A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans | Hacker News Reader

A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

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185 pointsivewonyoung156 comments

There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.

Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper.

Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes?

The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities.

Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.

Boys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't actually a difference.

However, the "greater male variability hypothesis" in terms of IQ scores is not terribly well supported by studies, and the difference isn't significant enough to account for the 4:1 ratio of autism diagnoses. As such, I imagine there's more at play here.

Personal experiences play important roles. As for the hypothesis, if not represented in studies, it is certainly reflected in penitentiaries.

I think boys just present symptoms that are more obvious. Girls with autism are very often much better at masking than boys are.Young girls also tend to fixate on more 'socially acceptable' topics that make that fixation less obvious

Also, 'better at masking' there isn't necessarily inherent by gender; it could well be a consequence of young girls in general being put through more social training than boys.

Are symptoms not the sole means of diagnosis? So if girls present less symptoms then aren't they therefore less autistic? Or, alternatively, if they present different symptoms then perhaps they have something else?

No. That's the whole point of masking. It's doing social behavior 'in software' instead of doing it 'in hardware' like everyone else. An alcoholic who is high functioning is still an alcoholic.

Girls are much more likely to be socialized to mask before the parents or children have a clue that's what's happening.

Boys are much more likely to be allowed to "express themselves," act out, etc.

Stereotype echo, ok.

My niece has autism and it’s much more subtle than I’ve seen in boys. It was difficult to even get her diagnosed until teen years when the masking became much harder for her because of more complex social dynamics.

IANAG but the idea is that women get two copies of the X chromosome (XX), and men only one (XY). This explains why women have squared the colour blindness rates of men - women have to get two bad copies, men only one.

Many intelligence related genes are on the X chromosome, so it makes sense you get more variation in men. However, not all genes interact in this way.

I think it was Larry Summers.

It was Larry Summers, who was frequently mischaracterized as having claimed that men were smarter than women. But he was far from innocent--it was one of the worst cases ever of failing to read the room--a room full of extremely accomplished and intelligent women ... and his speculations severely failed to account for cultural factors. It rationalized the status quo and suggested that nothing could change it. The history of women in STEM since then has refuted those speculations ... though the attack on "DEI" is turning the progress around.

> Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons

And what is one supposed to do with this vague generalization? Mostly it used to reinforce biases.

Larry Summers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-...

He clarified his intent: https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005...

In general, anyone not crossing medical taboos in evolutionary biology and neurology will never understand the horribly simple reality of modern humans.

Also, most savants score as cognitively deficient on IQ tests. =3

> in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic

I find this part to be a really strong highlight of our change in perception of autism and what it means to be "autistic" or "on the spectrum."

Perhaps due to the broadening of the spectrum or just an odd association with success and spectrum attributes, we now strongly associate intelligence with spectrum. Historically - perhaps due to a narrower definition of autism - the inverse was true. It's understood now to not have much strong correlation with IQ at all, but apply fairly distributed in a way similar to general population, certainly not skewed one way or the other in a strong way.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/

I still think it's odd how aspergers disappeared as a label. Made more sense than a spectrum with both really smart people and really stupid ones.

Why? We don't have 2 different terms for "blindness" (or any other condition for that matter), one for people who are intelligent and another for those who aren't.

Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator who drew an imaginary line between "less autistic" children, whom he believed could still be valuable to society, and "more autistic" children who were considered to be a threat to their racial purity - so he murdered them. That's the only reason this distinction came to be.

Autism "spectrum" isn't about severity at all - it's a spectrum because every person has a unique presentation and combination of challenges, e.g. sensory processing, communication, relationships, emotional processing, and cognitive rigidity. "Asperger syndrome" was just one specific combination of those that drew a line between people who are worthy of life and those who aren't.

This is a direct result of a push from within the autistic community to stop using eugenicist labels and notions of "more" or "less" autistic. The community is really sensitive to eugenics because of all of the people trying to do eugenics against them and treating them as subhuman.

Autism isn't a scalar. One is not more or less autistic than another. It's a multidimensional vector space where each individual has unique needs and disabilities throughout that space.

We also don't really talk about the IQ angle because, again, eugenics and elitism. It is a fact that some or many autistic people are incredibly intelligent, but it is exclusively allistic people who get hung up on this point. For autistic people, it's just the way things are and we have to make do, just like with everything else in life.

Turns out when a lot of people want to murder, sterilize, experiment on, or genetically engineer you, you get pretty sensitive about other people using actual, factual, literal Nazi eugenicist ideas to describe you.

