Autism, or early isolation?

I've come to think that the issues are seldom genetic in origin. There's a simpler explanation. LWers are often intellectually gifted. This is conducive to early isolation.

Classic autism begins early, way earlier than a child becomes interested in social interactions (except for parents) or demonstrates being intellectually precocious. The frequent first symptom is loss of speech after starting to acquire it -- the child starts to use words but then stops. There are often associated issues like shifted sensory perception, repetitive movements, etc. Avoiding eye contact is standard. All this happens when the child is 2-3 years old.

And, of course, autistic kids usually have delayed mental development.

Instead, you are talking about nerds/geeks/otaku/etc. They might be on the spectrum in which case their symptoms feed into social isolation scenario -- but the causality is reversed from what you are proposing. Or they might not be autistic at all in which case what you are talking about is a possible explanation, but calling them autistic is pattern-botching.

ETA: I've updated my position since writing this comment and no longer endorse it; see this comment.

I agree with Lumifer and shminux's comments. More generally, this does not seem like the sort of thing that you should be making conclusions about without taking a look at actual data when actual data is easily available. I recommend Neihart (1999). At best, the picture is a lot more nuanced than you're making it out to be, and at worst, you're regurgitating a cached thought: "Gifted children are poorly adjusted compared to their peers." The closest thing to this in the literature is the correlation between highly creative adults and psychopathology, particularly mood disorders, psychosis, and suicidality; not more general giftedness and social competence. There isn't enough evidence to conclude that this generalizes, in terms of populations, to highly intelligent individuals of all ages or to highly creative, or more generally, highly intelligent, children; or that this generalizes, in terms of individual characteristics, to social competence.

As for giftedness and measurements of psychological adjustment besides social competence, most studies have found little correlation between depression, anxiety, or suicidality and giftedness, and what correlation there is errs on the side of gifted children being better-adjusted than their average peers. Gifted children are also far less likely to engage in deviant behavior.

As for social competence, it's diverse among gifted persons. We can't conclude that either intelligence or personality factors are the primary causal factor in any purported correlation between the two and social competence. That is, your model is "Gifted children are highly intelligent. Gifted children are dissimilar from their peers because they are highly intelligent. Their peers ostracize them because they are dissimilar. Ostracized children engage in less social interaction. Gifted children have poor social skills because they have less experience with social interaction." A similarly plausible model is: "Some gifted children feel dissimilar from their peers. Gifted children who feel dissimilar from their peers are less likely to interact with their peers. Gifted children who interact less have poor social skills." And it can be both, and/or something else. There's also some evidence that verbally precocious children are less socially competent, or at least perceive themselves so, than mathematically precocious children. Finally, a big confounder in this entire field of inquiry is the correlation between high socioeconomic class and giftedness; it's hard to get a large control group that isn't also more socioeconomically heterogeneous than the experimental group.

If we're going to armchair psychologize, then I much prefer Paul Graham's model. High-IQ societies suffer from the same deficiency as public schools and prisons: their selection criteria are neither the motives of their members nor individual characteristics highly correlated with particular motives, groups composed of individuals with diffuse motives are directionless, and directionless groups that are prevented from decomposing into smaller more purposeful groups degenerate into unadulterated status games.

This community has a tendency to speculate wildly, especially about psychology and sociology. This can be useful. Sometimes there's no data to look at. But when there's data to look at, you should look at it. Jonah, do you disagree that this article has unnecessarily low epistemic standards? Usually when this criticism is made, you point out that you are still explaining and not yet defending, but there are clear misunderstandings of psychopathology, as detailed below by Lumifer, and direct contradictions with empirical evidence, as I have detailed above, so I don't see how that response would be applicable in this context.

I've withdrawn my downvote and updated towards the hypothesis that the sort of gifted children to which you are referring tend to have lower social competence than their peers. I didn't follow the link to Towers's The Outsiders because it is not a social norm for readers to follow all of the links in the articles here, and I assumed (rightfully, I think) that you were quoting everything relevant to your article.

When Jonah is talking about giftedness, he is not talking about the usual measure of IQ >=130 (some studies use IQ >=125). He is talking about IQ >= 155, 1 in 10,000; or at least those are the studies that he's implicitly citing. On this interpretation of Jonah's claim, there is evidence.

