1265 Comments

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/101111376/this-hit-piece-appeared-on-hacker-news-10-years

Just saw this on 4chan.

Y'know what's funny? That when I first read this hateful little essay (Dec 1st 2013) I actually thought it reminded me of Scott Alexander's writing style.

And that's strange, because we all know Scott is not hateful and doesn't hate Nick Szabo.

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Any tips on optimising comment visibility? Seems very difficult to actually get a discussion going.

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Be obviously wrong. Lots of comments that way.

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That's called Murphy's Law

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And I'm genuinely not trying to be a dick, but the broader and (probably?) more controversial your comment, the likelier it is to get wide engagement.

I'd like to think the ACX commentariat is above rage-bait et al, but we're all still human.

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Thanks for the replies. Are either of you paid subscribers? Is the dynamic different? On the hidden threads I mean.

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I'm a paid subscriber. Hidden threads obviously have less engagement than open threads, but it seems to me that they have higher quality commentary. Like perhaps Scott's truly core audience is a little more invested?

Or that could be a false narrative of there being a value-added!

What @Rothwed said below is accurate - the day Scott posts an open thread is often the busiest, so I think if you're wanting a comment to have a lot of engagement, you're best off posting it that day.

I once posted a comment to an open thread like 40 minutes after Scott posted, so my comment was 8th or so chronologically? I didn't notice a meaningful difference than when I once posted like 18 hours later, truth be told. I suspect a lot of Scott's commenters are the type of people who at least skim all of the comments.

Can I ask why you're asking?

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Why am I asking? I like the blog and it seems like a good place for discussion, but there's a large quantity of comments and many seem poor quality, not as in abusive, just not really engaging with the article or other people's comments. So I thought maybe the hidden discussions might be better.

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Oh, I see. Well, the commenters here have a semi-wide variety of interests under Scott's umbrella. For example, I find the predictions market stuff deadly dull and so I skip over both the posts and comments threads about it. In fact, I tend to enjoy comments that are out of left-field; people asking for, like, advice on what breed of dog would best suit their lifestyle, or whatever.

Hidden threads aren't going to be more focused on Scott's posts or on each other's comments. They have about the same diversity of topics.

Hidden threads *do* often cover topics that people might prefer to talk about behind a paywall, though. I've started a couple of comments on hidden threads that (obviously) weren't totally private, but that I didn't want casually discovered by a coworker or something.

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Okay thanks for the Intel. Obviously the Open Thread can be a bit more meandering and that's fine. I've found the Fake Traditions are Traditionanal discussion particularly frustrating so I'm looking for a better quality debate, but maybe there isn't one, or rather it doesn't grow on trees.

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Generally the open threads are much more active right after Scott posts them. The weekend before a new thread drops are the least active.

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There's probably an optimal time, you can post too early on an Open Thread and have your comment swamped by later discussions. But I guess there's several factors.

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Hello Enthusiasts,

Join us for our 67th OC ACXLW meetup where we'll delve into the future of artificial intelligence as projected by Leopold Aschenbrenner and analyzed by Zvi Mowshowitz, and explore the intricate dynamics of social groups. This week's readings provide a rich foundation for our discussions, exploring themes of AI development, social influence, and ethical behavior.

Discussion Topics:

Situational Awareness in AI Development

Overview: This topic will focus on Leopold Aschenbrenner's analysis of the rapid advancements in AI, particularly in Silicon Valley, and the projected developments up to 2027. Zvi Mowshowitz provides a summary that highlights key trends and potential future scenarios in AI.

Summary of Key Points:

AGI Timeline: Aschenbrenner believes AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is likely to be developed by 2027, based on current trends in compute power, algorithmic improvements, and AI capabilities.

Intelligence Explosion: Once AGI is achieved, there could be a rapid progression to superintelligence, possibly within a year, through automated AI research.

Economic and Military Implications: Superintelligent AI could provide decisive economic and military advantages to whoever develops it first.

US-China Competition: There's a strategic race between the US and China to develop AGI. While the US currently leads, China could catch up through chip manufacturing advances and algorithmic theft.

Security Concerns: Current AI labs lack adequate security measures to protect critical AI developments from theft or misuse.

Alignment Challenge: Ensuring superintelligent AI systems remain aligned with human values and goals is a crucial unsolved problem.

Government Involvement: Aschenbrenner predicts increased US government involvement in AI development, potentially leading to a national AGI project by 2027-2028.

Societal Impact: The development of AGI and superintelligence could lead to rapid and profound changes in society, economy, and global power structures.

Ethical and Safety Considerations: There are significant concerns about the potential risks of superintelligent AI, including existential risks to humanity.

Urgency: Aschenbrenner emphasizes the need for immediate action in addressing these challenges, as the timeline for AGI development may be shorter than many expect.

YouTube Audio: Situational Awareness - Summary by Zvi

Text Article: Quotes from Leopold Aschenbrenner

Social Dynamics: Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution

Overview: This discussion will delve into the social dynamics as explained by David Chapman in "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" and Leopold Aschenbrenner's quotes. We will explore how different types of individuals interact within social groups and subcultures.

TLDR: David Chapman's essay on "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths" examines the roles of different types of individuals in subcultures and how these roles influence the evolution of these groups. Leopold Aschenbrenner's quotes further illuminate these dynamics.

Text Article: Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution

Questions for Discussion:

How do the stages of subculture evolution described by Chapman resonate with subcultures you have experienced or observed?

What strategies could geeks employ to protect the integrity of their subculture without completely excluding mops?

How can subcultures recognize and mitigate the influence of sociopaths?

Considering the decline of traditional subcultures, what new forms of social and cultural organization might emerge?

We look forward to an engaging and thought-provoking discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these significant topics.

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To follow up on the thread below about the value in labeling people as "on the spectrum", this Atlantic article is making the rounds as an alternative to Haidt's social media thesis about Why Young People in the Anglosphere Are So Depressed. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed/678724/

Key excerpt:

"In the past few years, at least three distinct phenomena have potentially contributed to the gloom of the Anglosphere. Let’s think of them as diagnostic inflation, prevalence inflation, and negativity inflation.

