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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.


That’s really rude, autistic people are a diverse bunch.


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.


>>>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.


from the article:

> 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.


I would say my brain is anything but rigid, more fluid than most people I've met.


What you are describing is ADHD, that is quite common co-diagnosis to ASD.


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.


I know, I have similar issues with the world we're living in.

But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with my brain, just different.

I can imagine a world where none of these problems exist.


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.


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.


I'm not really sure how any of this applies to software development, as they detected edges in actual physical films, which have different layers of chemicals. Still a very interesting approach and that knowledge probably can be transfered to other fields, as humans consist of layers of chemicals, that are different from cars, houses and trees for example, but could you and other people just actually read the paper before writing anything here?

PS The title of article is on a clickbait level, as the meaning for images nowadays does not correspond to what is used in article.


You do raise a good point, but for certain applications like photography, microscopy, telescopy this can be avoided by putting the analogue chip before the digital conversion happens, so that you receive an image with layers, one containing color data, another containing edge data.

I'm fairly sure that modern cameras already have multiple layers for depth and color.


Are those Let's plays valuable because of games or because of personality of gamers?

If it comes to games, they have nearly 0 value and they can disappear - that would not change the value of the game, as they are derivative works and not the ones that are leaving influence. They have hardly any representation of culture around the game, and those who does not talk can be easily replaced with AI playthrough, so I would not care that much. Also, we are forgetting that gamers enjoy to discover new things - and those let's plays are there for a different reason - to stake a place of being there as the main source to generate income from ads and they are aimed at long investments, so they won't disappear as soon as I would like.


Frankly, I can't agree on any of this. Majority of the state of AI is way faar from where it can be really useable. We are nowhere near AI, that is emulating our intellect, besides - the byproduct of AI is much bigger than any pesky LLMs - understanding how our brain works and eventually making human megamind, that can persist through hormonal changes that humans go and what makes our life so unstable and full of changes.

Robotics - is nowhere near the promise as well - we are nowhere near biological entities(not made from metal) with syntetic brains, not to mention biological robotic arms that humans can use as prostetics while they are regrowing natural limbs. So much to learn.

As for the Jesus. That is not really a deep subject. We know what Jesus was as a human - his real life and his violent and human nature(as a military representative of cult, that was lead by John the Baptist) has nothing to do with how it is portrayed by religion. History of how Christianity started and including about Jesus was one of the easiest problems that I have encountered and wished to know and I fullfilled just recently.


Well, I am still waiting for the answer of how long it will take for Estonia to take over China. Previously it very quickly answered how many turns it takes to put elephant in the fridge and answered incorrectly some other answers, that are very well defined even in wikipedia. For that reason AI can't be trusted to answer any serious answers, but apparently some silly questions are taken very very seriously and this is something to do with Chinese huge ego, which doesn't make them fit as overlords, that people are unreasonably proposing.


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