> 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.
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.