That's why everyone should be using the terms that autistic people choose for themselves. So that you're not continuing to promote, again, actual Nazi war crimes as a way to distinguish "good" autism from "bad". That's why we've purged Asperger's as a diagnostic label.

This happened like 5-10 years ago didn't it? What changed?

I was diagnosed with aspergers just as this happened - basically new information came out showing he'd sent the higher support need autistic kids off for experimentation so they'd leave him alone with his lower support needs autistic kids.

It's not very odd. It's all part of the drift of science, where now things are loosely defined and what passes for science is often political propaganda.

The removal of Aspergers label has a lot more do to with politics (not wanting to be associate with nazi) than anything else.

As far I'm concerned, the only hope is from genetics studies, which greatly accelerated thanks to computing. At some point with enough studies, we will know what's what. In the meantime, it is safe to discard most of the bullshit coming from psychological studies...

That’s interesting, thanks for posting an explanation.

There is a parallel strain of argument for the former:

- https://www.tinygnomes.com/qwiki.cgi?mode=previewSynd&uuid=B...

- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-brain-overgrowth-dict...

(I have my own theory, which is that a large brain increases the risk of ADHD rather than autism—a larger flow of thoughts and ideas requires more executive function to manage, and therefore more executive function is required to achieve the same attention span—but that ADHD is a kind of multiplier for autism, because social situations are more challenging to navigate if you can’t reliably stay focused on the social interaction you’re having.)

My father’s (extended) side of the family seems to have once a generation severe autistic case and many of us less severely on the spectrum. Doesn’t seem to exist on my mother’s side with any regularity with similar cohort sizes.

Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.

On which side?

Father’s.

Even when it's Fathers all the way up it's turtles all the way down.

What if it is more like Vegeta's super saiyan 2. A false super saiyan 2 form. Just like the real SS2 maintains both power and agility the real Übermensch will attain new levels of IQ while maintaining if not advancing a strong EQ.

https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade

lol that’s an interesting comparison. Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself.

’round these parts it's not atypical. Merely a categorization. Goddamn auties are so stubborn though, my way or the highway all the way. Okay bub, go explore and ignore the team priorities.

Curse yer down votes, tell me rigidity isn't a manifestation of the condition.

You are unfortunately totally right

> Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself.

I wouldn't call it a problem so much as a fundamental aspect to human psychology as a clinical science. A lot of mental disorders are only really diagnosable by the impact the disorder has on the individual's life because of the fundamental limitations on external observers so at some point we have to draw a line or create a spectrum of what is considered "typical".

IMO the issue is that we use the term "autism" for two wildly different things. We use it for perfectly functional people who are more sensitive than usual to crowds and noise and prefers a somewhat different style of communication than most people. And we use it for completely non-functional people who can't communicate at all and don't understand what's being communicated to them and throw violent temper tantrums as adults. I understand that there are probably reasons why these share the same medical term, but I believe we should use different colloquial terms for the two.

the "level 1, 2 or 3 autism" has started to gain colloquial traction recently

Isn’t that straight out of the DSM 5?

Yes

We had it, it was called "Aspie," but somehow that wasn't good enough.

>Things not even an LLM would write.

That's how you know LLM's aren't AGI.

This feels true.

this man autisms

Training in a hyperbolic time chamber to max out my grasp of social cues. I emerge cocoon-like with a correct estimation of who is and is not mad at me

Just find zen and stop giving a shit, buddy.

thats what he said.

About what?

I'd thought that by living indoors and in otherwise controlled environments that there's not really much evolutionary pressure in any particular direction. Higher intelligence isn't a specific requirement to have (many) children live healthy lives.

This is obviously untrue, isn't it? A great many person has died maidenless, as it were.

Nobody offerred them toyota accord either. Really unfortunate

You don't have to die to be selected out of the gene pool, you just need to fail to reproduce. If intelligence contributes to wealth and wealth contributes to reproductive success, then there will be evolutionary pressure favouring intelligence (and any other genes that "come along for the ride" with it).

It also weeds you out if you reproduce but your children choose not to (and/or don’t get chosen), which adds an interesting dimension.

The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. As are intelligence, education, secularity, and so on. IQ is a decent proxy for intelligence. What many people don't know is that it's not a raw score, but relative. The mean of a population is always set to 100 and a standard deviation is generally 15 points. So an IQ of 115 means you performed better than 84% of people, one positive standard deviation.

