Re: OT: Asperger's syndrome

For reference on this topic, see:
         http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Personality-Characteristics.html
and
         http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Weaknesses-of-the-Hacker-Personality.html

esp. the last few paragraphs:

>1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention Deficit
>Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among other things) a
>combination of short attention span with an ability to `hyperfocus'
>imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another syndrome that is
>said to overlap with many hacker traits entered popular awareness:
>Asperger's syndrome (AS). This disorder is also sometimes called
>`high-function autism', though researchers are divided on whether AS is in
>fact a mild form of autism or a distinct syndrome with a different
>etiology. AS patients exhibit mild to severe deficits in interpreting
>facial and body-language cues and in modeling or empathizing with others'
>emotions. Though some AS patients exhibit mild retardation, others
>compensate for their deficits with high intelligence and analytical
>ability, and frequently seek out technical fields where problem-solving
>abilities are at a premium and people skills are relatively unimportant.
>Both syndromes are thought to relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter
>chemistry, especially the brain's processing of serotonin.
>
>Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to
>pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially
>those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and
>conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those
>questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are
>really `diseases' rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like
>having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a
>sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and
>over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced
>by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent
>individualists - thus, any social system that depends on authority
>relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such
>`abnormal' people until they are properly docile and stupid and
>`well-socialized'.
>
>So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about
>clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most
>would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for
>ADD and AS. It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather
>higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly
>mainstream-normal 10% (AS is rarer and there are not yet good estimates of
>incidence as of 2000).


/BP

  B.Philip Jonsson  mailto:melroch@mail.com
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