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Comment by scottshea | Hacker News Reader

I am glad to see that an ASD based tech company is going for more than just testing. Specialisterne and Aspiritech are excellent but slotting ASD folk into just software testing seemed a bit limiting. Also, the inherent conflict of testing (i.e. telling someone you think they made a mistake) always seemed problematic.

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One thing that many high functioning autistics share, is a low level of cognitive empathy. What this means, is that we often do or say things that other people find hurtful and offensive, not because we want to insult them, but instead because it doesn't make sense to us that someone would be offended by it. This could actually be a good thing in software testing, because you are likely to get a completely honest assessment of the product.

Can't any of those high-functioning brain cells be put to good use learning social skills and choosing to practice a higher level of empathy?

In my experience, I've found that applying the Golden Rule and "seeking first to understand" generally takes conscious effort and practice... and it's also my assumption that I'm not the only one on the planet like that, seeing as how Steven Covey's "7 Habits" book spent 1/7th of the book on developing empathetic habits.

I can't speak for everyone, but in my experience, social skills can be learned to a certain extent, but it takes an enormous amount of energy. I'm not sure why, but when go to a large social event, like an office party or a birthday, I feel completely exhausted afterwards.

I don't really know about cognitive emphathy though. Logically, I can understand why someone is upset after they explain it to me, but I normally can't pick up on something until its too late.

Very true, worst kind of empathy is when you realise hours or days or week or even years later make that connection to a event and realise your embarasment you never experienced at the time. So you rebuild your mental social handerling flowchart and carry on.

you realise hours or days or week or even years later make that connection to a event and realise your embarasment you never experienced at the time

This happens to everyone. It's part of normal social growth & development to have your brain wander and suddenly realize one made a faux pas (or figure out the truth about an old situation).

"Can't any of those high-functioning brain cells be put to good use learning social skills and choosing to practice a higher level of empathy?"

If you understood ASD better then you would realise that would come across as offencive.

As for golden rules, well there are always exceptions to any rule. Getting a job in IT involves convincing a bunch of HR people who know nothing about IT that you are best for the job. That would be the issue stopping most ASD(Autistic Spectrum Disorders) from getting the roles, and startups are just too dynamic and change to quickly for most comfort zones, let alone somebody with ASD.

As for empathy, it is such a open area and yes I'm sure we all learn, still I know if I kick somebody in the bollocks then even I know how that person is feeling ;(

would you prefer a feigned empathetic interaction to an honest one?

Yes. Listen to Act II of This American Life "Play the Part" http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/458/p...

fair enough, i'll listen. skeptically. but i'll listen.

In my experience (and I scored 28-29 AQ, depending on the day), there's a different kind of empathy that is very common on the spectrum.

It is often very easy to do a deep kind of empathy, where you focus a lot of energy into running a full simulation of another person in your head. This is often much easier when the person you're simulating is similar to you (e.g., on the spectrum). It takes energy, and it's really hard to parallelize, that is, I can't easily deeply empathize with a dozen people at once.

What a lot of normal people seem to be good at is a doing a first-order approximation of other people's intentions and motivations, a shallow type of empathy if you will. And perhaps it's just that if they're interacting with "normal" people, they can make a lot of assumptions that don't hold true for Aspies.

That being said, there are a lot of good strategies I've learned on how to make chit-chat with normal people and "flow" conversation -- I explicitly had to learn it as I was not born with that package pre-installed.

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