The Opposite Of Autism

Sort of related, everything studies wrote this essay in 2017 and now "wamb" is a term that my friends and I use all the time.

https://everythingstudies.com/2017/11/07/the-nerd-as-the-norm/

I have a proposed answer here [LW · GW]

Actually non-autistic people are quite extreme in many ways when you look at it closely. 

Here is my spoof DSM6 entry as illustration

From DSM-VI: Hyper-Social (Allistic)  Spectrum Disorder
HSSD is a syndrome in which there is an over-focus on social phenomena at the expense of other aspects of the world. Contrast with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which is in many ways the opposite.

Diagnosis: Any 5 of the following are present:

Inability to express self clearly; use of ambiguous and vague language; discomfort with clear language
Obsessive interest in knowing personal details of acquaintances or strangers e.g. celebrities, or even fictional characters
Unfounded belief in being able to read other people's minds, in particular to know if someone is lying or not.
Difficulty in thinking in a systematic logical way, e.g. to do math or program computers
Tendency to try to bend and stretch rules for no obvious reason. Discomfort with accurately following instructions and processes.
Forms beliefs based on the opinions of others rather than on facts and evidence
Tendency to affiliate with groups and to align all opinions to the group
Frequently lies for social convenience
Preoccupied with social status and “looking the part”
Focus on status symbols, and symbols of virtue and group affiliation
Focus on appearances more than underlying reality
Intolerance of diversity of opinion
Intolerance towards people who do not have HSSD
Spends large amounts of time on shallow “social” activities with little actual content. May lead to destructive activities such as substance abuse e.g. alcohol, and over-eating.
Lack of interest in mastering difficult, especially technical, subjects in depth
Tendency to stare into people's eyes, and to believe that this gives great insight into the other person's mind. Usually unaware that this can create discomfort in the other person.
Tendency to think that staring into people's eyes demonstrates trustworthiness

 

The "diametric model" of Crespi et al says psychosis / schizophrenia / schizotypy is the opposite of autism. 

I think identifying the blind spots of the typical AI engineer/architect is an interesting and potentially important goal. Though I'm not sure I follow the reasoning behind identifying the opposite as the path to "modeling the desires of the typical person."?

I think investigating this would be of interest to people working in AI alignment and whose ultimate goal and whose ultimate goal is improving the condition of humanity in general. Understanding the needs and wants of the subset of humans most unlike themselves would likely help in modeling the desires of the typical person.

Isn't that better and more easily accomplished by identifying the median person i.e. in what way is the typical AI engineer different from the general population, and adjusting for that?

Alternatively, one could find what is complementary to autism rather than the opposite of autism; assuming those are not necessarily the same. People who may be attracted to and good at roles/professions like people management, team sports, therapists etc.

I would not be surprised if the negative stereotype of a "blonde" would be people socially recognising the undesirability of anti-autism. Also a trope about approaching homework to bully or bribe people to make them for you and approach to tests as trying to copy the right answers makes one resistant to extracting knowledge from education. And while it is great to defer to experts on areas you are not an expert in it would be grand if there were something you are yourself an expert on. If an employee only delegates and never does or is capable of doing work that could be a setup with all mortar and no brick.

Treating autism as a degree of emphathy is a little simplistic and might be a error-mode in these kind of analyses.

What I have found that autist have social competence with practising and thinking out social situations. Their models are explicit. Non-autists usually don't have great theorethical insight to their social competence. its as if they can't modify or customise it because it is a black box that doesn't hiccup. So I have come to think that the implicit vs explicit modelling is way more apt for the difference.

With neural networks we have a problem of interpretability that we can have a competent network where we don't have a good idea how it does its thing. It is intriguing to me to think that some people have models that have like 10 million factors and some that have only 1000. Social interaction might be a field where approaches that weakly update on a lot of different signals can naturally do well. The shortcomings of autistic people often look like being too formulaic, having a heuristic that doesn't have a lot of caveats or adaptability. Rules that the person is explicitly thinking via auditory memory. The challenges that is typical for non-autistics is murkyness, having to say a thing multiple times before it sinks (say having to say "no" three times. Reading the manual and still calling the helpline to integrate information that actually is in the manual), being confused by mixed signals and having trouble giving priority to some level (if you say "no" calmy it might just induce confusion, verbal level alone being too weak a signal to process)

I would also like to point out that if you live with people that sahre your cognitive makeup means you don't have to think about psychology but can just get interpersonal interoperability by symmetry or identicalness. If you are a neurominority then you will use signficant resources to try to figure out what is a working way to interface with other people. So I consider autists to be veterans about trying to interface, even if it by neccecity. 

I feel like if one wanted to know what would happen if one took the "autism" dialed and turned it all the way to far-negative values, one should look for traits that are negatively genetically correlated with autism. I don't know what those traits would be, though; I had trouble finding any good studies of that.

However, I don't know whether this is necessarily the group of people that autistic people would most struggle to understand, or where their understanding of other people would be most improved if they learned to understand that group. After all, the group might have its own oddities that aren't related to autism.

Williams syndrome?