Most people on this forum don't have Asperger's Syndrome

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To this point you were doing a wonderful job of describing me. There are several other things like the stims etc. that could be added but you got a lot of the biggies for me.

But then you jumped the track for me
It is true that a lot of people do not understand me and more inconveniently they often MISunderstand me In which case Instead of being a puzzle to them they have put me into a (often unsavory) stereotype. E.G. I once had a colleague tell me, "After a person gets to know you, you really aren't so bad". That was actually a pretty decent and accurate assessment on his part. It is also consistent with my experience with a few of the folks in the psychology industry who had trouble figuring me out or putting a name to my weirdness.

But as for being "trapped in my mind" and having a "horrible life" I have to say that is not the case for me. I have difficulty properly analyzing and understanding the motivations of others but I can still do that to an adequate degree to reach a modus vivendi. I can reach a level of being able to anticipate them and their actions and that is sufficient to get by.

Life has been a bit frustrating at times but I have found it interesting and entertaining albeit chocked full of inconveniences and disappointments at times . Sometimes it is frustrating to see neurotypicals not impacted negatively by things in society, but then society is mostly structured for them. But to say that my life has been horrible is not true at all. I can however understand how it could be so for many Aspies. Perhaps I lucked out to land on the high end of the IQ scale and that has helped to make me valuable enough to others to prompt them to overlook (put up with) what they regard as my social deficiencies. I have a wonderful wife who loves me (she is abnormally tolerant !). I enjoyed my employment as an engineer in high tech industries, and as a professor of mechanical engineering (think eccentric college professor liked by most my students, not so much by many of my colleagues). Yeah, I had a lot of trouble in school with bullies and I still have trouble with some people who try to push me around, manipulate and dominate me (they read me wrong and act according to their misconception) but now in the end they pretty much find they can't. (Funny how dense they can be about a social interaction when they deal with someone who is not neurotypical!)

I can grant you that some things in the life of an Aspie can be overbearing and a burden, but life need not be "horrible"

i somewhat agree with the OP even though he is long gone.

i do not identify with many people on this forum and they, i guess, do not identify with me.
i was diagnosed with asperger syndrome in 1996 and prior to that, i was diagnosed as HFA, and i was schooled in special schools throughout most of my schooling life.
my psychiatrist told me when i was 12 that i had asperger syndrome, but it was not a recognized disorder at the time.
i thought of myself as AS from about 1984 even though it had not been yet formalized as a diagnosis

she said that asperger syndrome was "non intellectually handicapped autism", and is a rare type of autism wherein intelligence is not a limiting factor.

she said that my sensory and ideational assembly of the world i see would be senseless to me without the application of my intelligence to discern social dynamics in the form of "rules" that are testable and adequate to apply. a non autistic person does not need to apply intelligence, because their sense of the dynamics are inherent and instinctive.

she said that my approach to socializing is an artificial construct that is performed as a kind of solo dance, and choreographed purely from my acquired knowledge of rules rather than from spontaneous and instinctive reaction.

i never had a connection with anyone on any level in a deep way. that is, she said, a hallmark of autism.
i do not exist as a component of society, but as an adjunct, and i am not sewn from the fabric of normal neurology.

due to the fact that i was this way since birth, i never really felt anything about people that i would miss if i never experienced it. i do not need to see what other people think in order to feel as if i am really alive like neurally normal people do.

many people on this site seem to inherently understand how to cultivate fertile conversational flow, and i have always had a major problem with reciprocation.
i have a formal style that is not possible to vary with ease. i am not flexible enough for "banter", and there is much bantering on this site.

there are many pretty girls on this site who may or may not have AS, but they attract males to the site who otherwise were just browsing when they saw a picture of a pretty girl who speaks well and who seems naive and non judgemental and they are tempted to join and claim they have asperger syndrome as a free pass to credibility.

it is easy to reel off a few short posts with stereotypical "asperger" content in order to keep fresh the "validity" of their claim to have asperger syndrome.

an example may be threads like "post your most embarrassing "aspie" moment", and there are a flurry of posts that are not able to be believed by me. some people who are solidly entrenched as popular members will post things that belie their authenticity when they post in threads like that, but most people do not notice how unbelievable or unlikely the posts in those threads are.

people who are shy and have a great need to express themselves may be drawn to asperger people (as they imagine them to be) in order to display themselves with less fear of judgement than they would have that prevents them from socializing in the normal world.

