"A 2010 analysis of autism diagnoses in California did not find that autism clustered preferentially around areas rich in IT industry. Instead, it found that clusters tended to occur in areas where parents were older and educated to a higher level than were parents in surrounding areas."
That makes sense. More social stability, monotony.
That's a comforting thing.
IT systems are just systems that are predictable within some range of expected behavior without extreme variation, or if there is extreme variation, it's fun (usually).
My guess would be much simpler: older parents == worse genes. It is already proved that some disorders happen more often to children of parent aged 35+ (Down syndrome for instance)
Thanks for the link. After reading it, given the current political climate in Universities, I'm genuinely surprised Baron-Cohen has managed to retain his position after publishing a theory like that.
He has a permanent fellowship. I think it would be quite hard for Trinity to get rid of him even if they wanted to (and they don’t really have any desire or pressure to do that anyway)
The weirdest result might be that a pathology that one would ascribe to the empathizing side, borderline personality disorder (BPD), actually positively correlates with measures of systemizing, so there is a strange overlap between BPD and autism, the pathology one associates with systemizing:
More reliable and pronounced sex differences have been found on a similar scale, namely interest in things vs interest in people and that has also been linked to the gender gap in STEM:
Interestingly, some sex differences in cognitive processing disappear when one simply changes the domain to be more focused on people (e.g. rotation of dolls vs rotation of abstract shapes):
So the underlying difference here might simply be in innate preferences to process information that is in a social context vs an arbitrary context.
Autists have a lower preference for the social context, which is essentially a difference in value function, so value from epistemic/predictive accuracy independent of norms gets more weight.
It looks like systemizing emerges in both extremes of the people vs things dimension (though more likely in the latter), explaining both the NCBI study above and the Nature article linked here. Looking only at interest in people is a cleaner approach IMO (not a cognitive scientist though, so take this with a grain of salt). Systemizing seems to basically capture something like abstract thinking, but, guess what, you can also think abstractly about social problems. The crucial point is rather whether it actually feels pleasurable to delve into extremely obscure worlds of symbols and concepts, far removed from ordinary social experience and norms, and here the sex difference is quite pronounced (about one standard deviation). Notably this sex difference appears to be fully determined by presence of prenatal androgen (a male sex hormone such as testosterone), and a preference for gendered toys (dolls vs cars) also been found in some primate species:
This isn't strange at all (at least to me). I've been misdiagnosed as bpd in facilities that were socially chaotic. People who diagnosed me were also selectively biased to what information about me was indicative of past, present and expected behavior. It was a very traumatizing experience and the sad thing is this happens frequently in mental health care across the US to autistic individuals.
I can understand emotions in a systemized way but it requires watching patterns of every individual I interact with to learn. It also is very scary because I don't want to get to know anyone so well I accidentally mistake deep insecurities for topics to attempt polite conversation over. Thus, highly selective with individuals and how many (too many is cognitively overloading, but I've adapted fairly well on my own (somehow)) at my job, which - I'm a software developer, so although I'm not surrounded by people who have autism, I am surrounded by people who have a greater tolerance and higher sensitivity to neourological diversity.
I'm female. My mom dresses me mostly (most of my clothes are her old clothes). She's a beautician. I'm 32. Mental health care is annoying because of course BPD diagnosis has historically been highly likely, due to superficial snap judgements based on appearance. I had a coworker tell me flatly that appearances don't matter and this was very liberating. I continue to work on managing to communicate myself perfectly - great irony anticipating peculiar usage of language. Pedantry, always want to make sure the words I use are internally definitely correctly therefore used correctly (but I've been able to simplify the importance of this down to business logic definitions and computer science / programming languages / software definitions).
I am hoping I find an autism therapist that can actually help me in real life. At least with venturing out outside of working hours to create some semblance of a social life.
Systemizing is pattern matching. It's always hard when 2 people's patterns don't match perfectly. Calling it a willingness to work together or understand one another is so oversimplified with respect to the delicate balance process of developing relationships, it's not even funny.
Preference, socializing. I would say I have high preference to socialize where I have trust for both my expected pattern of behavior and people I trust - that their pattern of behavior will be relatively stable and neither myself nor they will be hurtful in any way. It never matters if it's one person or a group. Emotions run through people in groups in the same systematic way they do in individuals. Being perfectly calm all the time or just flat affect to stabilize groups that have related themselves to me in some unknown variant is really hard, and looping group behavior of 'i have an emotional outburst' - implies -> the group does generally, this drives me crazy because I can always relate it to myself therefore blame myself internally.
