Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism (2018)
bps.org.uk
bps.org.uk
I have two autist adult children. Both with amazing super powers.
In my house their abilities were always discussed and viewed as super powers. They are both capable of things others could only imagine. Focus, recall, logical reasoning are all on a level above most. Not to mention the ability to count cards.
The Monotropism theory speaks more completely to my experiences raising both of them.
> Recognise what someone’s passionate about and learn how to become part of the attention tunnels which come with monotropic focus, rather than trying to just reach in and pull the person out of the flow states that are so important to us.
This I believe is the most important statement in the entire article. Yes, providing tools to navigate the neuro world they live in is important. However, to shunt or not understand their ability is to loose sight of the outrageous things they are capable of. Helping each of my children to learn their strengths and the power of their ability to use flow states has made a world of difference.
Additionally, girls tend to be not be recognized as autist as early as boys. They are much better at masking. However, the Monotropism theory much better aligns with girls than other theories.
Thanks for sharing your experience. This is important advice for any parent, educator, or mentor.
My son and daughter are both autistic and I could go on a complete rant about the patriarchal experiences I've had with regards to the medical profession and women. My son got an autism diagnosis at eight just for being "a little bit odd". After may daughter barely left the house for two years from age fifteen she was first declared "borderline". Women are naturally more anxious than men, you see. Took another 1.5 years and a neuropsychologist to say that yes, she is autistic.
I was fortunate enough to be able to switch my work to part-time fully work from home so I could take her to various medical appointments (she has a lot of issues that are often co-morbid). Too many times this was necessary, not only for emotional support, but to be someone in the room who has a penis to advocate on her behalf.
Psychology has come a long way in the last few decades but it still has a long way to go.
It's not always overwhelming! I just think that whatever it is typically consumes more of a monotropic person's processing resources than for the average brain.
With dyspraxia, that I suspect I have, I think the difference is the same as software rendering vs having a GPU.
They seem like they are aware of all of their limbs at once. They never check in one at a time. They never see a reflection of themselves and realize "Oh, better make sure my arms are moving, they've been clamped to my sides this whole time". Some enjoy running, and it seems to be almost meditative, not this miserable process of trying not to hurt themselves with their own feet while also remembering to look before crossing streets.
They seem to have an amazingly rich web of automatic associations. The right thoughts just kind of arise at the appropriate times. They leave the house and never need any kind of process or planning to not forget their keys. They see a stop sign in their peripheral vision and ... somehow just automatically notice it and stop?
And they seem to effortlessly get familiar with things. They learn without specifically studying anything. They go to a place a few times, suddenly... they know their way around it? They can retrace their steps? They know what they were doing an hour ago?
And they can walk away from something and come back to it. They can leave a pot on the stove, do some other thing like get up to check the dryer, and then when they're done with that... they'll know to come back? It's almost like they've got a stack machine.
They don't seem to be paying attention to everything at once, but they seem to have dozens of background tasks, each with more "storage and CPU" than I have consciously, and things are constantly darting in and out of their awareness and retreating to the background, but not being forgotten entirely.
What they don't seem to be good at is chains of causations. They get weird about assigning causes to results without any theory, and really aggressive about pushing whatever idea they have. They seem to get into a very trial and error mindset and assume the solution to all problems is to just randomly do more stuff.
They also seem to be slightly worse with details. They'll buy an appliance that doesn't fit because they didn't systematically look at every spec individually and go through all their memories of all similar situations.
They seem to live more holistically, analyzing things by just observing, and letting whatever they need to know jump out at them, which works 80% of the time.
The greater number of interests at once would seem to follow from the ability to have multiple thoughts at once, and to more rapidly progress at any one thing, and the fact that there are a lot more popular interests that are well suited and appealing to people with the ability for parallel thought.
If it takes you a year to learn as much as others learn in a week, you might not want to try as many things. And if you have trouble keeping track of 3D space, most popular hobbies could be less enjoyable.
Plus, if you have any social challenges, that also might make a large number of activities less enjoyable, especially in a world where so many popular pursuits are mostly physical and rather uncomfortable, making them less appealing if the social aspect isn't working for you.
Basically it's an attempt to document a set of strategies for doing things in a way that does not depend on having any particular talent, in the most extreme high-process way possible, to be scaled back or ignored as needed for a situation. It's based on some pretty "pop self help book" level pseudo-research.
