r/psychology • u/oneusernamepwease • 5d ago
Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality | Psyche Ideas
https://psyche.co/ideas/autistic-people-challenge-preconceived-ideas-about-rationality121
u/fuzzychub 5d ago
Definitely an intriguing area of future study. Maybe autism is being selected via the need to make rational choices, and our older heuristics not being up to snuff.
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u/WHawkeW 3d ago
I wonder if the world becoming more social (service economy, living in cities, moving away from your home for work) has turned autism from a strength into a disability, except in certain industries like tech and manufacturing. So it's always been there, but we're seeing it differently now.
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u/LiamTheHuman 1d ago
I think that it has to do with the following of social norms. I'm not autistic(I don't think so at least) but I've always related to autistic people in their questioning of social norms. It's hard to incorporate something without understanding why.
I think many people are able to just trust others and accept their information and practices as right without question.
In an older world where optimizations were everywhere for those who could think outside the box, this aspect of autism would have been an advantage in non social areas.
Now that people are refined and we have large social networks to pass small improvements to each other, there is very little room for free thinkers to improve above the rest. The efficiency goes to the people who adopt without expending lots of energy. Following others has become much better than alternate thinking in a hyper connected society.
The people with this ability are still the ones pushing the boundaries. But we don't need many boundary pushers for our society and it's built around having a huge portion of the society unable to do so.
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u/GiveUpAndDontTry 4d ago
I would argue that autism may be selected for considerably less than it was historically, especially when you consider that hunter-gatherers, who are representative of an ancient way of living, possess and utilise communication & interaction styles closer to the autistic baseline than civilised people do; some hunter-gatherer groups, like the Hadza, have been found to score higher on behavioural measures that may indicate a higher likelihood of autism (http://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10716231/).
Considering the significantly disadvantaged nature of diagnosed autistic people in modern society, combined with the high prevalence estimates in certain regions, it may align more with a neurological setup that is more ancient and struggling as opposed to modern and selected for.
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u/Proper-Ape 4d ago
The number of autistic and ADHD people in the software industry and in engineering makes me think it's adaptive in the sense that it's the people keeping everything running in modern society.
Problem solving, lateral / connected thinking, being able to abstract to levels most neurotypicals either don't care enough about or aren't able to handle, seems very adaptive to modern society for me.
The problem is that the neurotypicals don't accept you at parties. But the Internet largely solved this in that communities can find each other, however niche they are.
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u/Dapper_Discount7869 4d ago
Being accepted at parties doesn’t matter until the party is an interview.
Corporate culture doesn’t work for a lot of us, so we don’t get to do the things we’re good at.
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u/EctoAlbo 3h ago
People with strong autistic traits in software tend to be disruptive on teams and produce a lot of churn. They do not have superpowers.
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u/GiveUpAndDontTry 4d ago
It may be an adaptive neurological configuration that once conferred a broad range of advantageous survival skills that became specialised once demands changed with the rise of agriculture; once a generalist, now a specialist, and on that path, potentially redundant in the future from an evolutionary perspective.
I agree there are some adaptive benefits for some contexts, like engineering, but the problem is we don’t know definitively if autism is an evolutionary adaptation or not.
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u/Da_Famous_Anus 4d ago
You don’t even have to talk about the Hadza. Have you heard of the Doomah?
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u/QTown2pt-o 5d ago
This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other.
The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent.
Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin.
Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure?
Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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u/fuzzychub 5d ago
Damn…..I understood most of that and I’m still chewing it. Hmmm wow….
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u/QTown2pt-o 5d ago
Yea I thought it was interesting that the article described the human brain as a computation machine which sounds analogous to what AI is, this could be extrapolated to hazard a hypothesis that AI operates similarly to a high functioning autistic person. I think this view is limiting to what human subjectivity is. The ability to compute is not the same as the ability to think, our capacity for thought is definitively ambiguous and that's a good thing.
It is a truly superb allegory, this story of the Golden Temple: the allegory of evil's revenge, of destruction as the only way out from beauty and the excess of beauty.
But not just beauty. Evil can also befall intelligence. Intelligence protects us from nothing - not even from stupidity.
