Pretty clear theres a tradeoff between social intelligence and other forms of intelligence
replies(5):
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.
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?
> 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
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.
Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
For example, a species sufficiently intelligent to discover acetaminophen is doomed to also create the sort of idiocy that is the current US administration.
Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade
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 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.
https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...
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.
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.
Also, most savants score as cognitively deficient on IQ tests. =3
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.
Curse yer down votes, tell me rigidity isn't a manifestation of the condition.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Also ten or one hundred (people) is more than one.
That math can’t be reasoned out of existence either.
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.
Eg: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8zqoBWBBHD2RjDuS/autism-and...
It's implied by being in a discussion about autism.
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...
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?
It is NOT saying that for specific individuals intelligence is correlated with autism. That is actually not the case.
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.
Have you ever seen Idiocracy?
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
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.)
> 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.
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...
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)
You actually make it sounds like what I said was derogatory?
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.
I am diagnosed ASD and ADD with high IQ and altruism, empathy and collaboration are core principles of mine - because they are optimizing efficiency and quality of life on a societal level thus affecting the individual as well.
You could argue that I am an exception but all ASD / ADD friends of mine also tend to at least view empathy and collaboration as important / useful and necessary, more so than many of my neurotypical acquaintances (which tend to be more conservative and focus on their small ingroup / family instead of a more societal / communal perspective).
> 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!
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-...
> Collaboration is the reason why we are here, along with altruism and empathy. Autism drastically limits all three.
Autism does not reduce altruism. What are you trying to suggest by this? Autistic people are often the most altruistic people I know; going well above and beyond to help out (sometimes to a fault).
Autism does not reduce empathy. This is a common misconception due to difficulties with reading faces and theory of mind. Empathy is often felt extremely strongly.
Autism does not mean unable to collaborate. Here on HN of all places! The software world is full of asd people happily collaborating to do great things.
> at the cost of losing core human characteristics like altruism, empathy, and the potential for collaboration.
Ahh I get it now. The neurodivergent are not even properly human to you. Perhaps a little eugenics is needed to correct things?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-...
He clarified his intent: https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005...
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.
My PoV is that conversations around intelligence should be had alongside conversations about goals.
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.
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.
>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)
Well, one definition of intelligence is something along the lines of 'better able to achieve your goals (holding resources available constant)'.
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...
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...
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.