From what I've read there's been a history of people not fitting the strict "Asperger's boy" type traits being excluded from autism diagnoses, so we end up with a narrow, wrong stereotype. Plenty of autistic people who outwardly appear antisocial and plenty who appear quite social. Also worth remembering that autism occurence significantly overlaps with other conditions like ADHD, which may mold the presentation of the traits.
Having worked with some brilliant people with autism, I argue that deficits in cognitive empathy/ inability understand intuitively what other people are thiking in real time is the hallmark of autism.
Moreso than anything about emotions, body language, social skills etc this is the most common trait. It pops up in odd places no matter how much you mask or learn the visible skills.
I think the actual hallmark is one layer deeper: the brain's "input filter" is different and doesn't assign "important" versus "not important" distinctions in the same way as a "neurotypical" brain might. (In fact, the brain just might not be very good at input filtering, period.)
This shows up in a lot of ways: sensory (can't just filter out the tag on the back of your shirt), interests (can't recognize that you're spending just a liiiitle too much time on that model train), food (don't categorize trying new foods as interesting, so you don't), etc. But human socialization is incredibly complex, and while many of us can do decently well at learning it, imagine trying to get a grip on social cues without being able to tell what's relevant and what's not. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
It also is a working theory that well matches my experience with the autistic people in my life. "Deficits in cognitive empathy/ inability understand intuitively what other people are thinking", aka "theory of mind", is a really good description of how things are often difficult, and I think "different stimulus input filter" is a pretty good hypothesis for how it might arise.
As an autistic person, what you say is correct to my experience. I have all sorts of sensory processing issues that all basically are variations on "I can't ignore signals".
It's the other way round - let's say you have a thousand inputs, and those contain 1 bit/s in a way that you can't pick one or a few inputs that allow you to correctly decode that one bit of information.
Or let's say you have a million inputs, or pixels, and you need to determine if there is a cat in the picture. Selective attention won't work for that either. You can't pick six pixels that allow you to reliably answer this question.
You need dimensionality reduction, that will reduce the data into a manageable amount of abstract features, from which you can pick what features matter to you.
Neurotypical people lack (or only have remnants of) this second filter.
To be clear, I'm not proposing any specific mechanism for or details of the difference in input filtering, just that this seems to be central to the impact of autism. (And, of course, it seems very likely that there is no "one true mechanism" here, just as autism has no "one true presentation".)
> Neurotypical people lack (or only have remnants of) this second filter.
This statement didn't scan for me, did you mean "autistic" instead of "neurotypical"? (And "neurodivergent" doesn't fit, there are many more neurodivergences than just autism.) Everything I know about neurotypicality does indicate something like that "second filter" is present (if possibly distributed).
Both have the selective attention filter. Autistic people also have another, dimensionality reduction filter.
So in autistic people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [dimensionality reduction] --> (latent space of abstract features) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking)
While for neurotypical people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking).
Positing the emergence of an entirely distinct layer of processing is a pretty extreme divergence. It goes counter to a lot of established theory and, in general, seems like too big of a difference. Abstract feature determination hardly seems to be unique to neurodivergence.
I think any common neurodivergences that still result in more-or-less functioning adult brains are going to appear as different weightings or emphases, not entirely different effective structures.
One possible contribution to the behavior you are seeing is that sometimes brain behavior that is missing or ineffective gets lifted to the cognitive (conscious or semiconscious) layer. The cognitive layer of the brain can do, essentially, anything. But it has to work a lot harder than the lower layers, so you notice it a lot more. This can result in "squeaky wheel" syndrome, where one counterintuitively notices only the things that aren't working as well as they could be.
The filter is obviously supposed to be there, it's "neurotypical" people who have a problem.
It means you need to use your higher thinking to do sensory processing. It's like if your GPU had burned out. So you had to find a way to do everything on the CPU. It sucks, and you don't have much capacity left for the actual thinking.
I'd say have been successfully precluded from developing that.
Instead, they've learned to substitute its functionality with the quasi-religious faith that they are actually any good at inferring what others think. (Take that precept away and see em flail, it's disturbing.)
At population scale, this resolves to either mass violent panic or a society living under the constant self-fulfilling prophecy that fewer things are thinkable than those which are possible, while screaming that it's the other way around. (Instead of, you know, aiming for the parity between interpretation and reality which is necessary to accomplish anything at all.)