First, the diagnostics. In 2013, the psychiatrist Allen Frances offered a warning to his field. Frances had chaired the American Psychiatric Association during revisions of the fourth edition of psychiatry’s “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly known as DSM-IV. The first edition of the DSM—published in 1952 in response to the needs of military personnel returning from World War II—listed about 100 mental disorders. By 2013, the number of disorders listed in the DSM had swelled to nearly 300. In his 2013 book, Saving Normal, Frances warned that “a looser definition of sickness” could make people worse off. “DSM-V opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder,” he told the Canadian Medical Association Journal that year. The expansion of clinical vocabulary risked creating a new set of patients he called the “worried well”—people with normal human experiences who spent a lot of time worrying that they have a disorder. He and others called this phenomenon “diagnostic inflation”—the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.

Frances was mostly concerned that diagnostic inflation would lead to over-medicalization. He might have been right. By 2016, the share of people in the U.S. using antidepressants was more than twice as high as in Spain, France, or Germany, and nine times higher than in South Korea.

As our mental-health lexicon has expanded, U.S. content creators have recognized that anxiety is a hugely popular—or, at least, hugely attention-grabbing-topic for young people scrolling on their phones. As I reported in December, the TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than 6 billion views. According to the podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. In celebrity media, mental-health testimonials are so common that they’ve spawned a subgenre of summaries of celebrity mental-health testimonials, including “39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” “What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,” and “12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.”

This takes us from diagnostic inflation to “prevalence inflation,” the term psychologists Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews use to describe the phenomenon of people developing apparent anxiety disorders from the sheer ubiquity of concern about anxiety disorders that swirl all around them. It might work something like this: People who keep hearing about new mental-health terminology—from their friends, from their family, from social-media influencers—start processing normal levels of anxiety as perilous signs of their own pathology. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on."

I'm reminded of the short story by Machado de Assis in which a famous-but-quack psychiatrist announces: "I have discovered that insanity is not an island but an entire continent!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_alienista

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Just a general point-- the DSMs don't have a definition or concept of mental health, which can leave everyone being various degrees of sick.

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I just learned that Micron Technology must delay building a factory because of endangered bats on the site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-06-20/micron-has-to-resolve-a-bat-problem-before-building-syracuse-chip-fab

It occurs to me that the proper person to fix this bat-problem is, of course, Batman. They just have to get the bat-signal going.

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The environmental consequences of losing a war to China are gonna be a lot worse than some unhappy bats.

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Welp. If we're gonna sacrifice the bats, we might as well put them to good use vs China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

> Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached.

> In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the "lowest form of animal life", and that, until now, "reasons for its creation have remained unexplained". He went on to espouse that bats were created "by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life."

I recommend reading the entire page. It feels like a fever dream.

Incidentally, there's a parallel timeline where Japan surrendered for fear of the Adams Bomb.

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That you for that horrifying insight into our war machine. Now I'm wondering if it's a good thing we used the atomic bomb instead.

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I could use some help with a bit of terminology. This is for a Call of Cthulhu RPG scenario. In this setting, the heroes work for a sizeable organization that sponsors investigations into archaeology and the paranormal and dispatches them to the far corners of the world. Let's suppose there is a group of "directors" that control the finances and decides which expeditions to fund. There is a group of "agents" who put together expeditions, pitch them to the board for funding, and then run the expeditions, typically without going into the field themselves. There are also "associates" who are junior staffers, working for the directors or agents, and "crew", the hired professionals who actually go on the expeditions.

I'm pretty happy with the titles of "directors" and "associates", but somehow the "agent" title doesn't seem quite right. It's a little too James Bond, for someone who is in the end a mid-level staffer. Can anyone think of a better term?

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"overseer"? <looks at starcraft2>

also, I don't understand what value the agents are providing, beyond being dispatchers/idea-fairies. why are they just sitting behind a desk in HQ, instead of being out in the field?

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Everybody hates middlemen, and wishes producers and consumers could just deal with one another directly. In simple matters that does happen. But as soon as things get complicated, opportunities for middlemen tend to open up.

In this case, I imagine the overseers (by whatever name) are kept around because they know a) what opportunities for expeditions actually exist, b) what sort of projects the directors are interested in funding, c) how to put together an application packet that is likely to be approved, d) who can be hired to go on expeditions, and e) how to exercise the level of supervision and budgetary control that looks proper to the directors. That's quite a bit of knowledge to squeeze between one set of ears.

The directors would love to deal directly with expedition leaders who mostly work in the field, returning only occasionally to report glorious success and request modest sums of money to continue. But in practice having some responsible person at HQ has proved indespensible, and the modern role of overseer was eventually formalized for this purpose.

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So, the middleman is someone who's directly and uniquely responsible for the success of a single crew's expedition. But they don't actually lead from the front? Sounds dysfunctional to me. But if you insist on this org-chart and you're not willing to make up a new word, I suppose "bursar" or "handler" are maybe the closest I can think of, depending on what you want to emphasize.

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Copying from the British Museum, what about "keepers"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_keepers_of_the_British_Museum

"The keepers are heads of the various departments of the British Museum. They are professional curators and related academics. There are currently nine departments plus the Portable Antiquities Scheme that have keepers."

Or perhaps "curators"? Or "conservators"? Given that they are meant to put together the missions and present the case for funding, but do not participate in the field, they investigate/research any objects brought back and present the final reports?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator

"A curator (from Latin: cura, meaning "to take care")[1] is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular institution and its mission. The term "curator" may designate the head of any given division, not limited to museums.

...A "collections curator", a "museum curator", or a "keeper" of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library, or archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material including historical artifacts. A collections curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort—artwork, collectibles, historic items, or scientific collections.

...In France, the term "collections curator" is translated as conservateur. There are two kinds of conservateurs: heritage curators (conservateurs du patrimoine) with five specialities (archeology, archives, museums, historical monuments, natural science museums), and librarian curators (conservateurs des bibliothèques).

...In the United Kingdom, the term "curator" also applies to government employees who monitor the quality of contract archaeological work under Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning (PPG 16) and manage the cultural resource of a region. In a museum setting, a curator in the United Kingdom may also be called a "keeper"."

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Interesting. I guess "curator" would be particularly appropriate if these expeditions are being organized by an institution that is mostly known for being a museum, such as the Smithsonian or the British Museum.

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Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Having seen the options, I have to say that nothing is really jumping out at me as obviously right in light of conventional use. That suggests I'm best off using a plainly descriptive term, for clarity. I'll go with "Expedition Organizer."

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Agent sounds right because if they're pitching projects to the board then they sound more like independent agencies than employees. Much like how the government gets a lot of work done by contracting NGOs. So "Contractor" could also work, or "Agency Head".

