Vinod, often flashy and interesting, also often plays a bit fast and loose..a strategy that seems to land his lab good journals, but questionable replication. So I immediately looked at the preprocessing steps in the methods...which is, annoyingly, in supplemental 1. A few comments:
It is written so vaguely, it is difficult to understand what preprocessing steps were done and in which order (which matters). The steps to avoid motion confounds mostly talk about why they didn't do certain things (e.g. GSR regression), and not what they did do (tissue signal covariates?), what about non-GSR based noise cleaning to remove physiological and motion related noise? The study may be good,I just wish it was written more straightforwardly, and less like they are weaving past potential reviewer objections.
Vinod (v) To Vinod a paper is to write it so loose and sexy, so fast and seductive, editors are bound to wake up the morning after with a new babe. (Just a little joke among some colleagues of mine).
Amusing comments provided you are not Vinod. Three sites and I would hope that connectomes were computed interleaved between cases and controls and analyzed with blinding. Is that standard? Do you think behavioral difference in the scanner could generate false positive connectome differences?
I am not sure what you mean by interleaved here.
In 2013 I am not sure that site differences were as appreciated as they are today. Today, in studies that use multi-site imaging data, ComBat Harmonization is often the method that is employed to account for site effects in two ways: (1) it models site-specific scaling factors and (2) it uses empirical Bayes to improve the estimation of the site parameters for small sample sizes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5845848/
By interleaved I mean that cases and controls were not each in their own run batches, but ideally run A ,B, A, B,
Yes ComBat can some of the batch effect if sample sizes are large enough. But here as you point out they are on thin ice.
I am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2
OP's article is about children, yours is about adults.
OP's article's conclusion states "Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of studying neurodevelopmental disorders closer to their onset, rather than in adulthood when a lifetime of compensatory mechanisms may have already taken place"
As I understand, autistic people often get negative reinforcement from authoritarian mindsets of society (follow the general norm and the power structures instead of thinking for yourself) and that can be kinda traumatizing for autistic people
So what we need is to value that every person's perspective is equally valid, and their ideas are plausible, and no one is inherently superior, whether NT or ASD etc...
> Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value
>
> -Baha'i Teaching
> OP's article is about children, yours is about adults.
Studies on biological causes of ASD are notorious for failing to replicate and reaching contradictory conclusions. It is just as likely that you’d reach the opposite conclusion with children too
Because “ASD” isn’t really a thing, it is a whole bunch of different things with different causes and different symptoms semi-arbitrarily squished together under the one label, simply because those symptoms have some overlap. And every research sample is a random mixture of these different underlying conditions, and two different samples are unlikely to have the same mix, which is why studies of the same thing with different samples (even defined on the same criteria) frequently produce opposite conclusions. “Heterogeneity” is the technical term for this
One of the lessons that I would hope that the world learns from the rise of the radical right world-wide is that platitudes about universalism, egalitarianism, empathy, and basically everything that the Baha'i faith teaches makes people hate you and want to kill you. This has been true historically (see treatment of Baha`i faith by like everyone) and is true today. These platitudes that you and the Baha`i faith (and jains) espoused seem to trigger a revulsion to "weakness" and "submissiveness" among others around them. Early Christians had to deal with the same extreme hatred.
Autistic people suffer the same fate. Dr. Hans Asperger could only say the "smart" autistic people from certain death by showing that they are useful to the war machine and could produce rockets so Nazis could continue gassing people longer.
Even today, "Autist" as a slur or insult is used even more than "Retard" 10 or 20 years ago, and the connotations around "Autist" are very similar to "Incel". Most people genuinely feel a level of horror that leads to "I wish you didn't exist" when they are around a chris-chan tier autistic person.
The world isn't ready to accept universalism, or love, or happieness, or peace or any of that hippy shit. The world wants a boot from a strongman on its face - forever!
Chris Chan is an abusive person and has been for a very long time (before the "internet found him", he was making rape threats against girls in his highschool.) He freaks people out for good reason. It's not fair to autistic people to use Chris Chan as some sort of archetype for autism.
Why not? Being a horrible person equaling people liking you is exactly my point! He famously now has a finnish girlfriend (Flutter) who is much more attractive than him. This has lead to hilarious 4chan threads where the incels of 4chan lament at how CHRIS CHAN is getting laid and they aren't.
He's more evidence that trying to be "ethically good" leads to bad life outcomes and the moment that he embraced his "dark" side, his life outcomes literally got way better. He's evidence that god hates the weak.
Your initial arguments are interesting, but I don't think any interpretation of the old or new testaments would allow for conflating a society and what it rewards with the will of their "God". Sodom and Gomorrah would be the most obvious example of a situation where dark personalities must have done well only to end up grouped in a fast track damnation.
I think a lot of Chris-Chan’s issues aren’t due to autistic traits in themselves, they are due to being surrounded by a subculture of stalkers obsessed with doing all in their power to make those issues worse
I would say "Happy dappy dumbp dipshits" is not what I get from the Baha'i ideals
Some people are born leaders, thats their inherent personality tendencies. Often they are psychopathic, which is a congential thing, and hence not their fault in any ways. Rather, just like anyone else, they are also mines rich in gems of inestimable value
So how can you get someone like Stalin or whatnot, who can mesmerize the populace, make brave, bold and rational decisions in the face intense crisis, but at the same time help them somehow understand and internalize foundational principles of justice and equity so that their strengths can be manifest without tormenting people and thereby extinguishing so much human potential?
