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Will_Newsome comments on Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome? - Less Wrong
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Comments (295)
Good post. I'm not sure how much advantage one would get out of identifying one's autism, but it's probably good to know either way.
I think the most glaring atypical-for-people-with-Asperger's trait among the Less Wrong and especially SIAI community is the lack of an "all-absorbing narrow interest"; I and many others had such traits as children, but these days a lot of what I see among SIAI Visiting Fellows and my vague impression of folks here on Less Wrong are academic generalists, or even true renaissance man generalists.
I'm not sure if it's atypical that I built up my generalist nature via obsessively practicing skills for 6 months to 2 years at a time and then moving on. I spent a year constantly playing basketball, then 2 solid years on guitar and music theory, then 6 months learning social skills, then 2-month spurts of studying chess, then 6 months devouring the Sequences and cognitive psychology studies, et cetera, until it came to be that I have a solid base for doing whatever it is I may want to do. (Of course, I dropped out of high school in the process, but I feel it was probably worth it.) Do others have similar experiences?
Yes. I built up my generalist arsenal one obsession at at time.
This is a great way to put it.
I read a pertinent comment on that criteria, probably by Attwood. He noted that sometimes the 'all absorbing narrow interest' can be 'the universe' or 'life'. For the purposes of identifying the type of personality in question the absolute scope is not the deciding factor. It is whether the interests happen to be approximately optimising social status in the local environment, being fully engaged in the social reality. Practically speaking 'knowing everything' is a narrow interest.
I wasn't good at social skills until something like age 17, though they still go bad because of winter depression. Kids have different brains too; I would tell adolescents wondering to wait a few years. For me it was like a light came on and I could understand strangers.
I was a very bizarre child up to age 10 or so. Wouldn't look people in the eye, walked into walls, talked to myself, didn't make friends, etc. Now essentially none of that shows. I may have "had something" but it's moot at this point.
The only bizarre thing that remains is my near-pathological lack of spatial skills. I can't aim, throw, dance, or drive with anywhere near the ease of a normal person. (I wonder if it's improvable at all?)
I taught myself to juggle at around 14 or 15 and felt it improved my coordination in rugby and basketball which I played at the time. I attribute some improvement in my reaction times and spatial awareness to extensive Quake deathmatch sessions as well. It's hard to say whether those effects were genuine however since I had no real way of performing a controlled study. There may be a cutoff age at which significant improvement is possible (as appears to be the case with language acquisition) but this study found that surgeons who played video games improved their hand eye coordination for laparoscopic surgery which suggests video games may be useful for adults.
I've heard this about video games. (I never played any, myself.) Now I really want to try and see.
So-called 'twitch' video games are best for improving hand eye co-ordination. First person shooters are probably best for improving spatial awareness and also generally focus on twitch gameplay. A realistic driving game may help improve driving skills specifically. There are a number of attempts to use driving simulators to improve awareness in new drivers but I'm not sure what research exists to support their effectiveness.
For a different perspective, Psychonauts, Cave Story, and Portal are all absolutely charming twitchy games I'd recommend to anyone. Portal in particular will improve spatial awareness even in ways that aren't actually useful.
Portal is indeed a great game and since it features a rather unfriendly (or at least homicidally eccentric) AI is quite appropriate for Less Wrong readers. It's probably a little less stressful for a novice FPS player than your typical modern FPS as well while still being a spatial and coordination challenge.
Apart from the unrealistic passive-aggressive personality, GlaDOS seems like sort of a reasonable example of the problem of giving an AI overly-narrow goals like "conduct research". ;-)
I don't know about unrealistic but I found GLaDOS a bizarrely sympathetic character considering she has no qualms about killing you. And she does offer cake.
ETA: For the non spoiler-averse the song from the end credits of Portal gives a pretty good insight into GLaDOS' personality.
How do you feel about your "spatial reasoning" abilities? I'm curious, since I know you work in mathematics, a field in which high aptitude in this domain is apparently common.
Used to be bad, improved with practice. Oddly enough, the year I learned topology I became much better at driving and also at geometrical puzzles.
Wait, all of academia is a 'narrow interest' in the eyes of your average person? Does the average person chunk people into two groups, 'those who seem like they read Wikipedia for fun' and 'normal folk'? That's a scary thought. It'd be really cool if someone ahem Michael Vassar ahem wrote a 'The World is Mad' post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.
