Autism is bad

debunking the myths

The online right and to a certain extent broader society have this mythical view of autism, where autists are tragic superheroes who are incapable of basic things like brushing their teeth but are able to become the best in the world at their own obsessive interests. Alternatively, they are painted as geniuses who are incapable of being influenced by elite propaganda with regard to race, gender, and whatnot:

Both of these mythical views of autism are wrong: autistic people are not more likely to be right wing and the link between genius and autism is overblown.

Autism and being right wing

For starters, autistic people are probably more vulnerable to propaganda than non-autistic people because being able to differentiate propaganda from regular instruction is a social skill, so autistic people will naturally be worse at it. Cross-sectionally, autistic people are also more likely to be left wing in comparison to normal people, and even among mentally disordered people they seem to slot in the middle:

from here

The data come from one of Aella’s convenience samples, though unless there is some really weird selection or interaction effect going on, the association between autism and left wing political views in this sample should not be biased.

Autism and genius

There are examples of people on the spectrum who are extremely successful, like Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, and potentially some historical figures like Isaac Newton as well. To some extent, you can find a lot of successful people with any mental disorder (e.g. Kanye is bipolar, Abraham Lincoln was depressed), though I will grant the opposition that, out of all mental disorders, autism seems to be the one that is the most highly correlated with eminence.

There are two ways one can think about this: autism is enabling these people to succeed, or autism is a bug that comes with high intelligence, which is what is actually responsible for their success. I think the latter is responsible for most of the association — there’s just much more evidence for it. Common sense and piles of academic research suggests that intelligence enables success in life, and autism genetically correlates with educational attainment and intelligence despite the fact that diagnosed autistics tend to be lower in intelligence in comparison to the average person. Therefore, there will be a surplus of autistic people (regardless of diagnosis) within groups of highly successful people.

On the other hand, there just isn’t much evidence for autism enabling genius besides the fact that it seems to have something to do with intelligence and that there are all of these really successful autistic people. Theoretically, being really into a few specific things could be an asset when it comes to succeeding in one domain, but specificity comes at the cost of value: being the greatest philosopher ever is much more impressive than being the greatest intelligence researcher ever. And that’s not even considering the social and personal constraints autism imposes. Overall, I would say that autism is probably a plus when it comes to something that is extremely cognitive like science or rote like competitive gaming, but is a negative when it comes to, well, basically anything else in life.

What is autism, actually?

I subscribe to the theory that real autism is caused by a brain architecture that optimizes too much for accuracy and dimensionality, and not enough for speed and convenience. In terms of their cognitive profile, autistic people tend to struggle the most with the comprehension (common sense test) and digit symbol test (processing speed test).

from the WAIS-IV clinical use and interpretation manual

This explains some of the classic symptoms of autism: negative reactions to stimuli, repetitiveness and social incompetence. Autistic people will dislike being presented with too much stimulus because processing more stimuli comes at the cost of less accurate neural processing, social situations require quick and dirty thinking, so autistic people are naturally bad at them, and accuracy is much easier to maintain in rote and specific tasks.

Some have noted that autism and schizophrenia are to some extent opposing disorders: autism is disordered high intelligence while schizophrenia is disordered low intelligence and autistic people are reluctant to accept patterns with insufficient validation while schizophrenic people are not. There are also a few other areas in which autistics and psychotics diverge:

from here

And yes, it’s bad

Beyond being bad at life in general, autistic people are particularly bad at social interaction. It’s easy to overlook this because NPCs constantly overrate the effect of communication and attitude when it comes to doing productive things, but being rude or unbearable will complicate the life of anybody who wants to have a family or a life to look back at. Men who fantastize about having an autistic girlfriend think that she’s going to care less about engaging in low status hobbies like gaming, doing drugs, eating out, or watching TV; in practice, an autistic girlfriend will be triggered every other week, might not even like touching or kissing, and would be incredibly insecure.

WRT the “double empathy theory”, where autistic people can communicate with autistic people easily but not with neurotypicals, and vice versa — that’s a cope. Some autistic people hate confrontation and are two-faced/evasive, while other autistic people are extremely direct and confrontational. Something tells me that these two types would not get along. I guess that autistic people might have a mutual understanding that certain smells or noises are unpleasant or something, but the same could be said for two people who share literally any mental disorder. Similar people are better at empathizing with each other.

I tweeted out earlier that there seemed to be an overlap between narcissism and autism. People responded that it might be related to the fact that both disorders involve deficits in empathy. Ignoring the controversy with regards to autism and empathy, I’ve never liked the idea that a lack of empathy is fundamentally linked to narcissism, which I associate more with self-enhancement and perception.

Human empathy is more politically and socially contingent than people give it credit for: whether somebody empathizes with a different person can be contingent on race, gender, nationality, religion, political views, and their relationship to said person. Consider how, for example, people’s perception of their romantic partners changes after they break up with them. A narcissistic person might not necessarily have low levels of empathy, but their empathy might be more selective in nature.