Dispelling the myth that autists are poor at teamwork

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This web site https://autcollab.org/about/ acts as a hub for mutual support, and encourages neurodivergent individuals and ventures to connect and establish long-term collaborations. You are welcome to join us.

Related webinar "From the busyness of innovation to the creation of lasting value"
http://s23m.com/techweek2018/ (95 minutes) and overview https://youtu.be/9Zd8uZ33NOQ (24 minutes).

Thank you.

Reading the link, this jumped out at me:

Discrimination against autistic people is comparable to the level of discrimination against homosexuals 50 years ago. The pathologisation of autism has led to what some critical researchers refer to as the autism industrial complex.

Spine chilling though that claim is, even to read, let alone think about, there is a great deal of truth in it. I remember acutely witnessing the hatred and oppression 50 years ago, unlike perhaps the majority of members here who were not witnesses, and not born until decades later.

Welcome back. Your work is admirable.

My hope is that modern global peer to peer communication technology allows us to make faster progress than 50 years ago. This excellent by Robert Chapman article https://intersectionalneurodiversity.wo ... -epidemic/ should also give society something to think about.

As part of the seminar below I asked the audience about the social model of disability. Across 30 people who were interested in social progress and innovation there was not a single person who had heard about it. This confirms the level of ignorance which we still encounter on a daily basis.

On a positive note, https://autcollab.org/ is leading to ongoing local and global collaborations of small neurodivergent teams as expected.

I absolutely agree with that quote. The fact that organizations like Autism Speaks still exist and their rhetoric is widely believed by the public shows that we need to make progress on the front of neurodiversity. I wasn't alive 50 years ago to see the oppression against gay people, but I am LGBT myself and I have learned about it secondhand.

For example, it is well known that homosexuality was seen as a mental disorder. This is especially comparable to autism, which is seen by many as nothing more than a disease, and of course is still a disorder. However, what makes autism a disorder? Only the fact that it is socially in the minority. If everyone was autistic, being NT would be seen as a disorder.

Another well known example of oppression against homosexuals 50 years ago was their forced chemical castration, or being exposed to other harmful "treatments" for homosexuality. This is very much true for autistic people as well. For example, autistic children being forced to undergo dangerous biomedical interventions.

Even on a lower level, it is still socially acceptable in many circles to use autism as an insult and to see autistic people as inferior.

Autism by itself, in my opinion, is not a disability. It becomes a disability, however, when others discriminate against autistic people and force them to fit in with neurotypical society. In a NT society, autism is a disabliity. In a neurodiverse society, it is not.

I believe that autism rights and neurodiversity need to be the next movements. Neurodiversity can merge with activism for those with mental health problems, as well as those with other disabilities, which creates a much wider base.

Terrible as that time was - I was born in the immediate post WW2 era - the unconscionable ferocity and hate was directed mainly at gay men of adult age. The murderous perpetrators of the most vicious violence were usually unrelated men.

The murder, ferocity and hate that is perpetrated on AS people can happen at any age, and not uncommonly parents are the most vicious perpetrators.

The dehumanisation, violence, murder and hatred directed at AS children seems worse than any other group of childhood-aged victims. This is how successful hate groups and Suzanne Wright's personal mission in her lifetime to spread hatred has been. This is the result of that sustained and well funded propaganda. I believe this is the main reason why the violent offending against and murder of AS children is so much more frequent in the USA compared to other Western countries.

It's a little sad really that we have rightly been outraged by the revelations that Hans Asperger caused the murder of AS children when they are being murdered right now more cruelly in many cases and without much complaint from the AS community. Sometimes I think I will die of sadness.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/mom-who-s ... in-prison/

Some of these stories are truly beyond belief. It makes you wonder whether it is such a good idea to be recognised as 'human'.

The unfolding of the story around Hans Asperger was interesting to observe, with many people from the autism industry jumping in, as if the specific label makes any significant difference, whilst at the same time doing nothing about the continued use of pathologising language.

I suspect many autism professionals are highly aware that their patronising and pathologising treatment of autists is not that far removed from what happened back then. Hence they felt compelled to make a big show of dissociating themselves from Hans Asperger. There no clear cut boundary between sending people to their certain death and slowly driving people into depression and towards suicide. In fact, slow death seems to have been a common option back then, and now people are dying even slower – simply look up the average life expectancy of autists.

Yes, one could die of sadness. I pledge allegiance to the non human creatures on this planet.

I so agree with every point you make ^.

