All of the autistic people I know are smart. Really smart. The Silicon Valley or Absent Minded Professor type, though a fair number of them do end up kind of piled up at the bottom working for minimum wage. They just also know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, are really good at things, and it’s just sort of a fact of life that being smart doesn’t mean success.
They do, however, tend to have this sort of sense of humor where “oh, yeah, that plane crashed right into the ground and everybody died, haha” is totally normal. They, like I (a diagnosed autist), had the ability to view Reality directly, and talk about it, and it’s totally normal.
The weird ones are everyone else.
I failed out of a PHD program, and I didn’t make it particularly far. One of the professors who wrote me a recommendation warned me that PHD programs have a tendency to be very good at sorting for the kinds of people who really want to do it. People that either really love the science, or really like the subject matter… not the kind that’s just chasing clout. In hindsight he was warning me specifically, that he didn’t think this was a good path for me. So I drank and watched anime, and barely studied and did almost nothing in the lab, until I more-or-less failed out, and I took advantage of everyone’s kindness in order to scurry out with a Master’s instead of nothing.
When talking to some current ABD’s (All But Dissertations, meaning they’re in their last year or two and have jumped through all the hoops except to show the final results of their research), I said something slightly disparaging against myself and other dropouts, and how the people who have what it takes tend to reveal themselves and be sorted away from the riffraff. People with the drive and focus, that actually want to be there, that actually want to do the science. They immediately went into damage-control mode saying “you’re so smart” or “if you really wanted to you could” and “those grapes are sour anyways”.
I looked at them, utterly stunned by how instinctive such a reaction to them is. After a second, I just absolutely exploded “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? This is a thing that has already happened. The outcome is known. JUST VIEW REALITY DIRECTLY!” And, nothing really bad happened to me. I got exiled to a 70k/year starting salary and started making 6 figures before I hit 30. What a horrific fate. I’m not under the impression that I’m dumb, just that doing piles of differential equations was potentially not near the top of the things I enjoy doing with my life, and it shows.
This is like when someone is 100+ lbs overweight, and at the company potluck the get up for their fourth serving and make a little self-deprecating joke about still being hungry because they’re a little on the heavy side, and the HR ladies rush to say “oh, well we’re eating a little late today” and other kinds of “you’re not that fat”. Once, in college, I was the HR lady in the situation, and my friend just looked at me, baffled, and said “Yes. Yes, I am. I am that fat.” I don’t know why I didn’t just view Reality directly, but considering the friend was an Electrical Engineering major, who probably gained a fair bit of that weight while doing WOW raids, I’m sure he’s the type of person who has no difficulty in viewing Reality directly.
John McWhorter has a few rants that he’s tired of going over when he’s on the Glenn Show, and one of them is that he has no idea what people really mean when they say stuff along the lines of “black peoples’ strength lie elsewhere”.
from
I think there's a very interesting question being posed as to whether we can just say that black people are going to be these people with rhythm, these people who don't deal in exactness, these people who are holistic, these people who can create hip-hop, but it's going to be the white people who invent glasses and you know transistors, etc.
Besides the sense of “black people are good at dancing, music and art”, he’s not really sure what’s supposed to be good about this kind of “holistic” thinking. For example, in railing against a document about math, he disagrees with the main points of
1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking;”
2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;
3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;
4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;
5. to value “procedural fluency” – i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … -- over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about,” rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;
I share this sort of view on math, where there really is a right answer, and that being able to do it is kind of a binary thing, and that there tends to be a skill tree that builds on itself. That being able to do it as opposed to knowing what it does is a very different thing that I had assumed was obvious to all, but as in the video, the thing he’s mostly railing against is that he doesn’t want Black people to be relegated to the “feeling” of math, as if “doing” math was beyond expectation for them.
But, I want to kind of answer his question in a different way that I’ve been toying with, in my usual “no looking up papers, just off the cuff hypothesizing” way, which is: what if Black people have the ability to view Flow directly?
Say that autists have the ability to view Reality directly, but reality is extremely computationally expensive to predict. They’d be great at taking measurements carefully, and building slowly expanding islands of precise understanding, but they do so in an incredibly expansive stretch of territory, so it’s unlikely that autistic science will ever get a good read on everything.
What if some other group of people, say Black people, have the ability to view Flow directly. Rather than a collection of fine resolution snapshots of the area directly beneath their microscope, they aggregate a field of derivatives automatically into streamlines that are obvious, predictive, and easy to use. Automatic path planning via simply selecting streamlines, as opposed to an attempt to calculate the position and velocity of each object in a large field, then forward kinematics the body parts individually in order to … just an absolute mess.
In everyday life, being able to view the Flow of a conversation and get to the end 5 steps ahead of everyone else would look like being the smartest person in the room. Knowing immediately who to avoid, or which machine is slowing down the line, or any number of things could be represented as a Flow.
You could go further. The HR ladies have the ability to view Feelings directly and respond to them immediately, as opposed to calculating out a theory of mind for each person they’ve ever met and making best-guesses based on individual memories of various scenarios.
The Marxist PHD’s have the ability to view Power directly. I could come up with some headcannons about how these trust fund babies are such good Marxists, viewing Power directly, but their parents used their innate knowledge of where Power is for the kinds of work that lead to those trust funds, but it’s completely unsubstantiated because I actually don’t know who, if anyone, has a trust fund.
The usual counterarguments against certain forms of “multiple intelligences” work, but it’s at least a slightly coherent attempt at an answer. And, from a first-person perspective, it does seem like people are blind to the obvious Reality. They must be seeing something different. There’s so many times where everyone else is on a different page than me, but they’ve all independently gotten together onto that page, that they must be accessing a different set of information than I am.
It’s possible that instead of calculating out a theory of mind for each person I’m talking to and making best-guesses based on a library of memories of various scenarios, I should instead assume each person falls into one or two categories based on what kind of Truth they can view directly. I’m sure, for example, a lot of people can view Power pretty well because they see Flows directly, and things tend to flow towards and away from Power. I, uh, I guess I don’t have a good model for how one would change their behavior, even if they knew what their conversation partner could see.
I think you’re on to something.