You have to indicate this! I feel like this is going to bring up the explaining vs. defending distinction again, but that is a huge, easily mentionable difference! And instead of or in addition to quoting Towers's essay, which looks like pure conjecture out of context, you could have cited some of those numbers from Terman or Hollingworth.

Dauber & Benbow (1990) has a good bibliography if you know where to look. Austin & Draper (1981) looks like it's probably a good review of this kind of research, if a bit dated, but I can't find a non-paywalled link. Each of the studies that I've seen seem to have weaknesses, but there are quite a few and it seems that their individual weaknesses are different.

Considering all of that, I would ask how relevant that research is to you or the community. In earlier articles you talked about being amazed by children with that 1 in 10,000 sort of ability, which makes me think that you aren't in that sort of range, and the LW average is 138 last time I checked. If social competence is really relevant to you and your audience, then we should be looking at the research I linked before for explanations.

The review I linked in my other comment talks about educational fit as a much greater factor in adjustment problems than giftedness in and of itself, and you even personally experienced this:

When I was in elementary school, I would often fall short of answering all questions correctly on timed arithmetic tests. Multiple teachers told me that I needed to work on making fewer "careless mistakes." I was puzzled by the situation – I certainly didn't feel as though I was being careless. In hindsight, I see that my teachers were mostly misguided on this point. I imagine that their thinking was:

"He knows how to do the problems, but he still misses some. This is unusual: students who know how to do the problems usually don't miss any. When there's a task that I know how to do and don't do it correctly, it's usually because I'm being careless. So he's probably being careless."

If so, their error was in assuming that I was like them. I wasn't missing questions that I knew how to do because I was being careless. I was missing the questions because my processing speed and short-term memory are unusually low relative to my other abilities. With twice as much time, I would have been able to get all of the problems correctly, but it wasn't physically possible for me to do all of the problems correctly within the time limit based on what I knew at the time. (The situation may have been different if I had had exposure to mental math techniques, which can substitute for innate speed and accuracy.)

That in tandem with personality factors seems like an equally plausible explanation for many people.

If lack of social skills were the only part of autism this might be onto something. But autism tends to be a cluster of symptoms, which aren't explainable by a lack of social interactions. For example, autistic people tend to have different sensory perception. I would not expect that symptom to appear from early isolation.

Alternative hypothesis 2

(At this point I should point out that I like your hypothesis, I just think it is not necessarily single-cause)

Satoshi Kanazawa's charmingly simple theory that general intelligence tends to suppress and displace most of your instincts. This means being smart pretty much automatically means being bad at a lot of things. The way I interpret it is that attention is a finite resource and you either pay attention to your analytical engine or your instincts or share it, but you cannot give full 100% attention to both. So if the analytical engine demands your attention the insticts shut up/down.

I have observed intelligent people being bad at the following instinctive things (not all of them, not in all of these):

• social skills
• motoric skills, hand-eye coordination like basketball
• 3D geometry i.e. toolmanship, fixing the plumbing or the lawn mower at home, being a handyman
• drawing
• music, singing
• balance
• rythm, dancing

You have a few videogames and you really play them a lot, you became an expert of every detail of them: indication of autism / Asperger (narrow obsessions). (Starcraft 2 seems to be optimized for this.)

You have a lot of videogames and don't really care about getting good at them, you mostly just use them to "discover", to daydream about living in a fantasy world, you find it important that your character should fit into a role in the world without breaking character, such as not wear mismatching armor that would make him look funny: indication of schizoid personality (withdrawing from the world, rich internal life). (Elder Scrolls games seem to be optimized for this.)

Are you claiming that genetics isn't the main cause of high-IQ autism, or that autism isn't a significant cause of LW people often having non-standard social skills? If it's just the second then you have to account for the fact that LW-like thinking is consistent with the natural thinking patterns of high IQ autistics, and so LW will naturally tend to attract them. If you are making the first claim, you have to account for the fact that children are frequently diagnosed with autism before they turn three.

I'm pretty sure that the effect you are describing exists, but it's not Autism OR early isolation, it's AND. Plenty of gifted people are well adjusted. And what starts out as a moderate interpersonal communication deficiency may spiral downward into isolation because of the positive feedback loop you describe. Just like mathematically gifted people spend comparatively more time doing math, physically gifted people spend more time exercising and musically gifted people playing music, there is a mirror vicious circle corresponding to each virtuous circle.