The other part of the project is the the math eli5, an attempt to document as much of the math that is actually useful or interesting in real life but that doesn't require years of study, plus the reasons why you would want to go and do that study, rather than actually trying to transmit the deep understanding(which I sure don't have!) directly.
I've also got a blog(eternityforest.com) mostly full of more creative work and essays on random historical stuff, plus some unpopular opinions about how software is (mostly) not in fact going down down the toilet.
The (highly functioning) autistic people I've known in my life all have this issue that they don't seem to be able to acknowledge when they are wrong. To the point of denying reality if it doesn't correspond to their mental model of whatever it is that they are wrong about. Is this common and related in some way to being on the spectrum, or just a coincidence?
Personally when I find out I'm wrong about something it's a relief. Usually when my understanding of something doesn't line up with everyone else's, the cause is much more complex and disturbing. Me just misunderstanding is the most benign possibility and one I am happy to accept.
Also, the autistic mind does not handle change very well. So it's usually not an ego thing about being wrong like a neurotypical person, it's a panic attack inducing psychological response to the world not working according to the mental model.
At least for me, the main issue I have is that many people I interact with use "gotchas" to try to "prove" that I'm wrong in conversations/arguments, which eliminate significant amounts of context, nuance, or stretch the bounds of reality. Alternatively, many situations involve people, and people don't act rationally, so a model which assumes rational actors will often be violated by the behavior of others in practice, which doesn't necessarily mean that the model is wrong or the expected behavior wouldn't have been more optimal, it's simply not what the person chose to do.
When there is sufficient evidence based in reality that my model or my understanding is incorrect, I freely admit to it and work to get even more information so I can update my model of the world and improve my understanding. I am rarely incorrect, because I am nearly obsessive about learning more and more information about the world around me. Sometimes when I am legitimately wrong, it is because I have forgotten a detail and when corrected admit to this, but it is unsatisfactory for the other person because they are expecting me to completely change my entire world view rather than simply saying "You're right, I forgot about that, but did know that, so yes ... X".
Theory of mind is a two way street. The assumption that "you're wrong because I don't get what you're saying" is always predicated on peoples assumption that the thoughts they are experiencing are factually correct. The idea that you (the autist) might know something they don't is seen as offensive and disrespectful... when in reality the autist just spent a lot of time studying something and actually is factually correct.
It's stunning, dehumanizing and depressing how many times I've had people wield a social cudgel against me because they didn't like the facts I presented. It's infuriating to be mocked as a "know it all" when you are educated and knowledgeable on a subject and incompetent people are dead set on proving you wrong and shaming you for your disobedience.
This is huge reason why I actively try to seek out teams and organizations where I am surrounded by people who are more knowledgeable, more competent, or just outright smarter than I am. I hate being the "smartest person in the room", because mostly it ends up being a series of futile efforts followed by watching predictable negative outcomes without any control to fix it. Because I seek out these situations, I'm highly practiced at admitting I'm wrong or seeking understanding by learning from others, despite the impression some people have of me that I am unwilling to admit it when I am wrong.
Contrary to what many people likely believe about me after meeting me, I take no joy whatsoever in being "smart", I just want to know enough to constantly be improving myself and the world around me, and that happens to require a large amount of knowledge to have any meaningful chance of correctness. If we're not moving the world forward as a species to better things in the future compared to now, what even is the point of being alive? We're only special in some ways as compared to other animals, but our basic reason for living is the same, to carry on, to procreate, and to ultimately continually improve.
Like... It's in a freaking dictionary.
(All L2 English speakers)
I'm not sure what word your are referencing, and if there is any good reason for such pushback in this circumstance.
But then one of the main uses of the word is to be clear that you are not talking figuratively. If it is widely deemed acceptable to figuratively use a word whose main purpose is to clarify that you are not talking figuratively, it defeats the purpose, and leaves people with no easy way to be clear that they are being literal rather than figurative.
Its not so terrible when the situation is sufficiently clear that the primary definition could not be possible, but becomes a lot more problematic when used as in intensifier in figurative statements where the literal interpretation is also possible/plausible.
It is, but you're appealing an authority that isn't seen as authoritative.
Dictionaries are factual and lack the social context that can completely change the meaning of the word. Business communication has its own jargon that can often be nuanced and sometimes indirect.
For example:
"Forecast" is an expected due date that may change due to circumstances.
"Estimate" is how long something will take, regardless of circumstances.
When possible, you want to use the word forecast for longer-term projects (especially one spanning multiple quarters) and but use estimate for shorter term projects.
