The need to belong to a tribe is more important than the need to be objectively correct. So if a condition like autism erased the desire to conform, than it would make sense that it would increase the likelihood that person would want to seek objective truth over tribal partisanship.
Yes! Unfortunately all austists do not become truth seekers. Many just don't get the thing with tribes and confuse tribal politics with truth. I think Greta Thunberg is a prime example of that. Most people talk about the climate threat just because that's how people talk; they don't really care what they say. But Greta seems to take it dead seriously, like if she doesn't understand the climate disaster thing is just a tribal game.
Yes, I’ve noticed that in many autistic people I know both in meatspace and on the internet. There is a big gender element too. In general, autistic women are able to “mask” their traits better than autistic men are and blend in. Women like Greta Thunberg are the exception to that trait. This makes her autism more the obvious, if she was male people would be less likely to see her as autistic, but rather just a socially awkward male.
There definitely is a gender element. I sometimes feel a bit uneasy when researchers talk about the "protective effect" of being female, because do we really know that females are protected against autism? Not being diagnosed is not the same as being entirely average.
Especially there seems to be something with linguistic ability. In my unscientific experience, females with autism are often very linguistically able, while males are less so.
I only really am familiar with the assessments you make by having people answer a questionnaire, but some researchers observe behaviour, and count the number of times people use the word 'I' or whether they let others interrupt them and other things like that.
Cultural differences make such things very hard to write, or observe. For instance, a great many researchers have an ideal of 'agreeableness' that translates into 'building mutual support systems which foster interdependence'. If that is what you end up testing for, practically every Swede will test out as seriously disagreeable, because independence and self-sufficiency are highly valued here, and no matter how sympathetic you are to somebody else's views, you don't get to stop being reasonable in the name of being supportive. This isn't how it works many other places. Also, around here, the default assumption is that when somebody comes to you with a problem, what they would like is to have their problem solved. There are many places where this attitude is considered disagreeable in Big 5 Personality terms because what the person wants is validation for the emotions they are feeling about their problem and emotional support. Whether the problem ever gets fixed or not is beside the point, and 'your feelings will get better when I show you how to fix your problem' does not count as a 'caring' or 'supportive' comment. The sort of emotional support the people from some of the more interdependent cultures want, on demand, from all and sundry is very much the sort I only want from my closest friends and relatives, which can lead to interactions where somebody is trying to be 'caring' and ends up making the other person feel threatened instead.
Books about the differences in business/workplace attitudes (and how to successfully build a multinational team) touch on this a fair bit, I suppose because the international workers have to figure this stuff out.
Maybe an AI could reveal agreeability/autism/whatever? Feed it enough data on how people behave in different cultures, and it will rather reliably identify people who are considered agreeable by others?
I know that some people are trying precisely this in hopes they can spot sociopaths/psychopaths young, where seems to be a more urgent need. I haven't heard how successful this has been.
Hello, Tove. You know, the difficulty with talking about "autism" is that a whole mess of different conditions get labeled "autism." Nevertheless, you and I both know ourselves as "kind of aspie" women, and you and I both have autistic kids, so within that range, there's *something" worth talking about.
One of the things I have found very striking in my conversations with autistic people on forums like Wrong Planet is very, very anxious they are. Many of them are even socially anxious. They are acutely aware of the fact that they are different from other people and they are very worried about other people judging them. It's like talking to a middle schooler who's afraid of being bullied, except these are grown adults.
My own kids are very anxious, too. It leads to a lot of phobias and OCD. It's... frustrating.
Anyway, autists might be bad at observing social norms, but boy do they wish they could.
I have a couple of different/related theories: autists have abnormalities in brain growth/connectivity. Smart people also have differences in brain structures. Stick two smart people together, and maybe you get a brain that is just trying to get too big/connected.
Relatedly, autists seem to be very emotionally/socially immature. My kid is like a 20 yr old in intelligence and a 6 yr old in emotions. Not just in bad ways, like tantrums. He is very sweet in the ways of little children, too. He does not like any sorts of "mean words" and is always kind to animals.
But all humans mature slowly compared to, well, practically all other animals (elephants and some dolphins/whales seem to be the exceptions). Extended childhoods are necessary for developing higher IQs. So perhaps "develop more slowly" is yet another way to get a smarter person, but combine two such people, and you get a very slowly developing child.
