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gwern comments on Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction - Less Wrong
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But why would these people be fans of MLP? MLP, as I understand it, is made for teaching social skills to little girls. Do males ages 18-35 who spend a lot of time on the internet watch it because they are especially in need of remedial education on the subject? Is that actually the hidden agenda of the makers?
I've speculated on this in the past. I was reading a book and it mentioned that one of the things used to help autism spectrum people learn social skills is something called Social Stories (TM); read through the article and some of the linked materials or look at Google hits, and tell me that MLP doesn't sound a lot like how one might design a maximally-appealing 'Advanced Social Stories'...
Despite searching on PubMed using iPubMed from UC Irvine and browsing around using "Related Links", I can't find anything about Social Stories and teenagers, young adults, or adults. Someone with journal access can take a look at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22284800 to confirm/disprove my suspicion.
The stuff I could find is quite uncertain about how helpful Social Stories are but there are no reports of harm so if a TV show can sneak in Autism Spectrum Disorder treatment, even if it isn't super effective, that's terrific. It can be difficult for older people to get a diagnosis and good evidence-based treatment; if My Little Pony can help that population for low to little cost, I'm all for it.
I'm quite surprised to run across that topic on Less Wrong. I heard about it at a medical conference regarding autism but only in the context of children. I guess it's time to take another look with regards to older people.
Thank you for bringing it up, gwern.
I could be reading this completely wrong, but it makes me think of something that might be worth posting in open thread (or not, depending on how much it's just me whining); that is, I've read stories that give me a picture of what's normal and how social interaction is supposed to work, and when I wonder if there are any lessons there to apply to my own life, I quite quickly conclude that they aren't applicable. Of course, free range children is a general assumption of 99% of everything I've read. And, in fact, if anyone ever advises me to do anything, it most always assumes more freedoms than I actually have.
(I'm mostly concerned that I can't generalize this to something not incredibly specific to my situation. I think I've veered quite far from the original point as it is.)