Effective communication is a pain in the ass.
Maybe it could also indicate that you are wrongfully mixed into normies with level of intelligence that matches your social skill levels, not overall or technical levels?
I've seen quite a few articles of late on something called the Double Empathy Problem which I think encaptures this.
Autism is overrated too, and everyone(including themselves) has preconception that autistics are always logical and intelligent. That could lead into a tunnel vision that their words spoken by them are explicitly chosen unaffected by anger or frustration, and sometimes that could lead to silly situations as well.
1) They weren’t actually wrong, but you didn’t understand their context
2) They experienced discomfort with an incursion into their worldview, and you didn’t compellingly convince them they were wrong, so why bother to switch
3) Along with autism seems to come a predisposition to narcissism as individual understanding frequently outstrips peers, and an under engagement with social skills mean they don’t get as much from those interactions
In my experience the denial is usually temporary unless they are malignantly narcissistic.
autism, like many "disorders", is keenly overdiagnosed, to create a sociopolitically-mediated norm from which deviance (like "high-functioning" autism) can be classified and, where desired, ostrasized, for the sake of control. it's a classic hammer looking for a nail issue, but with coercion as its central aim. biology is very unlike computers and populations of anything biological will exhibit a fascinating array of variance and an enormous range of biologically valid (but perhaps not sociopolitically valid) "normal".
Relevant quote from The Jargon File (http://catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html):
"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’.
So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS — the status of caffeine as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer at 0.4-0.5%)."
This is Hacker News. The Jargon File is a quite famous document of the hacker scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jargon_File&oldid...
- it gives access to a community of people that share your life's experiences. Seeing how alienating society can be to people on the spectrum, finally finding a peer group is life-changing.
- it allows us to put names on certain things we experience, and communicate those things to the people we interact with. Being able to frame some of my experiences and behaviours has resolved pretty much all the conflicts we used to have in my relationship.
- it deconstructs shame. We are now not just "lazy" or "stupid" or "creepy" or "weird" or "emotionless" or "stunted" or "distracted".
- it frames the fact that autism is a disability mostly as a problem with society not being accomodating to our neurological fabric, not the other way round. It allows us to ask for accomodation in a professional setting, for example
a diagnosis becomes an excuse for the inconvenience of having to deal with differences among ourselves. it's ok that we have to deal with discomfort and even (some) conflict. that's an essential part of life, otherwise we may as well be robots.
Why concede if the topic is not a topic of taste? And who should concede to whom? I personally can't tell you that you are right if I think you are wrong. That is lying and disingenuous.
I have learned to just walk away.
That's what I mean by conceding, just saying "fair enough" and shutting up
The mind games are so structured that a product may hopefully emerge from them, but if you want to keep food on the table, never forget what comes first.
If you fail to build a product, the team takes collective responsibility and they can RCA that and design more effective mind games for the future. If you fail to play the games, you will be singled out and fired.
I very much prefer to stand by my professional opinion (as in, I am professional about my craft), and not compromise, even if it has career consequences. This is not "wrong", nor "pearl clutching". I just operate in a different context. and am not antagonistic either.
What is however antagonistic and bullying is being so certain that what I care about is "wrong" and "pearl clutching" and dysfunctional. The stated goal of a company is to build a product that generates revenue. At an individual level you might want to play a different game, and make the person you report to look good so you can score your next promotion. I don't really care about scoring my next promotion.
What I care about is building good products, and don't see why I would "concede" and compromise on my skill building said products. Otherwise, where do I draw the line? Do I just concede as soon as someone disagrees with me? After 5 minutes? If it's my manager? If the person is taller than me? If they are louder? If they start calling me a pearl clutcher?
I might do it once or twice, sure. But then I'll walk.
> Otherwise, where do I draw the line? Do I just concede as soon as someone disagrees with me? After 5 minutes? If it's my manager? If the person is taller than me? If they are louder? If they start calling me a pearl clutcher?
I would say that the fact that you do not have an intuitive sense of when to concede is a symptom of autism or at least of not being NT. It is clear to NT people, we generally don’t have to rationally handle it directly, it’s intuitive
The problem here is that the default position in society is: "you should just know intuitively what to do, and if you don't, it will be detrimental to you and your career". As you point out, being ND is not being able to intuit what is typical behavior, which means being faced with a catch-22. I can make up rules by which to play the game, but then I am by definition not intuitively handling situations. I have no way of knowing when to deviate from these rules and when not.