BPD is the same pattern mentality assuming that diagnosis was correct at one point of me (again, relative to social environment), no ability to communicate self because people have their theories they depend on for their survival (hostile healthcare centers) or control it (this is taken as hostile behavior in such places, even though the control element is really only intended to control myself and my emotions, not anyone else). Stuck in between contradictory social environments with established rules (that may contradict or conflict), either deeply ingrained behavior from the past with new context, or multiple conflicting social environments. It's a stigmatized illness. BPD is not being able to keep up with all of them, or not being able to generate/interpret rules quickly enough to manage self behavior in all, possibily unchosen social environments.
I would never want to go back into the hell that gets me labeled as BPD because it's one of the worst labels to carry. There's always the expectation that "I'm the bad one" that gets carried with the diagnosis. But mental illness labels in general, always seem pointless to me in the long term. Can always explain them all (except ASPD, that's intent to cause harm) in terms of individual behavior relative to social environmental expectations and judgements. This can all be systemized. This is probably why I get labeled as a hostile element in so called 'cattle mental health centers' (phrase comes from a PsyD I saw). Intent is never to cause harm. Everything just often turns into patterns, or systems, to me, I'd prefer to see it as a gift, not a curse. Hard rules to not systemize individuals are of supreme importance.
It seems to me that BPD means obsessing about the social domain and ASD means obsessing about the non-social domain. Both obsessions are amplified by social exclusion due to being neurodivergent. Obsession leads to systemizing.
Baron-Cohen's theory is a fantastic near-miss IMHO. I mean, he was clearly onto something. Women are warmer in temperament, men are more autistic, have better mechanical and spatial reasoning skills. But what Baron-Cohen may have missed is that those are symptoms rather than causes. Symptoms of a difference in innate value function in the degree to which the social domain is valued. But that's value at a very low, instinctive, perceptual level. Autists might still like socializing, but they do not get a kick out of processing social information that neurotypical people do, so their entire thinking apparatus down to low level neuronal circuits will be shaped by different optimization constraints, from birth onward.
I've personally had both since birth. Obsession with machines and computation, that understanding maps over to understanding social systems.
I don't like it when it maps over to social systems. Everything gets shifted. Easier to be a coder, focus on machines, focus on words, symbols, patterns in symbols.
Math, math is the bridge between both. Isomorphic. Systems are mental graphs of static points of observation anticipated to be stable/ predictable and arrows indicating direction and flow.
As a female I really don't like gender binaries. Women generally, sure, but that's culture - cultural expectations.
I stated this in an overly mutual exclusive way. I suspect the difference is that people with BPD actually enjoy obsessing about social domain in a systemizing way, while autists don't. Autists might still engage in such obsession though, but for a different kind of intrinsic interest (interest in people vs what remains if you remove interest in people, namely mere epistemic/predictive interest).
I read something about autism being processing information removed from 'self'.
I have interest in some people I trust. But 'mind' and 'thought' are generally very fluid. That's just a fact from seeing connections in how minds think - being able to see the connection that creates their connection.
Always have to be delicate with it.
Epistomology is interesting. Predictive, I'm always more comfortable relegating this to machines - is the problem decidable or not. Obviously computer programs implicitly affect people. Cognitive overload because, chaos. Can't predict everything beyond the predefined context.
Math is always perfect. Contained system with rules that define it's behavior.
I understand you are saying things in an overly mutually exclusive way, but for me, if I deeply identify with something, it's hard to understand where you are coming from, because I don't know.
From what I recall, Ramanujan considered math a compulsion. Obsession, it's something that binds everything together. I believe math is discovered, not invented. It has to be, implicitly. Models come from reality.
I can't imagine enjoyment of social systemization. I imagine life long positive experiences would lead to enjoyment. If it's an illness (BPD), suggesting there's enjoyment indicates belief that the intent of the sufferer is malicious. I don't believe this is the case. A disorder comes from negative experiences. BPD is then, always trying to find the right rules to solve the problem. The problem becomes recurrent when the sufferer is identified as the source of the problem, or the sufferer believes they are both cause (and supposed solution) to the problem, but both cause and solution are fundamentally defined in a way the sufferer does not have any control over defining. Therefore, issues predicting, mapping traumatic experiences onto present stable environments.
Problem solving mentality for growth, escape from the negative. It's a compulsion, not an enjoyment to obsess. It's a compulsion to correct everything so everything is stable.
> If it's an illness (BPD), suggesting there's enjoyment indicates belief that the intent of the sufferer is malicious. I don't believe this is the case. A disorder comes from negative experiences.
Well, we are also hardwired to like chocolate, but if we eat too much of it, then it becomes a disorder.
