Herding cats
Just watched the film Today’s Man, which is about an individual, Nicky Gottlieb, with Asperger Syndrome. Near the end of the film he attends a meeting with others who are not “neurotypicals.” Gottlieb has some weird ticks throughout the film which shows quite clearly that he’s not “all there” (or, more precisely, no one else is there in his own mind). But it was really interesting to see a meeting of people with the same lack of normal social skills…they all seemed “out of sync” with each other (or, perhaps they were in sync in a different way which I wasn’t able to perceive). The most peculiar aspect for me was that physically these were all human beings, but their manner, gestures (or lack of) and social fluidity was almost like that of alien species. I’ve met people who have major social skill deficits before, but I haven’t observed dozens trying to interact. The closest thing I’ve seen in my own life are interactions with Singularitarians and some Perl Mongers. But these events & groups were tied together by a common theme or topic around which verbal exchanges invariably circled in a structured manner. Nicky Gottlieb going to be a meeting with other individuals suffering Asperger Syndrome and talking about their lack of social skills and attempting to grapple with the fact that most humans view them as abnormal freaks was different. It was like peering into the psychology of a species running radically different software.
Note: I’m not too interested in whether there really is unitary Asperger Syndrome rooted in specific neurological dysfunctions. Rather, it’s clear that a minority of humans are noticeably socially retarded enough that when they interact together with others who lack normal social skills the communal synergy, or lack thereof, is definitely not a scene you see everyday.
Labels: Biological Psychology
Physicists and mathematicians are often regarded as hyper aggressive by other academics or even other scientists. Part of this is cultural: more focus on logic and data in argumentation than in other fields, but part of it is the prevalence of neo-autistic personality types that don’t register the emotional/psychological reactions of others. I think economists have this reputation as well among social scientists.
When you get the physicists together as a group this social oddness doesn’t prevent them from getting things done or communicating well with each other. However, it may repel women or more normal male types from wanting to pursue a career in the field.
Neal Stephenson does a good job of poking fun at all of this in Anathem.
There have been suggestions that men tend to dominate large societies because (supposedly) they lack innate programming that women possess that is optimized for village-level interaction. Thus they must develop learned routines for interaction, and have an easier time producing routines that can handle interaction above village-level.
Were there any signs that, lacking intuitive social interaction patterns, the ASers were explicitly producing effective learned routines?
How effective were the ASers at making explicit routines for social interaction?
I saw part of this documentary a while back – it’s really good. What struck was his own appreciation/understanding of how different he is. Also, I had no idea how TV can be so useful, beyond its entertainment value, in providing a window into normal social interactions for individuals like Nicky.
Autobiographical book by someone with Aspergers.
Some aspects of Aspergers are like hyper-rationality and universalism — the failure to understand “points of view”. I think that it’s one of a number of mental illnesses which are basically too much of a good thing — others are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and compulsive-obsessive disorder. People are always speculating that certain very odd famous and successful people had one of these disorders, and I don’t think that we should dismiss those speculations. A troubled genius living in a protected environment (e.g. a hereditary aristocrat or a monk) might be very productive without being normally functional.
An agency I worked for hired a company to develop a database and interactive internet site to use and add to said database. One big problem was that the company’s most talented programmer had Asperger’s.
Now, I loved the guy and thoroughly enjoyed his 20 minute lecture on where the file cabinets in our office came from. He correctly identified them as having been donated from the DOJ. He knew when they were manufactured and what type of file cabinet replaced them at the DOJ.
As you might suspect, others were not so thrilled with this man’s knowledge of file cabinets.
The main problem was that social worker types could not communicate with this man because he needed concrete examples and they were psychologically incapable of offering them. Frankly, they had no real idea what information they wanted the database to generate. “Can’t you just make it tell me what I need to know?” was a common comment.
Though this company eventually got millions of dollars from HUD for the database this man created, he was fired for an inability to communicate with the end users.
