Aspies For Freedom

          If that is true then I guess you wouldn't take offense if I said, based on my experience in many support groups, that aspies tend to behave like social ASSHOLES. Example: your insensitive agreement with Mr. Maher.

       The above is as true as what Maher said about retards but there are nicer ways to describe both retards and aspies.

        I certainly took offense to what Mr. Maher said as I know some retards who despite that, are less of a drain to public taxpayers than many aspies who apparently consider themselves superior.

         And I would hope that if I actually said about aspies what I hypothetically proposed saying, that it would be offensive to you and others on this list.

                          Jerry Newport

         Well, you have now have another viewpoint to consider but at least we aren't having a dogfight or being assholes about this

                                      Jerry Newport

I talk to my daughter about catpeople (autistics) and dogpeople (NT's).  There is no intent to insult NT's by associating them with dogs, just that dogs are very expressive social animals whereas cats are social in a much more restrained way.  It's a very useful metaphor so that she understands both the need to learn dogpeople ways, and that she doesn't view herself as defective (it's just fine to be a cat, even if you're living in a world with a lot of dogs).

There can be a lot of stress because the world seems unpredictable, we don't know what to do, and hit and missing and failing increases our stress.  We don't learn these things instinctively, but we can learn them cognitively.

I've said before about the catpeople/dogpeople analogy I use with my daughter.  She has learned the appropriate "social rituals" that dogpeople use, solely because she is a catperson in a dogpeople world, just as if she were visiting a foreign country.  She still has catpeople (Aspie) quirks.  She walks on tiptoe, she's constantly twirling her hair, she holds her pencil differently, she's bothered by crowds, lots of noise, etc.  But she's also learned a lot of those dogpeople (NT) social rituals.  And that has made the world a lot less stressful to her because the world is a lot more predictable.  

Doing things to deliberately upset, irritate, or freak out other people has nothing to do with being autistic.  It's just being a jerk.

I generally agree with everything Jay Shaw has written.

I use Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, also known as welfare maximization, as my guide on how I believe social policy should be shaped. I also regard what is just/moral/fair within the same framework. (So do most Chicago-school Law and Economists such as Judge Posner: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archiv..._warp.html is his and Nobel economist Gary Becker’s blog). What is efficient is also what is moral and just and fair, in general and in the long-run. Of course Pareto efficiency is superior to Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as Pareto efficiency says that an activity should continue until no one can be made better off without someone being made worse off. However, social policy often necessitates decisions that create winners and losers. Kaldor-Hicks efficiency says that activity should continue as long as the gain to winners from the policy could compensate the losses to the losers ignoring the transaction costs. People who dislike Kaldor-Hicks efficiency tend to do so because they do not like blind social policy but feel that policy should break people into groups, with some groups having superior rights over others.

That all said, social policy that demands that majorities (NTs) adjust their attitudes to allow a minority (AS people) ignore social norms is likely to create bigger losses to the losers (NTs) than gains to the winners (AS), and would thus be inefficient and thus unjust, unfair, and immoral as it would waste scarce resources that could have been used to increase total welfare. While it may be harder for one AS individual to adjust their behavior to fit in with NTs than for one NT individual to adjust their behavior to fit in with Aspies (by not getting upset when they are told a truth for example), there are many, many more NTs than Aspies. “When in Rome, act as the Romans do,” or whatever.

I generally have three levels of operating: private, public, and social.
In private I am by myself or with loved ones and I act as I wish.
In public attempt to not offend others, but nor do I seek to create and reinforce social bonds.
In social, I am seeking to create and reinforce social bonds by engaging in active conversations with people and trying to show appropriate levels of empathy. This is the mostly costly level of operating so I rarely do so, although I should do more if I want to get a new girlfriend.

In general, I also attempt to minimize those actions that have the worse stress-relief versus negative attention attracting behavior trade-offs, such as quickly pacing back in forth in a two or three meter space like I did as a kid while waiting in line for the school bus.
Of course I do all of this out of rational self-interest.

The problem is that the same psychological mechanism that leads NT's to reject AS behaviors is the same thing that drives racism (or just 'ism' in general).  I don't know how many times I've heard white NT's say the equivalent of, "I'm not racist, it's not his color, it's his behavior," and the behavior they are describing is something that is characteristic of that "other" group, it isn't anything that is harmful to anybody or anything, it is just "different".  Children can be taught cognitively to reject that impulse to label different but harmless behavior as "wrong", and it has enormous benefits for society.  The children in a community where the parents are proactive in teaching their children inclusive and tolerant attitudes display more acceptance of "differentness" across the spectrum.