It was discovered some time back that the 'raw score' for IQs was increasing over time - meaning the mean kept going higher and higher. This is called the Flynn Effect. [1] People were getting smarter. The section I linked to is about the fact this trend reversed some time around 1990 in the developed world. Wiki uses weaker language 'possible end' but it's been tested and verified repeatedly at this point - we're getting dumber, and quite rapidly. This remains true even after controlling for obvious explanations like immigration.

This is yet another reason why fertility is, in my opinion, the issue of the century. The world is going to look so absurdly different, and not in a good way, in 50 years, owing to fertility rates alone. We're very likely living on the tail end of a societal golden age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

For most of human history wealth was positively correlated with fertility and especially with next generation fertility. The trend has changed in the more recent centuries but it’s not enough to affect us too much evolutionarily (for now).

But it is! To take a silly but noncontroversial example - if, for just a single fertility generation (which is driven by the female fertility window for humans - about 20 years) anybody over 5'3" stopped having children, all humans would become quite short! Of course there's some asterisks there like malnutrition may mean somebody's genetically 'normal' height is greater than their expressed height, but the broad point remains true - in a single generation there would be a dramatic transformation in humanity.

This has also been observed in nature. For instance most people view the variation in Darwin's finches as something gradually happening over eons, but further studies on them showed a rapid shift in beak morphology following a single severe drought. [1] It's the same stuff - suddenly one beak became more likely to reproduce (or not), which drove a very rapid population level change.

[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160421145759.h...

Bottlenecks of just a few generations should have a huge impact in the longterm, no?

> This is yet another reason why fertility is, in my opinion, the issue of the century. The world is going to look so absurdly different, and not in a good way, in 50 years, owing to fertility rates alone.

Have you ever seen Idiocracy?

That documentary? Yeah, highly recommended.

It's hilarious but that's kind of what's happening, and that's less funny. If you follow the data to its logical conclusion, we are getting there, the only question is how much time will it take...

> The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility.

Yes and no, it's a lot more nuanced. There can be higher fertility and the very low high and very high end of wealth, but it's also not consistent nor a solid link.

This article looked at as an well illustrated one to me:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

Their graph is setting off red flags for me. A decent sized sample of data over any sort of remotely normal distribution doesn't look like that where you're seeing a 3% change on the x axis drive a 30% shift on the y, and then back again. Here [1] are some of the data that they probably used. Table 7 in particular.

Here is the percent of women in each income bracket who gave birth in the past year by ascending income per household member (their choice of data, not mine - I would prefer completed fertility):

7.96 7.51 6.39 5.14 4.47 3.78 3.18

Here is the percent by total household income in ascending order of income:

6.27 5.23 5.64 5.88 5.26 5.30 5.26 4.98 4.64 4.75

In both cases there is a practically linear, and sharp, inverse correlation between income and fertility. I have no idea how they derived their graph as that data does not seem to be directly provided, but there's no combination of the lines in their graphs that would yield these data as an average, so I suspect they made a mistake.

I would not dispute that there is a U curved shape to fertility, but it's misleading as the tail end is in extremely high incomes. And in any case, their graphs look more like some sort of messed up sine waves, which is obviously just wrong!

[1] - https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/fertility/women...

----

EDIT: Actually I have a hypothesis. The census tables give an extremely useless datum that's very easy to misinterpret. The column is simply labeled "percent". It waxes and wanes all over the place, very much like their graph does. But it's the percent of all births that came from a given income group. But that is completely meaningless, because what matters is the data I gave (and had to manually calculate - by adding a new column) which is the percent of each group that is having children. Otherwise you're graphing some bastardization of population size at each percentile (a bell curve) multiplied by a pseudo-randomizing linear decreasing factor (fertility). So you get a graph that looks weird and makes no sense.

Yes but that's because our current system with the providence state has created "unnatural" pressures where being smarter doesn't correlate that well with wealth past a certain point. In a system where everyone has to be obedient and follow the same solutions as everyone else, you lose agency and that greatly reduces your capacity to make a difference, since those are averaged out on purpose by the system.

In the end what is successful is high-functioning sociopaths, that we can find in all high-power places nowadays. Funnily enough, inequality has increased, and now the wealth of your parents determines your life trajectory much more than even 30 years ago. This is really not surprising, once the exploitative sociopath gets in power, they really don't like fair competition that much.

And this is why both IQ and fertility is going down, it is not a future oriented system. It has a lot to do with the capitalist mindset, where we exploit the earth to the point of making it inhabitable at some point...

Evolution still happens, but in any case if autism is a side effect of the genes that make us intelligent, they are here from much before than central heating and plumbing

I have worked very closely with some autistic people and they were very smart in a human dictionary type way- knew a huge amount of facts but hit a wall very hard with higher levels of abstraction.

