CapitalistImperialistPig

An awful lot of people, including some of his oldest colleagues, seem to think that the real Mitt Romney is either elusive or non-existent. Frank Rich looks for the soul of the mystery man but doesn't find much: Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he ­responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was." ... He can come across like an android who’s been computer-­generated to be the perfect genial candidate. When forced to interact with actual people, he tries hard, but his small talk famously takes the form of guessing a voter’s age or...

C:The defendant stands accused of being the epitome of a syndrome characterized by: categoriz[ing] their fellow human beings after answering a few suggestive questions in flimsy online questionaires. How does he plead? D: I deny and repudiate the allegation.  I did post an online questionaire, probably one as flimsy as anything else constructed only of magnetic codes on some hard drive somewhere, but a quiz developed and extensively tested by leading researchers.  It is and was a screening test, as described in Wired, one of the secondary posters: Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis,...

The link between autism spectrum and scientific talent seems to be as controversial as ever. I recommend this article to Lee, Arun, and Wolfgang particularly. Some excerpts: Professor Simon Baron-Cohen has spent much of his career championing the positive side of autism. His most recent finding, to be published shortly in the Journal of Human Nature, is that talented mathematicians are at least twice as likely as the general population to have the condition. He also found, by comparing maths undergraduates at Cambridge University with undergraduates of other disciplines (law, medicine), that mathematicians are more likely than students of other subjects to have a sibling or parent with autism. That, he says, points to genetics: his theory is that there is a group of genes that codes for both mathematical ability and autism. “This association between maths and autism keeps cropping up,” he says. Finding these maths genes could be a milestone on the way to finding the genes associa...

One popular theory of Autism posits that it is a defect of the mirror neurons .  Here as elsewhere, the evidence is contradictory.  According to various studies, in Autistics the mirror neuron system is either deficient , normal , or developmentally delayed . The genetic evidence is also confusing.  A large number of genes appear to be associated with the autism spectrum , but none seem to be definitive.  In some cases, it appears that genetic changes not shared with the parents are involved.  Others have peculiar behavior, in that an allele inherited from father may act differently than one inherited from the mother. Bottom line: this is not yet understood, but evidence is accumulating rapidly. My guess is that it will turn out to be several independent conditions that are only catastrophic when to many of them occur together.  Finally, Arun has suggested, probably in jest, that the reason several commentators (himself included), object...

If there is anything evolution ought to be good at, it’s eliminating harmful genes. There at least a few genes in our pool, though, which are surprisingly common despite being very harmful. The classic example is sickle cell anemia. At least before modern medicine, if you got two copies of the sickle cell gene, you were very likely to die early from sickle cell anemia. Having one copy, however, tended to make the symptoms of malaria milder and make surviving it more likely. This double edged quality helped this otherwise purely harmful gene survive and prosper. You might ask your intelligent designer friends to explain that, though no doubt they have some BS answer. I want to consider the surprising results of a recent South Korean study in the light of the above. In the first study to take a broad-population look at the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders — types of autism ranging from severe symptoms to the milder Asperger's syndrome — researchers found a rate of ...

About those AS posts : A physicist and frequent reader of my blog said something like this to me: “it’s really weird how several commenters seem deeply offended by the subject!” I noted my own surprise – I thought the subject was intrinsically interesting, occasionally amusing, and replete with insight into how the human mind worked. Obviously, some people – people I know to be very bright, by the way – disagree. I asked if he had taken the test. “AQ = 30,” he said, “and it would probably have been higher when I was in school.” I happened to run into an old psychologist acquaintance at a cocktail party, and I couldn’t resist discussing my theories with him – they are not really my theories, since I quickly learned that others had come up with them before me. He, an old-line Freudian, was deeply skeptical, but he found the evidence interesting.

Gus is the cat at the theatre door…. ………….. T S Elliot First, another couple of members for my Aspie hall of fame … Michaelangelo and F. Nietzsche. Should there be an afterlife, Nietzsche, at least should find some philosophical company – other philosophs often mentioned for Aspiedom include Socrates, Quine, Wittgenstein, Kant, Spinoza, Russell and Gödel. But how about you? Here is a convenient short test for self administration . Some scores below: An average woman, so they say, gets a 14, while the average man rates 18. Male scientists, and female physicists, come in at 19. 24 is claimed to be the score expected of math contest winners. 32 is supposedly Asperger’s territory. I took the test twice, once as myself, and secondly trying to remember my 14 year-old self. I got a 28 and a 36. I know a few autistic spectrum people, and frankly, I don’t seem much like any of them to me. On the other hand, if you aren’t good at reading people, how can you tell? Scores, anyone?