The reason Harvard's president was lambasted was because he didn't just say that there are fundamental differences between men and women, but rather that women simply weren't cut out for careers in engineering.

Here's my philosophy on the whole subject.  Sure people can be asses to people with aspergers.  I [probably] have aspergers and I've spent my whole life trying to gain acceptance and respect from the mainstream world.  I have yet for that to happen.  And I suspect that it won't ever happen.  NTs probably won't ever give us the respect we deserve, so why worry about it?  If someone doesn't understand us, it's their loss.  I am by no way saying that there aren't any NTs out there who aren't understanding or that they aren't good people, but we're lucky if they know what asperger's is.

Anyways, I haven't really read the entire thread (only bits and pieces) so if that was off topic or was something that's already been posted, my apologies.

Here is a link to a 7th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge thinks of the Larry Summers controversy.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archiv...index.html
It has also been suggested by one of his critics that Larry Summers has Aspergers.
http://www.nysun.com/article/10311
11th paragraph

I'm not willing to be imprecise and thus lump Aspie behaviors under the umbrella of the term culture.  Scientists define cultural behaviors as learned behaviors, and Aspie behavior patterns are not learned, they are innate.  NT's react to "different" behaviors in the same way whether those behaviors are innate or cultural.

I do believe that human beings can be taught to control their reactions to their impulses, and to choose a different response.  It's part and parcel of everyday childrearing.  The fact that some human beings fail to do so is not evidence that most cannot.

Most people don't abuse drugs, and there is no actual evidence that obesity is bad for you, beyond that bad diet and being a couch potato have a tendency to produce both obesity and lousy health.  There is no addiction mechanism operating in bullying people who are different.

The reality is that few people have been taught any sort of impulse control that doesn't involve punishment aimed at a specific impulsive behavior.  Legislation is inherently coercive, and coercion strongly interferes in cognitive learning, and can even make it impossible.

Cognitive awareness can help solve a lot of problems.  For instance, I can experience strong PMS, and before I knew about PMS, I predominantly just followed my impulses, lashing out at people, breaking things, etc.  I had no cognitive framework for dealing with the impulses, and often I would just lay in bed all day as avoidance whenever I could.  When I learned about PMS, I began to cognitively understand why I had these impulses, and I learned ways to divert them into more productive behavior.  I *was* punished for my behavior, and all that produced was the avoidant response, and internal misery.

The belief in behavioralism and that it is only external behavior that means anything is what the ABA people rest their "therapy" on.  I think it is an intellectually bankrupt position.  They could care less if their victims are dying inside as long as they produce the correct behavior.

Ironically, the attack on Harvard's president and Bill Maher stem from the same source as discrimination.  People are following a kneejerk response and attacking behavior different from their accepted norm as wrong, without bothering to stop and think.  Political correctness is based on the "behaviorist" model of punishing anybody who steps out of line from the norm, even superficially.  The behaviorist model doesn't care if someone feels inside that black people are little better than animals, if their behavior never steps over the line.  The problem with this is that it requires a Big Brother like surveillance to ensure that nobody ever steps out of line.

What if you have someone who simply won't agree with you?  It's my experience that as long as what you're trying to teach is logical and makes sense, not arbitrary, simple enough to teach to a child, and not accompanied by punishment (or reward) there will be very few people who refuse to go along.  Even very young children are able to tell the difference between "social justice" type rules (don't hit other people) and "social convention" type rules (don't chew with your mouth open), even though young children often do follow their impulse to hit others, they can be taught to overcome that impulse, even without being punished.  Children who are cognitively taught not to hit are much more likely to not hit than children who were "taught" by punishment when "Big Brother" is removed (when an adult is not present or they outgrow adult supervision).

With only a few people not coming to agreement, it suffices to leave them be as long as they're not out doing something like punching people on the street.

Honestly, I think the problem is attempting to infer a person's beliefs or state of mind from their statements, rather than simply taking them at face value.  People seem to feel that who says something, and the context in which they say it is far more important than *what* they said.  Would there have been this blowup if the Harvard president's statements had been said by a woman scientist, or by a male researcher whose life work demonstrated that his attitude could not include believing that women are inferior?  The problem isn't that people are oversensitive to the content of the words themselves, it is their assumptions about the attitudes and state of mind of the person who made them, and their impulse to correct his "out of line" behavior.

