How autistic are geeks?

[megamole]

From this BBC News article:

For the first time the government is to calculate the number of adults with autism in England.

Announcing the £500,000 project, Care Services Minister Ivan Lewis said autistic adults are too often abandoned by health and social services.

Also, the leading autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, his uncle...)

Comments

[atreic]

My mum worked with adults with severe autism for many years, and she came to the conclusion that everyone was autistic to a lesser or greater degree.

[megamole]

I would tend to agree, in the sense that everyone exhibits one or more personality traits that could be labelled "autism spectrum". What I'm struggling with, indeed finding potentially dangerous, is assuming that these make one autistic.

[simont]

I tend to take the opposite view: if everyone or nearly everyone has some of the personality traits, then the word "autistic" should be reserved for people who have enough of them to be a real inconvenience. Words which describe everybody are not useful words, any more than words which describe nobody.

The analogy I usually think of is "disabled". Consider someone who has a slight chronic twinge in a leg muscle, which doesn't prevent them from doing anything remotely reasonable. (Perhaps it might have ruled out a career as a top professional footballer, but let us assume that the person wasn't in the running for such a career for more mundane reasons.) It would seem very silly to me to describe such a person as "slightly disabled". What they have is a condition which would be a disability if it were (say) a hundred times more severe, but it isn't and hence it does not in fact disable them

[megamole]

I think we're in agreement here; we're both saying that "slightly autistic" is a dangerous term and highlighting a concept of a sort of "line" which distinguishes the autism that functionally inconveniences people from one or two personality traits.

We're just saying it from opposite directions ;-)

[gayalondiel]

I don't know enough about autism to offer you an answer, but I tend towards the belief that most personality or psychological disorders are spectrums (spectra?) and most people exhibit bits of all of them. I would guess autism falls into that category.

OTOH it could just be that when you spend time thinking about a given thing you end up seeing it everywhere.

[caomhin]

I always find the Internet trend of self-diagnosing with Asperger's faintly ironic; although we're talking extremes it just seems bizarre that so many people apparently with that disconnect are still aware enough to take a web quiz and proclaim knowledge of their lives - especially as many take the tests to confirm their beliefs

[megamole]

THRRPPPPP! So I did.

[simont]

To answer your questions