Why business needs people with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and dyslexia | Hacker News Reader

Why business needs people with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and dyslexia

economist.com

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Dr. Temple Grandin, an adult with autism who became a successful engineer, academic and speaker, believes that her disorder is an asset. She once famously called NASA a sheltered workshop for people with autism and Asperger Syndrome. She believes that people with autistic spectrum disorders are the great innovators, and "if the world was left to you socialites, nothing would get done and we would still be in caves talking to each other."

I'm not a fan of this quote. It really does dismiss the arts, the power of socializing, society, government, and largely the human experience.

I'm much, much closer in mentality to Temple and to be frank, her strawman socialite is weak sauce. I've spent much of my adulthood learning social skills I never picked up as a child or teenager and they in themselves have an incredible amount of power. Without the socialites we wouldn't have gotten on the moon because we'd be too busy in our basements making toothpick replicas of various Lord of The Ring battles. Honestly, NASA is a pretty poor example. The amount of politicking, career maneuvering, inter department competition, giant egos, public policy changes, new administrations, etc going on there would be unbearable to someone like Grandin.

Different evolutionary neurotypical strategies exist because they have value. One isn't "better" than another. Let's stop playing this game and accept that from a macro view there's a lot going on and its unfair to piss on or put one group on a pedestal. Its just too easy to do so. Ease and psychologically pleasing conclusions should always be seen with a critical eye.

I think this is also why extremist right-wing politics appeals to the geeky crowd. We like simple answers that rely on systems (free markets, no taxes) and don't understand how the social aspects (regulation, control, subsidizing for the poor) matter. To many they're just roadblocks to some idealized system that 'must work' because it makes sense on paper in a very simple way.

Oh well, here come the downvotes, but I really wish on a personal level that my own issues were addressed when I was younger. I learned long ago that, yes, I'm smart and creative and am able to do difficult things, but the price for that for a long time was misery, loneliness, confusion, and depression. I know its a cliche but the balanced really life is the best life. I don't want to be Temple Grandin the same way I don't want to be Paris Hilton. I wouldn't mind being Temple Hilton though.

There are a lot of people, on Slashdot in particular, and also here, who have self-diagnosed themselves with Asperger's in the belief that it makes them Homo Superior.

Yuuup.

I'm always amused at the predictable trajectory of the comments on any sort of HN posting about Asperger's. In almost all cases, a disproportionate number of the people who comment or read the comments have Asperger's themselves, or at least think they do.

One of them will post this Temple Grandin quote or something along similar lines extolling the technical problem-solving superiority of people with Asperger's, with or without realizing how inflammatory it is.

Someone will point out how insulting it is to technical problem-solvers without Asperger's and to human beings in general, who typically feel pretty bad when they're confronted with what's basically an assertion that nobody like them has ever contributed to the progress of the human race.

That person will immediately be downvoted into oblivion because there are some elements in the tone of his comment that result in it being perceived as an insult in its own right.

>In almost all cases, a disproportionate number of the people who comment or read the comments have Asperger's themselves, or at least think they do.

So why is that? Does HN (and tech in general) attract people with a specific mental makeup, or does it attract a lot of liars?

There are Walter Mitty's in every walk of life.

Agree that it sometimes appears to be that some feel it makes them superior. But could also be for the same reason that people get a rise out of being a bad boy/girl and not just ordinary. Off the top another example of this is someone saying it's good to have a special needs child because it makes them a better person. Or how having cancer was a good thing. I'm sure someone can find the appropriate psychological principle that I am referring to. (Not talking about rationalization.)

People is not either autistic or socialite. Following the same (rhetoric) logic, "if the world was left to you autistic, humanity would extinguish in two generations tops".

I'm sure the special needs teachers who made that possible, and the taxpayers who fund them, are delighted to hear that. Maybe the socialites would still be in caves, but the "aspies" would be outside starving.

The symptoms of Asberger's are so indistinguishable from "being a dick" that they might as well be synonymous.

You're getting downvoted, but not being told why.

Asperger's is a lot more complex than just "being a dick". Unfortunately some people use it as an excuse for undesirable behaviors. Regardless, that does not extend to all sufferers. Sometimes it manifests as intense, uncontrollable interest in certain narrow topics and a sensitivity to certain sounds, foods, smells, etc, and a shy or awkward disposition. That isn't being a dick by any means.

I'm sorry if you had a bad experience. It may stem from the fact if you've interacted with people who were diagnosed at a young age, they tend to be on the very far end of the spectrum and as a result may exhibit more extreme symptoms. There are a lot of people who have Asperger's who simply don't disclose it and have developed coping mechanisms that help them blend in. There might be many around you, but they might never have come out as such.