There are also two axis of deficit in autostic individuals. Social and cognitive. Its not uncommon for individuals to present without cognitive deficit, however social deficits can still be severe e.g. A 5 year old who cannot participate in class due to meltdowns and inability to follow social norms such as sharing/turn taking/listening.
I haven't read these studies, but it seems natural that there would need to be control for the type and severity of autism.
I wonder how that ties into the hyperconnectivity induced by various psychoactive substances like psilocybin.
All the research about GABA and glutamate seems too low level to me and not specific enough for treatment targets. Somewhat like using body weight to determine that disease.
I’d suggest tracing a line through the points of published research on autism, hyperthermia and its effects on autism spectrum related behaviors, the effect of Interleukin-17 thereon, the relationship from between IL-17 and Th17 helper cells, and the 5-HT2A receptor’s effects on Th17 cell regulation. And other stuff. Like thermoregulation. There’s more interesting stuff on the way and at every point.
To manage expectations: It’s… an imaginary line?
—- edit: on the run, hope to be able to follow up with papers
I do recall reading that certain autoimmune disorders like psoriasis which are therapeutically impacted by serotonin receptors’ effects on the immune system do happen to increase susceptibility to fungal infection
iirc/afaik
before readings: that paper is wild
(I’ll approach it with a grain of salt while also not immediately discounting it)
hmm - still feel autistic on psilocybin and other tryptamines but more aware (and it works like a reset switch), however I've never felt as normal (or more like the people around me) as I did that first summer I binged mdma - when I managed to stay awake that is...
If it’s true, one idea to explain it might be oversensitivity to input (which maybe sometimes leads to withdrawal or avoidance to social situations which could be too stimulating and stressful?), which given the connection between autism and ADHD which has become discovered more and more by research in recent years doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable to me. Then again I have no expertise in this field whatsoever so can only conjecture.
This is before we even start talking about serial or parallel, concurrency, etc. And then modify the networks and the wires themselves dynamically in real-time and you have endogenous BDNF, endogenous DMT, and the fact that insulin has a different, psychoactive effect on the other side of the blood brain barrier.
It would seem that time-speed-distance would be a useful metric here, as well as accounting for the fact that we don't actually know where we are in the 6d chess of triune, bicameral, hippocampal, or glycemic variation moment-to-moment in real-time.
This feels like the work of a highly intelligent person operating on very scant information- it’s easy to construct castles of thought that more or less fit your experiences, but at some point the slow tedious work of conducting experiments and data has to be done, and most of these sorts of elaborate guesses turn out to be wrong.
My clinical psychiatrist crudely described autism as taking many - sometimes longer - pathways through the brain to do things and monotropism could be simply a sticky myelin sheath.
But both could be true - a myelin sheath disorder along with hyperconnectivity could explain so many sensory issues and such singular processing.
There is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane.
Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself completely wrong with an experiment, an "intelligent" man concocts a social conspiracy theory, but nothing proves him wrong: instead, he pronounces those who "don't get it" hopelesly stupid, too socially dumb to participate in a society.
This sounds like memespeak cope. There is a deficit from the perspective of other people participating in the society. Yes, nothing died inside. No, it isn’t necessary for anything to be dead for a deficit to exist.
The double empathy problem explains why it may not be a deficiency, just a "different brain language" between ND and NT people.
Basically, from autistic perspective, it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication. There's been a whole lot of research about that in the last 10-15 years or so. And a lot of memes in the community.
> it's the non autistic people who have deficiencies in communication
Example: In a Job interview, when you get asked why you did apply. Its the social norm to lie and make up some reason that sounds good, and saying the truth "i need money to pay my rent" makes you the weird one.
People say ND people are blunt and frank... but the other side of the same coin would be that NT people can't talk about facts.
What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?" Then saying "hey, I need money for blah whatever" is non-responsive, but you can just talk about why you think you might be a good fit for them after all.
Much of this stuff is just cultural anyway. There are Western societies where being "blunt and frank" like that is quite accepted or even expected, unlike the U.S. and the Anglosphere more generally.
> What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?" Then saying "hey, I need money for blah whatever" is non-responsive, but you can just talk about why you think you might be a good fit for them after all.
Yes, and that's exactly what's confusing to people like me who have autism; the question being asked isn't actually the question that they're looking for the answer to, and it's up to us to figure out what they actually mean. In this context, it might seem obvious to someone neurotypical, but I don't think I can easily articulate just how common this type of thing happens on a regular basis. The problem for me is that while I might understand what to do in this circumstance due to having encountered it before, it feels impossible to extrapolate what people mean when I'm in a new situation that I haven't had a chance to learn the "rules" for yet. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've had to separately learn what the expected norms are for pretty much every circumstance I've ever encountered when people say one thing but assume that it's clear that they mean something different.
The fact that most of this stuff is cultural doesn't really change the fact that implicitly learning rules like this is something that most people don't struggle with to the extent that people with autism do. To me, the issue isn't that I specifically want people to be "blunt and frank" or not, but that no one directly communicates what the expectations are, and that it's not as simple as a binary of whether to be blunt or not. Most people might struggle if they suddenly found themselves in a culture where the expectations were different than they were used to, but they probably didn't struggle to learn the expectations of their own culture. For me, learning the expectations of the culture I've spent my entire life in is still an ongoing process after over three decades, and I don't expect that it will ever really be complete.
An culture of all autistic people wouldn't be identifiable merely by how blunt they are, but by the giant binder they give everyone who comes to visit with all of the expectations written out to avoid any confusion. The reason I struggle with communication every day of my life is because I never got that binder, but everyone else seems to already have it memorized.