I do not have Asperger’s (at least not officially diagnosed!) but I couldn’t communicate with the end users either. I couldn’t even teach them how to identify data, much less enter it.
My conclusion was that it was all a game. And nobody but the company hiring the failed programmers won. Oh well… sorry for ranting.
I actually like people with Asperger’s as I know for sure where they are coming from.
I know for sure where they are coming from.
wins the understatement of the month award.
A troubled genius living in a protected environment (e.g. a hereditary aristocrat or a monk) might be very productive without being normally functional.
i agree. frequency dependence. these traits dampened somewhat and in a context where most people are normals might serve a group in good stead. OTOH, many aspergerian types clearly don’t have a fucking clue as to normal human psychology, and it makes them miserable for much of their life.
“I do not have Asperger’s (at least not officially diagnosed!) but I couldn’t communicate with the end users either. I couldn’t even teach them how to identify data, much less enter it.”
If you don’t mind my asking, Donna B.: were you also fired for ‘being unable to communicate with the end users’?
John Emerson (or anyone else),
what are the good features exaggerated in the three disorders you named?
(The one that springs to mind is that mania is too much hypomania, which seems to be pretty much purely good. But classic bipolar is not just mania, but also depression.)
No Caledonian, I wasn’t. I was the only person there that knew how to reboot the server, create accounts, map drives, deal with paper jams,and remove malware due to indiscriminate clicking.
Plus, somebody had to enter the data in the new database, write the technical portions of grants and reports, proof everyone else’s contribution, put the whole thing together and get it delivered on time to the right place.
I quit about 18 months later.
Frankly, they had no real idea what information they wanted the database to generate. “Can’t you just make it tell me what I need to know?” was a common comment.
Pretty typical!
I’ve been a software engineer (now retired) and what I can tell from years of such experiences is that there seem to be a “gap” in the human mind between the formal and the unformal.
We appear to use two different kind of logic to deal with “vague ideas” and to deal with precise “discretized” topics and whenever the need arise to bridge the gap, like in writing software, it is always a mess.
Interestingly this also shows up at both ends of the spectrum, so to say, with mathematicians and poets.
Poets having to pick up discretized bits of language to “evoke” fuzzy emotions, conversely, mathematicians scrambling with “elegance and beauty” of lemmas and theories to come up with hard facts and thruths.
An amusing recent illustration of the later kind is Tim Gowers blog post: Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?.
The whole stuff is about advanced arcane mathematics yet the questions debated seem, beside technical details, quite remote from what the mathematical end products (published papers) look like.
I’m pleased to hear that you escaped. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by ‘normal’ people that are anything but. I hope your circumstances have improved since then.
Caledonian, circumstances definitely improved. I went to work for a couple of geophysicists, until I retired. It was such a relief. Common sense coupled with a genuine curiosity about everything.
Part of my job there was making sure the fridge was always stocked with Heineken and that we never ran out of chocolate.
I learned what it was like to actually look forward to going to work.
i agree. frequency dependence. these traits dampened somewhat and in a context where most people are normals might serve a group in good stead. OTOH, many aspergerian types clearly don’t have a fucking clue as to normal human psychology, and it makes them miserable for much of their life.
What do you think would happen in the case of the reverse, i.e. the current “normals” being in the minority in the world at large. I know many people on the spectrum have thought about such a culture, and I must admit I have wondered about it too. However, since I do like variety in people, I would probably consider a personal ideal more in the middle, even if that might be really hard in practice (since neither group would have a world structured to their liking).
I managed to track down the video of the support group session featured in the documentary and it is rather hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkVYDo8vVLc
I have one question though. Although my Jewdar has a high rate of false positives, I noticed that a large fraction of the meeting’s attendees seemed clearly semitic in appearance. Is this simply a function of the main character’s location or is there a higher incidence of Asperger’s in Jews?
Uh…I was expecting something else. This video reminds me of pretty much every software development meeting I’ve ever attended. I guess I’ve been accustomed to such behavior for such a long time I don’t see it as abnormal.