I don't favor the "extreme male brain" hypothesis. Autism is more common in males, but so are dyslexia and retardation and schizophrenia... none of which are very masculine. Yes, autists are bad at social stuff and can be fascinated by objects, but a lot of that is repetitive "stimming" related to OCD and difficulties they have with anxiety. It's like they get stuck.
Hello, SharkFace, nice to hear from someone else in the same situation.
There clearly is something with assortative mating and autism: the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. The question is what: Is it that high IQ people mate with each other or high aspie people mate with each other? I would guess it is the second, because it seems like autism is present among parents on all IQ levels.
This study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31026573/ for example, says that fathers with high IQ on the technical side get more high IQ autistic children, but fathers with low IQ get more low IQ autistic children.
I also manage to both find the extreme male brain hypothesis interesting and disbelieve the idea that autism is much more common in males than in females. I think autism is heavily underdiagnosed in females because the diagnostic criteria were set after males. A research project that could shed more light on the issue seems to be going on. https://autismsciencefoundation.org/autism-sisters-project-expanded/
I can't easily find a specific study of sisters to autistic boys, but siblings of both sexes seem to be more aspie than average.
Welcome to the psychological study of genius! It has a long and illustrious history starting with:
* Francis Galton (who thought it was basically a function of neural processing speed), moving through,
* Lewis Terman (who thought it was basically a function of high IQ), and then,
* Hans Eysenck (who thought it was a combination of high IQ and Psychoticism) even including,
* Some random guy (who claimed scientific output in various countries can be found by looking at measures of androgens in the population. I can probably find his name and paper for you if you want). And eventually we reach,
* Tove K (who likes autistic traits as a predictor for genius).
The general consensus of modern psychology is that genius is actually combination of high intelligence and high Openness:
I'm working on it! But I also agree with the consensus. I mean, who doesn't? Openness is in the definition of genius: People who only like to think established thoughts can never be new-thinkers (if that is a word in English).
Hm, I wonder who the random guy could be. Philippe Rushton? I think he said something about androgens in different populations.
Alas, English is barely a Germanic language anymore - what works in German or Swedish will not necessarily work here. In English, "original thinkers" is probably the best construction.
Anders says I'm being inaccurate: He, like all other 18-year-old males by that time took the military's IQ-test. But that test is rather blunt so it could only place him among the best 4 percent.
We were told that the two of our children who had IQ tests were two standard deviations above the median. Which means an IQ above 130. But we didn't get to know if they were among the top 2 percent or the top 0.2 percent. If they were among the latter, they could maybe participate in some kind of competition...
The androgen theory is very interesting. I think it overlaps a lot with my autism theory. After all, there is an androgen theory of autism too, so why not? Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of the extreme male brain and all that. Genius is also quite obviously linked to maleness. It is not like females can never think anything new, but it is obviously less common than among males.
As things are, it is difficult to do any autism-related research, because "autism" is a very unclear concept. It includes both people with low social abilities caused by deleterious mutations and people with low social abilities caused by genes inherited from parents. The evolutionary mechanisms behind the two types of conditions should be completely different. Still, they are now bundled and studied as one condition. The threshold for autism diagnosis is also very arbitrary.
Neither I nor Anders know our IQs. None of us had a test. We tried some Mensa-style tests on the internet some years ago. Anders did better than me but none of us excelled in it. We also didn't enjoy it. In general, Swedes are not fond of IQ testing. My two autistic children, 10 and 12 years old at the time, had very elaborate IQ tests and I observed them in real time. The psychologists never revealed the exact result to us: They only told us both children were "very much above average". Scientifically I think they are right not to tell parents more than that, because IQ tests are not exact. Still, I was quite a bit annoyed that I couldn't get an exact number. Not because it matters, but because it interests me.
> The androgen theory is very interesting. I think it overlaps a lot with my autism theory. After all, there is an androgen theory of autism too, so why not? Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of the extreme male brain and all that. Genius is also quite obviously linked to maleness. It is not like females can never think anything new, but it is obviously less common than among males.
I'm skeptical that autism is a predictor, though. For a long time Eysenck insisted that schizophrenia predicted genius in relatives, but though there's a large body of research investigating schizophrenia spectrum disorders, these show only equivocal relationships to Openness and creativity. For autism, what studies I've seen are even more negative. If you agree that genius is related to high intelligence and Openness to Experience, then it's hard to reconcile that with findings about autism, which suggests it depresses these traits:
"The review further finds a positive correlation between ASD (severity) and neuroticism and a negative correlation between ASD (severity) and extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness."