> You're getting downvoted, but not being told why.

That's also a great way to describe the social aspects of mild[1] Asperger's: afflicted individuals are ignored, bullied, and excluded. No one tells them why this is happening, they're expected to "just get it", and it's assumed that they're making a deliberate choice to "be a dick".

[1] Severe Asperger's is much worse, e.g., you are a brilliant programmer but you're living in an institution as your family is unable to take care of you and you are simply unable to function on your own; this is an actual case I am aware of, not an imagined scenario.

You have sufficient social acumen to understand that this comment is critical of you. Many people with Asperger's don't.

Everyone is the hero of their own personal narrative.

Your post angers and insults me. Everything you said is negative and mean, while the original poster was at least trying to add to the conversation. Even calling those with Asperger's "aspies" is condescending.

People find their place in the world. I cannot imagine being dyslexic or unable to empathize with people. It's inspiring that people can turn those "handicaps" into competitive advantages.

While the comment wasn't very sensitive, it also happens to be true. Our society tries to build a support structure around folks to enable them to reach their potential. Sometimes we're successful, other times we're not successful. In the past, unless your family was able to help you find a place, folks with mental problems were basically discarded by society.

"Our society tries to build a support structure around folks to enable them to reach their potential."

I would argue most of the success is due to coping mechanisms developed by people than societal support structure. In fact, the free markets probably have more to do with their success than society.

NASA isn't a product of the free market, except in the sense that that "socialites" who work in the free market pay their taxes so Dr Temple can sneer at them from her ivory tower.

NASA is hardly typical of employers, and the free market is not the sole origin of value. Perhaps you are taking a tongue-in-cheek remark a little too personally. It's a big world, and it has room for some generally anti-social loners as well.

"Even calling those with Asperger's "aspies" is condescending."

Why? Are you claiming that using "aspies" is an "a" word?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

"People identifying with Asperger syndrome may refer to themselves in casual conversation as aspies (a term first used in print by Liane Holliday Willey in 1999)."

About Liane:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/liane-holliday-willey...

My point addressed the individual the parent quoted, who seems completely dismissive of the massive support structure created around her, by people she holds in contempt, that she calls "socialites". She claims that people without Aspergers are incapable of innovating, which is clearly arrogant nonsense.

"Recruiters have noticed that the mental qualities that make a good computer programmer resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome... an addiction to repetitive tasks"

I think someone is forgetting one of the three virtues of programming: laziness.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris

Typing out class and function declarations, if-then-else constructs, and recompiling on a regular basis is tediously repetitive to most people. It doesn't necessarily mean you're repeating the same program. Likewise, most techno music sounds repetitive to the disinterested listener, notwithstanding the large relative variations that occur within the music.

I thought the same thing. If there's anything a good programmer shouldn't be doing, it's repetitive tasks. If you're coding the same thing over and over again, you're doing it wrong.

By the time I find myself doing something for the third time, I start thinking: automation.

I wonder just how much I'm overreacting by feeling disgusted about the way that Asperger's, ADD and stuff like that are suddenly a thing of fashion. It seems to be a trendy thing for journalists to discuss and a sort of a fashion statement for geeks.

Maybe I'm wrong, but to me this is a rather simple matter: there are great people who happen to have Asperger's syndrome, ADD, dyslexia, autism or what have you, but unless someone proves some sort of link between their greatness and things they were diagnosed with, then that's just what it is -- people who happen to be both great and have one of the above.

As someone with ADD, I have trouble gaining and maintaining focus while ignoring distracting factors. However, in an environment where distractions are minimized (eg a traditional library), or where there is an agreed-upon system for handling distracting factors - some kinds of workplaces, or an understanding about personal space/time boundaries - then the flip side of this is an ability to stay focused on something for hours, days, weeks, if necessary and a capacity for very rapid adaption and innovation.

In film production, which I used to work at, a lot of people have ADD - but the highly procedural (and proceduralized) nature of the work optimizes for this. You need to be willing to keep doing the same thing until you get it right 10, 20 or more times in a row, but also to drop it and switch to something completely different at short notice if other conditions change. I have a strong hunch that people with ADD are considerably over-represented in the military as well.

I can't speak for dyslexia or asperger's, but there are documented advantages to not being able to pay attention: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/why-being-sleepy-a...

And maybe the way Bill Gates rocks in his chair is low-level aspbergers and the incidence of aspbergers in men explains why men dominate the computer industry and possibly these disorders are both indicative of strength in the area and encouraged by the usage of technology.

Yeah, either that, or pop-science doesn't actually have much explanatory or prescriptive power in this area until they clear up their own messes with ADD diagnosis and poorly crafted studies.