I am the same, although I can't say that I would have always been as unruffled as I am today.

Oooh, cognitive understanding wins.  It is a normal impulse for humans to shut down cognition, become defensive, and lash out when attacked, whether physically or verbally.  They stop doing so when either they retreat into avoidance or helplessness when punished for following their impulse, or when they learn cognitively to control this impulse, and seek learning.  You might be surprised at how many children grow up with their parents criticizing everything that they do, and a large number of these children grow up to be hypersensitive.  They have no example of comments on their behavior or suggestions for change being anything other than attacking.  A friend of mine has adopted a rescued dog that was abused in a puppy mill.  Even though she has had this dog for several years in a loving relationship, the dog is still hyperaware of her and will shy away if she, for instance, raises her hand to get something off a shelf.  The dog can't help herself, she has been taught via a punishment model that a human raising their hand means pain and abuse.

Note I don't mean to imply that someone being hypersensitive means they were emotionally abused as children.  My daughter is hypersensitive, and a large part of it stems from her impulse towards perfectionism, and even this abates as she gets older and understands more.

It was once believed that the vast majority of the population was incapable of learning to read too.  Or to do math involving numbers larger than 10.  Both of my kids learned to read like they absorbed it via osmosis, but most kids don't, and they need a more formal education to learn to read.

There is *no* research that adequately controls for confounding factors (most notably diet and exercise) that demonstrates that obesity affects mortality rates, and there is research that demonstrates the opposite.  I haven't yet seen a study that showed improvement where the patients did not change their diet and exercise habits significantly in conjunction with the surgery.  Much of weight loss surgery is explicitly designed to *enforce* a change in dietary habit.  There was a study published in the NEJM last summer where they used liposuction to try to improve the condition of diabetics who were already on medication, a very controlled diet, a prescribed exercise regimen, etc.  They instead found that removing the fat did absolutely nothing.  There was another study that measured cardiovascular fitness and BMI, and found that all-cause mortality correlated well with cardiovascular fitness, but not BMI between normal weight and obese subjects.  Very out of shape normal weight people had a statistically insignificant death rate compared to very out of shape obese people, and very fit obese people had a statistically insignificant difference in death weight compared to very fit normal weight people.  The shocker of the study was the finding that underweight people had a death rate that was much higher than normal weight or obese people in the same fitness range across the board.

Why is obesity *associated* with a host of medical problems?  Because poor diet and exercise habits *tend to* produce both obesity and medical problems and good diet and exercise habits tend to result in normal weight people.  It's difficult to eat a good diet, exercise well and still be obese, but it is possible.

I am currently on a pretty tight budget but I still manage to eat pretty healthy. Beans and brown rice are cheap enough to make up for the higher price of leaner meats, and skim milk is as cheap as whole milk.

That still isn't a reason to fixate on how fat someone is.  It leads to behavior that is paradoxically worse for one's health, such as going on extreme diets or undergoing life and health threatening bariatric surgery.  If we instead concentrated on diet and exercise, then those who were fat because they overate and didn't exercise would lose weight anyway, and those who weren't wouldn't.  And perhaps more importantly, we wouldn't have people neglecting their diet and exercise because they falsely believed that either they were okay because they weren't fat, or because they believed that weight loss was too difficult.  But doctors resist this because it is significantly easier to put someone on a scale for a few seconds than it is to put them on a treadmill for several minutes.

I first became interested in this due to the treatment of a friend of mine at the hands of her doctors.  She quit having a period for a number of months, and after ruling out pregnancy, her doctor simply blamed it on her being fat.  After awhile (without losing any weight), she got her period, but it wouldn't stop.  She bled for close to two months.  Her doctor also blamed this on her being fat (said she was "hormonally unstable").  Her doctor recommended a hysterectomy because of the prolonged bleeding, and in desperation my friend came to me for help because of my experience in researching medical issues, I sent her back to her doctor with my recommendations for possibilities to explore, complete with the proper diagnostic tests to run.  Her doctor basically agreed to run the tests only because she wouldn't agree to the hysterectomy without having them first.  The first set of tests to come back showed that she had hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that leads to a buildup of iron in the body to potentially toxic levels.  Not only was her prolonged bleeding not a threat, it was quite likely her body's attempt to rid itself of the excess iron.  The treatment is quite simple, you just donate blood a lot and monitor your iron levels frequently.  

