Well in my case the thing that stands out is that the ADHD diagnosis was given after a very quick/superficial evaluation, whereas the AS diagnosis came after many months of testing, evaluation, and thorough analysis of my developmental history. I cannot exactly speak to whether the two configurations can or cannot coexist in the same person without further study, but my suspicion is that AS and ADHD can appear superficially similar to adults who are observing children and teenagers, merely because of the fact that the child/teenager does not appear to be attending to what the adult wishes they were.
Full disclosure: I have been diagnosed with Asperger's (and prior to that, PDD-NOS and ADHD). I am also female and 31 years old at the time of this writing.
All that said, one thing I persistently have trouble with is thinking in terms of "isms" in the first place (well, with the exception of "autism", though that is a neurological configuration rather than an ideology). Hence I have no idea, really, whether my default mode(s) of thought fall into the "utilitarian/consequentialist" schools, and I have a very difficult time fol...
This. I'm not "creeped out" by people merely talking about PUA techniques, but I do find it boring, irrelevant, and pretty much useless in terms of any capacity to improve my thinking abilities. I don't think all examples / analogies used to make a point about rationality, etc., need to be things everyone can identify with (that would likely be impossible anyway), but PUA stuff really is sort of distractingly specific to the "hetero males trying to score hot chicks" demographic. I'd just as soon be reading about how to choose the best golf shoes.
Data point: I am physically (and I am figuring, genotypically) female but have never felt that I have an "internal feminine identity" of any kind. I used to think the whole idea of such an internal identity was a socially-imposed myth. It was not until I encountered trans women / trans men who very, very clearly had an internal identification that strongly differed from their sex phenotype that it became evident to me that some people (and possibly most cisgendered persons, even) really and truly did have an internal gender "sense".
Look up James Tiptree Jr. (the pseudonym used by sf writer Alice Sheldon) for a great example of a female sf author who "passed" not only as male, but as manly (in the opinion of many men who read her work) until her true identity was revealed.
Another nit about drivers' licenses (full disclosure: I don't have one, and I live in the USA): from what I've seen, drivers' license as an indicator of "real world success" is a very American phenomenon. Anecdotally, the Europeans I've encountered seem significantly less likely than Americans of the same age to have licenses on average, nor is there a stigma (or as much of a stigma) associated with not having one.
No one person is "in charge of the future of humanity". I know you were probably being somewhat flippant, but still.
Well, for one thing, privilege is a major source of bias, and when a person doesn't even realize they (or those they admire) have particular types/levels of privilege, they're going to have a harder time seeing reality accurately.
E.g., when I was younger, I used to think that racism didn't exist anymore (that it had been vanquished by Martin Luther King, or something, before I was even born) and didn't affect anyone, and that if someone didn't have a job, they were probably just lazy. Learning about my own areas of privilege made it possible for me to see ...
For what it's worth I don't think you've deliberately set out to become a "cult leader" -- you seem like a sincere person who just happens to be going about life in a rather nonstandard fashion. You've got some issues with unacknowledged privilege and such, and I've gotten impressions from you of an undercritical attractance to power and people who have power, but that's hardly unique.
I think mostly it's that you confuse people via sending off a lot of signals they don't expect -- like they think you must have some weird ulterior motive for not ...
It was some kind of "neurolinguistic programming" thing. This particular incarnation of it entailed my first being yelled at until "[my] defenses were stripped away", at which point I was supposed to accept this guy as a "master". Later on it supposedly involved attending weird summer-camp type sessions where I was told people would undergo things that "felt like torture" but which they'd "come to appreciate".
I didn't go to any camp sessions and probably wouldn't have attended them anyway for sheer lack of logistical finesse, but I am glad I had a co-worker point out to me that what was happening to me was emotional abuse at the very least.
Well I don't know that I've got any "rationalist" cred, but as someone who at least attempts to approach life rationally, I am personally terrified by the prospect of being part of a cult because of the way cults seem to warp people's capacity for thinking straightforwardly about reality. (And I could easily lump "religion" in with "cult" here in that regard).