The main neurotypical trait is lack of inherent revulsion to delusion.
Empathy is so where it's at. Especially after a few decades of rats in boxes taught the corporate parrots to bring themselves to say the word.
So, then: when was the last time you expressed empathy, and whom did it help?
And also: when was the last time you expressed empathy for someone you were told you should have no empathy for?
Cmon, give us that sweet, sweet emotional vulnerability. Because, surprise for whoever's not looking: insisting that a legitimate society can be built on the magical belief that performing an emotional emulation somehow equates to giving a damn about someone's actual well-being - that kind of thing is a big part of what's wrong with you guys.
Those are some pretty extreme views. I hope you find a place in this world where you fit in. And I also hope that I am very, very far from that place. It doesn't sound like it would make for a society that matches my values.
Hey, I understand if what I'm saying is making you upset. Not necessarily why, but let's say I can imagine.
Your countersignal references "a place in the world to fit in", this presumes a strong belief that the world fits together, right?
You're pretty invested in the view that social consensus is essentially fair, and does not, for example, hinge on tragicomical amounts of epistemic sleight-of-hand, or anything like that?
You'd find living with that sort of awareness kinda depressing, over the long run prone to lead you to what they call them bad places?
Yeah, well.
In any case. What it would be helpful of you to be aware of. And I don't usually mean things in that sort of sense anymore - but this time I do mean it in the sense of "do this to make the world a better place" helpful: please remain mindful that the world that gave my "views", if they can even be called that, is the same one that gave you yours. There's no essential difference, beyond the paths we've walked through it (which I'm happy to confirm are different enough that you're completely safe from any harmfulness that you've been so kind as to proactively ascribe to me, thank you very much, jfc)
No, the core difference is the level of abstraction, and the inability to communicate between people with different levels of abstraction.
The opposite of autism is schizophrenia, where abstract thinking fails completely, and the person is unable to find correct answers to everyday problems.
Neurotypicality is merely a socially acceptable level of schizophrenia.
Autism results when the level of abstraction is significantly higher than the surrounding society:
You can't automatically understand the concrete speech, and you especially can't understand the "implications" that rely on the concrete magical thinking.
People can't understand you, because their level of abstraction isn't sufficient to understand the actual meaning, so they assume you talk about something random.
People overread the gaze of more abstract thinkers, and underread the gaze of less abstract thinkers, due to the difference in the field of view.
Compare Taylor Swift (ultra concrete, easily understood by neurotypical people) vs Rihanna (very abstract)
> The opposite of autism is schizophrenia, where abstract thinking fails completely, and the person is unable to find correct answers to everyday problems.
I've heard this one before, but expressed in causal fallacy terms.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it's often right to assume a causal relationship even though you are unaware of the underlying mechanism.
If your criteria for assuming causality are too lax, you are schizophrenic (seeing relationships that aren't there), if they are too strict, you are autistic (missing the obvious).
Having worked with some brilliant people who don't have autism, I'd argue that their hallmark is deficits in cognitive empathy / inability to understand intuitively what autistic people are thinking in real time.
I'm not sure how to describe this phenomenon where one person says $CLASS has $DEFICIENCY and they are respected and understood. Then someone else uses the same phrasing to reframe the statement to mean the same thing from a different perspective and that idea is rejected without explanation as to why.
Allistic people do fail to empathize with autistic people everyday. To suggest otherwise only ignorantly refutes my lived experience. Only gaslighting will convince autistic folk that they should disregard that. (And that happens everyday, sadly.)
Yep. Too much empathy can be a diagnostic signal for folks with autism. (These days Asperger's is now diagnosed as autism and not a separate diagnosis.)
Are you asking if people with Down's syndrome are unique people with unique experiences and personalities? Because I hope you'd pretty quickly arrive at "yes, of course people with Down's syndrome are unique people with unique experiences".
I think a more generous reading of their comment would be: do people with Down's syndrome vary significantly in terms of their Down's syndrome symptoms? Or: do they vary significantly in how they experience their symptoms? I don't have enough experience with Down's syndrome to answer either – I've only met a few such people in passing – but would be interested in knowing the answer.
Edit: I feel I should note that, given the phrasing of the comment, I think your interpretation is closer to the original intent – or at least, a clearer reading of what was said – but I wanted to add this in the interest of taking the strongest interpretation of their comment (and to satisfy my personal curiosity).
