Math question supposed to reveal if someone is autistic

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This makes sense. NTs process input in real-time, which might lead them to get tripped up by a question like this.

People on the spectrum would also be wary of being humiliated by a "gotcha" question.

Admittedly, if an examiner sat me down and asked me to answer this question, I'd stare at them incredibly annoyed - and put something completely random down, like the truth was always in you, then I'd walk off.

I freaking hate questions like these. Why do I need to know the price of the ball? Surely if I wanted to just buy the ball, then I could look at the independent price? Why the mind games? Am I making sure they're not ripping me off? Do I not trust this hypothetical store?



What utter nonsense. I'm turning my piece of paper into an aeroplane and throwing it at you if you're going to ask me this. You've been warned.

So maybe autistic people are more likely to get the answer right. That's not the same as "all autistic people are right and all nonautistic people are wrong". It still doesn't reveal anything.

You're right, I should've read the article. "Utter BS" still holds.

Without reading the article, I first very glibly arrived at the answer that the ball cost 10c. But I checked it and saw that was wrong, so I did it more carefully:

Then I looked at the article. It seems I can do both system 1 and system 2 thinking, but possibly I tend to try system 1 first, and then if that fails, I switch to system 2.

It kind of fits. I'm very aware that I often get trapped in minute details, which gets tedious for self and others and wastes a lot of time, so (perhaps as a somewhat reconstructed Aspie) I often to go for the glib way of thinking as a first resort, and if that fails, I revert to the more detailed thinking style.

I had fairly good training in elementary mathematics, so I knew a bit about "simultaneous equations" - the exercise here is much like the questions they used to give us. It's not every day I need to know such things, so it took a bit of effort to recall the matter.

I don't believe it's diagnostic of ASD. I think it's diagnostic of having some kind of a flair for elementary mathematics.

I didn't click the button that said "continue reading" because I thought it might lead to tracking or a signup coercion, also because I've spent enough time on this matter as it is and I think I got all I need to know from the text before that button. It was kind of fun to get it right in the end. To a degree I like challenges and proving I can do things.

Took about 5 seconds to solve that. I think everybody I know can answer that correctly. Oh right, most people I know are related or similar to me. Although I think most autistics wouldn't be interested in ball or bat. If you switch the question to a cupcake and a cherry, people might try harder. And if the reward for answering correctly is a cupcake and a cherry, most people would try really hard.

My reaction to that sort of question is always suspicion that I'm being tricked somehow - it's like an invitation to make a fool of myself.

I don't know if that's anything to do with autism or just my own ego sending out distress signals.

Anyway, it gets in the way of me engaging directly with the maths of it, which is easy enough. When I engage with the question I can do it in my head and get it right.

But then I get annoyed with the unliklihood of the answer. I know the approximate value of a bat and a ball and the answer is completely unrealistic, both as individual items and in terms of their value relative to each other. .

And I wonder if that's why whoever posed the question chose those objects rather than two objects that are more likely to be worth those values.

Why not just say "Two items cost $1.10..."

Take the bat and ball out of the equation and it gets easier in my head.

Again, I'm wondering if the whole thing is designed to trip you up.

Maybe the test suggests autistic people are more suspicious and more likely to evaluate the question for pitfalls rather than just go for an answer?

I said exactly this in a previous comment.

x + (× + 1.0) = 1.10
2x + 1.0 = 1.10
2x = 0.10
x = 0.05 (the price of the ball)

So you did.

I feel like I would definitely have got the answer wrong if asked in an interview situation. I’ve always felt I have a bias towards system 2 thinking, but the downside is that it makes me feel very stressed because I am used to people answering maths questions much quicker than me, and that leads to me feeling stupid and self conscious. Ironically this stress response results in me getting things wrong, even if my thinking style would usually lead me towards the correct answer.

In a written exam situation, where no one was monitoring me, I believe I would get the correct answer.

And now you've made me feel bad about pointing that out.

I had trouble following that, because:
a) I had to get some of it from the context and by reading it right to the end where you said that x was the price of the ball. On a less patient day I'd have abandoned it before getting that far.
b) For some reason one of your x's looks like a superscript, i.e.
× rather than x, so I thought it was some fancy kind of notation that was beyond my understanding. Even now I don't know how you got that little x. I had to copy and paste it from your post to reproduce it here. Must be a different character code to the usual x.

Anyway, your proof wins in terms of brevity, mine (arguably) wins in terms of painstaking clarity, though it does rather assume the reader is familiar with simultaneous equations.

This here post says a lot about how my brain works:
1. If there's anything even vaguely inconsistent or misleading in a communication, I'll get stuck on it.
2. I usually begin by thinking I can't figure it out, and wonder why the author wasn't clear.
3. Nonetheless, given enough time I usually do figure it out.
4. My explanations are often of the verbose type.

Not sure it's autistic suspicion or just that we live in a world full of trick questions.

I kind of agree about the introduction of the bat and ball. It seems to be a common device that's supposed to make things easier to follow by making the matter more concrete. Some would call it dummying-down. In my case, sometimes maybe it helps, but often it just makes matters worse, because it's a distraction. In this case, for some reason I wasn't distracted by the crazy prices of the bat and ball, which I barely noticed in my enthusiasm to solve the riddle itself, but I suspect that "commodity A" and "commodity B" would have done just as well. I'm OK with abstract stuff at that simple level. For some reason I didn't equate bats and balls to my disdain for sport. The disdain is only partial, and has little to do with the equipment, particularly if it's inexpensive.

But I couldn't have solved the problem in my head and without recourse to writing it down. Probably that's down to a memory impairment, i.e. my short-term memory has a hole in it so I benefit from having everything set out before me to remind me of things.