Seconded.
No, but I will look into it as a case study.
I believe you! It's just... O_o
To be fair, that's true of pretty much any paper's horoscope page - The Sun is hardly unique in that regard.
Citation needed.
Roko, sometime we need to take LWers out on a field trip to talk to normal people in clubs and bars. I think many people here might be surprised at what they find out there in da jungle, baby.
...like people who believe in astrology, people with -1 second long attention spans, constant one-upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you "bro," obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities, complete moral relativism, talking extremely loudly, and other travesties too horrible to name.
At the same time, I wonder if there are citations available on this subject. If it takes, say, 115+ IQ to have academic interests, then most people are indeed below that threshold.
Your usual club/bar crowd in a major city is probably above average still. You can still have interesting conversations there: probably not AI, physics, serious philosophy or population genetics but pop-psychology, gender, sex, music and film, sure as long as you don't over do it and get too serious.
In comparison, my girlfriend's mother (they are from the rural midwest) thought "Al Qaeda" was the name of the man we had put in charge in Iraq (Al as in Albert or Allen).
Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.
Taking the IQ score for a characteristic that says something precise about an individual, like height or weight, is a fallacy. The real utility of IQ is statistical. It correlates highly with a number of relevant measures of ability and success in life, but the connection is ultimately probabilistic. Someone who scored 85 on an IQ test is highly likely to perform worse on pretty much any intellectual task than someone who scored, say, 115. However, in a large population, there will be a significant number of exceptions -- both above-average IQ types who are otherwise dumb as a box of rocks and useless for any productive work, and below-average folks who come off as clever and competent.
This is by no means to say that IQ is irrelevant. In a population large enough for the law of large numbers to kick in, the relevant measures of intellectual success and competence will correlate with the IQ distributions with merciless regularity. But whatever it is exactly that IQ tests measure, it contains enough randomness and irrelevant components to make the correlations imperfect and allow for lots of individual exceptions.
I want to read this. Can you dig up the link?
http://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aj9xf/by_request_i_have_an_iq_of_85_amaa/
IMHO the guy is super articulate and rational for someone who's got an IQ of 85. See his user page for everything he writes:
http://www.reddit.com/user/Quickening
From the passage you quoted... He does use much shorter, simpler sentences than most things I read (besides instant messaging), but his spelling, punctuation and capitalization are correct, which is not something you'd usually see in (say) YouTube comments. Maybe he has a copy-editor or something?
That's just a trivia question. It doesn't say much about her intelligence without additional information like the amount of news she has watched, etc.
I tried for a bit to think of something that would irrevocably demonstrate someone as stupid, but I couldn't think of anything. I think when it comes down to it, the kind of stupidity that matters is the kind that makes you slow at learning new things. So to figure out that someone was irrevocably stupid you'd have to see them work on learning something simple for a while without getting much of anywhere.
There is another important ability associated with intelligence: being able to apply existing knowledge creatively. This is easier to test--if someone "knows" how to program but can't write fizzbuzz, they fail. Or maybe if someone "knows" basic arithmetic but can't explain its misapplication in this story. But I think this creativity ability only arises in people who can learn things fast.
I think there is probably a high, multi-vector correlation between knowledge and intelligence such that it is evidence in favor of lower IQ. But yeah, I wasn't attempting to give comprehensive reasons.
Theres also the 'not recognizing the best solutions" thing.
Where can I learn more about what "multi-vector correlation" means in this context?
I tend to think of that as a lack of rationality. (I assume we're talking about someone who, say, simply refuses to change their standard response to a situation once they've made a semi-public announcement of it. This could also be explained by saying they're rational, but with a complex utility function.)
Er, sorry. I'm sure I've mangled whatever legitimate mathematical jargon that resembles. What I mean is that intelligent people tend to have more knowledge and knowledgeable people tend to be more intelligent. By "multi-vector" I just mean that this co-variability isn't due to one simple factor or explanation but that lots of factors are responsible for the correlation. Intelligent people learn more, those raised in environments with lots of knowledge to pick up are more likely to have had intelligent parents, etc.
What I mean is: say there is some task that needs to be completed an intelligent will immediately see one of the better ways of completing the task and will routinely improve on the methods of the less intelligent. The less intelligent won't even always recognize what makes the new solution better.