If you tell me "our goal is to build a great product", which is what I thoroughly enjoy, yet I am expected to play some nuanced game of kiss up to your manager, then it is no surprise that I am going to at some point call out the bullshit and leave. It is not wrong nor dysfunctional.
As illustrated by some of the responses here, NT people are not very proficient at understanding that people might play by different rules than their own either. Because are the majority, it is expected for ND people to "concede", and not the other way around.
This is where we can all make progress. Part of the more widespread recognition of neurodiversity is that it provides more tools and knowledge for neurodiverse people to work within society, but similarly, provides neurotypical people more tools and knowledge to reduce discrimination and communicate with their fellow humans.
For example, as a manager, being able to gracefully point out that the discussion is not productive, and either tabling it, or learning to listen better, or respectfully pointing out what might be going on and how to better approach such topics, rather than calling people pearl-clutchers, wrong or antagonistic, and ultimately firing them or demoting them. No-one benefits here, except maybe the manager's sense of being right.
While some aspects of being ND are handicapping by themselves (say, sensory sensitivities), operating under different assumptions and models is only so when they lead to discrimination and backlash, instead of acceptance and accomodation. As a ND, I accomodate and mask pretty much 24/7 already.
Thankfully I actually see things changing.
If you think it's fair to criticize people for their accents and then admonishing them for being upset, you might want to work on your empathy and social skills too.
This is a fundamental difference between ableism and things like racism, often with the former there really are differences that cause problems. For example I have depression and I find it very difficult to work, but society does not accept that and nor do I expect it to. Similarly if you are autistic and take arguments too far because you think you are right, you will piss people off, and I don’t think you can expect otherwise. I would actually say you are lacking empathy here
Someone will talk about their experience doing some task and they’ll pop in (uninvited) to say things don’t work that way. Their way is the only way things are done… or perhaps should be done?
Talking to other people who know them, they’ve been doing this their entire life and can’t understand why this upsets people. No attempt has made to learn. They just walk away and come back to do the same thing. This has been happening for decades.
The my initial thought is: This is incredibly aggravating. At some point after many decades of extremely poor social interactions, isn’t it reasonable to assume someone would learn to accept their experiences aren’t the only ones?
My second is: is this just behavior neurotypical people do all the time and are just nice about it?
I find it difficult to understand. I’m not autistic, but on the surface I deal with a lot of the same problems.
From my own background, I deeply struggled with social interaction until I learned everything by rote memorization until I could form a logical model of human psychology. I know people the same way I know computer programs.
My mental model of humans does handle most autistic people I’ve met. If my model was off, I’d notice the inputs and outputs wouldn’t match. I can usually tell when people are faking things because they have a less complete mental model of humans. The gaps are pretty glaring to me.
But I can’t figure this person out. My model’s conclusion is this person is severely impaired in a way that affects how they form mental models. Or… they are capable of learning but would rather feel bad than change how they relate to people. Whatever the problem is, it doesn’t feel malicious. But whatever it is, it’s gone on for decades.
I don’t like assuming either of those.
Edit: I should note, they seem like a decent person and I’m inclined to believe they are. Their friends wouldn’t tolerant or defend someone with bad intentions.
I often get told by a certain class of people that I can't accept when I am wrong. I feel personally that I am one of the extremely open-minded, constantly learning, seeking out new answers, curious. I love listening to end-users and distilling their way of thinking about their domain to make left-field technical changes, for example. Here are some of the explanations I could come up why "all the highly functioning people you have met in your life don't seem to be able to acknowledge that they are wrong":
A simple reason:
- I am actually right, and you can't recognize it, either because you don't hear me out, or you assume that I am wrong from the start, or you just don't understand the model I am operating under. "Denying reality" is just shortcode for "operating outside of/denying my model of reality".
Concrete example, very close to situations I've had in real life:
You are my manager at an ecommerce company. You might think the checkout on our website is bad, and needs to be rewritten. I know we don't even have any analytics set up, so will question why you think the ecommerce page is broken.
If you can't come up with a satisfying answer (I would often get something like "I read an article about how they use react at airbnb, we should do that too"), then I will not back down from me questioning the purpose of the change.
I understand you think that, as a business savvyy person, you are keeping track of what the industry is doing, and that's indeed valuable.
But you have to trust me that
- a) the technology used has nothing to do with what the user perceives. This is absolutely obvious to me, but you might just have realized that there is such a thing called web frameworks, and that they are a big deal, and that people can be very opinionated and forceful about them. It's going to take me a while to explain it plays no role whatsoever for the end-user.