Two things I see as required for cutting edge math or physics are intellectual humility and a lot of intuitive feeling for how to approach problems. Another way to say this would be not missing the forest for the trees.

Gordon Claridge thought the same about schizotypy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

Reminds me of the armchair medical theory about autism being a disorder of brain density/dimensionality:

https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...

This makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits.

If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.

If you believe in the intelligence -> compression thing, then the hard limit would be the komologorov complexity.

You could imagine that an ever more intelligent person could solve your IQ test pattern puzzle quicker and quicker, or could solve bigger and bigger puzzles of this kind.

Along these lines, I do think that most human problems don't require that much intelligence to solve. There are patterns which are counter-productive and best left unidentified if your goal is to create economic value.

My PoV is that conversations around intelligence should be had alongside conversations about goals.

> My PoV is that conversations around intelligence should be had alongside conversations about goals.

Well, one definition of intelligence is something along the lines of 'better able to achieve your goals (holding resources available constant)'.

It's easy to upgrade the RAM or hard drive on a computer, but it's not possible to upgrade the L2 cache (other than swapping the CPU).

>Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution

I have autism, I got a temp ban from one of the big autism subreddits because before I knew autism, I thought autistic people who seem to dominate the IT industry were simply the next evolution, far more logical, dont let emotions cloud your judgement.

But I've since understood better that indeed it's a "price" or "cost". Having no friends, no social life, and having random people for no reason at all hate you is quite a shit life to live.

Perhaps we are seeing evolution unfold in real time. The human brain is under constant pressure from modern life: technology, nonstop information, and increasingly complex social systems. Autism may not be a limitation, but the emergence of a cognitive style better suited to these challenges. Some researchers suggest we are at the beginning of a divergence in human cognition. If so, autism could be one of the first signs of a broader shift in how our brains develop.

Notably, technology is computers and networks but also pumps, presses, gears, everything since the wheel.

Isn't this already quite popular theory?

Eg: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8zqoBWBBHD2RjDuS/autism-and...

as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people

> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation.

I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?

It is a long paper, so not immediately obvious.

> The study links evolutionary neuroscience with neurodevelopmental disease, suggesting that the unusually high incidence of autism in humans might be a byproduct of selection shaping our brains.

> It suggests that key neuron types in the human brain are subject to particularly strong evolutionary pressures, especially in their regulatory landscapes.

> If valid, it opens a new lens through which to think about neurodiversity: certain vulnerabilities might be inextricable from the very changes that made human cognition distinctive

The idea is that the same evolutionary process that rapidly selected human brains for intelligence also selected for autism as a side effect. Perhaps because the genes are proximally linked or it’s just the way brains work or some other random reason.

It is NOT saying that for specific individuals intelligence is correlated with autism. That is actually not the case.

Is there a blood test for autism?

no.

There are certain genetic markers you can test for, but not all forms of autism appear in the tests we have today.

Then there's things like the folate blocking antibody (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/) which you can do a blood test for, but again not all people with autism have the antibody.

Why do you ask?

[flagged]

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409361 and marked it off topic.

Pretty clear theres a tradeoff between social intelligence and other forms of intelligence

Is there now?

High functioning autism exists, but autism in general doesn't seem to give any advantage to general intelligence. And the low end of functioning in autism is really, really low.

The spectrum doesn’t work that way, it’s more like a grab bag of traits than a “low to high” thing. High functioning is often just a way to dismiss the needs for certain autistic individuals who can mask very well.

And for girls in particular, who go mostly undiagnosed because they tend to present very differently to boys.

I'd say otherwise. My wife has a student in her riding academy who is a severely autistic adult who is not independent and gets intensive support from her mom and aides that she hires who turn over rapidly because of the difficulty of the job. She has several seizures on some days. One beautiful day when they were tacking up the horse she thought it was a great day to take a walk (it was!) and took off down the driveway and they pressed me into service looking for her. She wandered onto the neighbor's property and when they asked her what was up she took one of them by the arm and started walking back to our place, she then let go of their arm and grabbed onto mine and I brought her back to everyone's relief.

You know what they say, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.”

Yep it's like they're grouping all kinds of mental disabilities as autism

It is the so-called "autists" who do that. It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.

Look at the case of Kanye West

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sick-people-are-sick

There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study...

