Theme: Agency

CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON THE “ASPERGERY”:

(More in my series on SOLIPSISM VS AUTISM: Political correctness vs unloaded contrarian facts.)

Solipsistic – Autistic Spectrum

SOLIPSISTIC-SENSITIVE-SOCIAL-BALANCED-NERDY-ASPIE-AUTISTIC

“In general, we’re seeing an ongoing convergence between the bad intellectual habits of two groups that are powerfully represented in Internet discussions: the politically correct and the Aspergery. The former dislike pattern recognition and the latter love mechanistic computer-programming style reasoning. And they increasingly come together to try to shut down probabilistic thinking about human behavior.” – iSteve

Now, this is a really interesting topic: The Economics of Subjective Experience vs Objective Truth.

NOTES:

1) Notice how the commenters confuse relying upon intuition as ‘reason’.

2) There is a definite anti-intellectual trend in conservatism that is not present in libertarianism. This is probably another artifact of IQ distributions, as well as Solipsistic-Autistic distributions.

3) The aspie learning model is to observe, take a position, argue and learn from it. This is different from an emotionally laden dialog between individuals which would be ‘muddy’ to aspies. The autistic model is to adhere to a particular idea regardless. As is the Solipsistic (Politically correct) model.

4) Yes, the Dark Enlightenment is the product of Aspies. As are a lot of innovations. Normal people don’t obsess over details like we do. It is extermely expensive and difficult to obsess on causal relations.

5) There are plenty of Aspies that place infinite discount on emotional constructs just as there are plenty of Sensitives that place infinite premiums on experiences (emotions). There are plenty of normals who are oblivious. 🙂

6) Yes, Autists are often mechanistic, just as solipsists are politically correct. After all, to be politically correct is to place a premium on experience and a discount on truth. To be mechanistic is to place a premium on truth and a discount on experience.

7) Aspies are leery of emotional motivation and express incentives and require incentives be expressed as rational actions. This troubles conservatives who rely on emotional activation resulting from intuition.

SELECTED COMMENTS (Fascinating Thread)

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For me, the most interesting part of this post is the last paragraph. I’ve been looking for a way to describe this for a while but without luck. Steve, I think you nailed it with the “convergence between the bad intellectual habits of…the politically correct and the Aspergery.”

In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.

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…The Aspergery are subject to computer-thinking; in the digital world, everything is a 1 or a 0, it is on or it is off. As for the politically correct, John Derbyshire got it right when he called them “Totalists”. There is no room, for example, to not like homosexuals (or blacks, or immigrants) very much, but to neither wish them any harm – one must either gush endlessly about them, or one clearly wishes to destroy them. No room for subtlety in either worldview.

…

Understanding this point – that something that is generally true has some circumstances in which it is not – is something that PCs and Aspys have trouble with for three reasons. First, it is not Totalist. Second, it is not binary. Third, it takes genuine intelligence to understand, and PCs and Aspys tend to substitute snark and smarm for genuine intelligence, in their own version of “fake it till you make it”.

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We live in an age in which the darling of the world economy is the tech business. This is a business in which success comes from having a certain kind of smartness that is different from intelligence in general – that borderline autistic, unsubtle, binary-oriented, goal-obsessive, kind of smart that’s most often seen in high-performance geeks. This seems to go hand-in-hand not only with bad social skills, but with some mild level of genuine sociopathy – ask anyone who ever knew Steve Jobs personally about how he treated people close to him for an example of that.

In truth, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, and a lot of other tech-industry titans, are almost certainly high-functioning autistics who are too successful for anyone to dare call them dysfunctional.

And -this is key – because the tech sector is so important, these people are the ones who have become heroes and role models, with people brought up to believe that their kind of smart was the best – maybe the only genuine – kind of smart. People love to copy a winner, and when a certain skill set or kind of smartness of way of thinking seems to be successful, people aspire to it and try to emulate it (or at least put on an affectation of it).

This is one major reason why the internet – and life – is infested with tinhorn Aspys and dime-store Dawkinses.

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CURT: Actually, it’s because aspies are infovores. They require high amounts of stimulation via information that they cannot obtain by interaction.

What I find interesting is that this person isn’t terribly bright and he’s just railing against others with envy. When his real objection is that he can’t use moralistic argument to convince shame or guilt people into agreeing with him. How do I know that? Praxeology. The economy of persuasion.

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this is silly….. i dont expect this sort of intellectual sloppiness from someone of your calibre. Half the commenters here are probably aspergery, I am more than certain most of the “Dark Englightenment” is a product of Aspergery thinking. PC and Asperger’s are poles apart on any spectrum of intellectual functioning. One refuses to see patterns, one sees patterns all the time. One is feminine thinking to the extreme, one is masculine thinking to the extreme.

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“In addition to not being solid on probabilistic reasoning, software types are not trained to reason about causation.”

Not so, just the opposite. Software types live in a world where one debugs complex systems by probabilistic reasoning. Debugging programming logic, in programs of any size, is all about reasoning about causation.

Though some variation of what you say might be true if you modify it to be probabilistic reasoning or causation about human “systems” (society), in particular if the reasoning needs to take into account current, historical, and political social conditions at all scales. Many programming types, particularly those locked in “deathmarch” race-to-deadlines, simply don’t have time to keep up with these things. Something has to give, the task becomes all-consuming, stress and pressure wonderfully concentrates the mind. A hard problem that takes months to solve does warp the human personality trying to solve it. Don’t overlook the simple lack of time in producing aspy-type behavior.

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Anonymous said…

“…the politically correct and the Aspergery. In many instances, no convergence was necessary–they were already one in the same.”

I disagree… the PCs aren’t smart enough to be Aspies.

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Anonymous said…

Some people with Aspergers are aware that neurotypicals exist and that they think is some really weird ways.

Those people come around to the Dark Enlightenment once they become sufficiently disillusioned.

Other people with Aspergers seem to be unable to grasp the simple fact that neurotypicals exist, even when it is explained to them over and over.

When those people become economists, watch out.

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Anonymous NOTA said…

Reasoning about probabilities and statistics is really unnatural and hard for most people to do. Reasoning toward an unwanted conclusion is also unnatural and hard for people to do well. The combination is presumably still harder, and I suspect this is one reason why statistical reasoning dealing with some unwanted conclusion is super hard for even most smart people to think through.