at play, but does not specify them (because it's not needed to make a point). You can't make a decision, because you don't have the data.
> The non-refundable cost you sunk into two things in the past is relevant to the decision of which one to keep because you can use it to predict future prices.
You don't have enough information to assume that, or that any future prices will be relevant at all. In fact, the article explicitly says that this cost is "irrelevant" - which makes sense, since you may have no intention to rebook that cancelled trip at all!
If I have paid for two trips and have to cancel one of them with no refunds, I assume that I really wanted to go on both.
So when I am choosing which one to cancel, I am also likely choosing that I will later repurchase the trip that I am cancelling now. So at that point I’d be looking at which of the two trips is cheaper to replace. And if I am not allowed by the rules of this thought experiment to do so, then I must assume that the more expensive one of those two will cost more to buy again later also.
Then also as you say, which one is more preferable in the first place and again, if I was willing to pay more for one of them in the first place then presumably that one.
Unless there was something special about the cheap one. For example, maybe it’s a trip somewhere that I cannot go in the future, only now. Or a trip with someone I want to go there with and they can only go at this time. But again, all of that kind of stuff is left unspecified in the question. So if they force us to make a choice on so little information, what are they expecting, and in what sense is the kind of question they are asking anything but a straw man kind of deal?
What even were the possible answers that respondents could give? If “I don’t know”, or “too little information to determine” are an option then I’d pick one of those, but if the only answer we can give is “cancel the cheap one”/“cancel the expensive one”, then I would say cancel the cheap one, but they can’t then just go and say “oh this is a fallacy and you fell for it”.
Shruggs.
So I don't know the specifics of the question at hand, or if these autistic people were even able to ask these questions, but they seem rather important, and if they in fact NOT asking them but had the opportunity to do so, then I'd question the value of some of the assumptions this article seems to make.
So I completely get this and empathize.
The fact I don't get this anymore is probably from the trauma(?) of parentification I went through growing up.
It may be that the societal rejection autistic people face give them a perspective that enables a more rational worldview, or it could be directly caused by the autism itself.
Interested to see studies that follow up on this.
I think this would only work if all the other people who were also rejected (schizophrenics, bipolars, adhds, etc.) were also more rational and I don't think this is the case (or even close to being the case.) I'm guessing the researchers would have accounted for that.
Everyone says they want rationality and unbiased thinking, but don't really care if it takes extra effort or time. This threw me for years. When I would point out gaps or mention hidden assumptions I would get dismissed almost every time.
Like just because you have data to back up your point/idea doesn't mean your point is right. That's NOT what data-driven actually means. No, what people want is numbers to add to make a story seem more trustworthy.
Once I started treating "rational" or "data-driven" like a buzz word everything made sense.
I would argue that the greatest issue with neurotypical society over all is that it tends to value a singular mode of thinking and being as somehow inherently more valuable than others, failing to recognize that in our many differences we are actually stronger as a whole.
First names of elements started being capitalized. Then there was the "Black" thing, followed by the "White" thing. We seem to be headed back to the 1700s, when Important Words were capitalized.
Unfortunately, if the shit really does hit the fan, this process can lead to validation of the emotions and an 'autistic meltdown'. So it's a double-edged sword, to be sure
Still, I find stuff like this super interesting. It helps dislodge the narrative that autism is a problem or disease, something that needs 'fixing', rather than just being different.
Put another way, I suppose I'm saying that there may be a second group -- "highly rational people" -- that intersects and overlaps significantly with "people with autism", and we could be making statements about one group that should be attributed to the other.
(I'm not trying to touch any nerves here. I'm putting aside the fact that the article is a positive piece about people with autism and makes some enlightening points. I'm just claiming that the "challenging preconceived ideas" may be mostly true, but also too narrow and possibly misleading.)
This is missing a hige piece of context. What about the possibility that you may later decide to repurchase whichever trip you decline now? My future cost is reduced by canceling the cheaper trip now. If both are in the realm of "I'd like to go there someday" and close in appeal, it is more rational to take the more expensive one. If we don't consider that larger (possible) context then obviously take the one you prefer the most.