Basically, I don't like the way things I'd call "cultish" seem to disconnect people from concrete reality in favor of abstractions. I've seen some truly awful ...
My recommendations (in no particular preference order):
1.) "Momo", by Michael Ende. Like another commenter, I wish I'd read this one younger.
2.) "The Neverending Story", also by Michael Ende. The novel (which was originally written in German, but the English translation I have seems decent enough) is far more complex and interesting than the movie, and I suspect a fair number of people on here would find the "world-building" sequences quite compelling. There's a lot in the novel (again, which doesn't translate through to the m...
I agree (and I see sex/gender as far more valid of a biological concept than "race", for the record), but I've noticed a correlation between people who would describe themselves in terms like "race realist" and people who think there's good evidence for women being "less suited" to math and science than men, cognitively speaking. (And again, getting deeply into this right now is not something I'm going to do, it would be wandering off-topic for one thing.)
Responding to the question "What do you believe that most people on this site don't?":
I believe that people who try and sound all "edgy" and "serious" by intoning what they believe to be "blunt truths" about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part. I just want to roll my eyes when I see that kind of thing, and not because I'm a "slave to political correctness", but because I see so many poorly defined terms being bandied about and a lot of really bad science besides.
(And I am not g...
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that most kids aren't taught about Santa because their parents are trying to set up a rationalist epiphany opportunity for them. Rather, they're taught about Santa because, well, the parents themselves were probably taught about Santa (and God, for that matter) when they were kids, and they probably just figure it's one of those things you do when you have children.
Plus (and I think there might have been an OB post about this once), many adults find ignorance/innocence of certain types in children to be "cute" ...
Another thing to consider is the fact that being tired, or "half-asleep", or in that twilight state one might manage to maintain when getting up to use the restroom or fetch water at night, is different from being in a state of normal waking consciousness.
Even if the skeptics attempting to spend the night in the "haunted" house don't plan on actually sleeping, unless they're already night-shift workers or have otherwise pre-configured their body clocks so that they'll be awake all night, they are likely to at some point during the night...
OK, upon reading the experimental premise (I blocked out the rest of the text below that so it wouldn't influence me) the very first idea, the idea that seemed most obvious to me, was to bet on blue every time.
I basically figured that if I had 10 cards, and 7 of them were blue, and I had to guess the color of all the cards at once (rather than being given them sequentially, which would give me the opportunity to take notes and keep track of how many of each had already appeared), then the most reliable way of achieving the most "hits" would be to...
You find out how to disable pieces of yourself. Then one day you find that you've disabled too much.
This definitely happened to me. I realized at some point (a few years ago) that in trying to force-fit myself into roles I thought I needed to fill in order to be a "responsible person", I'd succeeded in turning off aspects of my brain that are actually pretty vital for me to learn effectively. I didn't do anything about this realization, though, until I experienced an Epic Fail that showed me that the way I was trying to operate was neither usefu...
Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one's capability.
This definitely happened to me. Between the ages of about 10 - 14, I was utterly obsessed with finding out what my IQ was. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I'd picked up the notion that Smartness in quantity was the most important thing a person could possibly have.
And it drove me frankly batty not knowing how much Smartness I had, because (a) I was insecure and felt like I needed to find out I had a "high enough" ...
Anne, feel free not to answer this one: What do you know about neurotypicals that neurotypicals don't know about themselves?
Wow, that's an interesting one. I don't think I can make a valid general statement that some particular thing that's true of ALL nonautistic people but that none of them know themselves, so I won't even attempt that.
However, the thing that does come to mind in response to your question (and I don't know if this counts but I'll put it forth anyway) is that I do find myself often aware when (nonautistic) people are making certain assump...
Commenting on the autism thing (as I've got an insider's perspective there): one thing that strongly characterized my experience growing up was being consistently "mis-read" by those around me. While I (and, I'd wager, most others on the autistic spectrum) do have some "standard" reactions to things (like laughing when amused, smiling when happy, etc.), I don't always emote in visibly standard ways. This led a lot of people, while I was growing up, to believe that I "didn't care" in situations where I cared deeply, that I had ...