You could also go with "Leads", but that sounds a bit too modern.

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Project managers?

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"Project Manager" is the right term in most of industry and government. In more academic contexts, including government-run science, "Principal Investigator" is also used. The "Investigator" part might suggest actively participating in the field work, and some PIs do that, but others just arrange the logistics, read the reports, and tie it all together.

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"Coordinators", I'd say. Or just boring old "Managers:".

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In movie-industry terminology, these people are essentially "producers". That seems too specialized. The projects they lead aren't building or making anything.

One idea I'm toying with is that they are informally known as "bucks", since they're where the buck stops on any decision pertaining to an expedition. The board doesn't particularly care how an expedition succeeds or fails, only _whether_ it succeeds or fails, and of course how much it cost. So these "bucks" have quite a bit of authority, once the board has greenlit a project.

I guess what I would really like to lean on is the idea is that the organization holds these people responsible for the success or failure of missions, and accordingly gives them a lot of latitude to make decisions. So, "Officer in Charge", maybe? That might work if the term "Officer" is also used for other senior people on an expedition. So, a large expedition might have a Supply Officer, a Science Officer, a Security Officer, and so on. Casually, these folks might be known as OCs.

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Possibly it's worth noting that "buck", when applied to a person, has distinctly racist overtones. But then, Lovecraft, so maybe that's not completely a negative?

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...what? I've only ever heard it as "young buck", akin to "feisty kid".

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Yeah, there's also that usage; even "kid" comes from that sorry of thing.

But there's the usage that Deiseach mentioned, where it was a deliberately animalistic reference, with overtones of domestication and breeding, like maybe calling a woman a "brood-mare"?

I'm not saying you *shouldn't* use this term - it depends on the group and any audience. But ... better to go into it with eyes open, you know?

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Wait until you hear that identifying a piece of gardening equipment and/or a particular suit of cards is also racist!

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"And your father was a rake!"

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"Buck" was a term used to refer to male African-American slaves. From "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (content warning for another term considered offensive):

"They swarmed up towards Sherburn’s house, a-whooping and raging like Injuns, and everything had to clear the way or get run over and tromped to mush, and it was awful to see. Children was heeling it ahead of the mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way; and every window along the road was full of women’s heads, and there was nigger boys in every tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence; and as soon as the mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of reach. Lots of the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared most to death."

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From the hip:

Representative (i.e. they represent the board in the matter of this expedition)

Commissioner (i.e. they have been commissioned by the board or are heading a committee commissioned by the board for a particular expedition)

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Controller? Manager? Administrator? It sounds like your agents are more like literary agents, so you could tack something appropriate onto the front of "agent" - I doubt anybody thinks that literary agents are like James Bond but for books (although that is a fun concept!).

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Inspired by Melvin's post below, my question is: Was Marx a Communist?

Let me qualify that. If Karl Marx had seen 20th Century Communism in practice, would he have still been a Communist by the year 2000? I think no, he would have seen its practical failings and horrors and realized that they were too big to overcome. He would have accepted that he was wrong.

The subject reminds me of Nietzsche explaining that he chose Zarathustra as his hero because Zarathustra was the first one to make a clear distinction between good and evil. Nietzsche chose Zarathustra because, as the first one to make a distinction between good and evil, he would be the first one to recognize his mistake.

By the same token, I think Marx would have been quick to recognize his mistake had he witnessed the Soviet Union.

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He was a Marxist but not a Leninist and certainly not a Maoist. I doubt he would have become any of them either. But I also doubt he would have recanted his beliefs. I suspect he would have instead spend his time writing angry tracts about how his way was right and theirs was wrong. Probably from exile.

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I am not an expert on this, but I think Marx basically believed that the predestined historical timeline goes like this: First capitalism creates a lot of wealth, and then as both the wealth and social inequality reach extreme values, the system collapses (because the poor are unable to buy the products, but the rich are unable to make any more profit if no one buys the products of the factories they own), and then a revolution replaces this by socialism which keeps the high production but distributes it equally or something like that. So basically, first the capitalism must reach its maximum, only then it can properly collapse into socialism. Also, he expected that this will happen in Germany, because I guess at that moment, it was the most developed capitalist country.

Communists in Russia were quite stressed about this, because on one hand they believed in the prophecy, on the other hand, their own actions contradicted it (by making the revolution in Russia, and skipping capitalism). Until the last moment of the revolution they still expected that somehow Germany would... gets it own socialist revolution five minutes before Russia does, so the prophecy would still come true. When that didn't happen, that's probably when Lenin started developing Marxism-Leninism as an alternative to Marxism, and afterwards Stalin decided that "actually, we need to build some kind of 'capitalism, but micromanaged by the communist party' in Russia, because you really can't build a welfare state when starting from poverty".

So basically, it would be enough for Marx to say "I told you; the real socialism would only come when the time is ready, and it will come in Germany, not in Russia; your experiment was premature and that's why it failed". Thus he could still keep the belief in Marxism.

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No, that's Keynes talking about the Great Depression. Low wages mean low consumption which leads to industries failing which leads to low wages. Which means Keynes argued for government intervention to break the vicious cycle.

Marx believed that what would happen is that collectives of workers would outproduce capitalist owned factories. This would cause the capitalist owners to pass laws or use violence to suppress these more productive worker cooperatives which would necessitate the use of violence to defend them. The resulting war would be ultimately won because the factories pumping out guns and armor and all that on the socialist side would be more productive. The period just before the war is late capitalism.

You're mixing up Marxism and liberal economics. Stalin (and all Marxists) oppose the welfare state, for example.

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I do not think Marx would have likely recognized his mistake. Lenin didn't realize his mistake, Stalin never realized his, nor did Mao, and I don't see Marx as an exemplar of virtue that would be more likely to repent and change his mind than the average man. Given that many Marxists still exist despite being aware of all the historical horrors, I imagine Marx would adapt and continue to believe that history was bound to unfound itself into a glorious communist future.

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I agree. Marx would have said they shamelessly used his ideas for promoting the welfare of the common people to create a new veneer for the powers-that-be to use to rule. He wouldn't recognize the theoretical fundamental flaws now shown empirically.