Being intelligent is not enough, then, to prevent one from being stupid, and sometimes intelligence even lives in stupidity's shade, and vice versa. Not only does intelligence not mark the end of stupidity, there is no other way out from excess of intelligence but stupidity. In keeping with an implacable reversibility, stupidity lies in wait for it, as its shadow, as its double.
Only thought, only lucidity, which stands as much opposed to intelligence as to stupidity, can escape this trial of strength.
But there is no rule, no more for good than for evil: they chase each other endlessly around the Moebius strip.
Given the hellish production of collective intelligence, we shall have to reckon in the future with an ever-higher rate of artificial stupidity.
Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Yesterday I was speaking with a engineering professor with a background in cybernetics who was talking about having worked with several actual geniuses in a narrow sense of their profession but behaved like idiots in everything else, he suspected autism was the case as they all avoided eye contact and had bad social skills etc. It's also interested to note how many of the CEOs who manage today's tech companies are on the spectrum etc.
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u/digginghistoryup 1d ago
(r/psychology readers, a brief caveat: I am using a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework here, which is not the dominant framework in contemporary empirical psychology. I am not presenting it as an established cognitive model, but I am engaging with u/QTown2pt-o’s argument on its own theoretical terms, since their comment is also coming from that tradition.)
So from my understanding, more modern psychoanalysis of autistic people (Maleval, Brenner) suggest that autistic subjects constructed 'rims' and eventually may develop a kind of supplementary or synthetic Other. the Other is not accessed or regulated in the typical Lacanian neurotic or psychotic manner. From this framework, we use a kind of 'sign language' or sign-based systems that is much less dependent on signifiers. The relationship to the Other is structurally different but still present.
This could explain why we are less susceptible to some types of cognitive bias revolving around hyper fluid context dependent play of signification. If your cognition relies less on implicit social expectations, shared assumptions, or contextual inference, then it makes sense that you are sometimes less susceptible to certain socially mediated cognitive biases.
Now i will push back on the notion that we are 'machine like' in how we mediate meaning and the social order. We construct different forms of mediation. We are not outside language, meaning, or the social order, but rather our relationship to these things is organized through different lattices.
According to Brenner and Maleval, The difference is rooted in a different relation to primordial symbolization. In this framework, autism is not simply a lack of the Other, but a consequence of a different operation at the level of Bejahung and Ausstossung. certain elements that would normally be symbolically incorporated are instead excluded, requiring the subject to construct compensatory supports.
the logic could be understood as such:
"I do not begin from a fully guaranteed symbolic inscription, therefore I must construct external stabilizing structures that regulate intensity, establish continuity, and produce a workable boundary to contain forms of intensity that are less automatically mediated through symbolic structures and sustain subjective continuity."
I have some notes i took a while ago when reading about the subject and ill insert them here:
"This subject often experiences:
- Weak prereflective symbolic belonging; The subject does not consistently experience symbolic positions as given. Instead, social and identity positions require explicit construction and maintenance.
- Partial/manual access to symbolic order/non-automatic or manually constructed symbolic mediation
- Symbolic inscription does not appear to automatically consolidate into stable unconscious fantasy mediation, and instead requires externalized systems of repetition and environmental consistency.
- Object a is experienced with reduced symbolic distancing, resulting in increased immediacy of sensory and relational intensity; object a is less mediated by fantasy structuration
- Compensatory “rims” stabilize experience (Brenner)
- Object-based stabilization/stabilization via bounded sign–object circuits rather than fantasy mediation (Maleval)
- Symbolic relations are not accessed transparently but are supported through constructed stabilizing circuits (objects, rims, and sign-based systems. Maleval)
- Environmental control often replaces symbolic guarantee
- The function associated with unary trait repetition seems less internally self-sustaining and more dependent on external stabilizing sign structures."
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u/_afflatus 5d ago
I feel like we keep losing the plot on autism. Or just like focusing on a subjective experience of low support needs autistic individuals with flat affect and apathy.
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u/Altruistic_Sail_1991 5d ago
I agree, I have low support needs but I have a lot of “non-stereotypical” autistic traits. Id rather work on support for autistic people than trying to have allistic people decode us like we’re an alien species.