I have experienced these feelings personally, but to bring up a high school metaphor - at some point I realized the popular kids weren't just dumb pretty people but spent a lot more time and mental energy on thinking through how they appear, how others regard them and understanding the social relationship amongst each other.
Realizing this, getting called "socially retarded" wasn't just an insult but somewhat descriptive. My mind was much more focused on other things and I could see and appreciate the result of those social efforts but at the time it seemed too much work and not very fun to bother with.
So I doubt the cause is a lack of ability or capabilities that leads to magical social awareness but actual compounding effort over years and decades. If you talk to a NT person about a situation they say "it's obvious" but if they break it down you see there actually is a richer decision tree underneath where they are empathizing with the other person's perspective and triangulating on their overall objectives and both physical and verbal cues they are providing to guide you one way or the other.
Realizing this means it is a difficult but solveable problem, which I found a great improvement over "I can't" or "they are the weird ones".
Obviously your brand of ND may be different from mind but everyone comes in with different skills as well as interests and focuses. It is best to remember were are ALL neuro-different, it is just a matter of degree and flavor. And also that no of this is innately easy for anyone - humans are social creatures and it makes sense our brains are equipped foe and spend a lot of energy on solving these problems.
> So I doubt the cause is a lack of ability or capabilities that leads to magical social awareness but actual compounding effort over years and decades. If you talk to a NT person about a situation they say "it's obvious" but if they break it down you see there actually is a richer decision tree underneath where they are empathizing with the other person's perspective and triangulating on their overall objectives and both physical and verbal cues they are providing to guide you one way or the other.
I've been spending effort on this my whole life, and being in the position where it's still quite difficult for me but I manage to get by is the result of that effort, not because of a lack of it. If this was something I hadn't worked on with significant effort all these years, I wouldn't even be able to have the conversation that we're having right now without getting too frustrated or anxious to the point that I would just give up rather than try to engage at all in conversations online with strangers.
It's interesting to me that what I've described fits with feeling you've experienced, because I'm honestly having trouble feeling like much of what you describe having felt resembles what I've felt over the years. I don't think I ever assumed that other people didn't spend effort trying to understand how other people felt, and I spent _significant_ time and energy trying to understand what I could do to better relate to others; I just never was particularly successful at it.
It's worth mentioning is that I don't have any trouble empathizing with people generally; when people are sad or angry, or when I notice that they're experiencing something that I think is unfair, I feel those feelings quite strongly myself. My issue isn't that I can't relate to the feelings other people have, but that with the exception of people I'm close to and have spent a lot of time with, I have a lot of trouble figuring out exactly how other people feel if they don't express it to me. I've talked with plenty of neurotypical people about how they approach situations in the exact way you describe, but I haven't ever been able to do anything remotely similar to what they describe.
You mentioned that "it's just a matter of degree and flavor", but it seems like you assume that implies that the distribution of differences people have is relatively uniform. From my perspective, the issues you described having and the ways you learned to deal with them are so different from my experience that it's honestly feels like you're using them to handwave away the idea that anyone else might struggle with things far more than you did. I don't think that's your intention, but it really does come across like you fundamentally don't think that anyone struggles with these things much more or less than you have, and as someone who's tried my whole life to try to learn to communicate better with others, it seems pretty dismissive.
He's wrong. He's probably from a country where NTs are not predominant.
First, NTs don't ever consider anybody except themselves, they only care about their own good. Even when they seem like they're helping you, they only think they get some benefit from being seen doing so.
Second, they don't think like you do: What you consider a failure is a success to them. They memorize the phrase, and learn how they're supposed to react to it. You think they understand the phrase and come up with their own reply like you do, but they don't, because they can't.
There is nothing that can be understood about the NT world, it's all just rote learned. It's a cargo cult remnant of what people created when they were still normal, mixed with some random nonsense creativity of the schizophrenics who work on "improving" it. The only reason why you think you're failing at it is that the difference in intelligence between you and them is so vast.
I think I've made the case above that it's not merely about "being neurotypical", it's also about being steeped in a very specific culture. That peculiar use of "why did you apply" might as well be described as an idiomatic expression, a play on words that happens to be common in that well-defined context. If you aren't familiar with that usage because you are from a different cultural context (or even something as simple as a different "low-class" socio-economic stratum in the same society), you might misunderstand the question in the exact same way - or perhaps you'll grok it but you'll still be bothered by the implied "dishonesty" in it and be inclined to subvert expectations by starting with a straight and to the point answer, and then getting into the actual topic of why you think you were right to apply.
My point isn't that neurotypical people will always be familiar with whatever idioms they encounter, but that learning those idioms is way easier for them. It seems like you're misunderstanding what I'm saying as the struggles of not understanding specific things as being specific to autistic people, and that's not the case; I'm saying that while neurotypical people might have to deal with specific cases of idioms or figures of speech, autistic people will often struggle with the meta-problem of struggling with idioms or figures of speech as an entire category rather than with not being familiar with individual ones. I don't just struggle with understanding language like that when dealing with people who come from a different background than me; I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.
As someone having experienced (and of course still experiencing) similar struggles as a person with ADHD, the Heureka moment for me was realizing that the difference is I'm overthinking it. In quite a lot of the situations, there's no right answer people are looking for. There's no strict protocol, people just say whatever random stuff that comes into their mind and it might not even be related to what the other person said, then the other person builds on from there or says their own random stuff. Sometimes they strike a chord, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they end up saying the completely wrong thing and then they may or may not attempt to correct the situation. Trying to attribute a system to it is mostly just my own desire for order that probably doesn't exist. Like most things in life, the system is so complex that it might as well be random in some aspects.