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At the time that Lenin died, the revolution he had fomented for all his life had succeeeded beyond his wildest dreams, the Bolsheviks were firmly in control of Russia and, thanks to NEP, it looked like the crisis situation was stabilizing. At the time Stalin died, Soviet Union was probably at the absolute zenith of its power or close to it, unquestionably the second-most powerful superpower still widely predicted to close the gap with the US even among non-communists, had just won an apocalyptic war against fascism, possessed the sort of technology a teenage Stalin at the seminary could probably not even have imagined. Why would one expect them to realize their mistakes at this point?

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When Stalin died, USSR was so soaked in blood that the next leader did the unthinkable and said what everyone knew: that Stalin was an evil man, and the Soviet Union had gone astray. When Lenin died he had the blood of millions of his countrymen on his hands, and had failed it usher in the age of freedom and utopia that he spent his years writing about and claiming was soon to come. The mistake they should have realized was not that Marxism makes for bad economic policy, or bad military policy, but that Marxism in practice does not usher in the utopia Marx promised but instead brings mass murder, terror, and slavery. Lenin and Stalin were content to be the instruments through which that evil flowed in order to preserve their own power, and I feel that Marx would have been much the same. He does not strike me as a person who is particularly committed to what is true and what is good over being right.

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Marx didn't rule a country, so admitting a mistake would have been less costly for him. (Then Stalin would probably send someone to kill him.)

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How much did Marx believe that a centrally controlled economy would be superior? How hard would it have been for him to stop believing it if he did believe it?

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Made this site where you can find and discuss research papers!

https://www.papertalk.xyz

Any feedback is appreciated :)

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the link doesn't open for me:

"We can’t connect to the server at www.papertalk.xyz."

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Weird, clicking on the link works for me. Do you have Javascript disabled on your browser?

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Ok it works on Safari. Yeah i probably have JavaScript disabled on my PC browser.

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Was Hitler a fascist?

If you'd asked Hitler "are you a fascist?" then would he have said "yep, totally", or would he have said "No, Fascism is the ideology of Mussolini's National Fascist Party, I'm a National Socialist, which is different in the following ways..."

Is the whole idea of "Fascism" outside the Italian context just an example of outgroup homogeneity bias?

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The second one. There was an international fascist movement which Hitler considered himself separate from. Doctrinaire followers of fascism in Nazi Germany were persecuted if they didn't change their beliefs. There was a broader recognition they were both far right ideologies with some similarities but they did not consider themselves the same or even compatible.

There was, however, an international fascist movement and you would have found people self-identifying as fascists (or at least saying "no, we're X, a movement inspired by fascism") all over the world. Nazism never really had much success outside Germany (except when it was backed by the German army). But fascism was able to spread and compete as an ideology. There's still political parties and countries that are significantly influenced by fascism and fascist policies. Most notably large parts of the Arab world but also things like Peronism in Argentina. It was also distinct from simple right wing dictatorships.

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My understanding is that this would have been dependent on *when* you would ask Hitler this. If you had asked him earlier on, he would have probably replied that fascism is, at least, an inspiration for National Socialism, though National Socialism is still its own, German thing. Later on, he started growing increasingly disappointed in Fascism and saw it as beholden to the traditional right.

>Is the whole idea of "Fascism" outside the Italian context just an example of outgroup homogeneity bias?

You have to form a map of *some sort*, the match to the territory notwithstanding. During the interwar era, and to some degree even afterwards, there was a great amount of extreme nationalist movements with certain commonalities that even took the power in some countries, and "fascism" is probably the most useful name for this tendency, since it was an open point of reference for many of them.

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The Nazis were directly inspired by Italian fascists, but given Germany became the greater partner, and had a much broader base and greater degree of social control (Italian fascists having kinda haphazardly come to power, versus Nazis getting almost half the votes), they kinda played down that connection.

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The Nazis did have a sense that they were doing the same sort of thing as Mussolini's Fascists, especially prior to 1933. A lot of it was tactics and aesthetics, like the Brown Shirts being heavily inspired by the Black Shirts, and the Beer Hall Putsch being the first stage in a plan that was modeled after the 1922 March on Rome that brought Mussolini to power.

How much Hitler personally thought the Nazis and the Italian Fascists were doing the same sort of thing depended on the relative fortunes of the respective parties and, once both were in power, how well the governments were getting along that week.

In terms of ideology and policy, the biggest difference was probably that the Italian Fascists saw nationality as the crucial fault line dividing humanity, while the Nazis saw race in that role. Mussolini was pretty dismissive of race as something significant up until the mid-to-late-30s when Italy was allied with Germany and shaking out to be the junior partner in that alliance. In particular, antisemitism was central to Nazi ideology, and the Nazis started writing antisemitic policy into Germany's laws very soon after taking power. Mussolini frequently flip-flopped on antisemitism in the 20s and 30s and Italian Fascists didn't start enacting antisemitic laws until 1938, 16 years after taking power.

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> Mussolini frequently flip-flopped on antisemitism in the 20s and 30s and Italian Fascists didn't start enacting antisemitic laws until 1938, 16 years after taking power.

And, at least according to Arendt, the Italians were extremely resistant to the Holocaust, and the genocide only really got started in Italy once the US invaded, and the Fascist government collapsed, and Germany occupied the north.

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On The Rest Is History podcast they had an interesting discussion about What Is Fascism? They both agreed that fascism must have an element of both futurism and fashion. Futurism in the sense of flashy new technology like jet aeroplanes and such and the notion the future will be shiny and bright. Fashion in the sense of well-choreographed parades with stylish uniforms. I think there may have also been some stuff about race and nationalism.

So by that definition, the Nazi's would seem pretty fascist. Maybe the Proud Boys too on the fashion front, though perhaps not on the futurism front. The Rationalists definitely fail on the fashion front.

ADDED: Trump isn't enough of a futurist to be a fascist, but I think he could put on quite the parade if only they would let him. I suppose he does like his shiny jet aeroplane, but that makes him more of a retro-fascist than a neo-fascist.

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I haven't listened to the podcast, but this strikes me as remarkably unserious. Fascism had very particular ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state, and was very consciously a reaction both to socialism (out of which it grew), Marxism, and, of course, liberalism. If an analysis does not address those aspects, then it is pointless. Here are some of those ideas, from the horse's mouth: https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf

>In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. Hence the great value of tradition in records, in language, in customs, in the rules of social life. Outside history man is a nonentity. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations.

>Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts The rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to he the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.

>No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State. Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle.

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I've seen a theory that fascism is a mood rather than an ideology. Academics try to define fascism, but it doesn't fit well into logical categories.

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Is Obama a fascist? All that "Hope" stuff and very fashionable.