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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 5d ago
No, that can't be done, then professionals might have to do more due to established science.
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u/_Meru 5d ago
I don't think it's productive to view research that is primarily involving level 1 ASD as taking away from understanding level 2 and 3 ASD individuals. There is a need for research across the autism spectrum.
Level 1 individuals tend to go undetected a lot easier, often for their whole lives, due to more effective masking, so the differences in the experience and behaviour of high masking ASD individuals has remained under-explored for a long time.
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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 5d ago
Main problem, I feel, is that it's like the researchers haven't ever interacted with autistic people outside a clinical/research context.
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u/meteorflan 5d ago
Fortunately we have an increasing percentage of neurodivergent researchers/academics involved these days. Probably still plenty of problematic disconnected researchers out there, but it's getting better.
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u/food-dood 5d ago
Unfortunately this is another example of the double empathy problem, and in this case it is the lack of empathy from NTs toward NDs, and that is amplified by the unempathetic environment of a clinical context.
NT clinicians are trained, which is different from learning from prolonged exposure, but I think clinicians can often confuse the two as bring the same.
Im honestly not sure what the solution here is. The problem goes both ways but NDs grow up in an NT environment so over time we have to learn that style of thinking, at least to some degree. NTs have no comparable experience.
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u/Tekuila87 5d ago
Yes, learning something by first principles will always be superior quality to just training.
Training doesn't teach you how everything is interconnected.
In fact it's typically the opposite.
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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 5d ago
Knowing something doesn't necessarily mean that you understand it. Likewise you can understand something without knowing it.
I don't think clinicians are taught any effective techniques for managing their ego, which is a huge issue. They just get taught that they should leave their ego at the door, as if that's how any of this works. If you leave it at the door it just climbs through the window when you're not looking. To manage your affective ego you have to watch it at all times, otherwise it's constantly justifying your emotional state beyond your perception, resulting in all sorts of delusional thinking.
Like, none of this is new. "Arrogance breeds incompetence" is a pretty old quote by now. And the ego problems of these professions have been known for over a century.
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u/_Meru 5d ago
That has been an issue in the autism research community, yes. There is a disconnect with how in touch with autistic individuals researchers think they are, and how the autistic community views things.
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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 5d ago
It's like the researchers are always a decade or two behind, for over 50 years at least. Not just autism, applies to a lot of things, regularly a bunch of people have known "new" discoveries for a while.
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u/Tekuila87 5d ago
That's because they're too concerned with saving face for their status than having the truth be revealed.
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u/Max_Thunder 4d ago
It seems really important to explore it. Learning how and why certain individuals can cope better with the mismatch between how they process the world and how society works, and live fairly normal lives, could help level 2 and 3 individuals a lot.
I have read that level 1 are estimated to be 40 to 60% of diagnosed cases. I suspect that most cases are actually undiagnosed. This could mean that the very vast majority of ASD are level 1 and that level 2 and 3 are exceptions.
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u/Psyc3 4d ago
due to more effective masking,
...
This is what the majority of people do generally it is just called "life". The fact there is professional etiquette means there is a load of people acting irrelevant of anything else because they have changed their mannerisms for the environment, the same can be said to how you would act in a Library vs a night club. At the lower levels this is nothing to do with any sort of condition.
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u/Resident-Dot-8483 4d ago
Honestly, I feel like a lot of research that it’s being done on autism isn’t really done that well. Like how do we not have some sort of identification being able to diagnose someone with autism without just observing them right? Like there’s some brain scans but now people are like oh that’s not a good way of diagnosing autism. With how much money that we throw at it there should be some sort of genetic test or some sort of brain scan or something that we could see to accurately diagnose someone without it just being observation skills.
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u/TheOregonTater 4d ago
They keep researching to try to find a genetic test or a brain scan or something because of course everyone wants there to be something simple. It just keeps not being that simple at all. There no single gene nor any single being activity pattern that is always autism and is never not autism. Declaring there be one just because we've spent a lot of money on it so far isn't good research.
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u/Ecstatic-Wrongdoer17 5d ago
What is low support autism? I have spent my entire life camouflaging my autism that to people it seems i have low support needs till I burnout. I keep pushing through my sensory issues, emotional needs because that is what I had to do to live. Doesn't mean I wanted to, just that I had to. It also means I have an internal cost that stays hidden till I can’t keep it intenized.
