Plutonia - Have been wanting to thank you...

[DrEvil]

And as for economy angle, there are ephemeral economies that exist outside of dollars, like social capitol for instance. So a good case study might be this place, RI, where a bunch of people have been organizing information for years just because of mutual interest - the result is that what were just data points are contextualized very efficiently and that's added value. There may be no monetary benefits, and it may be difficult to discern how valuable that added value is, but I'd say over all, it's highly valuable. The monetized equivalent would be the Think Tank.

Hmmm... the RI Think Tank ... ?

Slightly off topic here, but I do believe that this forum can become even more of a treasure trove in the near future. I can't stop thinking about what you could learn if you dropped this entire forum, wikileaks, wikipedia and assorted other sources into software like Palantir or IBM's Watson. If Moore's law keeps going a few more years you should be able to run Watson on your iPhone in 10-15 years, probably sooner if you throw in cloud computing. Right now you can rent a supercomputer for $1279 an hour from Amazon..
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computin ... ss-260846/
.. and again, if Moore's law keeps working, that price should be about $5 an hour in 12 years.
So bottom line, the kind of capabilities you have in Watson/Palantir today should be available to all of us in the near future.

[slomo]

Just want to say, as a spectrum adult raising (still) an aspie, this is an interesting thread.

It is not that I don't see emotion, it's that it becomes too overwhelming. It takes quite of bit of work to deal with the casual emotions/ cruelties/ drama of 'normal' folk so I tune it out...with the result that I appear not to have registered it and I scamper around after various dramas going, "Whaaa?". My kid amazes me, for the most part he just strips it all bare. I may not agree with his conclusions at times, but he has no patience with the kind of false emotion that we associate with the victorians and is still pandered to today.

Emotion is there but is not false or falsified. If you are tugging on my heart out of maudlin exploitation I will say "meh". If I am emotionally engaged by real people I will cry for days.

IMO, our emotional coldness on the spectrum is highly overrated.

I'll have to think about all this. I may be more spectrum than I think I am. I think of myself as being a very emotional person, prone to very deep (often painful) empathy, and I periodically have awkward outbursts (usually anger but sometimes other emotions). However, people sometimes describe me as "clinical", including my boyfriend (who is about as non-spectrum as one can get).

One thing that occurs to me is how I've tried to shape and regulate my emotional expression to suit strategic purposes. I'm not sure where that fits in. I'm just thinking "out loud" here.

[vanlose kid]

Just want to say, as a spectrum adult raising (still) an aspie, this is an interesting thread.

It is not that I don't see emotion, it's that it becomes too overwhelming. It takes quite of bit of work to deal with the casual emotions/ cruelties/ drama of 'normal' folk so I tune it out...with the result that I appear not to have registered it and I scamper around after various dramas going, "Whaaa?". My kid amazes me, for the most part he just strips it all bare. I may not agree with his conclusions at times, but he has no patience with the kind of false emotion that we associate with the victorians and is still pandered to today.

Emotion is there but is not false or falsified. If you are tugging on my heart out of maudlin exploitation I will say "meh". If I am emotionally engaged by real people I will cry for days.

IMO, our emotional coldness on the spectrum is highly overrated.

I'll have to think about all this. I may be more spectrum than I think I am. I think of myself as being a very emotional person, prone to very deep (often painful) empathy, and I periodically have awkward outbursts (usually anger but sometimes other emotions). However, people sometimes describe me as "clinical", including my boyfriend (who is about as non-spectrum as one can get).

One thing that occurs to me is how I've tried to shape and regulate my emotional expression to suit strategic purposes. I'm not sure where that fits in. I'm just thinking "out loud" here.

was trying to get at this, not very successfully, in my previous posts here about "spectrumites" being normal. and these two posts got me thinking again.

what Twyla says about the "casual emotions/ cruelties/ drama of 'normal' folk so I tune it out" ties in with what i think of as a narrowing of the range of what is scientifically deemed "normal".

was visiting my sister recently (she has tv) and watched a run of the mill talent show that was just so excruciating i had to leave the room. regular film and tv is front-loaded with all this stuff that is meant to trigger the "right" emotional responses and in so far as one feels pushed around by it one is not "normal", lacks humor, or feeling, is cold, or too soft, and so on.

the "right" responses are expected and one is judged by how one does respond. conversely, with Tavistock, Bernays, et al in mind, the right responses are pushed due to the idea that control through emotion overrides the mind (and one's natural emotional responses of course). one is pushed to feel B and not A. there is a target feeling as well as a target response or aim behind the push. (none of this is really clear, i know, i don't have the necessary terms for it and someone can probably make it a lot clearer, so apologies.)

one of the reasons i like this place is because a vast amount of it is written. i get to read at my own pace. think my own thoughts, etc. it gives me space which i don't usually find "out there", what with billboards, screens, radios, people's ipods, etc., all going on at all times.

i've managed to watch two american-pointy-ball games and was amazed at all the stuff it's wrapped up in. a game lasts one hour effectively but seems to take up to three or more hours of "play" to get done. the stuff- and puffery is just amazing. i'm not going back that's for sure.

it's like comparing a modern hollywood film score with viennese classical. with the later i'm following a developing line of argument, and architectural/mathematical progression of forms. i'm not having my buttons pushed in order to buy something.

edit: books are "safer". i screen lots of stuff out all the time.

ok, i'm making no sense, but i agree with the above two posters.