If it wasn't something people were flocking to like neurotypicals that is now a valuable part of their identity they'd just be honest and say that a lot of these people would have to give up their diagnosis. Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...

https://spectrumofhope.com/blog/5-different-types-of-autism/

Now we need an "awareness of everybody who isn't autistic" movement.

You’re arguing semantics here. You seem to acknowledge there are diagnosable issues, both with the subtype article and older DSM, but because it’s under one umbrella currently you want to throw it out instead of acknowledging the issues?

See

https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Matrix-Gil-Eyal/dp/074564399X

One issue is that special ed has taken all the air out of the room for kids who are not thriving in school but don’t have a diagnosis. I went to a PTA meeting where the superintendent completely dismissed any concerns I had about the school but gushed over how the mother of a “special” kid was a partner in his education. (Other parents and teachers did show some sympathy)

If you want to have some rights as a parent you are practically forced to get your child a diagnosis: if they are in the bottom 25% of readers that have ‘Dyslexia’ which similarly seems to have distinct enough subtypes that an honest definition is ‘bottom 25% of readers’

So autism went from being a disabling condition to something that applies to many people who really ought to have “no apparent distress” in their chart because you can’t be different without some reification of the difference.

> It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.

It hasn't "become" anything and it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, take Kanye's behavior up with him.

> There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases

> Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...

A few things to unpack:

1. autism isn't a disease, it's a disorder (or a difference from average)

2. they identified 4 *subtypes* of ASD, not distinct disorders

3. these subtypes have nothing in common with the conditions that were removed from the DSM-5

4. these are serious issues that have always had profound effects on people's lives, the only difference is that they used to suffer alone, in silence. Increased awareness doesn't make it a "fad" and your snotty, dismissive attitude towards them doesn't belong here or anywhere else

Whether is is a subtype or a disorder is political, which is true about everything in mental health and developmental disability.

Personally I have been hurt because a condition that I suffer from and that probably about 5% of people suffer from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

This is something I came to understand at the age of 51 where my ability to benefit from that knowledge is limited. I got a psych eval circa 1978 which I'm told was a good quality eval at the time -- they had no idea what I had but knowing what I know now I can attack it with a highlighter and line it up with Meehl's work that was published in 1962 but failed (and still fails) to be translated into practice.

Given that 5-10% of people have this condition, some will be misdiagnosed as "autistic", others will not be diagnosed at all. Kids with my condition will have to wait another 45 years for answers and I blame the "autism" epidemic.

And don't get me started on the other fashionable neurodivergence by which the children of the rich and powerful can get performance enhancing drugs and extra time on the test.

Oops late to the tussle with identarians.

>Andersen suggests that a tradeoff exists in predictive processing, where giving higher weight to prediction errors prevents the detection of false patterns (i.e. apophenia) at the cost of being unable to detect higher level patterns, and giving lower weight to prediction errors allows for the detection of higher level patterns at the cost of occasionally detecting patterns that don't exist, as in delusions and hallucinations that occur in schizotypy.

Personally: I focus on the anhedonia because ime the other schizotypists* (&, less commonly, diagnosed autists) seem to have it, and, as I might have mentioned before, negative affect in combo with some other traits tends to attract bullies/certain sadists/karens/well just friggin identarians and not fellow autists/schizos whatever :)

(*As far as I'm concerned the founding stoics were simply rationalizing their anhedonia, so they needed rich and powerful patrons to take that practice to the masses. Former-day VC and unis, as it were)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418765

That’s the point, if you use the hashtag #actuallyautistic you just proved you’re #notactuallyautistic.

An observation I've made is that the most people ("the general population") will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals. I.e.: They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back even if the instructions are total nonsense or impossible to physically implement.

It's a rare breed (1-2%) of the population that will actively push back, insist on facts, and stick to only the "hard, unyielding reality" of physics, chemistry, mathematics, physics, logic, etc...

There is a very high correlation between these types of people and autistic people.

You have to not care about how other people "feel" or what their conflicting priorities might be to prioritise reality above the personal whims of others.

To be truly intelligent, you have to be able to call the emperor naked.

PS: It's easy to disagree with the above, but this is invariably an instance of "the fish is the last to know it lives in water" idiom. Something like 80% of the adult population goes along with Santa for Grownups because of peer pressure, also known as "mainstream religions". Don't get me started on partisan voting against one's own interests. Etc...

I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.

> I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake.

One of the realities is more unyielding than the other.

Pi can’t be redefined to be exactly 3 no matter how socially important the legislator is.

> One of the realities is more unyielding than the other.

Also ten or one hundred (people) is more than one.

That math can’t be reasoned out of existence either.

