You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

komponisto comments on Autism and Lesswrong - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: CuSithBell 07 April 2011 03:34PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (29)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: komponisto 08 April 2011 01:27:35PM 10 points [-]

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that "nerdiness" is not the same as autism, and to voice my opinion that the relationship of autism to interest in rationality has been overemphasized, possibly severely. Autism is only one possible cause of "nerdiness"; if a person (to use a completely hypothetical example) happens to suffer from a combination of high intelligence, OCD, and social anxiety, they may have all the usual "symptoms" -- such as hating small-talk, having trouble getting dates with "normal" people, et cetera -- without being autistic at all.