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taw comments on Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome? - Less Wrong
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The most wtf cluster of questions is:
Another weird cluster is one about daily routine, which I feel strongly about but it doesn't feel that alien.
The cluster about social awkwardness / not liking interaction with people seems to me like a self-reinforcing personal preference, and it doesn't seem at all that there would be two different kinds of people based on it.
I'm not sure where questions about pretending and stories fall here - how is Asperger's/autism related to such geek activities as fiction, role playing games and such?
Memorizing phone numbers easily, doing arithmetic quickly, being fascinated by numbers, and being able to detect patterns in pictures rapidly, are traits that most people associate with high IQ, but that are highly associated with autism.
And, if you take an IQ test, you'll find it's full of questions testing how quickly you can memorize numbers, do arithmetic, and recognize patterns in pictures!
I think the idea that autism is correlated with intelligence is not the result of autism correlating with intelligence. It's the result of a cultural bias that doesn't understand what intelligence is, equates it with impressive "brute-force" autistic cognitive performance, and embeds that bias in our IQ tests. So if you test someone with autism spectrum, they score high, because the "IQ test" is partly an autism test!
I think this is obvious. IQ tests for one dimension of what I would mean by "intelligence".
But, maybe these tests have been refined by removing questions that don't correlate well with some independent measure of intelligence?
What would be an independent measure of intelligence?
I guess I don't understand what you mean by 'wtf' then, because to my mind, 'highly-wtf' indicates a profound surprise at something that is outside the normal range of experience, but we all know that some people are good at remembering phone numbers, and some aren't, while some are good at remembering birth dates and others aren't. That is normal human variation.
I don't see at all how "people who consistently reply so far unlike me to those wtf-ish questions must be seriously weird, not just differ in minor quantitative ways". Why would somebody be seriously weird because they do or don't have a good memory for phone numbers and birthdates?
Seconded. Why is that 'wtf'? Seems normal to me.
No, this is far outside what I consider human normality to easily remember birth dates and numbers. This is not "good memory", this is memory which works completely differently from how mine works.
You seem to be equating "human normality" with "how mine works".
Yes, this is exactly what I'm doing, and I don't see this as a bad thing at all.
The obvious reason that it is a bad thing is that a single example contains no information about the range of variation in the population it is drawn from. You will know more if you look around you, and observe the actual range.
But this is elementary stuff. Frankly, I am at a loss to find any interpretation of "I don't see this as a bad thing at all" that is compatible with being here in the first place.
Tell us more.
Generalizing from one example
This question really threw me. Is it asking me if I like having romantic dinners or if temporal co-ordinates are interesting?
I hadn't considered they might be talking about 'romantic dinners'.
Yeah, I first thought it meant romantic dinners, then realized that, since temporal coordinates have numerical content that autistics might be obsessed with, they probably meant the latter. (Also, they would have phrased a question about the former a bit differently.)
Thank you - that was my first thought too, and it really made no sense in the context, only after brief cognitive dissonance (or in Internet parlance, "a brief wtf") I realized what they were really asking about.
As others have mentioned, the test is teasing out certain behaviors correlated with the autism spectrum, rather than actually attempting to diagnose autism. I believe these questions are directed towards empathy-type issues that often show up alongside an autism spectrum diagnosis.
Per this, the "interaction between empathy and autism spectrum disorders is a complex and ongoing field of research.” Some reports suggest that alexithymia, an inability to feel and/or express emotions, often co-occurs with autism spectrum disorders. Alexithymia results in “few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination.”
I haven’t looked at the original research/reports, but even if the co-occurrence of ASD and alexithymia is quite pronounced, at least some ASD individuals would not have alexithymia; and these individuals might enjoy fiction, role-playing, etc. But even among some ASD individuals who have alexithymia, I would guess that they might still like idea/science-based science fiction or enjoy role playing games for the world-building type aspect.