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I think he was missing some of the pieces. He wasn't into remaking daily life or purifying society.

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There's been a fair amount about Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)-- serious brain damage from repeated blows to the head, even impacts that don't cause obvious damage. I'm wondering about group effects. What happens on the group level for demographics where a lot of impacts are common, perhaps especially for young people?

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What's the value, to anyone, in diagnosing people as being on the autistic spectrum? In the old days a high-functioning person of that nature would get described as eccentric, which has a charming ring to it, whereas autistic has all the charm of "retard". (Not many kids bully each other by saying: "Tom, you're eccentric! Stay away from me you fucking eccentric!")

And it all seems tautological. Someone has a variety of personality traits which can be grouped as Asperger's or on the autistic spectrum, but there's no treatment for it, and the effect of pathologizing these traits stigmatize them. What's the argument in favor of labeling these people the modern equivalent of "retard" instead of not labelling them at all?

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If we could diagnose all such people, I would see value in knowing that certain traits are much less rare than people currentlyt hink.

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> In the old days a high-functioning person of that nature would get described as eccentric, which has a charming ring to it, whereas autistic has all the charm of "retard". (Not many kids bully each other by saying: "Tom, you're eccentric! Stay away from me you fucking eccentric!")

And what of those who were even a tad less high-functioning? They would get described as "freaks" or "weird" or at best "anti-social" and generally would be looked upon with suspicion. Surely it is better for all involved for people to understand that a given person is acting oddly because they can't help it, and that their odd behavior is not a symptom of malevolence, nor a predictor of dangerous behavior.

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You need enough money to be called eccentric. But don't step over the invisible line by being too weird.

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I don't even understand what "autistic" is supposed to mean. Can someone give me an actual definiton? The definitions seem to be something like "has some combination of this long list of traits" and...I'm sorry, what do these traits have in common? What's the actual singular definition that unites them all? If there is none, why are they lumped together into the same thing? Is there a common cause? Or do they just correlate and no one's quite sure why?

It's all so vague and makes me think psychology is in a very messy and primitive state, kind of like medicine in the 19th century.

Several people have said I seem autistic. Maybe I am and I'm also commenting here (seriously what's the link between commenting on this blog and autism?; I swear every second commenter identifies with it). But I have no clue what it actually means.

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Those four things seem described as, roughly speaking:

* smart, repetitive, mildly awkward

* smart, awkward, mildly repetitive

* repetitive, awkward, highly verbal

* repetitive, awkward, nonverbal

I am not dismissing this classification, just complaining that even if true, it is difficult to remember. Do we have at some easy to remember archetype for each group?

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None whatsoever. The overall concept of an "autism spectrum," lumping together slightly awkward nerds with people who can't feed or dress themselves, is worthless and actively destructive: it's yet another example of what someone referred to as the gentrification of mental illness, where people who are basically fine move in to scoop up the victim cred of being "mentally ill" and actual mentally ill people are pushed out into the streets to die of exposure.

People "on the spectrum" need to recognize that they're just shy normies, and treatment should be reserved for those who actually need it. This will be better for the formerly autistic too as they won't have this fictional illness as a crutch, preventing them from taking action to improve their own lives.

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You are telescoping two things: the idea that asperger's and autism are the same thing, which emenated from medial professionals; and a socially constructed idea of "being on the spectrum".

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"This will be better for the formerly autistic too as they won't have this fictional illness as a crutch, preventing them from taking action to improve their own lives."

It's not fictional, though, is the question we're debating. Again,, taking the service where I work as example. We cater for children from 2-5 years.

Part of this is Transitions. This is a big deal. The act of going from one room into a different room can trigger a meltdown. So you have to teach the child about this is a normal activity, it happens everywhere, this is how you deal with it. That includes telling the child beforehand you are going to leave room A, then when going into room B telling them that now you are going into room B; encouraging them to say things out loud like "door" to get across the idea of 'we're opening the door, we're going through the door; seeing this door means we will be opening this door and going through it into a different room'. Getting them over this hump means they will no longer be having meltdowns at home about "now you have to move from this room to your bedroom" or in public. It helps them learn and cope. 'Normal' children don't need this level of intervention.

These are children "on the spectrum". It's not "slightly awkward nerd" because by the time you get to that age, the damage may have already been done. I do accept your point about gentrification, but that does not mean that there isn't a gradient from "real but mild version" to "real and totally disabling version". The kids can be "basically fine" up until you hit the one thing that sets them off. That's what the onlookers don't see; you can't tell from "John is perfectly fine, just a bit shy and awkward" adult who has learned how to function in everyday life that "but if this particular trigger sets him off, John is very much not perfectly fine".

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To be more clear... the kids you're talking about, I agree that there's actual autism (or whatever we'd like to call it, clearly something wrong) going on here. My disagreement is with putting the awkward nerds on a "spectrum" with people who have a meltdown about going through a doorway. It does a disservice to both.

To reach for the glasses example below: it does not resolve the problems of nearsighted people to teach them to read Braille, and it does not resolve the problems of blind people to buy them contact lenses. Different issues require different approaches.

(And in the case of autism we're not only lumping people with different issues into the same category, we're also encouraging random social climbers to insert themselves into that category too.)

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As with many things in life, the extremes are very different and easily distinguishable, but this does not yet mean you can have a simple binary classification, because there is actually a continuum without an obvious place to draw a line.

Worse, part of the difference between someone who gets a diagnosis and someone who does not is whether their symptoms affect their daily life badly enough for them to seek help. This is a combination of what their symptoms are, how capable they are of managing them, and what their daily life involves. You cannot, therefore, predict whether someone will want or get a diagnosis by considering the symptoms alone. The continuum is multidimensional and a partition of it that takes only one dimension into account will not lead to sensible results.

Meanwhile, if help/support is on offer, grifters will try to access it.

As with many other problems that have similar properties, we are left with a choice: we can have more gatekeeping and risk failing to help some people who need help, or we can have less gatekeeping and give some help to grifters who do not need it.

My preference, as always, is for solutions that accept some level of grift in order to help most of the people that need help over solutions that aim to reduce the level of fraud to zero; losing some money to help more people is IMO better than losing some people to save more money.

This is a fully general stance. cf. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

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"People "on the spectrum" need to recognize that they're just shy normies"

While I agree with the TikTokkers and Instagram and the rest of the bunch grabbing onto "I'm ackshully neurodivergent, you bigot!" as an excuse for why they should be allowed behave like assholes and get away with it is an example of using mental problems as a trend, being "on the spectrum" is not just "shy normie".