Hans Asperger's autism pathology diagnosis was about people who did not fit in specific ways which is pretty much what today's DSM 5 "Autism Spectrum Disorder" is about. The difference was what the "autistics" were not fitting into due to lack of teamwork or perceived lack of teamwork skills. In Asperger's Nazi Vienna what Autistics were not fitting into was the "Volk" the organism of a nation and superior race. In America what Autistics in are not fitting into is family, friends, school, employment etc.

I speak German and have listened to an interview with Hans Asperger from the 1970s. The detached way he talks about atypical behaviour and atypical people is very similar to what you hear from autism professionals today, not in any way inappropriate by typical cultural norms, yet still sending a clear message to the 'less fortunate' atypical creatures.

Typical humans coming together in groups are highly dangerous animals, as we know from the Stanford prison experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0. The logical conclusion from that experiment should be that giving any human(s) coercive power over others is a really bad idea. But our society has not learned that lesson. Instead human 'civilisation' and nearly all our organisations continue to be build on power relationships between humans.

There are two other experiments that are just as shocking as the Stanford prison experiment from my perspective:

1. The Asch conformity experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIh4MkcfJA

2. This little experiment that compares cultural transmission between typical and autistic children https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6ocDm ... 9UWHM/view

Taken together, these three experiments tell you everything you need to know about the social dynamics of 'typical' human behaviour.

It would be time to relearn some very old wisdom from hunter gatherer societies, and to pick up on the most important social norm that appears to have been shared or very common across such small scale societies:

Any attempts to gain power over others must be constrained

(See for example Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, "A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution", 2011).

With the emergence of 'civilisation' this social norm went out the window.

In modern 'civilised' society the notion of teamwork and collaboration is as described here https://autcollab.org/2017/09/30/social/. Note how 'civilised collaboration' differs significantly from the autistic understanding of collaboration of (a) learning from each other and (b) working towards a shared goal. When 'civilised' humans are not at war and killing each other, many go to 'work' to play social games. I can recommend the excellent new book by anthropologist David Graeber titled "BS Jobs: A Theory" for plenty of evidence.

"Working Definition: a BS job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

"Those who work BS jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is."

"... by no means all those who felt they are engaged in BS are information workers; but if our surveys are to be trusted, it seems evident that 
a majority of those classed as information workers do feel that if their jobs were to vanish, it would make very little difference to the world."

"All I am really arguing in this book is that just as much of what the financial sector does is basically smoke and mirrors, so are most of the information-sector jobs that accompanied its rise as well."

I have a theory that when young or older adults discover they have always been AS, the typical reaction of wanting to acquire information is often extreme and consumed with fervour. The problem is that most of it is written by NTs from NT perspectives for NT purposes. And I think that the consumption of that information at such a vulnerable stage may be a reason as to why there is so little (almost nil) critical analysis from AS people of these often glib theories which oppress AS people. There is a kind of unintentional, subconscious collusion I think, where many AS people repeat and defend so-called, received facts without really delving into their origins at all.

There is also a kind of deference to authority which I have seen here many many times, some of which perhaps arises from ignorance about research limitations and methodology, and how unreliable findings can be, how ambitious researchers can be.

It seems to me that if a NT "expert" is reported as pronouncing that AS people are no good at x, or can't do y, then about 75% accept this as fact without any analysis. 25% to varying degrees do challenge the paradigm and the results it produces.

This may explain in part why there has been so little progress in challenging reigning myths, many of why are perpetrated by "educated experts", AS people and organisations. A dangerous trio.

Asperger was seen as an authority, and championed by NTs before the AS acceptance followed. And we need to think of that as a cautionary story whenever claims are made as fact to our detriment.

I concur with your assessment.

Human politics at scale is not about achieving shared understanding. It has always been about attempts at empire creation/maintenance in the absence of understanding and empathy for groups of “others”. Power relationships are constructed via stories and via technological amplification of social games.

On the role of stories in human power relationships:

A warning from the perspective of an honest storyteller

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

On the role of technology in human power relationships:

All human artefacts are technology. But beware of anybody who uses this term. 
Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” 
has an agenda for your behaviour: usually what is being referred to as 
“technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to.

“Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.” This is actually almost always a political move. Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. 
Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.



– Ted Nelson, 
Pioneer of information technology, 
philosopher, and sociologist. 
He coined the terms hypertext 
and hypermedia in 1963.