Re Asperger's reclassification: it is called SCD (Social Communication Disorder) in DSM-V, see e.g. https://www.autismspeaks.org/dsm-5/faq and http://www.asha.org/Practice-Portal/Clinical-Topics/Social-Communication-Disorders-in-School-Age-Children/

Alternative hypothesis: schizoid personality.

I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder#Guntrip_criteria matches me well, but what is ever more important that it sounds like a description of "nerd culture":

• Introversion - check
• Withdrawnness - check
• Narcissism - um, here it is important to point out that low self-confidence, social awkwardness can also be a form of it ("everybody is looking at me and I am ugly!"). Or: the classic "naked at school" nightmares. But this is debatable.
• Self-sufficiency - check
• Sense of superiority - heh heh heh
• Loss of affect - understood as cynicism mainly
• Depersonalization - ?
• Regression - inward, as in: fantasy, D&D etc.
• Regression - backward, as in: enjoying childhood things like simple console games

I don't know how well it describes the LW community, it does describe me, and it generally does a good job of describing the Reddit type nerd-neckbeard community who are IMHO at the very least could be seen as the less intelligent "cousin" of the LW community in general (well, closer to to LW than a fantasy football community is close to LW)

This is just a hypothesis but may worth considering. Are you often described as emotionally cold and withdrawn?

Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities

My knee-jerk reaction to this was, "Yes, nobody understands me!" But on deeper reflection, that's not fair at all. I had many opportunities for mingling with people with the same interests as I did but I did not take many of those opportunities because my status-seeking brain was not satisfied with that. Also, I had many opportunities for mingling with people with far greater intellectual ability than myself, but was intimidated by the task.

I think that social isolation of the intellectually gifted is a harsh problem and I have encountered it several times before coming to LW. There are two different talks I've had to have with very intelligent people that I've met in the past.

The first is the "You aren't very good at social interactions so lets find some ways to improve that" talk which is often triggered by failures in communication that significantly upset people and require a mediator to explain the perspectives and motivations back to both parties. Social interaction is complex and full of pitfalls for those who simply aren't in the know. The explanation of controversial ideas to those who are reluctant to change their minds on an issue requires social nuance and great care.

The second talk is the "I haven't ever had an intelligent conversation like this before" talk which other intelligent people occasionally bring up to me in the middle of a different conversation. The worry and concern I feel in this case is not because the individual is incapable or has difficulty interacting with intelligent conversation but because they are capable of it and have either abstained or not been exposed to it for a long time.

Social interaction is important to anyone who is intelligent to increase the exposure of their ideas, improve their ideas by testing and growing them around others, and for their basic everyday rationality. One of the primary methods of determining whether your sensory inputs are working properly is by creating reference points through other people. "Does it feel cold in here to you?" "Does anyone else smell that?" Or one that happened to me this weekend while searching for a LW meetup location: "Does this coffee taste sour to you or is there something wrong with me?" (This was the second time I had tasted inappropriately sour coffee in the same day and I was starting to become concerned about the proper functioning of my taste buds/personal health.)

What's the base rate on lackluster social skills? Based on the popularity of self-help books and seminars aimed at improving social skills, I'm led to believe that social butterflies aren't all that common among the general population either.

Most people pick up a huge amount of tacit social knowledge as children and adolescents, through very frequent interaction with many peers. This is often not true of intellectually gifted people, who usually grew up in relative isolation on account of lack of peers who shared their interest.

Curious use of the singular "interest". Somehow I don't think intelligence is the real issue here. Rather, it strikes me as a consequence of diverging interests. Let's take youth/high school sports teams. There are the so-called dumb jocks and then there are athletic geniuses (for example, Alan Turing was an extremely good runner). You could easily end up with a skilled team featuring a large gap in IQ scores. The endpoints of this gap would have overlapping interests despite the intelligence difference. It's the people who focus their attention on a narrow range of topics outside the mainstream who are likely to have the most trouble.

One aspect of the isolation is the construction of concepts, structures thereof and whole private languages that are tuned and specialized to the mind and interests highly gifted. Now private languages don't really exist but that doesn't mean that they don't hinder interaction with other people - esp. the exchange of ideas interesting to them.

Asperger's Syndrome (which is no longer considered a valid construct...)

I'm curious what replaced it, if anything. It certainly seems to describe a real cluster in personspace. Was it just promoted to an unfortunate but non-disordered personality trait?