I work in a service where children with additional needs are educated, and I now have a next-door neighbour with two kids that are probably additional needs as well, and I can tell you it's more than a simple matter of "Little Johnny is just shy, he just needs to mix with kids his own age and come out of his shell". That's not the most severe cases, it really is "on the spectrum and needs early intervention to develop coping strategies and be integrated into society".

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>People "with glasses" need to recognize they can see fine, and treatment should be reserved for those who are properly blind

No. It's more like, people "with glasses" need to recognize that they should use glasses or contact lenses to see clearly, as opposed to wearing opaque sunglasses, carrying a cane, and reading Braille from now on. It's not that there isn't something different about them; it's that their issue is not the same as the issue blind people have, and talking about a "spectrum" that goes from wearing reading glasses to someone who has had their eyes physically removed is not a useful concept.

>otherwise just a normal and diffident guy, would freak out at screechy noises, smash his arms into table edges when his clothes itched, etc.

I'm sorry, but that is not a "normal guy."

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"Slightly awkward nerd" is not the same thing as "on the spectrum". I think you're going off the pop culture notion of what the autism spectrum is, and while I think certainly some awkward people have grabbed onto "oh I'm not a weirdo, I'm autistic!" as being something to help salve their sense of self-worth, unless you have a diagnosis, that's not it.

There are certainly things like social anxiety disorder etc. but those are not autism. The curse of self-diagnosis is what we're all complaining about.

I do think that folding in Asperger's was not a good idea as it may be a somewhat different disorder, but autism does exist on a range from mild to extremely severe.

This is not people who can see just fine pretending to be blind, or even near-sighted people pretending to be blind, this is people who are legally blind even if they have some vision.

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OK but if it's a spectrum then by definition it's not binary. Only the label is binary.

Or is that even correct? Does the spectrum peter out at some discrete point?

One reason I'm so curious about this is that, as an old, weird, eccentric guy, I can imagine that I'm "on the spectrum" and would have been labeled that when younger but feel thankful that I wasn't because I would have hated to have been labeled like that. But maybe that's a generational thing. Young people seem to love identity labels whereas my generation mostly loathed them when younger.

But if I did imagine myself as "on the spectrum" --- and I ponder it --- it causes me to reinterpret much of my past differently. I see things through a different lens if I adopt that label. That's, again, because however spectrumy autism may be, the label is binary. For instance, I feel as if I have less freewill if I imagine my life with the label than without it. (I don't believe in freewill theoretically, but it *feels* like I have it. With the label, it *feels less like I have it*. I prefer to feel like I have freewill, however delusionary that may be.)

I feel like it shouldn't matter so much whether I might have such a label or not. Anyway, I liked it better before the label existed, when the world was less medicalized and it was easier to feel normal even if you were weird.

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Maybe I should add that I did find "Autism qua Predictive Processing error" [0] as uniquely descriptive of whatever is going on with me. So maybe the label isn't 100% noise. But to reiterate, the dominant theory at the time I was "diagnosed" was Simon Baron-Cohen's theory [1] of emotional clairevoyance. And the "services" i was offered by the industry, which were supposed to help learn how to navigate social interactions, were not especially relevant to me.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/

[1] who, perhaps kabbalistically, is the cousin of the Sacha Baron Cohen, the guy who starred in the movie I linked to in my other previous comment.

(edited: found the correct link)

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> Maybe I should add that I did find "Autism qua Predictive Processing error" [0] as uniquely descriptive of whatever is going on with me.

Sensory oversensivity is about the only symptom I haven't got.

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I did kinda balk at the "intense world" theory. But also, my skin is sensitive enough to kill probably... 70% of mosquitos before they bite me. Which is pretty unusual, based on my observations of others. So idk.

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I have the fOrMal dIAgnOsiS as high-functioning and/or asperger's. Three points:

A) The "test" i was given by a professional shrink consists of trying to have a conversation about normie topics and seeing how well i could engage. But normie smalltalk bores me to tears, so i "failed" the test. Though I'm pretty damn good at carrying a conversation if I want to (and I often do, out of social politeness). So if I'd known in advance that "emotional clairvoyance" was effectively what they were testing for, I'd have aced it easily.

B) It's a "CoNsTelLaTioN oF SymPtomS". AKA syndromic. AKA nobody has the slightest clue what causes it. Except that it's vaguely genetic. (But that didn't stop the shrinks from trying to give me the runaround. They are SO CONVINCED that "constellation of symptoms" is somehow a meaningful turn of phrase.)

C) Temple Grandin has opined that the essence of autism is a lack of abstraction. Which is very much the opposite of whatever I have. So not only are people confused about the causes, but they're confused about the symptoms as well. Which leaves... not a whole lot to work with. So yes, it's practically tautological.

From this, I've concluded that the label contains negative information. Because not only is it completely useless, but it also gives the illusion of having discovered something valuable and authoritative. Maybe the label is useful for others. But as far as I'm concerned, I might as well have been diagnosed as "HIV Aladeen" [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYJ2w82WifU

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> But normie smalltalk bores me to tears,

Are you sure that itself is something different from ASD? Why shouldn't it manifest as a set of interests and disinterests?

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On one hand, I don't mind a label that's low-status/weird/etc. And I certainly have *something* that deserves a label. (I.e. no, I wouldn't go as far as carateca in describing myself as a shy normie.)

But on the other hand, I've met people with the SEVERE version of autism. Lumping "unusual interests" into the same spectrum as "can't tie shoes; speech impediment; literally a savant; etc" feels roughly equivalent to "Scooby-Doo fans are just slightly more well-adjusted Ted Bundy's".

And whatever I have, certainly isn't a lack of emotional perception.

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Failing the conversational test is part of it, though. If you can 'ace the test' once you know what the questions are in advance, then that is your coping strategy. The unfiltered you is the one who is bored to tears by 'normie smalltalk', so you only freely speak with enthusiasm and unprompted and from genuine interest on your special topics of interest.

That's high-functioning/Asperger's there, babes. I don't have a formal diagnosis but I have a strong suspicion I'm somewhere around Asperger's, and with a paternal family line of that as well (there are family stories going back generations of the 'odd' members which were not simply "shy normies" as per caracteca). I too am very "normie small talk bores me to tears". I don't know how your adolescence went, but mine was "why am I not interested in the things my peers are interested in, why am I the only one who cares about these odd weird topics?"

