The Ultraviolet

Indeed. In

nerds have more interesting things to learn than social skills

"interesting" =/= "useful"!

Formal schooling creates a hot-house environment for social development: it's artificial and fosters growth of things that wouldn't grow otherwise. The point I want to make with respect to the current discussion is that when nerd types fail to thrive in it in their formative years, it puts them behind in social development, and some have extreme difficulty catching up. Those who never catch up can fail to associate successfully even with other nerd types.

Social skills are skills -- a learned body of knowledge. You can fail to develop a body of knowledge for all sorts of reasons, not limited to a specific spectrum of neurological dysfunctions.

Sure, there's a stronger tendency than in the general population, but I think for an entire community to have a blind spot, you need either a much stronger statistical skew, or a pervasive tendency for people without ultraviolet-sight to dismiss ultraviolet-sight as evidence.

This seems rather disingenuous to me. It would be very remarkable if all non-neurotypical people missed the same sort of "ultraviolet" signals; the region of mind-design space occupied by humans might be pretty small, but it's not so small that you can reduce it to a bimodal distribution without glossing over a lot of stuff.

In any case, CuSithBell wasn't exactly shy about associating the autism spectrum with his metaphor, so unless you're trying to argue that anyone three standard deviations ahead of the mean is necessarily on the spectrum, I'd hesitate to read too much past that.

(ETA: I am aware that "neurotypical" is normally used to mean "not autistic". This post was written under the assumption that the parent was using it at its face value, i.e. "neurologically average".)

Would you say that there's something like ultraviolet that 145 IQ people can't see?

It is not at all obvious to me why this is being voted down. Anyone care to illuminate me?

It is the kind of comment that I expect to get a few initial downvotes but to earn those back over time and end up net positive.

Two factors which I would expect some individuals to object to:

• I did, as Eugine noted, support leaving part of the territory unmapped just because some can't handle the truth. We really do want to avoid making such compromises too often. Yet since the approach of being cautious when discussing matters of human social behaviours work is already in place I like to acknowledge it.
• Where people sometimes find it offensive to have the dirty laundry of how human social behaviours work discussed openly they will usually find it even more offensive to say that humans often find it offensive to have accurate discussions about human social behaviour. That breaks not only breaks the social illusion it points out that we liked fooling ourselves.

You've identified a serious problem. Unfortunately, your solution appears to be abandoning our search for truth because some members can't handle the truth.

That is approximately correct. It isn't an approach that I often take and one which, when taken, is best to make explicit.

We like to say "politics is the mind killer" and I say from time to time "social politics is the mind killer". The implicit understanding of social politics is exactly that thing which is most notably weakened in autism and so what we are describing here. We are reluctant to talk about politics. We do discuss it here and there but cautiously and only around the fringes. I suggest that we already have exactly the same approach when it comes to discussing social politics and for much the same reason.

offensive to vocal members.

I fail to see what's wrong with this.

You have no idea how much fun those discussions aren't.

The above statement is equally true with 'idealist' replaced by 'theist' and yet we don't have a problem with talking about atheism.

It's not equally true, because LW members do not have a tendency towards theism.