Not even 1% of members here ever post anything about the relationship between the uses of research to serve power in relation to AS. Yet power is at the heart of it all, the misuse of power, the desire to disempower, power relations.

Isn't that rather strange given how disempowered AS people are, as a group, in all major fields of life?

No-one but a few outliers question theory-driven research models which report findings based on assumptions made in the pre-theory stage. 99% of the research is theory driven in the most basic way, and it is this: "Autistic people are deficient, so I will devise a theory that proves it". That is theory driven research, and not to understand the power relations that enable it to flourish (at great financial cost, millions which could be used for the benefit of AS people administered by AS people in teams) is not to understand anything much at all about the power relationships that affect AS lives on a huge scale.

This is so important, and as the clock is ticking on my lifespan, whether fast or slow at this stage, I wish I could see some glimmer of hope that AS people are waking up in large numbers. But they aren't. Yet.

There is a conference in London this July (currently calling for papers) that will take this more nuanced perspective. I will find that link and post it here. Meantime, for anyone here who might be puzzled by what Critical Theory as applied to AS is, a basic about it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... src=recsys

Autists need to realise the following:

A. The hyper-competitive nature of our society is an emergent property of civilisation, it is not typical human nature. Human babies are intrinsically helpful and collaborative (Michael Tomasello, Why we cooperate, 2009), but they soak up cultural norms and beliefs like a sponge.

Cultural transmission is a powerful force that is very easy for us to underestimate. In the typical case transmission occurs predominantly from parents to children. In the autistic case transmission of knowledge occurs in both directions, and sometimes more from children to parents (if both generations are autistic). The way in which society increases its understanding about the world is via young autistic and inquisitive minds. Cultures that pathologise autistic minds are characterised by a loss of interest in knowledge and understanding, and by an addiction to social games that distract from other aspects of life. Societies that have become addicted to social games react to original thinkers with the same kind of denial that an alcoholic exhibits towards anyone who points out the problem. The difference is one of scale. Social games affect entire societies rather than individuals.

As outlined here https://autcollab.org/2018/04/09/autist ... arthlings/, evolutionary forces have honed the human ability to learn by imitation, but evolutionary forces have also kept alive the genes that are needed to survive during periods of rapid environmental change.

B. Obsession with social status has been a core characteristic of all civilisations to date. All three ingredients that power the boom and bust life cycle of civilisation are problematic:

1. Cities (large aggregations of interacting people, which are a prerequisite for large scale coercion)
2. Written language (symbolic systems that facilitate the preservation and propagation of cultural rituals and power structures across space and time)
3. Money (an abstract tool for creating, maintaining, and amplifying power gradients)

With digital communication platforms and the internet, coercion no longer requires cities. To again quote Ted Nelson:

"In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off airconditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room."

C. Autists have a much stronger sense of agency than typical humans. We do not seek safety in the comfort of the herd. Inspite of the above three factors, our originality allows us to creatively use technology in new ways to create new forms of organisation, new languages, and alternative metrics that track physical properties and constraints that matter to the living creatures on this planet.

Here is the link to the London Conference in July 2018. I am not well enough to attend, that amount of travel is beyond me at the moment. I hope someone from Wrong Planet will attend.

https://participatoryautismresearch.wor ... or-papers/

Thanks for the link.

I've posted the content in-line below, so that people don't have to click through. Damian Milton, the organiser, has also produced an excellent short presentation on including autistic stakeholders https://youtu.be/de8-tuiw2VQ.

PARC Critical Autism Studies Conference – Call for Papers

Date: 18th July 2018. Venue: Keyworth Building, Keyworth Street, London South Bank University (LSBU), London, SE1 6LN.

Following on from the conference on Critical Autism Studies (CAS) that was held at LSBU in 2017, the Participatory Autism Research Collective will be running a free one-day conference on 18th July 2018.

We invite contributions from experiential, empirical, theoretical, and practical perspectives to critically explore autism. This conference builds upon the recent current issues piece published in Disability and Society by Woods et al. (2018) in looking to expand discussions in this area. Possible themes include but are not limited to:

Participatory and emancipatory research
Theoretical and conceptual understandings of autism and autistic ways of being
Critical evaluations of support strategies, interventions and public policy
Research methodologies and ethics
Cultural representations of autism

Deadline for abstract (max 300 words) submissions: 8th June 2018.

To register for a free place and to submit an abstract (or an alternative submission) please email [email protected]. Conference registration is free, yet places are limited. We are unable to fund travel expenses for attendees.