it is a mish mash of different people, but one thing strikes me, and that is how threads which are topical always are very busy.
fashion, news stories, politics, sports, philosophies associated with basal things (like gun control or abortion etc).

there are some posters on this site that i always read, and i have a sense of familiarity with the way they think and talk (all of them are female at the moment which is curious), and i sometimes think that the veracity and fundamental importance of what they say is overlooked by the social rush of the "in" crowd.

i am not sure if this is a valid gripe or not, but i never use buzz words or alter my vocabulary to assuage my image.
words like "dude" and "chill" and "peeps" etc are somewhat foreign to my native vocabulary, as i do not replace adequate words in my vocabulary with new ones that all the "cool" people are saying.

i can only convey thoughts. i can not convey emotions or attitude, and the social grace that many posters have on this site makes me feel alienated. not because i envy them, but because they are concerned with things i consider unimportant, and also due to the fact they claim to have AS and talk on behalf of other supposed AS people.

some of them are like pied pipers to who's whistle other less vocal but misinformed people follow with full belief.

i am not however concerned that probably most of the people on this site do not have AS.
without the bulk of the non AS posters, this site would be thread bare and die.

it is they who stimulate discussion, and they who incite the AS people to think about what they believe.

maybe i am wrong but whatever. that's my cursory summary.

b9
I think that on several points that we experience Asperger's in the same way or a similar way. There are other aspects where we have a good bit of difference. But I thin that Asperger's Syndrome is better diagnosed when one has quite of few of the characteristics that can be listed in what we might call a menu. Your language difficulties seem a bit more "rigid" than mine but not all that different. Mine are sufficiently different to have caused me plenty of embsrassment (when I later found out how they were (mis)understood by NT's. I miss body language and I do it badly as well. I have adapted pretty well for an aspie but life and especially social life have not always been easy for me. And I found a niche where things worked well enough to get by with less difficulty. So I guess that what I am saying is that there is quite a bit of variability in what can properly be called Asperger's syndrome.

I think this reasoning can be formalized in this way:

Some people on WP are not like me.
I have Aspergers.
Therefore some people on WP do not have Aspergers.

There is a secondary, implicit argument in the form:

All people with Aspergers are alike.

If this statement were true, then the first argument would be true.

But the professional consensus seems to be that the proposition "all people with Aspergers are alike" is false, therefore the first argument is false.

Without the implicit statement "all people with Aspergers are alike" the first argument is no more valid than this obviously false argument:

Some people on WP are not like me.
I am human.
Therefore some people on WP are not human.


We know that humans are not all alike, so recognizing the underlying error is easy in this case.

For some reason, many people have a harder time recognizing that people with Aspergers are not all alike, but the evidence of this is overwhelming.

It seems to me that one could construct a matrix of autistic traits and find a certain clusters within that matrix and that this causes some autistic people to question the autism of other autistic people who don't fall in the same cluster.

One might think of autistic development as a dynamic system with several attractors that present as similar phenotypes or sub-types within the Autistic Spectrum.

For example one might have an emotional connection scale with a 0 representing a response such as yours: "i never had a connection with anyone on any level in a deep way" and a 10 representing a person who easily makes intimate connections with people.

You might find that some aspergers people scored a 0 or 1 such a scale while others scored at 3-4 and some as high as 5. To the person who considered themselves the benchmark and scored a 0 or 1, those with higher scores might seem not really aspergian or autistic.

Such variability in complexity of verbal communication is expected, but for reasons that are not clear to me, many people are less accepting of such variation in other capabilities and traits. Nevertheless, such ranges of ability are well documented in autistic and specifically aspergers people.

Given the available information on this, I think the arguments of the OP and the arguments from your own experience are false, though they provide an interesting perspective.

I do not detect any such reasoning. In this quote, b9 has merely stated disidentification with other WP users. I see no indication that this disidentification forms the premise of an argument that other people on WP do not have AS.

There was a thread about autism having no neurological template of its own. Then why do spectrumites have the same core symptoms(social difficulties)?

there is a reason why people say "when you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person". we all have a different clump of symptoms and abilities for a reason, and it is because of how our brains are wired compared to other autistics as well as compared to neurotypicals.

autistic brains are idiosyncratic and individualised

I can't believe this thread is being taken seriously. The OP does not understand the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy.

If you look at the entirety of the OP and the entirety of b9's message, the logic is absolutely clear.