Psychological theories struggle to deal with the better functioning people. It's easier when you've got the kids who (to take a real life example from a previous job) have to wear a motorcycle helmet pretty much 24/7 as otherwise they will beat their heads against the wall so hard and so continuously they cause injury to themselves. Everyone looks at that and agrees "that's not normal".

But "does well at school, doesn't share peer interests, is socially awkward, has some quirks of behaviour"? That's a lot harder. And I was a lot weirder but repressed the hell out of the stranger behaviour/beliefs around other people because I knew "this is weird and possibly crazy". So looking from the outside, it's a lot easier to dismiss all that as "spectrum does not exist".

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> The unfiltered you is the one who is bored to tears by 'normie smalltalk', so you only freely speak with enthusiasm and unprompted and from genuine interest on your special topics of interest.

It's a bit ironic that an aspie who tries to talk like normies, and even does a mediocre job but gets bored, is considered to be bad at social skills... while the normie who doesn't even try to talk like aspies (except mockingly), and boasts about how he hates math, is considered to be the empathic and social superman. Seriously?

That's a bit like living in a world where most native German speakers also fluently speak English, but only a rare native English speaker speaks even a little German... and concluding that the native English speakers are *better at languages*, because you only compare everyone on how perfect is their English.

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I think you may have hit the nail on the head. What makes aspies appear antisocial is only that they happen to be *outnumbered* by people whose personalities and communication styles exist on a different spectrum. If the majority of the population had stereotypical aspie traits, then those who didn't would be the antisocial ones because they would have a harder time communicating with the majority of people.

To be less generous, one could say that the world is full of dumb people who are interested in dross and if you happen to be one of the rare smart ones interested in more complex, abstract things, well, you've got this syndrome that makes you uninterested in dross and we're going to come up with a label for it so the dumb people can use it as an epithet in the lunchroom.

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No, come on. That's offensive. "Everyone not like me is just a dummy interested in dross" is both a terrible over-simplification and ignoring that it's more than "just being shy" but that people 'on the spectrum' (and yes, horrible term but we're stuck with it) do have genuine, real problems with ordinary social interaction and the tasks of adulthood.

It's very tempting to go "well I don;'t need them, they're just too stupid to appreciate the finer things, unlike me" but that's sour grapes. I've had that temptation, I've done that looking down my nose, but at this hour of my life, I have to recognise: I am not able to do some ordinary things and that's *my* lack, not society. It's not just a label, any more than "wheelchair user" is just a label the dumb people came up with so they could use it as an epithet in the lunchroom.

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> Everyone not like me is just a dummy

> people 'on the spectrum' (...) do have genuine, real problems with ordinary social interaction and the tasks of adulthood.

I dunno why these need be mutually-exclusive. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the normies who are mentally ill by needing to share inane gossip.

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It's not the modern equivalent of "retard" in a lot of settings, and this forum is one of them. I don't know whether Scott considers himself to be on the autism spectrum, but it would not surprise me if he did. And many of the people here who describe themselves as somewhat autistic are very smart people with good jobs, usually in tech, who are are introverted and eccentric, have always felt different from other people, and were seen as oddballs by their peers growing up. I don't know whether thinking of these people as being at the smart, high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum is accurate, but I do think the cluster of characteristics they have is a thing, a syndrome. I'm a psychologist, by the way.

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Look, I'm not usually one to get mad about terminology, but it strikes me as a mistake to refer to "shy, eccentric, introverted, smart, feel like oddballs" as a "syndrome." I'll agree that it's a distinct personality type, but pathologizing it is the wrong direction to go in.

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I agree with you there. I do think some people have latched on to "I'm on the spectrum" as a way of handling the dissonance of "I'm the weirdo in my peer group".

But that is not to say that "Therefore the autism spectrum/Asperger's Syndrome" does not exist. As I said, our service deals with children with additional needs, which includes autism spectrum, and it's not just "needs some coaxing to interact with peers". It's having meltdowns out of thin air (to outside view), repetitive behaviours, sensory processing issues, hyperfocus on special interests, a whole raft of things all going together.

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Well, syndrome literally means "run together," which captures the way I think of it. I have never seen the term used in a context where the speaker was not referring to something that they saw as pathology, though. I'm fine with calling it a personality type. On the other hand, many people who have grown up as that personality type do not experience themselves as just one of many perfectly fine personality types. They feel as though something is *wrong,* something is getting in the way of them doing all kinds of things. And I do think the list of things they have a lot of trouble doing is longer than the lists that go with other styles of living and thinking that we regard as personality types.

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I don't exactly disagree. I guess I'm just uncomfortable with going so far as to medicalize it, which is a lot of what's going on.

This is a valuable personality type, and the people who have it can have happy lives with all the same life achievements that the "normies" do, even if it requires a different approach from the normies. I do strongly believe that many of them are held back in making those achievements because they're encouraged to see themselves as mental patients who have to somehow be "cured" before they can move forward.

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The problem is that to get any kind of help, it needs to be medicalized. You need the Official Diagnosis. Otherwise you get the "just deal with it/pull yourself up by your bootstraps" kind of reaction from everyone which does not, in fact, help.

You feel like you're drowning and instead of being thrown a lifebuoy, you get "just learn to swim! if you could swim, you'd be fine! everyone else can swim!"

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But is the medical system the right way to approach these specific problems? Surely there is societal infrastructure better suited to the problem "I never know what to do in social situations" than medicalization!

And while I agree that society as a whole fails to help people with this more often than not... for those of us who are old enough, at least, I think we've seen this type of infrastructure, even if there isn't enough of it. There are (were) books about how to improve yourself, there are (were) clubs and organizations explicitly around socialization, there are (were) local peer groups that supported each other. A lot of this stuff has been annihilated in the Current Year and we're trying to replace it with medicalization.