Autism may turn out to have some kind of value from a survival or reproductive standpoint, but at least right now, the evidence really isn't there.
1.Are you sure that there is not a link between madness and creative genius? This review says there is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6102953 /It would be logical if different kinds of madness predicted different kinds of genius. Scientists and artists probably are not very closely related.
2. I don't think autism predicts genius. I think a certain lack of social ability predicts genius. I also think that with enough assortative mating, the same lack of social ability leads to high-functioning autism. Autism genes are like sickle cell anemia genes, but more complex, I think: Too many are always bad, but a certain dose can be good in some environments.
For that reason, I think the androgens-predict-genius theory is interesting. Since it measures both androgen expressions and genius expressions at the population level, it could catch exactly those genes that are circulating in the population and only occasionally cause diagnosed autism.
> 1.Are you sure that there is not a link between madness and creative genius?
Not at all! For over a decade I thought Eysenck would turn out to be correct in that regard. But psychology has a replication crisis, and I've learned to be skeptical when effects are ambiguous. Even the paper you linked states in the abstract "This evidence for this polarizing issue ranges from psychometric to neuroscientific disciplines and creates ambiguity neither refuting nor accepting this association completely."
> 2. I don't think autism predicts genius. I think a certain lack of social ability predicts genius.
Right, OK - or maybe obliviousness to the siren songs of society, and immunity to the power of the Hermès Bikin handbag. That in and of itself isn't too hard to imagine, given the isolated lives lived by figures like Newton. But there's a competing hypothesis that can explain Newton's isolation: genius is itself a source of isolation. https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
The need to belong to a tribe is more important than the need to be objectively correct. So if a condition like autism erased the desire to conform, than it would make sense that it would increase the likelihood that person would want to seek objective truth over tribal partisanship.
Yes! Unfortunately all austists do not become truth seekers. Many just don't get the thing with tribes and confuse tribal politics with truth. I think Greta Thunberg is a prime example of that. Most people talk about the climate threat just because that's how people talk; they don't really care what they say. But Greta seems to take it dead seriously, like if she doesn't understand the climate disaster thing is just a tribal game.
Yes, I’ve noticed that in many autistic people I know both in meatspace and on the internet. There is a big gender element too. In general, autistic women are able to “mask” their traits better than autistic men are and blend in. Women like Greta Thunberg are the exception to that trait. This makes her autism more the obvious, if she was male people would be less likely to see her as autistic, but rather just a socially awkward male.
There definitely is a gender element. I sometimes feel a bit uneasy when researchers talk about the "protective effect" of being female, because do we really know that females are protected against autism? Not being diagnosed is not the same as being entirely average.
Especially there seems to be something with linguistic ability. In my unscientific experience, females with autism are often very linguistically able, while males are less so.
There _are_ psychological tests for social behaviour -- see, for instance, 'agreeableness' in the Big 5 Personality Types theory.
That's interesting! Are those tests of the self-assessment type, or are there also tests that can measure agreeability the way tests can measure IQ?
I only really am familiar with the assessments you make by having people answer a questionnaire, but some researchers observe behaviour, and count the number of times people use the word 'I' or whether they let others interrupt them and other things like that.
Cultural differences make such things very hard to write, or observe. For instance, a great many researchers have an ideal of 'agreeableness' that translates into 'building mutual support systems which foster interdependence'. If that is what you end up testing for, practically every Swede will test out as seriously disagreeable, because independence and self-sufficiency are highly valued here, and no matter how sympathetic you are to somebody else's views, you don't get to stop being reasonable in the name of being supportive. This isn't how it works many other places. Also, around here, the default assumption is that when somebody comes to you with a problem, what they would like is to have their problem solved. There are many places where this attitude is considered disagreeable in Big 5 Personality terms because what the person wants is validation for the emotions they are feeling about their problem and emotional support. Whether the problem ever gets fixed or not is beside the point, and 'your feelings will get better when I show you how to fix your problem' does not count as a 'caring' or 'supportive' comment. The sort of emotional support the people from some of the more interdependent cultures want, on demand, from all and sundry is very much the sort I only want from my closest friends and relatives, which can lead to interactions where somebody is trying to be 'caring' and ends up making the other person feel threatened instead.
