If I showed the EQ-SQ theory's findings to be due to measurement bias, would anyone change their minds about it?

I’m already not sympathetic [LW · GW] to extreme-male-brain-theory-of-autism, so I guess I’m not the target of this question. I suppose that if you found the opposite results of what you expect, I would be mildly interested.

Intense World does seem like it could be a contributing factor.

Ironically, despite being autistic, I feel like I don't really understand how autism is recognized or how it works. So while I do have some theories on it, they feel uncertain/not very crisp.

One of my current main theories (which might be overupdating on my own case, but I guess I might as well put it out here so I can either get corrected or confirmed) is that a core contributor is "falling off" the general "track" of socialization/enculturation. This is kind of abstract, so let me try to explain:

I think as people interact with each other, they get exposed to certain norms and cultural ideas. If they have the appropriate context, they can notice these norms/ideas and parse them in a similar way that others do, "keeping up" with everyone else about what is going on. This probably starts all the way back in childhood, with games, movies, play and other things leading to social experience. If one doesn't engage in this in similar ways that others do, one might miss out on a lot.

In my case, the missing out seems to be polycausal. I'm temperamentally naturally introverted; my family moved to a new place when I was 3; I have difficulties with sports (a primary activity) for reasons that seem connected to neurological autism symptoms; I have strong unusual interests (mainly computers and science, which of course fits into some variants of the EQ-SQ theory); my family didn't have many cartoons or shows for children and didn't keep up well with movies (people keep being surprised that I didn't watch classics such as The Lion King); I tended to get involved with weird political ideas; and I didn't make many friends.

There's a lot of basic norms and purposes about social interactions that I didn't really learn until relatively recently. And there's a lot of basic signs that I still don't understand - people often seem to mention stuff like car brands, cities, clothing brands or other things and have an idea about the relative status differences (and other things?) implied by which brands you use or which cities you come from/live in, but I usually don't know what people are referring to.

And I think this also contributed to a feedback loop? Like once you're already behind, you're gonna be the weird kid who has few friends engaged in unusual activities and who doesn't "get it" when stuff is explained.

So basically, my lead theory - which I don't at all feel confident in but which seems reasonable to me - is that autism is due to a variety of factors (neurological, temperamental, environmental, ...) which interfere with the enculturation process and creates a feedback loop of being off track.

Unrelatedly, I strong-vote for you to spend more time thinking about cluster B personality disorders. If paying you money would help make that happen, we should talk! (Your recent post on narcissism [LW · GW]was already helpful!)

Neat that you like my post! I'd be curious if there's anything specific you can mention as being helpful? (Maybe in DMs if you prefer?)

As for spending more time thinking about Cluster B, maybe? I think I'm currently evidence-bottlenecked rather than theory-bottlenecked. But this constraint can of course also be loosened through the use of money and time. I've also been reading a few case studies, though the case studies typically don't have the sorts of details I need, so it is kind of of limited value.

(In a way, it's kind of weird for me to lack so much evidence, since I grew up with a BPD mother. But I think my mother's conflicts were mostly with my brother, my father, and various people outside the home, not so much with me until later. At which point I think my dabbling in conservative online spaces had made me adopt memes which present a stoic, resistant face to BPD while ignoring the conflicts. So I don't think I got a clear view of the conflicts. Have been meaning to discuss them more with my brother.)

Oh also, another thing:

The concept of "Social Intelligence" seems to come up a bunch, both in the context of autism and in the context of a bunch of socioeconomic research. But I think existing social intelligence scales are kind of bad. To understand how, let's contrast them to the notion of general intelligence.

IQ tests try to measure the g factor, cognitive abilities that are useful across a wide variety of tasks. To do so, they can just grab a bunch of cognitive tasks and average the performance across them together, and this tends to give a reasonable measurement of the g factor, precisely because it is so general.

One might want to do the same with social intelligence, grabbing a bunch of social tasks and evaluating performance over them. But one can't really do this because social tasks are "big"; they involve interacting with other people, but it is expensive to have another person around, and it takes a long time to build enough relationships with them to perform any sort of meaningful task.

My view of existing social intelligence tests is that they address this by postulating some "core capabilities" which are used in social tasks, and then they aim to measure those core capabilities rather than social performance. For instance, "Mind In The Eyes test" assumes that a core capability of social intelligence is being able to read someone's mind from the expression they give with their eyes.

At its core, there are basically two kinds of social intelligence tasks, differing in the ways they measure their "core capabilities". "Trait-based" social intelligence tasks measure them in basically the same way that personality tests do, and so they basically end up being personality tests that have been relabeled to be "social intelligence". Meanwhile, "ability-based" social intelligence tests measure them in basically the same way that IQ tests do, and so they basically end up being IQ tests that have been relabeled to be "social intelligence".

Ultimately, because social tasks are "big", I think a social intelligence measure must be "formative" like the above. However, without a fairly accurate objective outcome criterion, it is hard to know what exactly to measure (what is redundant, important, missing, etc.). Lately I've been thinking that it must be possible to do way better with respect to outcome criteria. I feel like it should surely be possible to measure social performance by considering relationship history. That is, people may have relationships with their family, friends, coworkers, romantic partners and others, and it seems like it should be easy to assess how well those relationships are going, and use this as a ground truth criterion for a sort of "general social functioning". And then it seems like it should be possible to study why some people do better or worse in relationships, and come up with a more specific measure of social intelligence which centers on the factors relevant to that.

Constructing a measure of social intelligence seems relevant to autism, as autism is often conceptualized as being closely related to poor social skills. It might also be relevant to personality disorders, as poor social skills might also contribute to them? Idk. I guess if this was to be done specifically for autism, one should probably first check to what extent autistic social relationship performance is worse than allistic social relationship performance. The effect size might be too small to be informative.