- b) we need analytics to understand if checkout indeed needs an overhaul. Analytics are not easy, data lies very easily, data needs work. The statistics are not easy, the causality of things is not easy, it is going to be hard to get a good signal.
- c) our current stack, team, software, technical debt, feature prioritization is the thing determining the technology choice. Many things come into play here, and each of them can be incredibly subtle (maybe it's hard to incorporate react because our SSR framework works entirely differently, etc...). It's going to take me a while to explain why certain tech choices might be good, might be bad.
- When I'm wrong / don't know enough, I will just keep quiet and learn and figure things out on my own. You will just never realize it, and thus think that I "never" admit I am wrong, when in fact, I do so almost daily. Understanding that people think very differently, that I shouldn't bring it up, that I need to adapt to the 95% of normal people out there, is what makes me highly functioning.
- You don't understand how I communicate. You think I might just argue about something you know is wrong, when I am actually asking questions and trying to understand what you are saying. I can't have a conversation if I don't understand what you are asking for in the first place, and you might not be used to the level of rigor I require to state an actual opinion. This turns into a circular dialogue where I will ask questions, you will think I question your premise and reject the question outright. I will either get frustrated (see next point), or usually just stop early, because I don't see the point, and have been in situations such as these countless time in the past.
- I will only forcefully argue about something only if I deeply care and have put in the countless (thousands! tens of thousands!) of hours to learn more about the topic. Many people don't realize how absolutely obsessively I will research and learn things, nor how good I have gotten at learning things.
Spending 14h a day learning about things and trying things and writing and designing and building really adds up. I don't really have hobbies or friends or chill out days or spend much time with family. Instead, I have known I wanted to be a programmer since I was 6. In the 35 years since, I have been away from my computer once for 7days, and never not had a programming book in my backpack. I enjoy computers and programming and software and anything related to it to a level that is I think completely alien to more neurotypical people.
While people think individuals might maybe have one area of expertise, because they studied it and maybe held a job in that area for 15 years, adding up to say 20k hours of practice, a lot of it probably quite distracted / uninterested. I might have maybe accumulated 100k hours in the same 20 year span, a lot of it in obsessive single-minded pursuit. Probably only my wife knows what that looks like.
- Because I care so deeply about these topics, there is indeed a tendency to overcommunicate / not realize that I need to police my speech and boil things down to a more "human" level. I also spend most of my time in the areas of the internet where people are similarly obsessive about a single topic, and communicating this way is actually my normal. You might not realize it because I have gotten so good at masking it.
> Because I care so deeply about these topics, there is indeed a tendency to overcommunicate / not realize that I need to police my speech and boil things down to a more "human" level. I also spend most of my time in the areas of the internet where people are similarly obsessive about a single topic, and communicating this way is actually my normal.
The other critical feedback I receive from people relatively often is that I "talk too much" and that I "never answer their question" because I grew up, for the most part, on the Internet in circles of people who are highly engaged and educated. In most cases my communication is focused on establishing context first, and then making a statement, assertion, or answer. A lot of people tend towards just skipping the context, which I think is sometimes reasonable if you can assume context is shared, but my experience in work/business is that /most/ miscommunication is due to lack of shared context. I often get interrupted when answering someone's question, where they came to me /specifically/ because I'm an expert on the topic, because they think I'm not answering their question, where from my perspective to be able to truly answer their question I first need to establish shared context, and teach them a deeper level of understanding of the topic so they can even understand my eventual answer.
What's interesting is I am now in a role not as an engineer, but as a product manager, in part because I've gotten very good at distilling complex topics down to be understandable to others and teaching other people (I also guest lecture, give conference talks, and do internal classes at companies I work at), and most of my life has been focused on reading and writing, so I am very good at writing, which at least in business matters as much or maybe more than talking. So, obviously I've adapted in some way that's successful to perform my job function successfully, but I still face these challenges primarily in personal relationships. It's not really clear to me that my methodology is inferior to the alternative, and I mostly think that other people simply lack any reasonable attention span because of the current situation with social media / our distraction economy. If someone wants to learn something from an expert, they should be prepared to listen to the answer, but I have friends who've told me this is arrogance on my part to believe this way. I see it as a two-way street though, and despite preferring reading to listening/watching, I've spent hours listening to experts when they've been willing to give me their time.