Books about the differences in business/workplace attitudes (and how to successfully build a multinational team) touch on this a fair bit, I suppose because the international workers have to figure this stuff out.
That's what they say about IQ tests too: They are only valid within certain cultures. https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-019-0335-7
Maybe an AI could reveal agreeability/autism/whatever? Feed it enough data on how people behave in different cultures, and it will rather reliably identify people who are considered agreeable by others?
I know that some people are trying precisely this in hopes they can spot sociopaths/psychopaths young, where seems to be a more urgent need. I haven't heard how successful this has been.
Hello, Tove. You know, the difficulty with talking about "autism" is that a whole mess of different conditions get labeled "autism." Nevertheless, you and I both know ourselves as "kind of aspie" women, and you and I both have autistic kids, so within that range, there's *something" worth talking about.
One of the things I have found very striking in my conversations with autistic people on forums like Wrong Planet is very, very anxious they are. Many of them are even socially anxious. They are acutely aware of the fact that they are different from other people and they are very worried about other people judging them. It's like talking to a middle schooler who's afraid of being bullied, except these are grown adults.
My own kids are very anxious, too. It leads to a lot of phobias and OCD. It's... frustrating.
Anyway, autists might be bad at observing social norms, but boy do they wish they could.
I have a couple of different/related theories: autists have abnormalities in brain growth/connectivity. Smart people also have differences in brain structures. Stick two smart people together, and maybe you get a brain that is just trying to get too big/connected.
Relatedly, autists seem to be very emotionally/socially immature. My kid is like a 20 yr old in intelligence and a 6 yr old in emotions. Not just in bad ways, like tantrums. He is very sweet in the ways of little children, too. He does not like any sorts of "mean words" and is always kind to animals.
But all humans mature slowly compared to, well, practically all other animals (elephants and some dolphins/whales seem to be the exceptions). Extended childhoods are necessary for developing higher IQs. So perhaps "develop more slowly" is yet another way to get a smarter person, but combine two such people, and you get a very slowly developing child.
I don't favor the "extreme male brain" hypothesis. Autism is more common in males, but so are dyslexia and retardation and schizophrenia... none of which are very masculine. Yes, autists are bad at social stuff and can be fascinated by objects, but a lot of that is repetitive "stimming" related to OCD and difficulties they have with anxiety. It's like they get stuck.
Hello, SharkFace, nice to hear from someone else in the same situation.
There clearly is something with assortative mating and autism: the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. The question is what: Is it that high IQ people mate with each other or high aspie people mate with each other? I would guess it is the second, because it seems like autism is present among parents on all IQ levels.
This study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31026573/ for example, says that fathers with high IQ on the technical side get more high IQ autistic children, but fathers with low IQ get more low IQ autistic children.
I also manage to both find the extreme male brain hypothesis interesting and disbelieve the idea that autism is much more common in males than in females. I think autism is heavily underdiagnosed in females because the diagnostic criteria were set after males. A research project that could shed more light on the issue seems to be going on. https://autismsciencefoundation.org/autism-sisters-project-expanded/
I can't easily find a specific study of sisters to autistic boys, but siblings of both sexes seem to be more aspie than average.
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/siblings-children-autism-social-emotional-problems/
Welcome to the psychological study of genius! It has a long and illustrious history starting with:
* Francis Galton (who thought it was basically a function of neural processing speed), moving through,
* Lewis Terman (who thought it was basically a function of high IQ), and then,
* Hans Eysenck (who thought it was a combination of high IQ and Psychoticism) even including,
* Some random guy (who claimed scientific output in various countries can be found by looking at measures of androgens in the population. I can probably find his name and paper for you if you want). And eventually we reach,
* Tove K (who likes autistic traits as a predictor for genius).
The general consensus of modern psychology is that genius is actually combination of high intelligence and high Openness:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4459939/
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/10/2/191/1652873
I'm working on it! But I also agree with the consensus. I mean, who doesn't? Openness is in the definition of genius: People who only like to think established thoughts can never be new-thinkers (if that is a word in English).
Hm, I wonder who the random guy could be. Philippe Rushton? I think he said something about androgens in different populations.
Alas, English is barely a Germanic language anymore - what works in German or Swedish will not necessarily work here. In English, "original thinkers" is probably the best construction.