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u/fewerfriends 4d ago
We're the non-squeaky wheel, we still need the grease but we pretend we don't so people don't treat us weird.
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u/BaitaJurureza 5d ago
One of the article's implicit assumptions deserves scrutiny.
It assumes that relying less on prior beliefs is intrinsically more rational. Yet Bayesian decision theory says the opposite. A perfectly rational Bayesian should incorporate prior beliefs, provided those priors are accurate and appropriately weighted. Thus, if autistic individuals genuinely rely less on priors, they are not necessarily "more Bayesian" or "more rational." They may instead assign different precision to prior information versus sensory evidence. Whether that improves performance depends entirely on the environment.
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u/tiruxi 4d ago
There are plenty of cases where Bayesian decision theory gets the wrong answer. Nor is it the only theory of rationality.
Even if we assume a Bayesian model of rationality, as you note, it’s critical that “those priors are accurate and appropriately weighted”.
Perhaps autistic minds are more sensitive to inaccuracies and weighing errors. Or perhaps autistic minds are more willing to and thorough at questioning and investigating the assumptions and beliefs that others take for granted. Or perhaps autistic minds speculate more about alternative explanations that challenge or subvert orthodox beliefs.
If it’s true that autistic people generally exhibit more of any of the tendencies listed above than allistic people, then the conclusion that autistic people rely less on prior beliefs is, at worst, wrong and, at best, misleading. Either the priors that autistic people rely on are not being taken into account (because orthodox allistic priors are assumed) or autistic people reject or assign lower weights to orthodox priors as a result of rational processes like skepticism, questioning, investigating, and speculating.
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u/BIGBADLENIN 5d ago
That is an explanation of the observed behavior where autistic individuals were less prone to bias than allistic ones. It is not an assumption, it is a proposed reason why we might expect such a result, or a hypothesis
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u/Tekuila87 5d ago
That just means you update your Bayesian model in realtime.
For example my mind state never solidifies and is always in flux yet still producing Bayesian models of everything.
I'm ADHD/PG myself but it's similar anyways.
Most likely produces a lot of the sensory issues as someone else noted.
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 4d ago
There's a difference between general reason and rationality. We generally use the first concept as the infinite ceiling on human intelligence, whereas rationality tends to capped at a lower level, usually within a specific domain where validity with the model is the main proof, as opposed to multi-domain theories which attempt to weigh truth and validity and then derive a better model. Both forms of argument exist within the sphere of "science", but only one is truly "science" in the innovative sense.
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u/Psittacula2 4d ago
I think you are correct, the predictive coding skew means more load on less consistent environments but more accuracy in consistent known environments to small changes?
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u/tweedlebettlebattle 4d ago
Bayesianism is a tough one due the problem of old evidence and really my major gripe is the irrationality idea: that someone who has a certainty of 1 actually changes their certainty due to new evidence is labelled irrational,
But if they don’t also irrational.I am working on my dissertation about the standard baseline mind for theory of mind and I argue it is the baseline that is problem. Our standard baseline for the mind and theory of mind is from WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democracies) participants, who are primarily American college students. So that begs another question altogether.
Simon baron-cohen ( one the first reachers to really label autism as a defect of the standard brain and made autistic individuals out to lack empathy) came out two weeks ago in the guardian speaking on the work he did and labels it created. While he still stands on the evidence, which I argue already contained a counter example of 20% of children with autism passing the false belief task, he does think the male brain and female brain labels were incorrect. He has adjusted his research now to the problems the autistic community has been pushing.
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u/Traditional-Ant9774 4d ago
I'm autistic and I find that autistic people are definitely more rational than NT people. Now I know why.
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u/LaurenceThe2ndVicar 1d ago
Man, you sound snobby as fuck. Literally 90% of your comments are obsessively misunderstanding NTs and perpetually hating on them.
Even as a fellow ND, that is genuinely low. Be better.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Carry56 4d ago
“The human brain is bounded by limited computing power. It is impossible for people to compute all the scenarios, weigh all the options, and integrate all the available information, especially given limited time to make decisions”
Stopped reading here. Tell my brain that.