"Overthinking" stuff is good for you actually. It's just a phase of learning any sort of skill: 1. Unconscious incompetence 2. Conscious incompetence 3. Conscious competence 4. Unconscious competence. Step 4 is where you get rid of the "overthinking" bit.
For sure, zero disagreement there! Just pointing out my personal observation that most people seem to not really do that.
In myself, overthinking is a quality I value very highly in some situations while also being one of the highest contributors to personal misery in other situations. In the net though, definitely a keeper.
As you say, it leads you down a path. Often at the beginning there is pain, such as being painfully self-conscious. At the end of the path is often self-development though.
Actually I have a completelly opposite experience. Being among people, that I do not understand and where I am foreign is the best state for me to exist so far - it makes those people to adapt to me. I start to get communication issues, when they decide that I am no more foreign to them and that I should now adapt to their silly ceremonial behaviours, which I am very fully aware that I am not going to do.
>>> I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.
Exactly - I have never fought more battles to dominate than with my relatives. And to be fair the cases where I was getting along was when I fully subjugated to their will.
It doesn't seem plausible to me that "why did you apply" is like an idiomatic expression. Where would it come up outside of a job interview? Are you saying that a non-autist would not get it in the first couple interviews as a young person then pick it up?
From the comments I read, you just like rest of bunch are going in the wrong direction by thinking that you have to learn something from others, which logically in your argumentation point to a deficit compared to others, which is very wrong direction. Quite the opposite - autistic people are capable to learn behavior to adapt to others and many are very good at that, but NT would struggle to achieve talent levels of autistic people - they simply have no ability to learn to achieve that level. Also, you seem to be missing the main issue here - autistic people have issues not only understanding NT, but there are more issues understanding other autistic people at which autistic people seem to fail spectacularly(also for the logical flow reasons, the previous sentence would not have sounded as good, but exactly the same struggles for NT are affecting other autistic people achieving talents of other people they can't achieve). The harassment that I am receiving from NT people is rarer than what I would receive from autistic people and I can assure you that by classifying harassment that I would receive, autistic people would pretty much fall under the cathegory of plain stupid at that and I would think that the same observation would be from other autistic people towards me, pretty much because they are trying to limit their responses to what they know or have been thaught without thinking outside of the box on their own.
The issue with communication is not that it is something that is unique to humans, but it is how all the animals are functioning. Other animals are more specialized and their brains are attuned to that specialized behaviour. Autistic peacock that would not understand the requirement for flashy tail would essentially have change in brains that would make it a different peacock species. There are even more trivial differences - fishes that specialize in eating different foods would evolve into different species that would not crossbreed(mostly because they would also evolve different mating rituals). However with humans it is different - while we do not differ on genetical level to be classified as different species, the difference in cultural norms and ceremonial behaviour would make us different species but we can shift and adapt to different cultural environments, so this is something that does not effect us so much, though it still occupies a very large space in our brains.
Anyway, if we are returning to the topic of job interviews, then it has nothing to do with answering the questions correctly - the issue is mainly how would you get along(at least that is what I can extrapolate from successful interviews being in both sides of table). That also applies to other communication fields - generally my understanding with communication failures with other people has come to conclusion that we would not be getting along anyway and the tolerance level from me is not so high and subconciously or even consciously I was the one that was showing disrespect to other person. And that applies to communication between autistic people even more. There is no need to learn answers to these questions at all - if you want to get that route, you are going to set yourself for a failure, because learning questions and how to behave changes rapidly not only among differnt cultures(in a global village that is impossible task), but also among generations... and in the end you need to grow your own backbone, because adapting to virtue signaling(which basically is what society consists) is not how it is done, as you can't run across savanna in a zebra flock avoiding lions all your life. At the end you want for other people to adapt to you or at least acknowledge from hyenas that you are an elephant that wants to eat grass and enjoy the company of other elephants. And at the end we are humans and humans even more than other species want to change environment around us - if you are trying to adapt only, including to other humans, this is going to be a constant failure. Then again, this might not apply to everyone - my struggles are trying to dominate over other people obviously and I have not even decided if that is really something I require.
> What they're really asking, translated to "blunt and frank communication" mode is: "Why should we even care that you applied?"
I think you just made that up.
There can be plenty of things the interviewer could be fishing for. They may want to hear that the candidate really wants to work at this job (and have a "correct" reason - the company, the team, the nature of the job ....). They might want to hear about how it's similar to your previous jobs. It's quote possible they want a specific response, and it's either an intentional or untintentional gotcha.
The interviewer might just have heard it's a good question, and is filling in time, or faking being a good interviewer. They aren't "autistically" trying to get the best candidate, maybe then your interpretation is right and you want to say why you're a good candidate for the job.
Why are you assuming that being a good fit would not also include things such as liking the company, the job etc? It's all the same thing anyway, you're right that there might be some cases where that becomes quite relevant. What's not going to be helpful though is answering "hey I just want to make some money and pay my rent" - even though in some sense, that answer might be quite reflective of reality!
But the interviewer isn't asking something in "non-autistic language", they're farting out their mouth, and you need to just fill the space with something that sounds good.
Lmao, then ask ”Why should we even care?”. I will filter people who lie or can put things straight regardless which side of the interviewing table I am sat.
4chan seems to privately believe that Germans and all Germanic groups are plagued by ethnic autism. I tongue in cheek believe it given how dry their humor is.
