Do you think aspies might have an advantage over NTs?

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Once you know what you are it is likely you will try to learn "proper" NT traits so long as they further your agenda. I had to learn a lot of "correct" responses to hold the job I wanted and it worked. So I wonder, are we better off than NTs who pick up stuff along the way, bit by bit. We, after all, are working at behavior modification with a purpose, like an actor learning a role. The NTs are ad-libing their whole lives. Once we know what we gotta do, might we have a better chance of success due to our extra effort?

I think that we do have some advantages.

I don't think that's one of them. I don't think that appropriate social interaction is ad-libbing for NTs; it's behaving naturally. What we have to think about and work for doesn't require effort on their part. They are able to access the social code at a younger age, with greater facility, without all the struggle. I think that is a great advantage for NTs! They can be themselves and still make their way in society, we don't really have that option to the same degree. Yes, we can learn to "fake NT" but I bet it's much easier to be NT without having to remember how to behave like someone we are not.

Last edited by Rose_in_Winter on 04 Apr 2010, 6:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, I do not think having to learn by rote and recall by rote and to think about and use energy on things that just happen automatically for others results in a net advantage over those who can do these things automatically and usually to a higher standard and without any explicit effort whatsoever.

Yes and they will continue to thing worse of those who do not possess those qualities.
So even if people with autism became the rulers of all existence, we would not be seen as equal, due to this.

I dunno. I tried acting the role for many years. It burned me out, badly. Pretty close to fatally.

I guess I was fairly successful while I was trying. People seemed to like me, and want to give me jobs or promote me. But then, there were a lot of things I still didn't pick up on, like when I'm being taken advantage of. Or when people are laughing at me and not with me.

With some people I will be myself; with others I'm very guarded and withdrawn. Either way, I just can't bring myself to care about "acting" NT anymore. I've just plain burned out on it.

No, I don't think having to learn systematically the social rules and gestures over the years can give you any advantage. NTs knew it from pretty much the age of 4/5, us? Still teaching ourselves well into our late adulthood.

Yeah REALLY sounds like an advantage doesn't it.

No matter how hard you work at it, no matter how well you think you have the act down - you're never doing it as well as you think that you are.

Oh, you may get on passably well from day-to-day - for a while. But the whole time, they're saying things like "What's up with up with that one? What's their deal? Why do they act like that, that's so weird" and snickering, every time you leave the room. And eventually the boss will just get irritated with you for being out of synch with the rest of the 'team'. Buh-bye!

And that's when you're expending maximum effort to fly under the radar.

If you know you were born with an inability to read nonverbal signals and understand social cues, how could you possibly know for sure when you're 'faking it' well enough to actually fool anybody?

Exactly. Willard is gifted at wording harsh realities.

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Last edited by druidsbird on 05 Apr 2010, 10:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Money is life. If you have enough money, you can live a reasonably good life. If you can't make money, the odds are stacked well against you.

It depends upon the situation; I for one can intuitively understand mechanical concepts simply by looking at them and can then re-engineer the principle into a new and innovative use, I've yet to meet the NT that can do that. If however the situation is picking up a girl at a crowded bar, then no, most of us are at a definite disadvantage, including me. Change the situation again to trying to pick up a date online, and suddenly I'm Mr. pick up artist, everything is dependent on context.

AS people CAN have advantages over NTs: we have different strengths and weakness. While everyone is unique, often our differences are much more stark. This can mean our doing things no one else considers doing, which usually just makes us weird, but sometimes it makes us very, very effective. I would consider most lists of possible famous AS people as finding extreme versions of this: Mozart, Wittgenstein, Bill Gates, etc...

One very current example of an AS person seeing things differently and having a surprising advantage was portrayed in a book by Michael Lewis, "The Big Short". The AS person in question, Dr. Michael Burry, saw the collapse in the subprime housing market long before most everyone else, especially the hyper-educated, informed, and well payed NTs close to the market. An excerpt on Burry and how he saw things differently, is found here: Betting on the Blindside: Vanity Fair article/excerpt on Dr. Michael Burry

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Last edited by timeisdead on 04 Apr 2010, 8:58 pm, edited 4 times in total.

um...I really do not want to divide people along those lines. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Big "Agree" here. I can do that with mathematical and statistical problems. I can see that your methodological problem is simply the inverse of something I came across ten years ago, with a little help from another method I know, so here is your solution. But I cannot tell, when leaving friends' houses, whether it is appropriate to hug/kiss goodbye, and if so (i.e. when I see others doing it) how to do it. I just have no intuition for these social situations, but give me a statistical problem to solve from my data and I am a duck in its favorite pond.

I am a problem-solver, except when it comes to social and emotional problems: then I am all at sea ("alexithymia"). I am ahead of the crowd in logical intelligence (top 1%), and way behind in social and emotional intelligence (bottom couple of %). We have strengths, and we have weaknesses. NTs are more often all-rounders: jack of all trades, master of none. Where I work, I tend to be the technical specialist doing arcane things that only I know how to do. I am the master number cruncher, but please don't ask me to manage anything, I cannot do that. And I still have problems with shyness and getting upset in situations where other people wouldn't.

Oh, and then there are the sensory sensitivity problems... aaaargh!