I don't know about Bill Gates, but several of the people mentioned (e.g., CEO of Jetblue) have clinical diagnoses and would not have been able to be where they are without understanding their conditions.

Two of the three of those have prevalence rates at around 10% of the population, so if nothing else not effectively employing such people cuts your pool of potential employees by 10%...

Sure, the outlook for people with these disabilities look good. But it is no fun raising a child with one, every day is a challenge.

I recently read Elizabeth Moon's Nebula Award winning Speed of Dark. It's about a cure for autism being forced upon employees by a corporation.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC1B2Y/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

It wasn't forced upon the employees; they were free to choose to take the cure or not. Personally, I think Moon's portrayal of the protagonist was overly dark and depressing (probably to shed some light into the kind of nasty shit that can happen to an autistic). Given the choice, I'd refuse the "cure".

There is no such thing as Asperger's or ADD. It's just the term boring morons use for interesting clever people.

If we were in charge we would have medical terms for "unable to set the clock on a VCR" and "unable to read a book when Oprah is on"

But fortunately we don't care what a bunch of dreary moron office drones think of us - even when we bother to notice them.

I met a friend in college with real ADD. The type where the medication he takes is about 2 chemical reactions away from straight-up cocaine. One day, he forgot to take his meds, and I was talking to him at lunch. He was in the middle of a sentence, and he just... stopped. Completely frozen. Motionless, mid-gesture, staring off into space. He stayed like this for close to a full minute, and just as I was about to ask him if he was ok, he yelled out "SHIT, WHERE'D IT GO!?!" Apparently the sentence he was saying evaporated from his head while he was in the process of speaking it.

So yeah, there really is such a thing as ADD. I won't contest that it's overdiagnosed to hell and back. I wouldn't be surprised if only 1 case in 100 is the real thing, or even 1 in 1,000. But there actually is a real thing, that exists, underneath all the misdiagnoses.

Could that not have been withdrawal symptoms?

From my personal experience this is an entirely plausible reaction.

I appreciate the attempted compliment. It's nice to consider myself interesting and clever.

Unfortunately, it's not so nice when I'm unmedicated to lose my train of thought constantly, be totally distracted by small noises (think Doug the dog: "SQUIRREL!"), be totally manic and creative for two to four hours only to be beset by a terrible fog of malaise for the next few days or even week. But with a boost extra norepinephrine and dopamine, however, I can actually function as a human being and feel like I have control over my life.

Whatever peculiar chemical mixture I have, whether you'd like to call it ADD (or ADHD-PI) or some sort of minor bipolar disorder or depression or hypomania, has very real consequences on my life. Without medication, I am miserable. With it, I feel some semblance of what I would presume "normal" feels like. It doesn't fix all of my problems - my memory recording and recall skills are still very poor and my ability to manage my time is a challenge, which has taken years of practice to compensate for - but it stabilizes me emotionally and mentally so that I can actually focus on living my life vs. using all my faculties up struggling to do basic things like dishes or laundry.

Now I'd like to turn the discussion back to you: what's with your hostility to people who aren't like you?

"Oh my little darling could never sit down and read that 1000page book - it's not because he's lazy boring and stupid - it's because he has ADD".

You can sit down and read a 1000 page book? when Jersey Shore is on? You must have Aspergers.

Little "moonflower cherub" doesn't do well at school. It's because she's too delicate, fragile and artistic for math. She can't read either, she just sits in class eating crayons - she must be dyslexic.

Do you have any arguments that aren't flippantly insulting and irrational?

That wasn't really aimed at the comment above. It was that the majority of "behaviour disorders" are 'diagnosed' by teachers or parents.

In the US I have known children who were medicated for ADD on the word of a teacher or classroom assistant. Basically it becomes the socially accepted alternative to making the disruptive kid sit in the corner.

The rather more laughable but harmless affect is the middle class parents who have decided that any deviation from perfection in their assumed to be perfect little offspring is obviousness a medical disorder

I think kids (usually boys) with behavioral problems getting misdiagnosed with ADHD is more due to the conformist structure of our godawful school system than delusional parents. Parents want the best for their kids, and if the child is underperforming by the metrics of grades, focus and class participation, then naturally they will want to figure out how to compensate. The answer could be tutoring, better impulse control, change of diet or (gee!) learning environment, or the introduction of a psychiatric evaluation, and sometimes the last option is considered first.

I was actually diagnosed with ADD when I was in second grade. My mom refused to acknowledge the diagnosis, claiming it was bunk and that it was the Montessori school's ability to run a classroom that was lacking, not my ability to focus. She reasoned that I could draw for four hours straight, so I must not have ADD. (This was back when all studies on ADD were on boys with hyperactivity as the main criteria - "hyperfocus" and "low arousal theory" were barely off the ground then.)