NonA-DHD typically respond to deadlines with increased urgency, commitment, and re-factoring assessments.
ADHD may respond to deadlines by abandoning tasks and starting new extraneous tasks.
Is that rational? It’s what happens, and since it is such a dramatic and consequential difference, it warrants a reconsideration of the meaning of the term “rational”, and it’s limitations.
ADHD isn’t an isolated minority. It’s a transient condition in a significant number of people, prevalent enough in the population to make economic text books about monolithic “rationality” unfit for purpose.
Various subgroups can have different responses, but rationality is its own ideal, regardless of what people do.
Ostensibly Rational just means “with reasons” or “calculated” but there are many different calculuses under which one could operate.
I agree with GP. Economic rational agents are supposed to do things like maximize utility or minimize loss. I know that I for one do things like “anticipate others’ needs”, “feel ambivalent about eating the entire box of donuts”, and “take a day off work to practice origami”, and I’m not sure how those actions fit into the economic model.
People who 'grow out' of having ADHD either:
1. Developed coping methods that lessened the impact of their symptoms, making them functional enough to not be diagnosable (ADHD is only diagnosed if it negatively impacts your ability to function in two or more of the domains of work, social life, and home/family life). Often people who do this are still negatively impacted by their condition, but their problems are invisible and go unnoticed.
2. Never had ADHD to begin with, and instead had one of the many other psychiatric or physical conditions that can impact executive functioning (e.g. depression, sleep disorders, anxiety, malnutrition, etc.).
(wow I used the word impact a lot in this paragraph)
(May not be remembering this correctly and I assume this study was done in the 90s when thinness was more in fashion - wouldn't be surprised if it didn't replicate if done today)
See also: dunning kruger effect.
My takeaway is that the 'normal' human brain lies to itself in many ways which protect the ego. Some disorders are caused not by disconnection from reality, but rather too accurate a view of reality.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are many autistic traits that have a similar origin: the brains socio-protective instinctual lies are failing, and autistic people are actually acting more rationally.
It may have been the same study or one inspired by the study you mentioned, but I've heard things like this before too.
Yeah, I've heard this about depression. [1]
> Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.
Hmmm. What are they implying by that parenthetical comment placement?
Think of it like primitive vs value types in Java. ‘int a = 7; Integer b = 7’
“a” is 7, but “b” just has a pointer to 7.
—- I guess autistic people must not mind or even prefer to identify in this way, but it can really help in a therapeutic setting not to call someone “a borderline woman” or “a psychotic woman” because for better or worse labeling someone as mentally unhealthy is colloquially tantamount to an insult.
It was a very awkward lunch.
It cannot be combined in a plural; I stand alone.
>"Did this person just assume xy possessive adjectives?"
Differentiating between them is vital to the continued existence of the species.
Talking with your buddies of the same gender about how you were hanging out alone with one of the opposite was a tribally significant thing in the early days of speech. It still today implies you might be mating! And babies might be forthcoming.
I'd guess that it's pretty common for autistic people to fight concepts like singular "they" just out of the sense of maintaining linguistic order, uncorrelated with whether they actually see the need for gender-neutral and non-binary pronouns or not (which can be a source of frustrating misunderstandings that assume bad intent when there's none).
For me, it only "clicked" once I understood that gender and sexuality are completely arbitrary and subjective social constructs that try to describe a whole spectrum of multidimensional behaviors and (potentially repressed) feelings, so there's little point in trying to objectively categorize them - it's all about the subjective impression of the person themself, which makes it obvious that the language should be able to actually express their identities and that it doesn't help anyone to try to force some categorization on them.
Sex is a fundamental property of living organisms; it is not determined by thoughts or feelings.
You said sexuality is a “completely arbitrary and subjective social construct” and that “there's little point in trying to objectively categorize” it. Sex has been studied since animal husbandry existed. So what you said was obviously wrong.
I think there's more than a little utility provided by the communication it enables. I'm all for non binary identities and letting people identify across them as they want, however with any change we must also recognize the utility in the previous norms so that we can preserve some useful aspects as we construct new norms.