My two cents: what you describe mainly applies on the micro level: advancement within peer groups. But if you step back and look at the macro level, accounting for biases, you can sometimes make giant leaps.

I've seen a related effect: most people will stick with an emotional position despite conclusive proof that it's based on a flawed "reality".

I have a strong suspicion that autism is a case of too much of a good thing. Things like being a carrier for Tay Sachs confers a survival advantage but two copies is lethal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

Also known as the backfire effect, where people will paradoxically believe in a false position even more when presented with the contrary evidence.

There are anthropological explanations of this, such as wanting to remain seen as being loyal to a "social group" by publicly and visibly rejecting the behaviours or positions of a rival group.

There are many real-world examples of this, such as immigrants become more religious as a way to distance themselves from the dissimilar mainstream religion of their new home. Back where they came from, there was no need to "show off" their adherence to their faith because it was the default state and everyone was the same as them. But when faced with dissenting viewpoints, they feel a need to demonstrate their loyalty.

There are similar effects with sports fans that move locations, conservatives that move to very gay-friendly areas, etc...

None of this is true or plausible.

> They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back

Zero push-back? Or zero push-back in front of the rest of the group?

Humans are pack animals, highly evolved for social connection, and ostracism can be life threatening. The benefits of group membership and cohesion are enough that it is worth tolerating some mistakes and suboptimal outcomes because over time the expected utility for individuals and in the aggregate is much higher when people are working together harmoniously as a group.

I totally agree that if it’s “just” politics or some purely social situation, then sure, the optimal behaviour is the one that prioritises the group dynamics and social pecking order. Even in practical matters like hunting or war, obeying more senior leaders can have a net positive outcome because of their greater experience, etc… This is likely true in many “low information; high variability” situations… which is a lot of them… but not all.

The problem is that we have one set of wiring, one set of instincts, and one set of common social behaviours. These just don’t work in “unnatural” scenarios for which we aren’t evolved, such as pure mathematics or computer science.

The maths just doesn’t care about your seniority and a proof is a proof irrespective of the age of the author.

To truly excel in those “hard sciences” the default wiring isn’t optimal.

The article states that non-default wiring has the downside of also causing autism.

(FYI— I’m not trying to be sharp, I’m trying to be direct because many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush. I apologize if that’s presumptuous.)

> The problem is that we have one set of wiring, one set of instincts, and one set of common social behaviours. These just don’t work in “unnatural” scenarios for which we aren’t evolved, such as pure mathematics or computer science.

Social behavior is so complex that this is not a useful way to frame it. Most people see nonsense when they examine something they don’t understand.

> The maths just doesn’t care about your seniority and a proof is a proof irrespective of the age of the author.

You’re conflating sycophancy with tact. They are extremely different.

> To truly excel in those “hard sciences” the default wiring isn’t optimal. […] The article states that non-default wiring has the downside of also causing autism.

Statements like this are like bubble wrap people subconsciously wrap around their egos to protect it from things they’re insecure about. Most disagreements in the hard sciences don’t stem from people’s feelings obfuscating math. And when you’re trying to organize a team, solicit people’s best efforts to find a creative path forward with a nebulous problem, inspire people about your research to secure funding, inspire people to work on your problem rather than some other problem, mediating conflicts… all of those dreaded “soft skills” are every bit as important to science as the math as soon as your team is larger than one.

If your mental makeup affords you the ability to step back and say “hold on, I think we’ve got the numbers wrong, here,” then that’s fantastic. If you feel compelled to tell people they’re wrong, you’re probably getting something out of that, emotionally, and you just don’t realize how incredibly counterproductive doing so is. Not being able to effectively leverage a team to collaboratively solve a problem is very very bad for hard sciences, no matter how precise the numbers are, because you’re going to generate a lot fewer of them if nobody’s willing to work with you. Beyond that, in my experience, autists can often communicate really effectively together, but it can break down really quickly as soon as a less cut-and-dried conflict arises, especially if one of them has difficulty regulating their emotional responses, or easily feels alienated. Mediating that requires someone that’s able to recognize how and why someone might be hurting someone else’s feelings, and say “ok, let’s hold on for a second.”

And there are so many kinds of non-default wiring that trying to associate one with hard sciences doesn’t make sense. I went to art school with a ton of autists doing tech art: as a non-autist (with a mean case of ADHD,) I was the most technical one there by a mile. My friend’s wife is an autist artist that is absolutely allergic to math.

You should really challenge your assumptions, here. Consider your susceptibility to selection bias, overconfidence in your ability to gage the causes and effects of social motivations, and consider that many of your strengths may be far less coupled to autism than you imagine they are.