I have found that this is not an isolated circumstance.  I've met women who've had their psoriasis, their asthma, pain following surgery, etc., all blamed on their being fat.  Some have had treatment for athletic injuries refused because they were fat.  Diagnoses of PCOS, Cushings, basketball sized tumors in the abdomen, leukemia, anemia, either missed or significantly delayed because the doctor attributed the symptoms to "being fat."

I refuse to believe that there is an instinctual wiring to attack people who are different.  To notice them, yes, but to attack, to bully, to marginalize, no.  Very young children often notice that I am "different", but they tend to react in either a neutral or curious manner, and they accept matter-of-factly, that yes, indeed I am a different sort of person.  When they get older it's very easy to tell if they have been taught by their parents and peers (typically by example) to either respect, to fear, or to attack those who are different.

However, it also doesn't invalidate my assertion that your statement of "obesity is currently the second greatest *cause* of preventable death in the United States" is factually incorrect, and not nearly as useful towards preventing morbidity and mortality as focussing on the true cause.  It is also not true that nearly all cases of obesity are symptomatic of poor general health.  Most obese people are quite healthy.  In fact, even the "obesity kills!" crowd estimates that even if obese people were to lose all the excess weight and keep it off for the remainder of their lives, their life expectancy would be increased by only 1/3 to 3/4 of a year.  In Sweden where they have socialized medicine and are able to know the health statistics of almost every Swede just by consulting a central database, they found that when they divided the population up into fifths according to their BMI, it wasn't those in the fifth comprising "optimum weight" that lived the longest, it was those in the next fifth up, that would be termed "overweight" to just barely obese.  Note that at the time the study was done, Sweden didn't have a rabidly anti-fat media and medical profession.

Do you have a lot of experience observing children?  As a mother of two children, I do.  Respect yes, and children often have a natural wariness of strangers, but I've only seen children really fear adults when adults hurt them, emotionally or physically. Of course, since the vast majority of children in this country are spanked from time to time, punished for contradicting or criticizing an adult even when the adult is wrong or there is an honest difference of opinion, and ridiculed by adults for the very things that make them children, most children do fear adults, but I don't see any fear beyond stranger wariness in those who are not routinely hit or verbally abused.

I also get to observe children interact with each other.  When the actions of their parents and peers teach them acceptance of difference, they are accepting of difference.  I've seen parents break down and cry at how their children were welcomed and loved by their peers at my daughter's school when they were ostracized and beaten down at every other school they went to.  Before my time, there was a child who had been so traumatized at several previous schools that he would do nothing but hide under a table.  It took him a long time to trust that the children weren't asking him to come play just so they could bully and tease him. You might think it must be a school of misfits, but those with innate identifiable differences are very much a minority, although the accepting atmosphere results in a fair number of kids making choices to be different, whether it is boys growing their hair long, or kids cutting their hair in funky styles or dying it in unusual colors.  If you met my daughter, you'd know she was Aspie within a few minutes (she walks on her toes, she stims, she tends to talk in a pedantic oddly inflected tone, etc.) and yet her biggest problem socially right now is that *too many* kids want to be around her and be her friend, and she ideally would like to eat lunch or work in a group with no more than 2 or 3 people at a time tops.  It's not a perfect school with perfect little Stepford children, there are problems, sometimes even serious ones.  But bullying and ostracizing of "different" people is rarely one of them.

Yes, it appears that neither of us will get the other to budge, but as far as medical studies go, the devil is frequently in the details.  I've got to leave to pick up my kids soon, and my quicky searches aren't finding the study I mentioned, but the difference in this one is they removed from the data those who had diseases that are recognized to cause obesity, and they did a fairly good job at being up to date with current research.  Most researchers are aware that diseases like Cushings will cause obesity, but many still believe that obesity causes type 2 diabetes instead of the other way around.  People with type 2 diabetes get fat because while their muscles become insulin resistant, their fat cells don't until they "fill up", and because their muscles aren't receiving enough fuel, their bodies signal for more food.  When their fat cells fill up and stop responding to insulin, their blood glucose levels rise and they get the symptoms of diabetes and get diagnosed.  The gain in weight preceding the diagnosis is falsely attributed as the cause.