What I had in mind was actual, demonstratable instances of being wrong. Such as assuming a parameter in a function of a library works a certain way based on how it's named, and what _should_ be the _correct_ way such a parameter should work leading to a subtle bug that I then helped to debug. And then the uphill battle being trying to convince the person to try to use the parameter the way its documented, going against their understanding of how it _should_ work.
Obviously neither myself nor the parent you were replying to are the person you had the disagreement with, so we cannot tell you what was in their mind.
I have given it some thought in as far that the best I can do is get better at thinking and writing, so that I can publish my thoughts and insights on my blog. If reading them resonates with a few people, and helps them lead a better life, I will have achieved something meaningful. (I just linked my writing outlets in my profile). I also hope that openly writing about neurodiversity and mental illness will help deconstruct stigma, and I don't mind enduring whatever consequences this might have on my career.
I don't think improving relations between humans is something I'd be good at at all, nor does it really interest me. However, the topic of doing good is becoming increasingly relevant to me as I just turned 40, and I am discovering that systems thinking deeply resonates with me. I will try to pivot into agritech or another climate change related topic soon.
On a more prosaic level, hopefully I will become confident enough in my writing to try to distill what I learned about programming in the near future, and this might help people make a clearer point in technical debates here and there :)
Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to see admitting you are wrong as announcing you changing your worldview, but it just kinda feels like that for me, even if it is about something small.
Also, for me at least, I have this weird anxiety that, whenever I tell someone I made a decision, that I could never go back on that decision. It feels really weird to me. For the longest time I felt like I couldn't let anyone know I wanted to live a healthier lifestyle, because it somehow felt like, if I told anyone about it, I could never go back to comfort food and stuff like that. Not sure what that is all about, even my psychologist didn't understand it.
To me, especially in technical contexts, I've always been afraid of backing away from a point I strongly defended before - because I want people to trust and what I say and not be afraid of relying on it, which is undermined by admitting fault.
However, admitting that you're wrong (and maybe even more so, admitting that you might not be right) is actually quite freeing: Nobody should expect you to be 100% perfect, and regardless of your technical prowess, if you challenge yourself you will sometimes fail. Communicating clearly when you are unsure about something, or when something made you reconsider your opinion, is just as valuable to how people perceive you as "always being right". As a bonus, it also helps keep you humble to admit to yourself that you won't always be right.
I'm starting to finally[1] learn just to give up when I see this as trying to change such minds becomes a self-damaging time sink.
[1] yes, finally. Taken me a long time. Perhaps there's a touch of them in me, I do wonder sometimes.
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
| O O |
| ----- ( inner landscape (fact) ) ( inner landscape (fact) ) ----- |
| | | |
| / \ / \ |
The autistic person will, instead, view it as if there is one big unified shared reality between him and the other person, and one true fact, in any given situation. He will also assume that the other person sees it in the same way as himself.
The "double empathy problem" is that neither of them can see how the other person views the world. The non-autistic person cannot comprehend that the autistic person sees a single shared reality, and a single fact. Likewise, the autistic person cannot comprehend that the non-autistic person sees two different realities and two sets of facts.
Very possibly the "autistic"/"allistic" labels refer to a mix of different underlying cognitive variables, monotropism being just one. Either way, the theory seems an important step forward.
Stimming is doing well known things that doesn't take much attention but also provides emotional safe feeling.
I never was formally diagnosed with autism but the signs are obvious as it was also noticed by family and friends. The paper is academic and not vulgarized for the general public but if you take the time it is really worth it, specially the part about perception.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophreni...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-...
tl;dr:
Autistic folks have really tight confidence intervals on their priors. In these circumstances, sensory data that deviates slightly from expectation becomes very grating (noise and touch sensitivity) and sensory data that conforms to expectation is exceptionally rewarding (hence stimming and deep topical science-y interests).
Schizophrenic folks have really broad confidence intervals on their priors. In these circumstances, sensory data that deviates from expectation is interpreted as meaningful rather than noise (hence hallucinations and psychotic jumps to conclusions), but they'll tend to do better on tasks that require relaxed priors (e.g. the concave/convex face)
He's a smart dude and I can't help but appreciate his work. But his defense of racialism is getting harder and harder for me to ignore.
??
I don't think the Times was entirely fair in their coverage. But as a long time SSC/ACX reader I've often felt a subtext of racialist beliefs lurking in the corner. He never comes right out and says it, but e.g. praising Charles Murray is more than a dog whistle.