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edit: typos.

[slomo]

^^^^ Oh, I don't know, I think you're making a lot of sense.

Both my ex-partner and current boyfriend have observed (with faint, implied criticism) that I prefer silence to background music, and I am well-known for loathing TV (but also aware of simultaneous mesmerization and anxious overstimulation whenever I'm forced to watch it).

I really hate being manipulated emotionally or cognitively, which is (now that I think about it) one of the main reasons I avoid all sensory stimulation that I can't, in large portion, control. Supposedly that makes me "controlling". However, I don't make demands of others' consumption habits - so what is really being criticized is high standards for what I willingly allow to enter my cognitive space.

[Plutonia]

Psst!

Guys, you may want to look at this old thread:

Are You Apergerian: viewtopic.php?p=152076#p152076

[Sounder]

Hey Plutonia, thanks for posting that CATO inst. talk back up-thread. I admit to not having watched it the first time out of simple prejudice.

That fellow nails it almost the whole time he is talking.

Hmmm, mebby those libtariantards are not quite as crude as all my prog friends are always telling me. But wait my conscience is torturing me, those CATO people are a nasty bunch; do you know that WHITE SUPREMACISTS and NEO-CONFEDERATES regularly circulate CATO institute material at their meetings.

Oh dear, what's a po naive boy to do who find themselves to be carrying the luggage of 'organizational and ideological affiliations' that are connected to elements that are odious indeed.

[Plutonia]

That's Tyler Cowen. He blogs at Marginal Revolution if you are interested in getting more of a sense of where he's coming from - I find his posts mostly incomprehensible, but his "special interests" seem to be highly specialized: http://marginalrevolution.com/

His insight that people may be better classified or organized around their cognitive styles, rather than their political orientation, seems like a good binary buster to me.

Take the gold where you find it, I suppose, with all the usual cautions.

[Sounder]

Plutonia wrote...

His insight that people may be better classified or organized around their cognitive styles, rather than their political orientation, seems like a good binary buster to me.

Yes exactly, at that point more people might come to see that the polarity is within each category rather than living with the current stupid habit where the polarity is taken to be between categories.

[Plutonia]

Yes exactly, at that point more people might come to see that the polarity is within each category rather than living with the current stupid habit where the polarity is taken to be between categories.

[vanlose kid]

^^^^ Oh, I don't know, I think you're making a lot of sense.

Both my ex-partner and current boyfriend have observed (with faint, implied criticism) that I prefer silence to background music, and I am well-known for loathing TV (but also aware of simultaneous mesmerization and anxious overstimulation whenever I'm forced to watch it).

I really hate being manipulated emotionally or cognitively, which is (now that I think about it) one of the main reasons I avoid all sensory stimulation that I can't, in large portion, control. Supposedly that makes me "controlling". However, I don't make demands of others' consumption habits - so what is really being criticized is high standards for what I willingly allow to enter my cognitive space.

something justdrew said in the thread Plutonia revived:

82_28 - you shouldn't self-diagnose based on a multiple choice quiz.

aspergers is a totally socially defined matter, there is no known biological basis for the diagnoses. Nor is there any basis to say that people who can be thrown into the "aspie" bucket have the same fundamental condition as persons suffering with traditionally defined concept of Autistism. This "spectrum" they talk about it bunk. No one denies that persons presenting on the severe end of this theoretical spectrum have a medical problem, no one's exactly sure what it is yet, but there's something there. Lumping persons who can be classed as "high functioning" or Aspergian in with that group only weakens research and treatment and care for the severely suffering population and quite possibly utterly side-tracks the on-going research.

There's another recent article out there with a headline claiming that "new study shows why some kids are bullied" - the reason? They don't act right! Talk about blame the victim... You see they don't respond appropriately to subtle social cues, misinterpret or are blind to such subtle non-verbal stuff. The "study" in question had a lot of problems, I'll try to find the article later on the right site, where I found it had some very good comments...

What's really going on here I think is a segment of what they like to call Normals are simply discriminating against alternative neurotypes, and not just alternative neurotypes that can be classed on this bullshit "autistic spectrum" (the spectrum theory has resulted in the diagnoses becoming the "last bucket" - if parents are bringing a kid in and the kid can't be diagnosed any other way, they fall into the high functioning autistic label. Sometimes parents advocate for it. adhd has many of the same issues.) This discrimination all too often leads to social isolation and an inherent lack of basic human interactions. Take any "normal" kid and subject them from a young age to the same degree of ostracization and medicalization of their basic nature and they will end up demonstrating many of the same traits as a "high functioning autistic" - there needn't have been any medical issue had the person been treated as a human being should and must be.

viewtopic.php?p=319367#p319367

says it much better than me.

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