> ... Most disagreements in the hard sciences don’t stem from people’s feelings obfuscating math.

I didn't clarify my point sufficiently, we ended up "talking past each other" a bit because of this.

I'm not referring to people within the hard sciences having arguments! That happens, but like you said, typically for good and valid reasons.

I was referring to the general population of office workers and the like, outside of the highly-selective Silicon Valley startup bubble that many HN readers might find themselves in.

> many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush

I'm not on the spectrum, but I do appreciate "direct" communication!

More to the point, you seem to be in the bubble I mentioned, so you may not even be aware of what a typical large corporate or government office worker's experience is like.

In my $dayjob I regularly see objectively bad projects moving forwards effortlessly with zero resistance. I see dozens of supposedly important people just "going with the flow" and nodding in agreement with their superiors because they're terrified of taking an objective stance against the "tribe leader". There are zero pointed questions asked. No technical analysis of any kind. No objective metrics or numbers, ever. No graphs. No charts. Nothing you might recognise as "science".

Just a few weeks ago I was in a meeting where they were presenting a new network security design that had already been signed off and approved for implementation by dozens of senior leaders including the CIO, CTO, CISO, etc...

This multi-million dollar project was already in motion for six months, and I was the only one to ask pointed questions: "Won't routing all outbound traffic via another cloud provider tank network performance? Won't that result in hairpin networking where we go out and back in to talk to ourselves? Won't this break out server-to-server firewall rules? What about egress bandwidth costs, have they been estimated? Has anyone tested any of this?"

"No, we didn't test it, the vendor selling it to us assured us it was good, its in the top right Gartner magic quadrant, and it has been signed off, so there's no concerns."

Translated: "Authority, authority, authority."

This is what the "rest of the world" is like, the vast majority of the general population out there working in typical jobs.

You yourself said you know "many autists". You're in the 5% highly selected weird corner of the world, probably a startup or something akin to it.

Ime, there are two causes of heated scientific debates. (1) Conflicting or insufficient data. (2) Communication issues.

Cause (1) cannot usually be resolved without some sort of technological innovation.

Cause (2) is quite interesting because it is a social problem.

For example, someone comes to you with a markov decision problem and insists that no form of reinforcement learning could be a viable solution. Why would they do this? Probably because their understanding of RL differs from yours. Or your understanding of the problem differs from theirs. This can be solved by communication.

Stated differently, the topology of your “semantic map” of the domain differs from theirs. To resolve it you must be able to obtain an accurate mapping of their local topology around the point of disagreement onto yours.

> will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals

You can look no further than masking for Covid prevention. It makes sense, it works, it's relatively easy but social pressure is strong enough to force the majority to make a suicidal decision not to. We are so, so screwed.

Watching a foreign language movie without subtitles might allow someone to notice visual components others might miss on the first pass, but it definitely doesn’t give the viewer a better understanding of the movie.

Einstein seemed to have absolutely no problems with his social life. Newton on the other hand lived and died alone, possibly a virgin.

Feynman was also very charismatic

Ditto for John von Neumann

It seems like there are a lot more gay guys than asexuals out there though.

In Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now.

Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).

Never being married did however.

There are essentially no married virgins, i.e., essentially all the virgins are unmarried, so it seems inconsistent to consider the unmarried as losers but not the virgins.

> There are essentially no married virgins,

Which is something I point out to JWs rude enough to interrupt my Sunday breakfast. Which of the following scenarios present as most likely:

1. A married couple, living together as a married couple, had never had sex, or

2. They had sex

It literally did not. Celibacy was much more common (or at least commonly aspired to) and was considered virtuous.

Only in prescribed folds. The average unmarried person was a relative outcast. Lifelong singleness was exceedingly rare. It went as far as having legal ramifications like not being able to own property and being unable to hold certain offices.

If anything, Newton was very well connected with other people and had extensive collaborations with them. He was very much social.

The fact he may have died a virgin says nothing about his social capabilities.

Maybe he was gay in a time when being gay was a death sentence ? Which would be really sad.

You can read his life history in some books. One that I’ve read says that he grew up essentially in foster care because his widowed mother remarried and continued to live mere miles away from him in the same town. She completely avoided all contact with him. You could imagine what that kind of rejection would do without having to invent his sexual orientation.

You're speculating just as much as I was? I never said "he was gay" I was just saying (like you) there are several others reasons he maybe didn't' marry outside of autism.

You actually make it sounds like what I said was derogatory?

