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steven0461 comments on The Ultraviolet - Less Wrong
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Comments (40)
This sounds overly dramatic to me. Most LW commenters are not on the autistic spectrum.
There seem to be a lot of posts coming at this from another angle - working on more effective social skills, and the like - and this sort of objection never comes up there! Regardless of the precise demographics, there's a stronger tendency than in the general population, and the rationalist "character" seems to have some trouble with social navigation.
To be fair, though, Eliezer didn't know this, but he was talking about me when he said "'But if I could never try anything clever or elegant, would my life even be worth living?' This is why cleverness is still our chief vulnerability even after its being well-known, like... tempting a Bard with drama.".
Social skills are skills -- a learned body of knowledge. You can fail to develop a body of knowledge for all sorts of reasons, not limited to a specific spectrum of neurological dysfunctions.
True, though I'd hesitate to characterize social skills as "a learned body of knowledge" precisely.
Perhaps I should have been speaking of "social inelegance", rather than autism? Have I conflated unjustly?
Yes!
I've changed it, and I'm open to changing it again, or scrapping it.
Sure, there's a stronger tendency than in the general population, but I think for an entire community to have a blind spot, you need either a much stronger statistical skew, or a pervasive tendency for people without ultraviolet-sight to dismiss ultraviolet-sight as evidence.
No, but various kinds of non-neurotypicality are common. People with 145+ IQ are definitely not neurotypical.
This seems rather disingenuous to me. It would be very remarkable if all non-neurotypical people missed the same sort of "ultraviolet" signals; the region of mind-design space occupied by humans might be pretty small, but it's not so small that you can reduce it to a bimodal distribution without glossing over a lot of stuff.
In any case, CuSithBell wasn't exactly shy about associating the autism spectrum with his metaphor, so unless you're trying to argue that anyone three standard deviations ahead of the mean is necessarily on the spectrum, I'd hesitate to read too much past that.
(ETA: I am aware that "neurotypical" is normally used to mean "not autistic". This post was written under the assumption that the parent was using it at its face value, i.e. "neurologically average".)
This is what I don't like about "neurotypical".
Would you say that there's something like ultraviolet that <145 IQ people can see and >145 IQ people can't see?