Pretty clear theres a tradeoff between social intelligence and other forms of intelligence
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Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's implied by being in a discussion about autism.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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
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)
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.