Yeah, at least in my experience as someone autistic, I sometimes joke that everybody else got together and decided on a bunch of rules for how everyone needs to talk to each other going forward, but somehow my invite got lost and I missed my chance to learn them. I don't pretend to have any idea if things would be better or worse for society as a whole if everybody did things the way that would seem more natural to me, but it does seem pretty likely to me that neurotypical people would probably struggle in a lot of the ways I often do.
In a certain sense, this makes the experience of being autistic more frustrating. If there were some definitive flaw someone could point to in my brain that would make communication difficult for me regardless of social norms, that might be easier to come to terms with; the feeling that I'm not actually struggling due to any actual issue other than not being in the majority makes it hard not to feel resentful sometimes though. That being said, it's so hard to conceive of a clean separation between the parts of my personality that I do like and the parts that make me struggle to communicate in a neurotypical fashion that if there were a magic switch I could flip to make me like everyone else (whatever that would mean), I still don't think I'd do it. At the end of the day, it's part of what makes me who I am, and I wouldn't recognize who I'd become without it.
I'm honestly not quite sure what you mean here (which I guess is fitting given the topic of conversation!). In case what I was talking about might have unclear, when I talk about feeling like the majority of people are different than me, I'm saying the idea of social norms being communicated implicitly, or at least being something most people seem to be able to infer from previous examples. To use the example of the interview given above, someone might be able to explain to me that when I'm asked that question, I shouldn't treat it as literal and instead given an answer that fits the expectation they'll actually have, but if the interview instead asks a slightly different question like "what's one thing you would change about your current job?", someone like me might not realize that this is _also_ not a question where it's good to give an answer like "I wish I got paid more for doing less work". For me, it's impossible to take all of the norms and expectations that I've learned over the years and apply them to an entirely new situation that I'm not familiar with, and that's not something that most people seem to struggle with as much as me.
The socially acceptable way to say exactly that is something like "I wish I was enabled to be more productive and accomplish more with the same amount of effort." It's implied that you'd also want to be paid more as a consequence, since that's what everyone wants at the end of the day. The general rule, to the extent that there is any, is "try to be helpful to the interviewer and be cautious if it looks like you might be stating the obvious!".
> Example: In a Job interview, when you get asked why you did apply. Its the social norm to lie and make up some reason that sounds good, and saying the truth "i need money to pay my rent" makes you the weird one
This question has been included (not by my choice) in some hiring loops where I’ve been an interviewer.
There are a lot of good answers that are definitely not lies. You see a lot of candidates who actually care about the work they do, the people they work with, and advancing their career.
You don’t even need to pretend you love to work. That’s not the question at all. Good answers include “This role is a natural next step in my career and I could leverage a lot of my experience at past jobs here”
The cynical myth that it’s just a trick question to see who lies the best does not match what I saw. Honestly, it’s not hard to see when someone is treating an interview question (or the whole interview) like a competition to see who can lie the best.
> People say ND people are blunt and frank... but the other side of the same coin would be that NT people can't talk about facts.
That’s a deeply unfair characterizing of “ND vs NT” given then that “neurodivergent” label covers a multitude of different modalities. There are people who identify as neurodivergent in ways that make them obsessively love their work, for example.
I personally don’t think the “neurodivergent” label is very useful any more because most people use it to describe themselves as if everyone “neurodivergent” is just like them and everyone not like them is “neurotypical”, as you’ve done in this comment.
Yes, there is additional context that is not explicitly stated in the question. It is clear that you are looking for a job to earn money and live your life and everyone already knows this, so there is no need to talk about. The question is: Why did you apply (here out of all the places you could have applied to)?
Good points, I appreciate the perspective! But, as someone probably on the spectrum, I still feel like the point about "NT people can't talk about facts" holds up.
Like, if someone replies, "I need the money etc" why can't NTs better clarify what they mean? For example, "Okay but why this company/role/specialty" as opposed to <alternative>?" If someone lacks the self-awareness to narrow down what they're looking for in a case like that, and just writes off the interviewee as deficient somehow, I'm happy to label the interviewer as being bad at "talking about facts".
I've had a case where I got a similar kind of prompt, and I asked a clarifying question to better get at what he was looking for, and he replied, "Just, whatever you interpret that to mean."
Like, what? You're the one asking the question, and you don't know what you want out of it? You'll knowingly let the interviewee "interpret" it, in a possibly incorrect way?
There was a reddit thread I'll try to find where they were asked "What's your favorite drink" and they replied "water" to which the follow-up was "come on, you can do better than that". A lot of commenters said, "oh yeah obviously that was an attempt to get you to see if you can intelligently defend your preference" or whatever. Okay, but the interviewer can also clarify what they're looking for!
Is it really (always) a bona fide occupational qualification to be able to guess the wishes of someone who's making no effort to express them on their own end?
It's not rocket science. What is the purpose of the interview? For the company, to find out if you are a good fit for them. The questions must be interpreted in that context.
That you need money is not interesting information to them, that will be true for (almost?) all other applicants too. So when they ask: 'why do you want this job?' they mean 'why do you want THIS job?' so they actually do literally say word-for-word what they mean. So you answer with stuff like why you might like the job, or why it is a good career step for you, or why your skills make you a good fit.
That's not responding to the point in my comment, which was about whether NTs are actually deft in communication about facts, as claimed.