I was imprecise about the word "enjoyment". What I meant was simply attainment of reward signals. But reward signals do not necessarily imply happiness. At minimum they shape what feels like the right thing to do. At maximum they cause euphoria. E.g. a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder will repeat the same sequence of actions, say, 100 times a day, and each time it will feel like the right thing to do, but such a person will not find much enjoyment.
I suspect that in neurotypical people, the processing of social information (dominance relations, social status, norms, nurture, grooming, communication, gossiping etc.), always feels like the right thing to do, from birth onward, so their neuronal circuits are finely attuned to computations in that domain.
In the absence of such reward signals, the circuits are not trained for such things, and what remains is epistemic circuitry: Building models of the world by approximating/predicting how it works based on accumulated information.
(All of this ignores, of course, the entire neuroscience literature on this topic, which identified e.g. differences in synaptic density in people with ASD; though perhaps the increased value of non-social things comes from more circuits doing epistemic computation, but I'm just shooting in the dark really…)
> All of this ignores, of course, the entire neuroscience literature on this topic, which identified e.g. differences in synaptic density in people with ASD; though perhaps the increased value of non-social things comes from more circuits doing epistemic computation, but I'm just shooting in the dark really…
Do you have any links to any articles?
From the research I've read, PhD students in the field (was lucky to meet and talk to a few at other mental health care centers), a lot of the research on mental health care is focused on GABA.
The overall picture seems to be local overgrowth/overconnectivity and global/cortico-co-cortical underconnectivity (especially to the frontal lobe). Cortex tissue appears to implement universal epistemic circuits, since they are known to learn arbitrary functions e.g. one can rewire visual input to the auditory cortex in animals and they learn to see. So, too much of those circuits might both imply heightened focus on the details and more intrinsic reward (=reward from pattern prediction/completion for information gain/exploration) which might as well explain the overall difference in value function, deemphasizing reward from social and normative things by relative magnitude. Norms and social stuff is rather processed frontally and subcortically in the insula and amygdala, AFAIK, but there is no reason to believe this is not also partly wired into the cortex too. Evolution has likely encoded most functions all over the place as it likes to do with the genome itself.
I am a male whose experiences you describe are incredibly congruent. I am 1 year older than you and honestly struggle to find any differences in the details you share. The one is that I do dress myself but that might be because I am male and can get away with wearing the same thing every day for about a month at a time. I have a regular aspergers coach who helps quite a bit but mostly by compiling their understandings from working with others and relaying them to me.
I have always been obsessed with humanities, art, art theory, art history, etc. and have had to internalize this almost entirely. It’s hard to articulate all the problems I have had related to this but they all seem to boil down to an issue of an intensely systemized approach at pretty much every level. For one example, I started out making films, but that was short-lived because I had zero interest in working with people or actors. I was very good with camera and lighting, and planning in pre-production. My film projects were always completed in my mind and fully documented before the start of production. This drove collaborators nuts. I could always see the film in my mind so it made no sense to leave things to chance. I didn’t realize that was the problem until much later. I did identify my habit of using actors as mere props but I made the mistake of trying to overcome that and it led to giving the wrong impression of my skills. Things like navigating curation and promotion were a challenge but making good work generally cancelled them out. Nonetheless, still too many people skills required. Relatedly, I also love critical theory and articulating social organization. I cannot discuss or collaborate with other academics on these subjects. It’s not a problem with disagreements, but that I cannot tell whether they are actively being self-centered or just lack conception of systematic imperatives. In return, they find me to lack empathy for whatever is right in front of me. As such, I don’t want to judge them but I am too bothered to continue associating. All of this stuff is harmful to my well-being but letting the problems go unsolved is not an option, so I aim to occupy myself with other things. I do programming now, every day, whether I am getting paid or not.
My happiest moments are when I can fully immerse myself in activities of technical implementation and technical problem solving, as I do when I am programming. My whole body becomes healthier and happier, but the moment I am not doing that, I compulsively identify social chaos and get anxiety. This is a problem in the mornings and evenings. I can get thrown off easily and it will interrupt my ability to start working or going to sleep. I identified this a long time ago and my first solution was to just not stop working once I started, and only sleep when my body forced me to, but that was of course problematic. I have to ask: do you experience something similar? Is there anything you do about it?
Yeah, that’s what I try to do.
I think I revised and added to my comment after you replied. Sorry about that. I added some more of my unique experiences.
I have been sleeping better for years but it causes me to have to perform the morning and evening transitions twice as often.
