It appears that you think autistic people are less rational than the average person. Why do you think that?
If we just pretend the context of FrameBenignly and Dahlen didn't exist (I don't agree with everything either of them said) and take this statement in isolation, ignoring the whole "is this intended to be offensive or not" aspect...
Isn't it a given that anyone with a mental impairment of any kind is less instrumentally rational than a similar person without impairment? We don't usually give diagnosis to people who tend to win at stuff.
not being good at some kinds of intuitive understanding of other people" is not at all the same thing as "being less rational than average".
But it is. Assuming we're modelling the entire brain as part of the agent, if you take two individuals, give them the same info, and one of them is able to correctly act on that information and win while and the other is not able, then all else being equal the one who won is the more rational of the two. (We're modelling the entire brain as agent here, so this would even be true for things like epilepsy. There are other ways to model this, such that the autistic person is just as rational but acting on less information, but that's a bit convoluted because we'd have to consider some parts of the brain as "agent" and others as just complex sensimotor bodily organs)
I'm not trying to diss autistic people here, just reiterating: Rationality is not intelligence, rationality is not goodness, rationality is simply acting in ways conducive to winning. I have ADHD myself, and yes, that trait makes me less instrumentally rational - and I think the same goes for autism and others.
(After writing I considered deleting this because it would be easy for an angry person to miss the point and take it as justification for what Dahlen wrote. I dislike his conflation of "autists" with "people who don't look at art or whatever" as much as everyone else because it's simply not true and perpetuates misconceptions of autistic people. But Lesswrong doesn't let you gracefully delete things, and if one can't play devil's advocate here then where else? So I'll leave it up.)
Isn't it a given that anyone with a mental impairment of any kind is less instrumentally rational [...] We don't usually give diagnosis to people who tend to win at stuff.
I am unconvinced by the broadest versions of the "rationality = winning" thesis, for reasons I've mentioned to alienist elsewhere in this thread. The very broadest version ("rationality = anything conducive to winning") would make, e.g., shortness or heart disease kinds of irrationality. A more reasonable intermediate version ("rationality = any features of one...
For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?
I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:
However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.