Exactly. Elon is open about ASD (he uses the word Asperger's because he’s older), Anthony Hopkins is open about autism too (he can memorise a 7 page script), I suspect Tarantino may have it, and half of the people who built the internet.
Anyone that tries to ‘rectify’ me can fuck off.
Edit: as a user of HN since it was Startup News, and as someone who is very much aware of the HN guidelines, 'fuck off' was chosen very carefully towards anyone who would erase my existence.
Hopefully HN has a modicum of empathy for other people and can understand others not wanting to be destroyed.
Elon is probably as much ASD as he is an inventor. Going by his behavior (parts that are reported on in public), I can as a lay-person recognize him to have more narcissistic traits, so a personality disorder like NPD or ASPD is more descriptive of him in my mind.
When you have money it's known as "eccentric", ie eccentric billionaire (similarly you have mad scientist, absent-minded professor, wise old man, etc).
This video has logic like (all from the first 3 minutes):
- "Elon wasn't public with his condition before SNL, nor did his mother reveal this deeply personal information, maybe he has it buy maybe he's a sociopath?".
- Some people in our YouTube comments section have diagnoses and don't believe Elon. Here are their comments!
Sometimes I think I'd be quite happy to be "rectified" of ASD...
Whether it is correct or not to see it _entirely_ in a disease model (which it's not clear to me, how should the study have been done with a hybrid model?), I have to disagree with the suggestion it shouldn't be seen as an issue.
Don't forget that the S in ASD is for "spectrum". There are parts of this spectrum with people for who ASD is debilitating to their happiness and participation in society. "Rectified" might not mean complete change, but enough to give someone the tools to handle things better.
Neurotypical peopple often lie about things for social convenience, overly value fitting in, have trouble exploring the depths of their interests, and have a poor sense of smell and taste.
For people who are high-functioning, it may be that the benefits of autism you mentioned are worth the downsides. But I think most medium and low-functioning people would not agree with that.
I’m technically level 2, which means there are periods where I cannot communicate. I have at least one level 3 friend that I’m sure would feel the same, I’ll ask her and find out for sure though.
I agree it isn't entirely separable. I assume that personality / self develops differently due to the "issue" identified in the study, and if it were "rectified", then it would no longer be a factor. That doesn't mean that you'd wake up the next day as a completely different person. Everyone changes over time, and the prior "self" is still there and you can still choose how to integrate the new "changes".
Of course, this is just my imagination, it may not actually be anything like that. But I will double down on the thrust of my original comment, which is that although autism is not simply a "disease" because the self has developed differently, doesn't necessarily mean that we want it to stay.
I would be 100% ok with being cured of ADHD and off spectrum. If I don’t take my meds everything goes haywire for me and everyone around me. I don’t think people realize how “one hand tied behind your back” these things really are.
So be a constant slave to judgement of strangers on how I talk, act and dress rather than tuning out all that useless noise and focusing on the few people and things I truly care about? That would be a hard pass for me.
Maybe "ASD" umbrella is part of the problem, I don't have a "sensory integration disorder", I have emotions that tend to go from 0 to 65 with little in between and some other issues like poor facial memory (that would be nice to cure) and tendency to daydream.
Maybe that's consistent with Aspergers as originally understood, maybe not. But just for starters, can we stop inventing nonsensical umbrella terms like "ASD" and "AAPI" that serve no purpose except shared victimhood and shaming everyone else for supposed microaggressions? Hawaii is not the same as India, and I don't need a service dog to tell me there is a fire alarm in my building. Maybe then it would be easier for me to work on my unique needs. Like you know how one in a several hundred people finds your responses 100% natural and preferable to superficial norms without necessarily sharing the same personality themselves? Would be great to be able to find them efficiently to maintain a decent social circle rather than stumbling upon one randomly every ten years.
I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
I wonder how many ASD diagnoses are made just because someone never learnt social skills properly due to circumstances or lack of effort/interest.
A person with balance disorder wont be able to walk straight and will trip a lot. You can't just study physics and fix your balance, those calculations are too hard to make quickly enough to be used in practice. Understanding physics might help a bit, but their walk will always feel clunky and unnatural.
ASD is the same kind of problem but with social situations. No matter what they do their social interactions wont feel as natural and smooth as what normal humans do. And interestingly enough many with ASD also have unnatural and clunky walking styles as if they had a problem with balance, it is a known red flag to check for a diagnosis.
I remember hearing of someone that had blown out their inner ear and had balance issues. The issue was solved with a gyroscopic plane that sat between their molars and covered the back of their tongue.
A person who got ahead even though their social skills are shit probably has a lot of other things going for them, not everyone judges a persons worth just based on their social skills.
You can actually use autism to have good social skills. It takes a lot of work but once you realise you will never fit in, and have the same issues speaking to a thousand people as you do speaking to one person, you can speak honestly to a thousand people. Very few NTs can do this.