My mom moved me to a public school and, wonder of wonders, the focused group environment of second and third grade was much more engaging for me. Then I got to the more rigid structure (separate desks, "all eyes on the blackboard" style classroom) and I started to slip. My mom made a little sign for my desk that said "PAY ATTENTION," as if that was going to magically snap me out of my daydreams. My poor performance continued all the way till high school - every report card insisted that I was bright, but not trying hard enough. Finally, when I got to high school, the challenges of AP classes and college prep got me motivated and goal-oriented. But once I was at college, all my old problems came back. It was like I was back at Montessori, totally lost and dazed and losing credits.

Then I got RE-diagnosed with ADD, started medication and group therapy, and voila! I graduated. Had I tried medication in middle school and high school, who knows what I might have been capable of.

For every diagnosis that you may think is unnecessary, I guarantee you there are kids (mainly girls) out there who are humiliated constantly by their mysterious "laziness" and "flakiness" who suffer in silence and parents who are frustrated and sad for their kids' unexplained struggles. Had I known that there was truly something about the way my brain worked that gave me these challenges, I wouldn't have gone through the shameful years that I hated myself for trying twice as hard as anyone else to do half as much as they could do without trying.

The problem isn't cut and dried and your insistence on belittling the choices of well-meaning parents undermines those of us who are fighting to be understood.

tl;dr - "ADD doesn't exist" isn't helping.

This is a valid observation, but maybe you should try making it without all the posturing.

It was that the majority of "behaviour disorders" are 'diagnosed' by teachers or parents.

I don't doubt that this happens, but to convince me that this happens in a majority of cases, you've got to give me some concrete evidence.

As cynicalkane said, you say this because you haven't met people who are very serious affected by these illnesses. These people will greatly disagree with you: yes, they are interesting and clever, but they do _suffer_ from their afflictions. Saying that these conditions do not exist discourages those individuals from seeking diagnosis and accommodations for their conditions.

For example, an individual with ADD [1] might be very intelligent but will be unable to focus on timed tests and will suffer from worse academic performance. If they're unaware of their ADD diagnosis they and others around them will think they are lazy and/or stupid; this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Being diagnosed with ADD doesn't just mean a prescription for medicine, it can instead mean being allowed to take more time on a test or to take the test in a closed office. This can mean they have a chance to be admitted to a university and be exposed to intellectually stimulating material (whether it's computer science, physics, economics, or philosophy).

>it can instead mean being allowed to take more time on a test

And is also widely abused for the same reason. In 2010 OFSTED (the UK govt school inspection agency) found that nearly 1/2 of the 1.6M pupils that were assessed by schools as ADD/Dyslexic/special-needs showed no sign at all of any condition. But did allow the school to either ignore their poor exam results in performance tables or claim extra funds for teaching them.

Similarly there is a statistically odd large increase in the number of children suddenly diagnosed as dyslexic/ADD in their final year at UK `public schools` (= private fee paying) - just before they take final exams - allowing them extra time, the assistance of a teacher or to use a laptop to write essay answers.

I had a co-worker with Asperger's Syndrome. It was actually quite fascinating to me, since I'm a big science/medicine geek.

The amazing thing was that you could pull a list of symptoms from wikipedia or the Merck Manual and put a check mark next to each one with this guy.

Smart guy and very pleasant, but it was apparent his lack of social awareness was very challenging to him. I would get frustrated sometimes and other coworkers would be very aware of my frustration but this guy was completely unaware.

Like I said, pretty interesting...

yes interesting in that "normal" ppl gets a chill from others who by will or ability differ ...

I don't think you've ever met anyone with severe ADD, or severe Asperger's for that matter.

PhD in astrophysics, worked at Cambridge, Caltech, MIT and in a bunch of military space projects.

In my world 'Sheldon Cooper' is a wild party animal.

I have ADD, and my diagnosis comes courtesy of a leading researcher in the field. I like to think that I am also interesting and clever, and there are aspects of the condition that are a positive asset, but these are offset by considerable disadvantages. I can tell you meant your comment positively, but it comes across as ignorant and obnoxious.

wannabe big soon companies want socially nice ppl . very few companies hire for shear capacity because their culture can not handle it ... capacity is looked at with fear since plain jon/jane can not simply grok ...

is it a problem ? well really its a opportunity ...

the most wanted ppl. is free for hire ...

Legitimate post, but you're probably being downvoted for the txtspeak and grammar.

I think this is more perceptive than people appreciate.

seems there are some wannabe be big quick companies hanging here ... that did not get the message ...

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