Perhaps you mean that, in characteristics where humans are known to vary, one should suspend judgment / assume the default probability distribution, rather than assuming the person is known to be average?
Yes. I put notions like "humans are generally vulnerable to Death by Hemlock" in a different class than notions like "Girls don't like science". For one thing, the stakes are a lot higher in the former case: you don't harm a female by not assuming she doesn't like science, but you might kill a human by feeding them hemlock under the a...
there's no point in trying to make someone match the average (or mere stereotype) of the female-human cluster if you already have access to more detailed information about her than that.
I would say that there's little to no point in trying to make someone match the average/stereotype about someone even if you don't have access to more detailed information about her than that. Or, at the very least, people should be capable of maintaining awareness of the information that someone is female without their connotations of what "female" means blockin...
Mainly I see categories as useful only as "shorthand", and then only along very particular vectors.
For example, one category that includes people like me (at least along one particular axis) is "female". To me, all this really means is that I'm physiologically configured in a particular way that influences what kinds of bathrooms I can use and what kinds of doctors I need to see. In that respect, "female" is a useful and descriptive category.
But in other respects, it isn't at all useful. As a youngster I went through a phas...
Eli: I wouldn't argue otherwise, though I think that sometimes people think they are applying "utilitarianism" when in fact they are just going with "what sounds good" to them based on very limited information.
This is probably just something I should think harder about and go off and make a post on my own blog about, but one thing I've noticed recently is that many people claim that their preferred option provides the most utility, when in fact, there are other options they haven't even considered. So as I conceded above, the nursing h...
Prakash: Good example, I can see that.
Nick: Institutional bias comes to mind. A lot of people think that some groups (the elderly, people with particular disabilities) "naturally belong" in institutions, when the fact is that institutions are completely unnecessary. There is no form of care provided IN an institution that cannot be provided in the community (often for lower cost, though I don't have exact figures on hand right now). And institutions themselves tend to be internally structured in such a way that power imbalances, abusive situati...
I realize people have to make decisions regarding how to best distribute their own resources, and I agree that "whichever cause saves the most lives" is a far, far better choice criterion than "whichever cause is more likely to make others look admiringly at me". That's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. Of course we each have to deal with, if not a literal lack of sufficient resources, the difficulty of figuring out how to distribute resources effectively where they are needed. My comment was meant simply to caution people agains...
One must also be wary of what might be termed the "zero-sum game" bias. In real life, how often does it really occur that a person is faced with either saving X people OR saving Y people (where Y is greater than X)?
The notion of human lives as some sort of currency to be paid in exchange for fate's favor seems like something stemming primarily from the world of mythology and story problems, rather than something stemming from practical reality. While of course people shouldn't let themselves be "blinded by their own greatness" to the ...
Spinoza suggested that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve propositions which are rejected by consideration.
That sounds like what Sam Adams was saying at the Singularity Summit -- the idea of "superstition" being essential to learning in some respects.
Nick: I'm not a Buddhist (definitely can't grok the reincarnation stuff), but in a lot of ways I can see where the Buddhists are coming from, especially with regard to "letting go of attachments".
When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most.
This is good advice.
I started doing this around 9 years ago, because at the end of adolescence I experienced a sudden "mortality awareness". I imagine this is probably common -- that is, many people probably experience a moment in their life when the fact that they, too, are getting older, comes into sharp relief. But in my observation, most people seem to respond to this moment by sayi...
Re. "the reason most people don't agree with us is that they're just not smart enough"...totally aside from the question of whether this sort of sentiment is liable to be offputting to a lot of people, I've very often wondered whether anyone who holds such a sentiment is at all worried about the consequences of an "Emperor's New Clothes" effect.
What I mean by "Emperor's New Clothes" effect is that, regardless of what a person's actual views are on a given subject (or set of subjects), there's really nothing stopping said pers... (read more)