Kinda like the peacock's tail being attractive because it is harmful to the individual. The bigger the tail, the better the peacock, if he made it this far without getting eaten!
If he is able to successfully maintain an audience on social media and date celebrities while juggling multiple CEO roles it sounds to me that this disorder is mostly cured.. unless you can prove there is a region of the brain that is responsible for being tactful.
He just needs to work on not firing or picking fights with random people when in a bad mood.
We call both social skills, but they are very different, just like how balance and theoretical physics are different things. Managing a company or a large crowd requires more intellectual understanding, he has that, managing direct social interactions requires more of the intuitive parts of your brain, he might have a disorder there and it would classify him as having autism.
And just to clarify, people with autism can have great theoretical understanding of people, doesn't mean that they perform well in direct social interactions.
But this discussions doesn't seem to go anywhere, you hate the guy and want to say he is evil rather than him having a disorder. There isn't much to argue about then.
I don’t think he does fire people when in a bad mood. As we’ve seen in the last week he fires people when they give ridiculous reasons for poor performance though.
So what you're saying is that it's possible to study human behaviors enough to be able to put up a good performance and convince people to give you money, analogously to how someone with an inner ear condition could study physics enough to become a gymnast? Aren't contradicting yourself?
The ASD person could write a paper explaining what he wants to do because he has studied English and people enough to understand what to say to make others understand, and when others read that paper they agree and give the ASD person money.
Similarly a person with balance disorder can write a paper explaining how balance works, and others can read that paper agree and fund the persons project for making self balancing robots.
Doesn't mean the ASD person can fluently navigate social situations, but luckily modern technology means he doesn't have to. When writing papers and proposals you can spend a lot of time thinking and preparing general statements, you can't put that sort of effort into more immediate interactions.
the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...
the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.
They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.
most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.
(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on?? idk)
fake small talk and go-to phrases and lame jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and managed voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc
Both people know it's fake and that's okay
-----
it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll
it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)
'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe
Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested, shamelessness in breaking norms and criminality, helplessness/numbness to the disturbing etc
Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.
There are infinite ways to be dysfunctional and very few ways to achieve 'good-vibes only' haha
TV shows have skewed the sense of how smooth-talking and self-aware and charming normal real people are...
> the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...
Most humans have friends, at least as children. They’re certainly not hated so much to be thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten to the point of being hospitalised as young Elon was.
I'm not sure how that's directly related, but I venture bullying among boys seems to be about the weakest / smallest / poorest/ easiest to harm and get away with it, not necessarily social skills or autistic stuff.
Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.
Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....
Masking behaviors are strongly correlated with worse well-being and increased mental health issues (generally depression, suicidial ideation and attempts).
> I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
I personally see three points:
- People often expect that one reacts "intuitively" instead of analyzing the whole situation first
- Humans don't behave in an "easy" way like physical systems. So extracting the "hidden laws" is in my opinion nigh impossible.
- Even if one tries to find possible hypotheses, one has to run a huge amount of "experiments" to extract rules. What does "running experiments" here mean? Behaving in very weird ways all the time just to obtain data on the behavior of the people. And the required data volume is insane, so it means behaving consciously weirdly rather for decades.
> I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.
It's not, but people tend to be able to spot the difference between studied and natural behaviour if you know them long enough. Studied behaviour is called 'masking' and has a tremendous mental toll. Over time, someone will eventually see you tired, and therefore unmasked.
As a seven year old I studied Peter Curry (the most popular boy in school) and Michaelangelo (the most well liked ninja turtle) because it seemed everyone else had been given a set of social instructions and I had not, and that by adopting their behaviour I would be less isolated.
It was still a nine year wait until I had a friend.
I genuinely spend a lot of time studying people offline and online.
I think someone who can't do this from first principles is probably going to struggle if they try living in a very foreign country or amongst a different subculture of their own nation. Most people can't cope outside their comfort zone.
It does mean that tactful social interactions require conscious mental effort for a person with ASD. If you’re busy using your mind for something else, tact might get lost along the way. Or so I understand.
Huh, have you experienced, or have been with a close person experiencing shutdown because environment is too loud, smelly, or there is someone acting in a provoking, humiliating manner? How analythical knowledge of social skills can be of help in that situation?
Suppose three armed persons draw a weapon and give you contradicting orders while threatening you. How will deep understanding of those individual orders help you reconcile them and decide how to act?
Anyone that tries to ‘rectify’ me can fuck off.
Edit: as a user of HN since it was Startup News, and as someone who is very much aware of the HN guidelines, 'fuck off' was chosen very carefully towards anyone who would erase my existence.
Hopefully HN has a modicum of empathy for other people and can understand others not wanting to be destroyed.