The tragedy is that none of the super high IQ societies created thus far have been able to meet those needs, and the reason for this is simple. None of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.

I came across this same essay some years ago, though I think it was on a different site. The phrase "Psychological walking wounded" has stuck with me ever since. It's just too poignantly accurate a description of my sociomental life to forget.

(it is interesting that this post shows up at a time when I'm trying to arrange psychological appointments to work on this and related issues...)

This is an interesting debate. I found this article as I was able to experience a relationship followed by great difficulties with a girl who had a highly autistic brother. What caused difficulties and huge problems was the mother of this girl's efforts to isolate her child. Of course the mother was not intentionally abusive but would isolate her daughter from relationships with others and the world under the guise of protecting her. I once watched a documentary with the mother of an autistic child telling the child not to play with toilets in the bathroom. Of course she made logical sense, wanting her child not to play in room which could be dirty but her protection of her child, in fact isolated her child from the world around them. I saw the mother of the girl create perceived threats which then led her daughter to isolate herself. This was usually people.

So I question whether or not these children are really intelligent or have they been forced by their parents not to play as their parents have directed them to focus on other 'higher' things which leads the child to become isolated. Rather than engage with and interact with the world the parent tries to be the childs guide, forcing the child to resist what the parent may see as fickle. The child enters their own world.

This is the conclusion I've recently drawn about my own social skills - I used to think I didn't have the native architecture for some things, but more recently I've noticed that it's pretty easy to internalize some social skills once I decide it's interesting to learn. Related is the kitten vertical vision experiment, where cats that from birth saw only through vertical slits couldn't track horizontal motion once the filters were taken off. (They recovered.)

I have yet another possible reason for these social difficulties one tends to experience: If you are smart, you have to hide it. It sounds plain, but you may be able to remember someone making fun of you in your childhood for using "fancy words", excelling at math or literature or something like that. I am not sure if I can fully identify the cause of this behaviour on others (maybe a defense mechanism) but I find it to be empirically true. Personally, I went most of my very early life complying with the constant need of feigning modesty, which made me reluctant to participate in quite a lot of conversations, and I thus believe it to have been an obstacle for my social interactions.

I notice that you often wrote "intelectually gifted", but never "intelligent" nor "smart". Is it just eloquence, or might that be a way of modesty that -such as myself- you have got used to?

I suspect there is a communication barrier between high-IQ and average-IQ people. Also, people tend to connect with each other through shared interests, and many with high-IQ also have high openness, lending oneself to have unconventional interests. With fewer people like you, it can lead to literal social isolation, and a feeling of disconnectedness with others. I don't think this is autism per se, but I can see why many people with high IQs may think they have autism.

At around three years old one of the staff at preschool suggested that I had Aspergers or ADHD after I had gotten into trouble for playing with the fire extinguisher. I was formally diagnosed on the autistic spectrum at age four/five. I took two separate verbal ability tests at age 4y7m as part of the assessment process to receive a diagnosis and scored respectively in the 4th and 96th percentiles. Wildly discrepant, but not in the gifted range.

In my case social isolation was due more to a lack of interest in socialising than to a lack of innate ability. I was comparatively sociable during my primary school years, though I had a few periods of selective mutism, and in earlier childhood I'd play with more boisterous older children but refused to interact with other children my own age. When I got older my peers were no longer interested in playing running-around games and switched to spending all their time chatting about topics that I had no interest in. So I became a loner and developed social anxiety issues.

Some symptoms didn't apply to me; I never had difficulty with understanding pragmatics or sarcasm or with theory of mind and I never had enough difficulties with abstract thought to prevent me from studying philosophy or category theory.

However I was/am hyperactive, hypersensitive to sound, lined up toys, would scream at any attempt to have my hair brushed, refused to wear shoes and socks until I was given seamless socks and rocked or stimmed when stressed. I have atrocious handwriting, can't really catch a ball and once accumulated so many bruises that a teacher called social services. I frequently space out, which could be interpreted either as a sign of autism or of the ability to think about something more interesting than my immediate surroundings. Additionally, I have narrow obsessive interests in life, the universe and everything in the complement of the set of things that non-nerds are interested in.

NB I deviate from the nerd stereotype insofar as I am blonde, like being outdoors and run ten miles a day.

I suspect that the clumsiness is a sign of cerebellar problems, and the sensory differences are down to 'weak central coherence' - being more conscious of the lower levels of sensory processing.