That’s called masking.

I have level 1 ASD and rated pretty high in masking when tested. I show up the way I’m expected to show up. I don’t let people see what it costs me. I deal with that later in private.

You can be an introvert without having autism. A lot of people “mask” it doesn’t mean they’re autistic.

That doesn't invalidate the fact that there are high functioning autists that mask well.

You can’t peer inside someone’s head to know the motivations behind why a person acts the way they do. A autistic person will have different causal reasons for acting in a way that might look like an introvert from the outside.

I ran across a video that went over this and all the autistic reasons in the examples were the ones that resonated with me. I had even spent an hour debating back and forth with a therapist a few months earlier about one of the examples the video gave. The therapist was trying to apply the neurotypical view, and I was unknowingly arguing for the autistic view, trying to explain that I didn’t feel the way he was saying, but he couldn’t understand the nuance I was trying to explain. It was very frustrating. This happened many times, and I finally quit the day before getting the results from the testing.

I used to think like you. That’s why I actually got tested; I wanted to know for sure. It took over 6 months and cost around $3k. It’s not something a person is going to do on a whim to justify their fidget spinner collection. When I got the results, I spent the whole time asking about the tests. Could I have gamed it, objective vs subjective tests, etc. I spent decades trying to figure out what’s “wrong” with me. I didn’t come to this lightly or because it’s popular. It was the first thing that actually fit and made sense. And the more I learn, the more it fits and makes sense. The visibility in the mainstream helps people like me find the answers we have been relentless searching for our whole life, that everyone overlooks because of masking.

Or "there's a fine line between genius and insanity".

It’s kind of rude to equate autism with “insanity”, but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.

Bit more than rude, historically.

He equated being insane with being a genius. Nowhere did he mention autism.

I'm diagnosed as autistic and I am therefore more qualified than you to classify what is rude and what isn't rude to autistic people. I think misrepresenting what he actually said is what is rude, not what he in actuality said.

>Nowhere did he mention autism.

It's implied by being in a discussion about autism.

Disclaimer: I also read it as rude at first glance.

Question: Can you classify what is rude or not for autistic people in general or is it more likely that you might perceive something as not rude which other autistic people might perceive as rude?

Thanks, I am also autistic, so I guess we're evenly matched for this battle to the death :)

Also, I wouldn't presume to speak for all autistic people, though I am one.

Sometimes people can take the same sentence to mean different things. Please don't assume malice from others where it could be a difference of understanding.

I am not mad or anything, I know how it is to misunderstand things.

I just noticed (and got a chuckle out of) something:

To me it looks like you first "assumed malice", got called out and now don't want to be assumed malignant yourself.

Thanks for the chuckle!

But in seriousness: would you mind describing how you interpret your own participation in this thread?

I'm fascinated by this behaviour, but I suspect it's as "easy" as you not being able to interpret the original comment in more than one way.

(Just as I'm doing too, or at least we both seem to act like it anyway)

I said

> but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.

Which I assumed the person I was talking to originally would see, read, and understand to mean that their comment was rude but I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way.

Instead, a bunch of others jumped in to interpret it a different way. I don’t see how I supposedly have assumed malice when I literally said that the OP probably wasn’t being malicious in a slightly different way!

You are correct, I'm not sure how I missed the second part of your original comment, my apologies!

(I thought I could edit my first comment, but I can't, so this comment will have to do.)

No worries at all, I hate textual communication for the specific reason that it's hard to express true emotions through it.

IMO ideas which make the believer feel better about themselves, particularly about their weaknesses, should be viewed with skepticism.

Maybe those bright people with poor social intelligence are more likely to be labeled as very intelligent by others…which would be the kind of thing a social species would do.

That's not "pretty clear" at all--and you've provided no argument.

As a lifetime member and former officer of Mensa, I know many people with both very high IQ and very high EQ.

The smartest person I’ve ever met— like, well-cited research for all 3 PhDs and still does a lot of it, a few moderately popular books, yet also teaches very popular classes at a world-class university— is extremely socially adept.

I've wondered if it's something akin to an LLM with the wrong temperature or a GPU that's overclocked. If human intelligence is right at the evolutionary bleeding edge you'd expect some proportion of outcomes like that just due to randomness of various kinds.

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The article is about how the fundamental nature of intelligence has certain weaknesses that will manifest.

For example, a species sufficiently intelligent to discover acetaminophen is doomed to also create the sort of idiocy that is the current US administration.

Please don't post trollish comments like this on HN. It's not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. Please make an effort to heed the guidelines, particularly these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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