I think these things might depend on what side of the Atlantic you're on: ISTR that Feynman was surprised when some European physicist asked him what he was working on while they were drinking in a bar, because Americans don't usually do that. (I've never been to America, so for all I know things may have changed since then.)
"upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you "bro," obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities"
These seem like common narrow-interests within the general population. I find fixations with a handful of interests common with many people, it just seems that those with ASD or ASD-like personalities have interests beyond the mainstream. I am a little bothered with the pathologizing of academic interests, particularly in STEM fields, as "narrow" and "all-absorbing". Americans obsession with football and celebrity culture is fine, but if someone has an obsession with biology or physics it suddenly becomes "narrow".
OTOH, see the comment thread to this post.
Men don't do that?
I don't spend enough time with people who focus on celebrities to have an opinion, so I'm trying to update.
Men tend to talk about the teams more than the individuals. If they talk about the people it is often in terms of their skill (Did you see X's brilliant Goal) rather than their character/actions.
Nerds also have their teams, see the cult of the Apple or open source software fanboys.
I get curious when I look at the covers of the supermarket tabloids, and once in a while I look at the insides when I'm bored waiting in line. But it's not something that I "should" care about - and it's not like the tabloids are known for their accuracy anyway - so I don't think about them when I'm not looking at them. And just seeing the covers has already made me sick of the Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / Jennifer Aniston love triangle.
Do men gossip about the lives of famous team sports players, or is that also mostly women?
A more general point: I have an untested belief that everyone has something they're rational, or at least logical about. They might not be able to focus on math. They might not understand that plumbing pipes have limited capacity.
But they will by God track it down until they've established whether someone is a second cousin once removed or not. They'll fit actors' careers neatly into timelines.Maybe it's gardening or a model train set-up where they have something to defend, and update effortlessly even if they're clueless in other parts of their lives.
Am I over-optimistic to think that people generally have something like that?
Sorry, I deleted my comment after I saw Roko say the same thing.
My experience is that the personal lives of athletes only get discussed when they commit a crime which might lead to a them missing games and thus affecting the sport. And so it is mostly men.
but "nonacademic" doesn't equal "NT."
Tell me, where do I meet "ordinary" people?
I am only being partially sarcastic - I'm a college student studying mechanical engineering professionally and a massive geek recreationally, and I already know those people have academic interests.
I have found that playing sports in some sort of team framework has introduced me to at least a somewhat different group of people than I would more typically meet through school or work.
An easy way is to join a popular chur...ver mind.
I was in a choir for a bit - I don't believe I got to know the people in the way Roko might suggest, but they were interesting.
You need to go to an "organization" that breaks into groups that have meetings, which gives you time to socialize in general (both before and after, and probably during). Preferably groups that plan group activities on top of that.
...Boy Scouts of America?
No, I mean an "organization" of the type that starts with "chur" but leads me to pause in the middle and try to act as if I were saying "never mind" when I mistakenly suggest it here.
I hear things that are totally outside my life experience from hearing strangers' cell phone conversations on public transportation. It's certainly not a random sample (selects for urbanness, not having a car, and the part of town you're in) but it's broader than my friends, classmates, or coworkers. Example: yesterday heard a totally fascinating discussion between two teenaged boys about girl problems.
I suppose working in a bar might work, but I don't think you can really get to know someone from their weekly shopping trips. Even I rarely break out the philosophical discussions in line at the CVS. I don't know if your experience is different.
Point!
I scored 22 or 23 on the Baron-Cohen/Wired test (I took it a few days ago and can't remember which of these two scores I got).
This fits my pre-test judgment of myself: I don't think I am AS but think I am noticeably more in that direction than the average person. I would have answered "people often tell me that I keep going on and on about the same thing" differently (and gotten a one-point-higher score) ten years ago.
When I filled out your poll (Roko) I didn't check any of the "Gillberg" boxes, but it could be that someone closer to the hump in the neurotypicality bell curve would say I should have checked this one. (I also have "impairment in reciprocal social interaction", but not severe, and very mild "imposition of routines" [untwisting twisted phone cords and such].)
Quick heads-up: I've been elaborating on my response in a few comments downthread.
I have this too. It's fun to get into something, but then at some point it stops being rewarding, and fades away. Thus far go has been the only thing that I have kept doing for more than 2 years just because it's fun.
Are you afraid of success? What do you think would happen if you succeeded?
I get my generalism by going back and forth between 3-4 things and every 6 months or so dropping one and picking up a new one.