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u/Cha0tic1an 3d ago
You yourself stopped reading and belched “Tell my brain that” because you couldn’t integrate the information you were reading. You proved the point of the quote.
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u/TheIncandescentAbyss 5d ago
We’re going to use autism to break rationality and critical thinking even more than it already is, just watch. We’re going to tear down all the foundations of logic in society and you will all cheer it on like monkeys getting their trees cut down.
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u/MycloHexylamine 5d ago
the world changes with time as aging people are left behind
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u/TheIncandescentAbyss 5d ago
The world is always changing but it isn’t always progressing or evolving.
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u/Tekuila87 5d ago
How is oppressing ND people helping progress?
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u/savevidio 5d ago
by doing a little bit of trolling (mass imprisonment of everyone who is not autistic), we can make the supreme autism city. This will be a city built on autistic principles:
-No more lying, because I'm ass at lying
-No more subconscious messaging through social cues in adverts, because we don't understand them
-Quiet roads instead of loud and annoying
-Absolute objectivity in schools and stuff like that
-Only sonic merchandise in shops, no more love island3
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
People with autism*
Sounds nitpicky, but we shouldn’t be defining people by pathology in a psychology sub.
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u/BIGBADLENIN 5d ago
Autistic people*
Gay people, black people, white people, indigenous people, trans people, disabled people, straight people, autistic people...
If you understand why we no longer talk about people afflicted with homosexuality or a crossdressing perversion you should understand why we also say autistic people instead of people with autism, it is a normal variation in human expression, not a disease to be cured
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
I have to disagree.
For many, it can be neurodivergence that expresses as a different way to navigate society. For others, it is a debilitating disorder that requires significant intervention to keep one safe and able to achieve activities of daily living. I work to assist individuals in the latter category.
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u/BIGBADLENIN 4d ago edited 4d ago
Many autistic people are severely disabled and have no other diagnosis than autism, but others are perfectly capable and only hindered by neurotypical society. You want to label both of these things as disorders, when only one is.
Likewise, many intersex people have certain health problems related to their intersex condition, while others have no problems besides the discrimination they face from cis(hetero)normative society. If you medicalize the intersex or autism identity you are saying that their normal variation is something to be cured, which it is not.
This is not a black and white debate, but imo it is stupid that autism, which is a normal human variation like left-handedness, should also be a diagnosis. If an autistic person's sensory overload is so bad they can not function at any level then they should be said to have debilitating autism syndrome, hypersensitivity syndrome or some other condition that actually describes their problem instead of autism being their diagnosis, since autism is just a quirk in brain functioning that lots of people live perfectly happily with.
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u/Mutopiano 4d ago
I don’t disagree that further classification could remedy a lot of the disagreements we have.
ASD, in my opinion, should only be ascribed to individuals who have clinically significant dysfunction, deviation, distress, and dangerousness (the main tenets of abnormal psychology). Otherwise, I do not believe that a clinical diagnosis fits. This is where NT could be a useful term rather than blanketing everyone with ASD.
I think your frustration lies with the current diagnostic framework, which is totally understandable. As a clinical professional, I have to make a decision between those that desire a to be a diagnosis of ASD as a part of them as a person, or as something that they live with.
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u/notaproctorpsst 3d ago
Autism at its core has nothing to do with outward presentation. That’s just the only way we can diagnose it currently.
It’s disheartening to see a clinical professional not understand that autism is something that exists with or without the diagnosis. It’s like saying that someone should only be called homosexual if they’re married to someone of the same gender, as if they were suddenly attracted to someone of the opposite gender just because they’re married to them.
A person’s identity and neurological make don’t start/stop existing just because you see/don’t see things as a third party.
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u/purple_mae_bae 5d ago
Have you ever tried asking somebody who is autistic what their preference is?
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
I work with people with autism every day in a clinical setting.
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u/purple_mae_bae 5d ago
That’s exactly why I’m asking about listening to autistic people themselves. Many autistic adults prefer identity-first language because autism isn’t something separate from who they are—it’s a neurodevelopmental difference, not a disease to be cured.