If what you describe were the only issue, it would, at most, be a minor hiccup while the interviewer clarifies what they actually want in the answer -- i.e. are they validating that you have reasonable expectations about what you can get out of the job? Or that you have relevant qualifications? Both?[1]
If they're utterly stymied or write off the applicant on the basis of that answer, then yeah, that would validate the point that they're bad at "talking about facts!" Ditto for the other two examples, like where they interviewer refuses a chance to clarify, and leaves it open to guessing the secret desideratum.
Also, FWIW, it's kind of generous of you to discount the possibility that they're looking for indicators that you're desperate for work that they can't ask for directly.
[1] Note that another reply gives a different "obvious" interpretation, the confrontational "Why should we care?"
To be fair being able to understand which facts matter in which situation and which are irrelevant can be a very important aspect of some jobs.
I mean before replying “I need the money" etc. one should consider if that’s not obvious and why would the interviewer care about the information. It’s not particularly subjective.
> who's making no effort
Having to always be very literal and explicit is not very efficient though. That person might prefer spending their time doing something else.
You're missing the same point as in the other reply. The issue is not whether you can conceivably derive some other reasonable interpretation of the question. The issue is whether a NT interviewer is deft enough at communication so as to make this just a minor hiccup. If they're so flabbergasted by that kind of reply, and just shut down that that point, then yeah, I'm sorry, they just suck at asking for what they want, or are trying to weasel out of owning the real question.
(Edit: Or, even better, why not, like migrate to a question that heads off the misinterpretation in the first place e.g. "Why do you feel this role is a good match for you?" I think you know why.)
Remember, everyday communication constantly has (far-more-obvious) misinterpretations that, in hindsight, with sufficient logical strength, one party could have avoided entirely. Those who are actually good at communication, at "talking about facts", can easily identify the mismatch and narrow down what they want. This remains true regardless of how obvious a thing one party missed.
So yes, I get it, you can derive a better interpretation. That's beside the (original) point about, why can't you ask for what you really want? Why would you say something like, "[uhhh, oh crap, I have no self-awareness...] Just, whatever you interpret the question to mean"?
And, as with the other commenter, it's kind of funny that you're discounting the possibility that an NT would ever be in a position where they can't/don't want to ask the question they really want to, and are in a position of power to expect the interviewee to volunteer it. ("Yes I'm desperate enough to really need the money and make up some story about how I really like your company/line of work to cover it.")
If you offered minimum wage, do you think those candidates would still accept? If not, then you can deduce that the compensation must be a significant factor, but one that goes unstated.
While science allowed the schizophrenics to fix their material related thinking (but they eventually corrupted that anyway) and become somewhat funcional in that regard, they have always stayed socially isolated. As such, all recent history that we are taught is narrated from their perspective. People suffered horribly, until science allowed the people to rise up against THEM. Anything else is at best mentioned as a side note, utter madness, a fringe belief only held by the 95% of the people. They were harmed, opressed, subjugated and gassed, and whatever else, but now they are free.
This is like assuming that cancer is good? More cells, better body?
This is just a hypothetical counter-argument. More connectivity could be better, "more intelligent", and autism seems to be "cool" among nerds for this reason. But maybe it's just a fallacy, just a way to pretend to be something better.
Again, all hypothetical.
Yesterday I listened to a podcast episode about bird brains [0]. That some birds have a way more efficient brain than ours, even if they are not as intelligent as we are. They are smarter than other primates, but their brain just weighs around 10g, while the one of chimps, which are about as intelligent as some birds, weighs 400g and consumes a lot more energy. They have an underdeveloped cortex, so apparently it isn't as important as one might think. That it could be that the cortex is more dedicated to sensing, than to thinking. Birds, for example, don't have such complex sensory inputs like our hands or our entire skin surface, that "memory mapping" all those inputs requires such a big cortex.
I know several autistic adults who check their outgoing messages with AI for unintentional meanings or recommendations to better communicate what they mean. Not getting the ai to write for them mind you. Social coprocessor indeed!
I know non-austistic adults that ask ChatGPT to rewrite their messages so they land better. Take the nasty unproductive letter you want to send to your partner that you're currently fighting with, then have ChatGPT soften the accusations so the reader doesn't immediately become defensive and doesn't read the rest of the letter so the two of you can have a productive conversation.
You won't be ready for what AI is about to do to human sexuality/romantic tendencies.
You think the war of the sex's is bad now? Just wait until a man or woman can literally buy a human-like android which never says no.
I anticipate things like the marriage rate, partnership rates, dating rates and similar to further crater compared to where they are now. Human based marriages will be the minority by the end of the century, likely far before it.
Almost no policy makers consider this, but it's clearly staring us in the face. Go see civit.ai to see de-facto what people learned how to use adapter/lora models for. The overwhelming majority of text-to-image content and plurality of text-to-video created today by AI is hardcore NSFW.
I don't really see why people harp on about this "never says no" thing.
I don't think that's what people want. They want a robot/AI that loves them or agrees to the desired relationship status (girlfriend or wife), because dating and finding a partner who reciprocates your feelings is hard.
That's not the same as indulging in the most depraved fetishes. For whatever reason, there is a lot of misandry in the context of male sexuality, where it is selectively reinterpreted to be as evil as possible.
Self proclaimed anti sexbot feminists fear that men will use their companions to practice rape, so they suggested that sexbots should refuse to give consent, which paradoxically gives rise to the possibility of rape, because rape is not defined by the severity of the outcome/consequences, but by a simple yes or no "question". This is especially ridiculous in the case of affirmative consent, where unprovable positive consent must be given or it is rape nonetheless.
