Autism/Asperger's prejudice map

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I've been thinking about trying to create a sophisticated map that plots out the ignorance and intolerance of the average person within different regions. I've been kind of afraid to travel since the Sandy Hook tragedy, for fear of being persecuted for no reason. This map could serve as a travel guide for people on the spectrum. To start off with, I'd need some reasonable, objective guidelines that could be used to quantify prejudice. Then, I'd need to get input from a lot of people on the spectrum to collect data points, that could hopefully be extrapolated to show some regional trends. Is anyone else interested?

There are what....?

EIGHT BILLION or so people on the planet?

I seriously doubt one person would be able to achieve what you're aiming for. You'd need a staff and huge resources to do anything that approached an accurate "survey".

It'd be a shame for you to start something and end up realizing you can't finish after expending a large amount of time and energy.

As for traveling and people's reactions to the idea of an Autistic being a school shooter, take it easy. I haven't heard of any "kill the Aspies" mobs forming anywhere in the country. Not much chance you'll end up with masked people with flaming torches on your front lawn any time soon.

To protect us from all those evil NT nazis out to get us?
Kinda like an underground railroad?

Here are 3 proposed markers that might help.

1)tolerance for weirdness/difference in general. You can use tolerance for homosexuality as a proxy for tolerance in general. A place where gay and straight people have learned to co-exist will be a place where the genral skill of getting along with others who are unlike you is practiced.

2)"nerd" meccas. Places where being a "nerd" is not so marginalized is a place where autistic traits in general might be found in a greater density than in the general population

3)autism "hot spots" where the diagnosis rate seems higher than the country overall. This may overlap with (2) in some places, if Assortative Mating is to be believed (BAP nerd parents meet, marry, have autistic childen). Where it doesn't overlap with (2) it will also be places where parents with autistic children have congragated because the school situation seems better for their kids. This means the non-autistic locals will have greater exposure to autistic behaviours and may (hopefully) have acclimated to them.

Looking for these 3 markers is something you can do with google.

You could map levels of tolerence more easily than levels of intolerence.

If it were gays you could put hotspots of gay tolerence at Cape Cod, Key West, and San Francisco.

With the autism spectrum there is probably just one equivalent 'hot spot"- Silicon Valley.

You can add Seattle as one of the safe places for those on the spectrum. There are autism counselors here, an adult autism clinic, meetup groups for those on the spectrum and a plethora of agencies helping those on the spectrum. Seattle is pretty diverse and tolerant, too. Capitol Hill by itself is a hotspot for diversity; other areas like mine merely tolerate it.

You don't need 8 billion observations to have a reasonably accurate map. A couple hundred will do, depending on your resolution (the size of the areas you're dividing your map into). More if you want to do more than one region of the world; more if you want to do sub-regions of countries. I wonder if there are online maps that people can put little pins into--like, you could do a short survey that gives them a score for their area, and then the program would stick that score on the location they're reporting on. There'd be blank areas for places where people don't tend to speak English or where they don't tend to access the internet, though.

I dont think that there is yet anyplace on the planet where you would have to worry about being lynched just because you're an aspie.

Yep, I'd say slight over reaction - although I don't think it's a bad idea to map places like red robin mentioned, where we might find kindred souls or help if we need it.

Uhm, actually, yes, it happens.

Not lynched, necessarily; more like, killed by your parents, or killed by your staff, or shot by the cops, or bullied so much that you eventually kill yourself--but, yes, people are killed because they're autistic.

Yeah, it's a different thing from getting lynched because you're gay. Usually murders of GLBT people are done out of active hatred and desire to harm someone. The perpetrators see the gay person as an enemy. In the case of autistic murder victims, the perpetrators usually see the autistic person as non-human, unimportant, or an obstacle to be got rid of. Oh, and they're also more likely to get away scot-free because it's "so stressful" to raise an autistic kid. Well, if they're white, they do. If they're black, they go to jail, because black people don't have access to slick lawyers...er, I mean, black people are violent. Yeah.

See sig for examples.

By what metric do you measure "ignorance" or "tolerance"?

I mean, you measure distance in meters, mass in kilograms, time in seconds, volume in liters, and so forth ... what do you measure "ignorance" and "tolerance" in?

Or is this going to be a map of personal impressions? As in ...

"Someone once gave me a dirty look in Fresno, so let's mark the entire Bay Area as 'hostile'!"