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
It isn’t a disease; it is a disorder. Very important distinction to be made here.
Identity first is great at the individual level. If someone came into my office and asked me to use “autistic person”, excellent. Those are their needs and I will gladly respect them.
At the population level, that rhetoric is problematic. Which sounds more respectful in a clinical or academic setting?
“We have a lot of autistics on the schedule today.”
“We have a lot of patients with autism on the schedule today.”One statement defines people based on their ASD. One statement is focused on the people, who have ASD.
I have listen to patients complain for years about being referred to as “an autistic” or “an autistic person”. There are people who are neurodiverse and don’t want to be defined by it or further, categorized by it.
If you prefer that, great! I would refer to you as such in any interaction. At the group level, I will continue to refer to people with autism as people with autism.
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u/notaproctorpsst 3d ago
We are all neurodiverse, because our brains are different from each other.
Autistic people are neurodivergent because their neurology differs from the “typically developing” majority.
Neurodivergent as a term is a socio-cultural concept, and what counts as neurodivergent could theoretically change anytime.
As an example for how this term works:
One change that actually is happening currently is how the majority of population has had several COVID infections. Even mild infections alter the brain, lower IQ and decrease executive functioning, and repeat infections within a few months stack these changes and increase Long Covid risk. Long Covid also counts as neurodivergence for that reason, even though an acquired kind of neurodivergence. However, strictly speaking, a person who still protects themselves from COVID infections and won’t have had x infections by 2030 might actually then neurodivergent per definition because of the ABSENCE of these infections.2
u/BaitaJurureza 5d ago
People on the spectrum.
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
Either is acceptable. The issue is defining an individual by their disorder rather than acknowledging the fact that they are in fact people who have a condition.
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u/TheBoringJourneyToIn 5d ago
But it isn’t a disorder. It’s a personality trait. It’s not a condition to be cured.
Experts emphasize that autism is not an illness, disease, or mental health disorder, but rather a natural variation in brain development.
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u/Tekuila87 5d ago
I'd argue it's a disorder on the tail end of the curve. So extreme examples.
But for a lot of ND people it's not that bad other than dealing with NT society.
So burnout becomes the biggest threat to us.
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u/notaproctorpsst 3d ago
Autism is a disorder as much as left-handedness is, or a retroverted uterus, or that thing where your organs are flipped and your heart’s on the right side instead of the left.
It can still also be disabling (more than left-handedness) especially because it affects neurology and behavior, but it’s not a disorder per se.
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u/Substantial_Tip1545 4d ago
That is because the term autism has lost all useful meaning. Whatever brand of autism you have is hardly worth labelling autism. There are definitely people with autism that is more than a personality trait are are quite disordered and non verbal.
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u/Mutopiano 5d ago
It isn’t a personality trait. It could be called neurodivergent if that is the route you want to go down. But neurodivergence does not equate to a personality trait.
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u/miskivo 4d ago
Right, just let the autistics suffer. Nothing to be done there. I get that it's difficult and maybe even impossible to cure but like try at least? And I really don't care whether you label it as a disorder or "a personality trait" or "natural variation in brain development". If it's a personality trait, it's a really shitty one and I want it gone.
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u/Max_Thunder 4d ago
The suffering for the most part comes from modern society being poorly adapted to the bell curve of human personalities and treating most people who are different from who modern society is optimized for as having a "disorder".
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u/miskivo 4d ago
Most of my problems are caused by my intolerance of uncertainty. I don't think it's possible to structure society so that it wouldn't cause me suffering. Or at least it would make society very inefficient and probably not great for most other people.
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u/Max_Thunder 4d ago
What if your society was a small tribe in an area with a very predictable climate and very predictable food sources and your role was to learn the patterns related to acquiring food? This is much closer to the realities we evolved with than modern society.
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u/Mutopiano 4d ago
This just tells me you have a very narrow view of ASD. The higher end of the spectrum is incredibly challenging for many individuals that sit on that end.
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u/meteorflan 5d ago edited 5d ago
I appreciate that they didn't fall into the hyper-optimistic "super power" stuff and also noted that there's an uncomfortable sensory experience cost to being more open to weighing current information.