So back to my original point. A lot of men just want to live out a relationship with someone who loves them back, something that is in short supply these days. This is in no contradiction to regulations making AI girlfriends or robots or whatever a positive influence in a man's life. Let them be happy and they'll be productive members of society.
Isn't it usually assumed that birds have such an efficient brain, akin to a real-time kernel, so that they can process incredibly high resolution occular input, while managing flight, and possibly possessing unknown senses (magnetic global positioning, wind speed, etc)?
Akin to bottle-nose dolphins and orcas with sound. They have, easily, the most signal-processing neurons of ANY species on the planet.
And, fwiw, their encephalization quotient is just behind one species--us.
Since they're aquatic mammals (given the requisite mass for thermoregulation), that severely under-represents their effective brain/body-mass ratio too.
Birds use their optic tectums to process visual inputs, but that likely doesn't enable much more than visual recognition. The mammal brain goes far far far further than that:
It is the nature of most real life signals that they are sparse when represented in certain domains, and what the neocortex does is that it finds these sparse domains, which has at least three consequences:.
1. Simplicity. As mammal thinking doesn't deal with the world directly, but only through this latent space of sparse data, it only needs to deal with the meaningful values. This results in great simplicity, and allows previously overwhelming problems becoming manageable, then simple, and later trivial, as the neocirtex succesfully finds their sparse representation.
2. The representation in which the signal is sparse is its theory. By engaging only with the meaningful values, a mammal's thinking and creativity gets restricted to what can be relresented with those meaningful values, and so gets restricred to what is real, or realistic. Unlike the schizophrenic, which comes up with completely random nonsense that he needs to test with the scientific method, healthy people can't even conceive the theory that he's testing, as it cannot be represented within the values that they use.
Healthy people thus have very little need for science, as their brains do all the science they need in their daily lives.
The third one is reconstruction. This is what in its most extreme for allowed for various seers, oracles, visions and premonitions, and other such things, and what is already used in practice in MRA machines, once its nature is known, its sparse representation can be used to reconstruct a shockingly clear and accurate picture from seemingly hopelessly inadequate data.
yeah sure my autism is real cool and all until I forget my sunglasses or my headphones die at the grocery store. cool or uncool aside, seems like life must feel considerably more comfortable than for those of us with all the senses cranked to 100 24/7.
I'm well aware of what my medical diagnosis and comorbidities are, I was sharing a fact about my situation, not an idea. I can't readily go outside without certain tools to manage my senses, I don't know anything about ADHD but I'm talking about autism.
>>>This is like assuming that cancer is good? More cells, better body?
There are many things in our build up, where evolution have been outcome from viruses. However I do not like your comparision to cancer - cancerous cells are generally shredding cells from the unity of your organism - they might be making new organism, but that organism is not part of your evolution anymore. Changes that are happening in autistic brains are not destroying brains, but is part of the processes that are changing and optimizing them for the environment they have to exist in and the reasons for those changes are evolutionary - those changes started long time ago. Do you like that or not or can it be worded better - it does not really matter here.
>>>This is just a hypothetical counter-argument. More connectivity could be better, "more intelligent", and autism seems to be "cool" among nerds for this reason. But maybe it's just a fallacy, just a way to pretend to be something better.
You might be new. The mainstream argument and a direction for autistic people where it was going for a very long time has been, that autistic people were mentally disabled(not only intellectual but also emotional), which clearly is not the case. I mean, yes - that attitude might be helpful for purposes to suck out government support, but that leaves autistic people treated like deficient people, that are not contributing to society and telling a talented and intelligent person, that he is mentally disturbed would yield different results than telling that the person is very intelligent. And frankly, the issue is not hypothetical, like you have classified it but autistic people that they are smarter(at some things) stands out in the crowd. Genius and NT at this point in time is oxymoron.
>>>Yesterday I listened to a podcast episode about bird brains [0]. That some birds have a way more efficient brain than ours, even if they are not as intelligent as we are. They are smarter than other primates, but their brain just weighs around 10g, while the one of chimps, which are about as intelligent as some birds, weighs 400g and consumes a lot more energy. They have an underdeveloped cortex, so apparently it isn't as important as one might think. That it could be that the cortex is more dedicated to sensing, than to thinking. Birds, for example, don't have such complex sensory inputs like our hands or our entire skin surface, that "memory mapping" all those inputs requires such a big cortex.
You seem to have somewhat lack of knowledge and mixing things together based on what you know. Bird brains also have "cortex" - they have evolved some parts of brains, that are important to their evolution while we have massivelly developed cerebral cortex even compared to other primates, which is not what you are comparing here. Primates are much more inteligent than birds and if you realy want to go the route of comparing brain size, which you have got wrong, then brain weight to body mass comparision in birds is much lower than that to primates. As for energy that is used to operate brain, I would really need to know what is the evidence of that claim that birds are smarter than primates. It is assumed, that higher energy consumption of brains is because of amount of calculations that are happening in brains and birds brains are no more efficient than human brains - you can't use ostriches as a replacement of a very simple tasks for programming, that even dumb student can do.
The issue that you have declared that cortex is not needed is that it does not change the fact, that the cortex as part of human brains is not going to go away - cerebral cortex have developed over long time and it seems to be going to be foundation for future developments of human brains and also autistic brains. We could even get larger cerebral cortex, but expecting that some other brain regions would develop more than they are(as they also are constantly changing), compared to cerebral cortex is going against the topic, as while there are some changes in other parts of brains, the ones that are in celebral parts are more important to brains of austistic people.