Done at last and somehow I feel that I ought to have something to say about the whole thing.  I undertook this to try to find out why so many people seem to find this book so inspirational.  I guess that I've said enough about why I don't like it .  There are a few sentiments expressed in the book that I can applaud: having a purpose and a goal, for example(like *finish*this*damn*book*, perhaps). So why did I invest a large part of my free time over the past few weeks in these 2/3 of a million words?  I had read some Rand before and was pretty confident that I wouldn't like this one or learn much from it.  I blame Bobby Fisher. I have been fascinated by his peculiar tragedy for nearly half a century.  What caused this brilliant individual to launch into a succession of progressively more self-destrustive acts even as he reached a peak of success?  Frank Brady's excellent book, Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall , gave me a theory...

Re Asperger's, Lee asks: Are you really serious about this or are you being facetious?   Let's consider it part by part.  First two paragraphs - I'm just reporting here.   Do I seriously believe that there is such a theory?  Of course.  Do I believe it is seriously speculative? Yes.  Do I think it's interesting?  Yes. Next two paragraphs.  Let me be more explicit.  Suppose we take a standard diagnostic list like this one .   If we sort a large random group according to the degree at which they exhibit these characteristics, do I seriously believe that physicists would tend to cluster more on one side of the mean?  Yes.   The side with the extreme constituting the true Aspies?  Yes. Finally, I really do believe that the heroic characters in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are pretty far toward the Aspie/Autistic side of this line - far enough to be classifiable. Does that answer the question?

Autism is often a seriously crippling disease, one that for much of human existence would have been fatal before reproduction.   Nonetheless, it's a relatively common affliction.  When such illnesses persist in the gene pool, it's tempting to guess that the responsible genes, or some of them, are beneficial in some combination - as in the case of sickle cell anemia and a few similar diseases.  Is it possible that Autism is a multi-gene version of the same sort of thing? A few psychologists have made that argument, for example in  Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Changed the World . Such arguments typically depend on identifying a number of past and present individuals who made dramatic impacts on history despite - or perhaps because of Asperger's syndrome. The credibility of the claim is in doubt of course, but I find it pretty interesting.  So do a lot of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders - Temple Grandin once referred to NASA as a "sheltered wo...

Asperger's syndrome is usually classed as an Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Wikipedia says: A pervasive developmental disorder , Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language. [23] Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody , and physical clumsiness are typical of the condition, but are not required for diagnosis. Also: The lack of demonstrated empathy is possibly the most dysfunctional aspect of Asperger syndrome.[3] Individuals with AS experience difficulties in basic elements of social interaction, which may include a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others (for example, showing others objects of interest), a l...

... of Nietzschian/Randian "supermen". What if it were really true that a disproportionate fraction of certain types of high human accomplishments were due to a relatively small fraction of brain-damaged individuals whose disconnection from normal human emotional life gave them an ability to focus beyond most of us? I've already remarked that Rand's heroes look a lot like high functioning Asperger's syndrome types. Their interactions with others seem to consist largely of others complaining about their emotional obtuseness, paired with their resentment and feeling of being abused. It's a familiar observation that Rand's unheroic characters are hardly even caricatures - they are more like billboards on which she can post caricatures of un-Randian speech. Her heroes, besides being repositories of nearly every virtue, are continually criticized for their emotional obtuseness. It's been a mystery to me how this objectively very bad writer could be so ...

Alysa Rosenbaum's bourgeois childhood was disrupted by the Russian Revolution. Doubtless this fact explains at least part of her lifelong antipathy for collectivism in any form. Her unrelenting ferocity, and her own quasi-Stalinist intolerance for any opinion but hers suggests something deeper to me, though. Yes, reader, I have embarked upon Atlas Shrugged . I'm not in a position to do any kind of review - I'm only on Chapter 2, but I have formed certain impressions of the lay of the land. The number one impression I have is that all the heroic characters (as I imagine them) and probably the author are somebody I've seen before - the Asperger's syndrome semi-genius. Naturally that's a snap judgement, subject to revision after further reading, but the fundamental diagnostic criteria (DSM IV) appear to be there for Dagny and Hank. I don't want to attempt to compete with the many talented reviewers who have mocked her prose, but I don't find it too...

Bobby Fisher did not appear to be psychotic. He didn't, apparently, hear voices or see visions. Nonetheless, his self-destructive pattern of behavior was clearly driven by paranoia combined with an apparent inability to judge or appreciate other people's points of view, and a fierce sense of entitlement. Somewhat similar peculiar behavior seems to have been found in a few crazy geniuses - Kurt Goedel, Grigori Perelman, and Alexander Groethendieck, for example. My guess is that the underlying condition is something like Asperger's syndrome, but most with Asperger's don't appear to suffer the same kind of personal disintegration.