I did not wish to quote that volume of text.

It's because autism is a "syndrome." Syndromes are conditions defined only by a set of characteristic atypical easily observable traits (biologically speaking, the "what" but not the "how" or "why). We don't all have the same core symptoms resulting from the same autism (this is abundantly clear in the literature on this topic). We all have the same core symptoms because that is how autism is defined diagnostically.

This can be confusing for lay people, as many other diseases referred to commonly as "syndromes" were similarly described only by symptoms when they were first discovered (ex: Down syndrome in 1866), but have since been found to ACTUALLY HAVE one underlying cause (in the case of Down syndrome, that would be trisomy 21). Because of social momentum though non-medical folks keep using the old terms.

[/soap box]

Last edited by Fern on 18 Sep 2015, 2:51 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Yes. And it's worth noting that the "core difficulties" that define the spectrum are not defined positively as a thing, but negatively in terms of differences from the neurotypical.

There are many ways to have difficulty in social communication and many ways to have restricted, repetitive interests and patterns of behavior, these are patterns of difference from an expected norm, not patterns of identity and association in their own right and the heterogeneity of their manifestations is widely discussed in the professional literature.

People can have similar and identical traits without there being a definite and unique neurological pattern behind it. Behavior and neurology are not the same thing.

I am so very grateful to you, W., for posting this exceptionally interesting link, the most illuminating and interesting one that I have read anywhere for a long time. You have really made my day. In social science, (though rarely in neuroscience) it is a common practice to examine and analyse "between group differences" and
"within group differences". How refreshing it is to see a neuroscientific experimenter do this!! ! While not comprehensive, nevertheless it may be that kind of keyhole experiment that finally shines a light into an overlooked area that has existed all along, neither seen nor conceptualised.

It has caused me so much consternation in the past when some neuroscientists have made wild generalisations from extremely reductionist studies, over-claiming that autism resides in this or that single part of the brain's anatomy, such as the hippocampus. I suspect that these reductionist claims, which attract so much misleading publicity in the press, come from eager-beavers striving to enhance their reputations, funding and career. I have certainly met academic types like this, whose pursuit of truth is completely subservient to their pursuit of success.

Perhaps what's ridiculous is to assume you know the intimate details of anyone you haven't personally interacted with. And even if you had done so with even ONE other member of this set of forums, a VERY important question is "Are you trained to diagnose ANY form of autism?"

If the answer to that question is "No", and I suspect it is, and since you HAVEN'T had up-close, personal interaction with the other people who visit this site, then... Guess what?

You don't know what you're talking about.

You're making up a fantasy, doing a VERY good job at making yourself believe it's true, AND trying to convince us that it is.

You lose.

While you yourself might have some of the problems you've listed, in place of or in addition to a form of autism, the fact remains you're in NO position to make claims about a bunch of people you don't know.

Thanks for playing. You get no "lovely parting gifts".

But you can look at the DSM. It's not just a diagnosis made because someone is a little social awkward. There's more to Asperger's than that. He wasn't saying to anyone "no, you don't have Asperger's". He was saying that people can be socially awkward without having Asperger's. Which is true. I don't see any reason you responded like that.

I find this response fascinating and hard to understand. It's as if you took the language Sethno quoted and Sethno's response in complete isolation from the thread. But the thread is the context that gives those words meaning. This reminds me of what Starkid did in responding to my comments about b9's tentative and partial agreement with the OP: both your objection and Starkid's were to the posts as if they had no context.

The language Sethno quoted was from the OP which went on to say:

Yet you responded to Sethno:
In fact he was saying exactly and specifically that.

Even stranger, you suggest that the DSM diagnostic criteria for autism are a guideline for determining who is an is not on the spectrum, but the criteria listed in the original post by Mw99 lists "self awareness" and "empathy" as criteria when these are not to be found in the DSM.

I find the discrepancy between your analysis of Mw99's statements as described by Sethno and the actual content of Mw99's post so great that I can only speculate that you did not consider the context at all, but took Sethno's post at contextless face value.

When I saw the language Sethno quoted, I thought, "this is referring back to the original post." But I think you took it as "this is a reference to the specific language quoted" and I suspect that this is very much the same thing Starkid did when objecting to the logic and fallacy that I discussed in the context of b9's post.

I wonder if that is correct and if those divergent understandings of quotes are a frequent source of misunderstandings on these threads?