And no, it wasn't Rushton (which actually makes me trust it more; I think Rushton wedded himself to simplistic models and struggled to fit data to them). In fact it was a fellow named Van Der Linden, and you can find it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325329461_National-level_Indicators_of_Androgens_are_Related_to_the_Global_Distribution_of_Scientific_Productivity_and_Science_Nobel_Prizes
By the way, do you know your own IQ? What about Anders?
Anders says I'm being inaccurate: He, like all other 18-year-old males by that time took the military's IQ-test. But that test is rather blunt so it could only place him among the best 4 percent.
We were told that the two of our children who had IQ tests were two standard deviations above the median. Which means an IQ above 130. But we didn't get to know if they were among the top 2 percent or the top 0.2 percent. If they were among the latter, they could maybe participate in some kind of competition...
The androgen theory is very interesting. I think it overlaps a lot with my autism theory. After all, there is an androgen theory of autism too, so why not? Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of the extreme male brain and all that. Genius is also quite obviously linked to maleness. It is not like females can never think anything new, but it is obviously less common than among males.
As things are, it is difficult to do any autism-related research, because "autism" is a very unclear concept. It includes both people with low social abilities caused by deleterious mutations and people with low social abilities caused by genes inherited from parents. The evolutionary mechanisms behind the two types of conditions should be completely different. Still, they are now bundled and studied as one condition. The threshold for autism diagnosis is also very arbitrary.
Neither I nor Anders know our IQs. None of us had a test. We tried some Mensa-style tests on the internet some years ago. Anders did better than me but none of us excelled in it. We also didn't enjoy it. In general, Swedes are not fond of IQ testing. My two autistic children, 10 and 12 years old at the time, had very elaborate IQ tests and I observed them in real time. The psychologists never revealed the exact result to us: They only told us both children were "very much above average". Scientifically I think they are right not to tell parents more than that, because IQ tests are not exact. Still, I was quite a bit annoyed that I couldn't get an exact number. Not because it matters, but because it interests me.
> The androgen theory is very interesting. I think it overlaps a lot with my autism theory. After all, there is an androgen theory of autism too, so why not? Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of the extreme male brain and all that. Genius is also quite obviously linked to maleness. It is not like females can never think anything new, but it is obviously less common than among males.
I'm skeptical that autism is a predictor, though. For a long time Eysenck insisted that schizophrenia predicted genius in relatives, but though there's a large body of research investigating schizophrenia spectrum disorders, these show only equivocal relationships to Openness and creativity. For autism, what studies I've seen are even more negative. If you agree that genius is related to high intelligence and Openness to Experience, then it's hard to reconcile that with findings about autism, which suggests it depresses these traits:
https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/35707880/10.1007_s40489_018_0131_y.pdf
"The review further finds a positive correlation between ASD (severity) and neuroticism and a negative correlation between ASD (severity) and extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness."
Autism may turn out to have some kind of value from a survival or reproductive standpoint, but at least right now, the evidence really isn't there.
1.Are you sure that there is not a link between madness and creative genius? This review says there is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6102953 /It would be logical if different kinds of madness predicted different kinds of genius. Scientists and artists probably are not very closely related.
2. I don't think autism predicts genius. I think a certain lack of social ability predicts genius. I also think that with enough assortative mating, the same lack of social ability leads to high-functioning autism. Autism genes are like sickle cell anemia genes, but more complex, I think: Too many are always bad, but a certain dose can be good in some environments.
For that reason, I think the androgens-predict-genius theory is interesting. Since it measures both androgen expressions and genius expressions at the population level, it could catch exactly those genes that are circulating in the population and only occasionally cause diagnosed autism.
> 1.Are you sure that there is not a link between madness and creative genius?
Not at all! For over a decade I thought Eysenck would turn out to be correct in that regard. But psychology has a replication crisis, and I've learned to be skeptical when effects are ambiguous. Even the paper you linked states in the abstract "This evidence for this polarizing issue ranges from psychometric to neuroscientific disciplines and creates ambiguity neither refuting nor accepting this association completely."
> 2. I don't think autism predicts genius. I think a certain lack of social ability predicts genius.
Right, OK - or maybe obliviousness to the siren songs of society, and immunity to the power of the Hermès Bikin handbag. That in and of itself isn't too hard to imagine, given the isolated lives lived by figures like Newton. But there's a competing hypothesis that can explain Newton's isolation: genius is itself a source of isolation. https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/