To be clear - I'm distinguishing racialism (which believes there are large, measurable, genetic differences in traits like intelligence and aggression between races) and racism (which carries an extra connotation of emotional hatred). I think of racialism as racism masquerading as objective science.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...
But yes - in my set of definitions, race is genetic/hardware, and culture is environmental/software.
Obviously the two correlate pretty heavily - i.e. racial groups tend to form subcultures.
Quantum mechanics is also "beyond the human mind's ability to conceptualize" but we're still able to make progress. And discussions of race are vastly more important, at least when measuring in terms of human suffering.
I don't know you personally, but "most" people I encounter seem to draw no distinction between their model of reality and reality itself.
Consider:
> praising Charles Murray is more than a dog whistle.
What is the meaning of "is" (to be) in this context, in a literal/architectural sense? Does your "is" align with other people's? And where this a discrepancy, how skeptical of your take on it are you?
Possibly related:
[Edit:] Yes, yes it was the smear that doxed him and misrepresented his writings in an egregious manner. I had forgotten about that incident, but F the NYT and anyone repeating Cade Metz' lies.
In early 2020, I learned the New York Times wanted to write an article about me. They had discovered my real name and wanted to reveal it to the world.
But it seems really unfair to infer that someone believes X because he praised someone who believes X, especially without further context.
The autism end is highly skilled individual learning, either intrinsically or because of social deprivation during development. This does not mean they can’t learn socially, but that social learning is a net loss for them and they become a commons (in the tragedy of the commons sense)
The schizophrenia end is predominantly social learning, where either individual learning skill is not as high, leading to bad outcomes and seeking confirmation, or early social opportunity is atypically high, leading to a bias for social interaction.
This can be either based on skills/ability or more simply on differing intensity of affect as experienced in different settings.
There seems to be another related but separate dimension to the spectrum. I remember an analogy of borderline personality disorder being the female version of autism mentioned somewhere on SSC as well, which is interesting. The disorders seem to share some sort of failure in integration between top-down priors and bottom up sensory information, but with a different focus. Borderline personality disorder seems like a difficulty in integrating more extrinsic, social concepts like self-identity and models of other people. It makes me think there's something fundamentally different between introverted and extraverted cognitive strategies.
I think this silly joke by jreg about Schizotism/Autizmophrenia explains it best:
I've actually wondered something similar about myself: I exhibit some minor autistic and schizophrenic tendencies, but in different contexts. I like to think my position on the scale is more fluid than it is for others. Maybe some genes code for higher variance along the spectrum, while other genes push in one direction or the other.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/autism-vs-schizophrenia
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/escape-from-sp...
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-...
* https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-the...
* https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-ba...
The core concept is called predictive coding, which suggests that the brain is constantly generating and updating a model of the world in a top-down and bottom-up manner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
Disclaimer: epistemic status = very speculative.
This also reminded me of the article[1] about the “Bayesian interpretation” of Autism and several others mental conditions. I'm not sure how much rigorous study there is behind such theories, but they do provide an interesting framework to think about these conditions.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-...
That said one might make the leap that poor mentalization is a effect caused by monotropism as the article seams to imply. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
I personally tend to think that poor mentalization ability leads to problems when it comes to subconscious guiding of attention.
I'm not particularly educated on this subject at all, but monotropism certainly describes the experience of living in my mind. Other people aren't a mystery to me, nor am I or my motivations a mystery to myself. I struggle against being overwhelmed by certain experiences, emotions, stimulus and changes, but not in understanding them.
I may not be representative here and I'm not saying I am, or that my experiences are a refutation of either theory. But a lot of what the article says rang true for me and nothing you propose has.
It’s like a dunning Kruger effect.
It is also important to note that good does not necessarily mean correct or accurate (even if that certainly can be a part of it)it means useful for guiding proper behavior.
With that said, the hypothesis is not that bad mentalization abilities is equal to autism. It is that bad mentalization causes you to adopt/learn unconscious behavioral patterns and those patterns are what we classify as autism. This means that even when you “fix” the bad mentalization ability. The person still has all of those behavioral patterns ingrained in them.
Mine is generally useful for acting with care and grace towards other people, which is how I want to act as much as possible. I don't know if that's Proper Behavior, a term I feel like you should be willing to define if you're going to use.
And mostly unrelated but I explicitly reject the label of high functioning for myself, and the model that groups autistic people into high and low functioning. I can't exist in the contemporary world and meet my obligations without my supports. Autism is fully disabling for me without accommodations that I am by no means guaranteed. In this I have more in common with your "low functioning" autists than I do with most people in this forum, and I don't accept this language that distances me from them.