We have wasted so much time in getting over your nonsense, but the information flow of human eyes is massive - the "thinking", that brains are doing is basically in discarding most of information for later processing. Autistic people have overflow of that information because their brains are not behaving "normaly"(like other human brains) and are not discarding as much information as other human brains does but tries to process it all. That is very much evolutionary change and very clearly processing more information has advantages compared to those that does not have them. Generally the things that some people are freaking about overstimulation will go away, as it is part of how changes are happening, but changes that will wire brains differently are there to stay - for all humans eventually.
> Brain hyperconnectivity may limit flexible resource allocation, resulting in the rigidity and need for sameness that is often observed in individuals with ASD.
Hence "more (all the time) isn't always better". If I just run all programs on my computer at once, I don't get more done. Don't forget it's a spectrum, including nonverbal.
I think we don't so much discard information, but filter data (the raw sensory input etc.), and otherwise process it, in order to derive information from it. Without any filter or structure it's just raw data, or even noise. There'd be nothing to "store" either, you can't store a full resolution reality feed at "full frame rate". I know nothing and still claim that :P
That said, also I'll claim most of the suffering of autistic people, way too much at any rate, doesn't come from anything "wrong" with them, but the friction with societies that mostly ranged and ranges from ignorant to outright cruel. So please don't take my insistence that the article does indeed describe problems, not superpowers, as denying the amazing things many autistic people do, or saying even those who don't achieve anything special or struggle are lesser for it.
For evolution it means next known retrospectively. Naturally.
Those with hyperconnectivity not evoking social dysfunction (some dots in the charts) may become a potential step in evolution in a society not supressing evolution. And in a post Trump world of course where intelligence and the ability of collaboration for common good (needs social skills) is beneficial again.
The fitness function that would govern that evolution would be new though. We’d be intentionally optimizing for brains that work that way with some new social or technical construct. Like if we said “autism is the new exposed ankles” and suddenly had many more babies who also demonstrated that trait. Or if we had access to technology that would select for that outcome, gattaca style.
Well, there are plusses and minuses. At a certain level of size, connectedness, and semi-specialization, you get (what we label) consciousness.
It's not just size, but there is some bare minimum of nodes.
It's not just pure contentedness. That's just noise.
It's not just specialization. It helps with speed, but you lose plasticity and adaptability.
Also, there's a physical limit with respect to growth speed 'cuz cancer and sustainable metabolic rates wrt food intake, digestive efficiency, and thermoregulation. It seems the shrews and moles have "hacked" that in very different ways.
There's also a physical limit with brain size for live births--which we're already really, really pushing.
Honestly, I would've thought the most intelligent species would use eggs to minimize the trauma/risk of live-births to both child and mother, but I guess mother's milk is so beneficial it makes up for all of that.
Over-excitation tends to create more redundant, less synergistic information in networks. The balance between excitation and inhibition is thought by some to be requisite for efficient and flexible cognition.
Any evidence the reproduction rate is higher among tech workers, or even among the wealthy in general? From what I've gathered in the past autistic people are more likely than average to not reproduce.
That is not how things work. Females are the main drive to reproduction and decide demographic trends in societies where they are not oppressed(also, diagnosed autism levels in minority grpups is higher compared to classical white populations - make from it what you want, but I will avoid comments for this here). And female autism works differently than male autism and a lot of that does not show up, because less females would be diagnosed for the very simple reason that diagnosis is not a disease but how well a person can function in society and females differ from males in that as they are doing better than males. We do not exaclty know variable for amount of females, that have "autistic" genes, but they seems to be main drive to spread autism and very successful at that, regardless how diagnosed male autists are multiplying less. Also, people seem to have wrong idea about how genes spread - it takes SINGLE successful case to spread dominant and successful genes over the next generations.
The main issue that people are thinking of autists, that they are somewhat different from other people - even on biological level and it does not help, that among autistic people there arte those that think in the levels of "autistic nation", because genetically we are even less different to other humans than a lab rat to other rats. And like I mentioned before, spread of succesful autistic genes is irrevelant of the number of direct descendants that person produces, and with genes you can't assume, that they are only present to those that have diagnosis.
As someone else pointed out: more isn't better. There's an optimum, and it depends on the task. There are some "in vivo" studies about connections in the young cat's visual cortex. It starts out very connected, and most of the connectivity is lost, while structures form.
Elon Musk has diagnosis. He is part of autists. Generally my observation on autistic people is that they are assholes in one way or other and Elon Musk to me does not look like an exception.
Neither are you.
> What if growing bigger, more connected brains is the next evolutionary step?
I don't mean to be mean - but unlike what "nerds" think "intelligence" isn't some superior trait that automatically means the gulag/eugenics for the socially popular kids who they despise. All this situation indicates is that the societies are broken/mean (on every side).
Traits need to be "rewarded" for them to be evolutionarily meaningful in the individual's environment. More connections etc. also means a lot more energy consumption. Not many societies can support such phenotypes.
It is written so vaguely, it is difficult to understand what preprocessing steps were done and in which order (which matters). The steps to avoid motion confounds mostly talk about why they didn't do certain things (e.g. GSR regression), and not what they did do (tissue signal covariates?), what about non-GSR based noise cleaning to remove physiological and motion related noise? The study may be good,I just wish it was written more straightforwardly, and less like they are weaving past potential reviewer objections.
Vinod (v) To Vinod a paper is to write it so loose and sexy, so fast and seductive, editors are bound to wake up the morning after with a new babe. (Just a little joke among some colleagues of mine).