EDIT:
I guess the thread is too deep but I can’t reply. By “transitions” I just mean all the stuff I do between doing the stuff that occupies me. It’s common that I find another problem and start compulsively trying to fix that instead of getting back to work on the thing I would rather be doing. When I work in an office it’s not really an issue but I am trying to develop patterns that allow me to not work in an office, mostly for career progression. I want to work in a different industry and can only get freelance work in it for now.
I also tend to find I ultimately fix my own problems in my own way, but finding corrolaries can be useful in the decisions of what to try next.
Replying too frequently puts a timer on your reply. This can either be good to learn impulse control with explaining or to control heated argumentation.
For problems that lead to identification of other problems, taking notes is useful. Mentally imagine setting aside each problem to maintain focus on one at a time.
I understand the compulsive mentality where it feels like you created a problem and you need to fix it, where the steps leading to the solution of the problem lead to identification of other problems.
Any way of recording each one to maintain focus on solving one at a time is useful.
Finding connections, patterns. Decision problems.
I understand sort of the transition word, but more like, 'trend' or 'direction' or 'flow'. I tend to analyze my own behavior to meticulous detail, and correct, over and over.
I also used to be an artist (am planning phase from art theory / music theory / mental abstractions / code influences / painting) to computer, mind, code, pure computational proof, etc.
I have to have my mind organised very precisely for this, that's something I have to accept as fact for stable mental trends.
But I am putting my email address in my profile if you want someone to get in touch with about art. I have been identified by others as an artist for much of my life, I have put a ton of work into it and I have created a lot of art. I have a lot of beliefs about art. Bounce ideas, etc.
I don't know. I went to school for engineering for 4 years, I did some engineering design courses, but I identify as a computer scientist and software developer.
Software engineering is where you do 80% now assuming that 20% will turn into another 80% for yourself or someone else in the future. I talked to my stepdad today about 80/20 philosophy.
"The WAIS-R arithmetic score also depended on sex, being higher for men than for women (12.1 vs 11.1, t149 = 2.4, p = 0.02), and on occupation, being higher for participants in biological/physical than in social fields."
No, it's not allowed, because this is pseudo-science. For future reference you can detect pseudo-science very easily because pseudo-science is just the formalization of non-observable entities.
The "scientist" in this study posit the existence of many non-observable entities: "mathematical intelligence", "nonmathematical intelligence", "systemising mechanisms" and "empathising mechanisms" and "lawful systems." Then he posits a theory which relates these entities -- which, again, are not observable or real in any sense. Finally he collects real data to support his theories about all these imaginary entities. Now, data is always good, but you can see the problem here?
No attempt is ever made to ground any of this in observable reality. It's garbage in, garbage out, from the get go.
Unfortunately this sort of pseudo-science, as we've seen time and again, can be seized upon by all manner of propagandists eager to push their narrative. That's why this sort of nonsense -- which is non-sense in the purest form because we cannot observe or measure any of the entities supposedly at work here -- is very popular with the public but is regarded very suspiciously by actual scientists.
Can you explain what you mean by 'observable' and 'real'?
As I understand it, most science involves using instruments to measure quantities that fit into some simplified model of the world.
How does this differ?
Judging by the fact that most maths degrees are listed as science degrees, it's pretty clear that "mathematics is not science" is a controversial claim.
I don't think that's true. Certainly among the people in my department while I was doing my PhD in mathematics, it was universally agreed that mathematics is not a science (because mathematicians don't do experiments as a part of their work).
Even outside of math departments I see some evidence of that agreement -- for example, why else would the "STEM" acronym list Science and Math separately?
> Judging by the fact that most maths degrees are listed as science degrees
How colleges categorize their departments has an element of politics to it, so I wouldn't pay much attention to that. I've got both a math and science degree, and none of my professors or peers would consider math to be part of science -- even considering our math department was listed under our science department. I think OP is correct that this topic is not controversial at all, at least among the people who actually do math and do science. There's no question that math and science are completely separate things.
This is exactly why this kind of simplistic positivism is far from uncontroversial, and in fact saying that it is uncontroversial betrays an almost perfect innocence of epistemology. Once you subscribe to it, it becomes impossible to talk about very many things that we need to talk about.
I've encountered this viewpoint before and it took me a while understand the nuance of the assertion - as it is so matter of fact it is easy to take "not a science" as a value judgement - especially as we often enshrine empirical thinking.
As with all things though, it comes down to definitions and with the more specific and academic understanding of science, it is easy to see how (pure) mathematics isn't a science. Indeed, a lot of computer science somewhat doesn't fit well as a science - like FP.
It's quite a controversial statement that can be construed as aggressive which is probably why you're getting downvotes but I think you're right to point out how confronting your own assumptions/axioms can bring out strange reactions.