The idea of finding a way to test our various theories of mind is both amusing and fascinating. There should be a way to do scientific tests. :D
I am not here to tell you who you are or how you are like. I am here explaining a hypothesis.
Labels are what they are. Some are useful some are not, some are emotionally coupled some are not.
If you look at what a person does you can make hypothesis's about what is in their mind. It is what the field of psychology is all about.
Proper behavior, like not being mean, answering people when they talk to you, not bashing your head in to walls when you are upset and so on.
I gave a description that clarified that to a certain extent. The description is just a description, an answer to a question.
And what are we even to infer from "and so on." Basically that "proper behavior" is what non-autistic people do, and that when we deviate from that it is inherently disruptive and improper. Which, we know that, a big part of our lives are spent managing the consequences imposed on us for not acting in the ways other people expect or demand.
It didn't clarify much for me except your ignorance or lack of depth of introspection on this subject, which is why I didn't engage with it further. But this "oh shucks I was just answering the question" response is also bad so here we are. I can't read your intent but I certainly received that response as a dismissive stereotype. If you didn't want it read that way you should rephrase it next time this comes up.
It seams a key difference between us here is that you think stereotypes are dismissive. I just think of them as things that are more common statistically on average in the group of people vs in some other group of other people.
Are you saying you're well-above average in being able to read neurotypical people in ordinary social settings? If that's the case, I don't think "autistic" is the correct description for your deviation from neurotypical. It's unclear to me if you're saying you have some kind of complex analytical models for people (to compensate for the inability to intuit) or merely that you are able to intuitively read people naturally neurotypicals do, in which case I'm not sure what you mean when you say you're autistic.
I'm fairly monotropic (so this is something I've paid a fair amount of attention to when observing others) but not even the least bit autistic. I also know a bunch of people on the autism spectrum as well as those that have varying degrees of monotropism. I don't see any particular correlation between the two, other than the fact that those on the spectrum tend to pay less attention to certain aspects of reality, while paying more attention to other aspects of reality, which makes neurotypicals feel that they are unusually focused.
I mean that I have been tested and diagnosed as autistic by a doctor, and treated within the context of that diagnosis by other medical professionals for many years. I'm not sure what else would be meant by it?. I don't usually see it used as a casual adjective without an accompanying diagnosis or implying one.
If the latter is what you're saying and you're correct in your self-assessment, that likely means your autism diagnosis is highly questionable.
If the former is what you mean, then I think you misunderstand what people mean by "dysfunctional theory of mind" as it applies to autism.
It does seem like that was the correct read though, which yes does change my relationship to the conversation sorry.
1) You misunderstand what people mean by "dysfunctional theory of mind" and in particular, may be misinterpreting "theory of mind" as some sort of deliberate analysis people do with regards to people, as opposed to being able to casually and effortlessly understand other people. What you wrote isn't clear enough to establish this but this is one possible way to read what you wrote[1].
2) You aren't wrong about what people mean by "dysfunctional theory of mind" and when you say you have "a pretty good theory mind" you're indeed talking about your own ability to effortlessly read people and situations. However, you're mistaken in your assessment of your own ability in this regard.
3) You're misdiagnosed.
Also, in case it's not obvious, the implication here is more that 1) or 2) seems to be true. And if that's the case, the point here is that your focus on "monotropism" as being more fundamental to autism may be because you understand what it means, whereas you're more skeptical about the "theory of mind" explanations because you either don't understand what that means or have trouble perceiving your own deficiencies in that regard.
[1] For example when you say "I have complex models for all the individuals I interact with and have no particular problems developing them for new people." - it's unclear what you mean. Most people generally do not perceive themselves having any sort of complex models for others, but under the hood, our intuitive ability to understand people and situations is powered by what effectively amounts to complex mental models for others. I don't know if that's what you're saying with regards to yourself or that this is explicitly how you perceive and function, which does support the diagnosis of autism, but amounts to a misunderstanding of the term "theory of mind" - needing to do this explicitly and saying that you have "a pretty good theory of mind" is similar to saying you're completely fluent in a foreign language when all you can do is describe various aspects of the language in English (in a sophisticated way that most native speakers of the language won't be able to) and translate sentences in that language to English and vice-versa with a ton of effort and time.
Had to read it two more times before it clicked. Tired Australian here.
I could've sworn they were about to say Sheldon Cooper