1) If we assume that it's essential to genderize pronouns, it doesn't really matter what the majority fits into because existence of other options does not influence that majority at all. The only case where it matters is when someone doesn't fit. The utility remains unaffected (in fact, it actually is increased because of better expressivity).
2) If we assume that it's not necessary to genderize pronouns, then it may be argued that we're losing some information that the vast majority of people was comfortably fitting into - but I don't really understand why do we actually need that information. When I refer to other people, it's extremely rare that I do it in a context that requires me to mention their gender identity (or even what do they have between their legs). In those rare cases where it's actually relevant, I wouldn't mind having to express it explicitly at all, so overall the utility seems dubious.
It's relevant because it's efficient more than 99% of the time and removing it introduces ambiguity 99% of the time. The person you're responding to even said they didn't have a problem with adding more pronouns, just not making it worse by removing them.
My whole point 2) was about how it does not (most of the time it just removes irrelevant noise), so I'd appreciate a counterexample.
Then you fail to see the usefulness of specificity and efficiency in speech, which is both weird and explains why it took you so many words to say that.
It seems to me that it's actually you who misunderstands the usefulness of specificity. It's not useful to be overspecific.
For the record, my native tongue is much more gendered than English (it has gendered nouns, verbs and adjectives; not just pronouns) - I don't understand how it's useful at all, I don't miss it in English.
Personally I agree, for me gender holds little importance, if I'm being most true to myself I identify as non binary simply because I don't really identify with a gendered label. That motivation has also lead me to being ok with being gendered male, because it just doesn't matter to me.
I understand I need to look outside of my own experience to see the importance people place on gender though. You can say all you want that most people don't care, but I feel if you misgender people, a lot of them would be very upset. Trans people are very vulnerable to suicide because of this, to diminish the importance of gender (this includes the binary, of which many trans people want to fit into) to these people is to be at best lacking in empathy.
Now if you're approaching this from a gender abolitionist angle where you believe all this attachment to gender is socialized and that we should push to de-emphasize genders role in society, then I believe that's a far more defensible position, but I feel you need to at least recognize the importance gender has to people today (socialized or not) if you're to have any hope in bridging that gap with people.
So I'm only a grammatical gender abolitionist :) I don't see the point of gendering people when I talk about them unless I talk specifically about their gender. As a happy side effect, this would also massively reduce the risk of accidentally misgendering someone.
The person you're replying to is talking about the last two, not the former.
To be clear, this isn’t a political view point, it’s a scientific view point, there’s no singularly accepted way of defining sex in human. Unfortunately nature has this amazing ability to conjure up exceptions to every seemingly reasonable definition of male/female, and it doesn’t give two shits about our desire to arrange the world into neat little categories.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/gender-benders-and-s...
To claim otherwise is definitely political.
Gender is entirely more complex social phenomenon and indeed isn’t directly related to sexual dimorphism, and evolving gender politics are totally legitimate.
Pretending humans aren’t sexually dimorphic isn’t.
However that doesn’t mean that ambiguity in sex doesn’t exist, and that sexual ambiguous in individuals is impossible. Sexual ambiguity isn’t common, but equally it doesn’t represent an aberration or break some natural law.
So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial, and those that dismiss real cases of sexual ambiguity as political correctness gone wrong. Its just that sometimes people are born who don’t fit neatly into commonly held categories, it doesn’t make them special, it just means they’re unique on axis that most people aren’t. Most of the time that nothing more than an interesting observation, but sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.
The comment you are replying to never said it does.
> So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial
the comment you are replying to never said this.
> sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.
The comment you are replying to doesn’t dispute this.
It’s not clear how what you have written relates to the comment you are replying to.
There are many other parallels - e.g. the criteria for using (and expecting/demanding of use) of formal vs informal "You" in many languages, the expectation on how mandatory it is to use specific prefixes or honorifics (Sir/Ms/Dr), etc; and in all those cases it's an arbitrary social construct and the wishes of the individual can be and are shunned whenever they go beyond what the locally prevailing social norms require.
The peer pressured group might think they did properly think it through, but mostly all you need is an appeal to authority and they fall in line.