CapitalistImperialistPig

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...

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...

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.

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 ...

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?

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,...

Let us consider another surprisingly common “rare” variant of human nature: the psychopath. Yes, I have been thinking about Jon Ronson’s new book, The Psychopath Test . My interest was piqued when I caught an interview with him on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. As is my want, I saw some connections to my thoughts about Asperger’s and to Rand and Nietzsche. From the standpoint of society, psychopaths are a major nuisance. The make up a rather large fraction of the prison population and commit a large fraction of the most serious crimes. Even when they don’t commit crimes, they tend to leave large trails of devastation behind them. Estimates are that psychopaths constitute about 1 % of the total population – a surprisingly large fraction unless psychopathy either is associated with some selective advantage or results from a common developmental accident. You might note that I assume that being a psychopath is an organic condition. The evidence supports that idea in a few ways. Psychop...

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?

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...

Among the concepts that have taken a lot of damage this election cycle is the notion that brain surgery is a uniquely challenging intellectual task. Thanks for that, Dr. Carson. I don't think that there is much doubt that surgery on the brain is tough test of hand and eye as well as requiring a lot of knowledge about the complexities of neuroanatomy, but if Carson is any kind of exemplar, its pretty clear that that kind of intellectual accomplishment is pretty well compartmentalized from understanding the rest of reality. The idiot savant is a standard caricature in popular art and also a pretty familiar figure in science departments everywhere. The kind of narrow focus that may help one master the esoterica of a demanding field often seems to leave no energy or interest for the rest of the intellectual universe. Michael Burry, the real-life neurosurgeon turned hedge fund manager who is one of the central characters of the The Big Short , despite his thorough medical training ...

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 ...

Simon Baron-Cohen, who has often been featured on these pages as an expert on autism, has a new book out, reviewed here in the New York Times.   In the US, it's title is The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty .   From Katherine Bouton's review, cited above: “My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, “Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind” (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”). Dr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge and director of the university’s Autism R...

I've always been skeptical of the notion of prodigy. I think my default suspicion was that prodigy was the product of unusual focus and a "Tiger Parent" unleashed. The evidence seems to prove that idea wrong. Andrew Solomon, a psychologist who studies prodigies, has written on the subject in the New York Times Magazine. Many prodigies are subjected to harsh, controlling, or even brutal educational methods by their parents: I once told Lang Lang, a prodigy par excellence and now perhaps the most famous pianist in the world, that by American standards, his father’s brutal methods — which included telling him to commit suicide, refusing any praise, browbeating him into abject submission — would count as child abuse. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme, and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t...

I saw a couple of pieces on Putin's thinking recently, here and here. I don't know of any reason that these theories ought to be taken especially seriously, but they are at least thought provoking. The first link is to a 2008 Pentagon study that suggests that Putin has Asperger's, an autism spectrum condition. Putin's "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy," wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement pattern analysis at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Studies of his movement, Connors wrote, reveal "that the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality." Since I tend to think that anyone achieving great political power is nuts in some way, this wouldn't surprise me, but I think this sort of diagnosis in absentia is absurd, I don't take it seriously, either. Even if it's true, it's far from clear that it would have important implications. The second analysis, by Walter Russell Me...

Jason Linkins reports on a study showing that conservatives don't get Stephen Colbert - or perhaps humor at all. ...conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism... Surprising perhaps, but I can definitely see it. Irony apparently involves some sort of higher brain functioning that conservatives mostly lack - a sort of intellectual equivalent of Asperger's syndrome. This could explain a lot - like why conservatives seem to think Rush Limbaugh is funny. And why they tend to be so nasty. Always being the one who doesn't get the joke must be rather humiliating. And what other theory could explain Ayn Rand?

The LA times is running series called Discovering Autism . The title is derived from the idea that Autism, long thought to be a rare disorder, is actually quite common, afflicting about 1 per cent of us. Autism diagnosis in childhood has exploded, and is now twenty times more common that a few decades back. Increasingly overwhelming evidence indicates that that difference is due mostly or entirely to earlier generations failure to spot the illness or correctly identify it. In particular, large scale population studies show that autism is roughly as common in 80 year olds as in children. Nearly all these people went through life with no diagnosis or or an incorrect one. Some were institutionalized as psychotic, but others managed to lead somewhat normal lives. As I've mentioned before here, usually to great derision, there is even evidence that many classed as geniuses were also autistic. Artists, musicians, physicists, chess masters, and mathematicians are frequently cited. ...