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Well, what I think is a reasonable approach if they want help with some of the things they have trouble with is just to work on the thing itself. What's the bottleneck? One bottleneck I often see (I'm a psychologist) is that people with this profile want an unusual amount of certainty about what's going to happen next, and that gets in their way in situations where certainty is not possible. For instance somebody I see got a job offer, but then delayed quite a long time before accepting it, because there were various things he did not know about what the job would be like. He kept trying to figure out what the things would be like by obsessively analyzing all the data he had, but that data simply did not hold clear answers to all of his questions. It helped him to see this pattern, and to give some thought to which things in life fall into the highly predictable category and which did not, and to realize that new jobs were in the latter category. And we talked about steps he could take if the new job had various bad characteristics -- ways to change the job, ways to exit if it was unfixable. He's quite smart, and would have been perfectly able to carry out this analysis on his own. But he was so anxious about the job, and so stuck in the impossible task of figuring out exactly what the job would be like that it did not occur to him to ask himself the questions I asked him. This approach is neutral as regards whether he has a mental illness or a wiring problem or a syndrome. And that seems like a reasonable approach to me, given that if we could somehow know that he had a certain wiring problem or that he perfectly met the criteria for high-functioning autism that info would have no utility whatever, since we have no treatment that specific to wiring problems or autism.

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I genuinely think the problem is the smartness. You're dumb (no disparagement to my dumb fellow-humans) and can't deal with things? Okay, people make allowances for that because you're dumb. Maybe you're so dumb you need special help, okay fine.

BUT. You're academically capable? This needn't even mean "straight A student", it's "does okay at school, is not falling behind, is not failing tests, is not causing trouble in class".

Then it's "well what's wrong with you? you just need to try harder! you don't have a problem, you're just being difficult!" The idea being that if you're not stupid, then your difficulties with everyday functioning that ordinary people can do just fine are down to lack of will power, or grit, or tenacity, or just thinking yourself too good for the rest of us.

Looking back on an incident which puzzled me at the time, when I was a kid my mother brought me to the doctor. This wasn't our usual family doctor, and I wasn't sick. Doctor did a physical exam, said I was fine.

I think she was trying to find out if there was something 'wrong' with me, because she had noticed I wasn't developing 'normally' in some aspects (one of that was that she was worried I might have hearing problems, as often I didn't respond when called). She didn't have the vocabulary or concepts of things like autism or development delays, so she was reliant on the doctor picking something up.

But of course, since she never raised the question of "does my child have developmental problems?", the doctor just looked for physical problems, no her ears are fine, her health is fine, she's okay.

So that was it. Nothing went further. I couldn't understand at the time why I was going to the doctor, because I wasn't sick. But now I understand what she was trying to grope towards, and I think she was right. But it's decades too late now to do anything about it, and the shape of my life has been formed.

Would a diagnosis have helped me? I have no idea. I have no idea of knowing what would have happened. But it sure as hell would have helped explain me to myself.

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Right. I know that and I respect this community tremendously. And one thing I respect about it is that it is so open to questions that might run against the grain of conventional wisdom. It strikes me that there are trade-offs in pathologizing a cluster of characteristics. Others in this thread have given good reasons for why the label and diagnosis have positive value. I can imagine that there is also a negative side to it, as there are for most things.

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It can make therapy, life skills coaching, and self-improvement more productive. There are common issues that people on the spectrum often struggle with that aren't often major problems for neurotypical people or people with non-Autism-Spectrum issues. Having an autism diagnosis focuses the hypothesis space for "areas that might need work" more onto those particular issues and also suggests that where those issues are indeed problems, there may be a standard playbook for autistic people to work on those particular issues.

This hypothesis-focusing effect is particularly valuable when the issue is superficially similar to a more-common-in-the-general-population issue with different root causes and treatments. For example, an autism meltdown can look a lot like either a panic attack (an anxiety disorder symptom) or an emotional flashback (a PTSD symptom). There are significant differences between their presentations, but those differences are easy to miss unless you're looking specifically for them.

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OK. That makes sense.

I think I have some wrong notion that "kids these days" are just getting scrutinized, medicalized and labeled to death by the time they are in First Grade whether they have serious problems or not. Perhaps I'm extrapolating too much from the helicopter parenting phenomena to imagine that kids are no longer allowed the space to be a little bit weird without getting a full diagnosis for their little bit of weirdness.

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That is an entire separate problem, Hank. Again, like yourself I'm only going off online comments, but there is a definite sense in which the push to get better results means "you need good grades to get into a good school to go to a good university to get a good job", so if accommodations such as more time or other assistance is available for kids with needs, then for the pushy, anxious, 'tiger mom' types of parents who can afford it - get your kid diagnosed as ADHD (for the Ritalin/Adderall to improve focus) and any other disorder which means "Little Johnny needs extra time on the tests and other help" so little Johnny can keep on grinding out those high grades and eventually get a high status, high paying job.

So there are a few problems:

(1) Medicalisation of everything. Little Johnny can't still still in class and pay attention? Now that's ADHD and he needs to be medicated

(2) Gaming the system, as above, which extends into university (related to that, I think, is the attitude that cheating is fine, everyone does it, only fools actually do the reading and the work and write their own essays and study for exams, take the easy path to guaranteed grades)

(3) Self-diagnosis by the terminally online. Some people really do have problems, but instead of facing up to "I am a pain in the backside and need to work on that", they prefer to grab for "In fact, I am a Type Z multipolar disorder person with Complex Childhood PTSD due to narcissistic parents and anxiety disorder and see attached list of my disabilities, so that is why I should be permitted to be a massive pain in the backside and anyone who objects is abusing a survivor of childhood abuse and neglect by toxic family and environment".

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Knowing yourself... seems like a good thing?

Making your diagnosis known to others is possibly a bad idea. However, if your symptoms are strong, they probably already know or at least suspect.

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>Knowing yourself... seems like a good thing?

Sure, but Asperger's or whatever syndrome are social constructs. The question is whether they are useful social constructs. The constructs can come with information, but they can also come with baggage in the form of negative stereotypes.

I suppose I've observed the negative stereotyping around autism/Asperger's more than I've observed the gains people have made from the label. That doesn't mean what I've observed has much bearing on the reality.

An example of the negative stereotyping. Razib Khan yesterday tweets: https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1803121717629555045

"let me be explicit here: a lot of rationalists are so psychologically abnormal they are incapable of being conventionally racist. that also means they are incapable of being antiracist.

to be against something you have to be able to conceive of it. they aren't wired that way"

Someone responds: "Can you clarify psychologically abnormal here a bit?" Razib then tweets a link to "Asperger Syndrome" on Wikipedia. Someone responds to that with "ha ha".

I don't believe Razib was trying to make any sort of mean-spirited joke, he was simply being direct about what he meant. But the response "ha ha" demonstrates that it's a subject of mockery and derision, which was inescapable once the terms "autistic" and "Asperger's" become popularized to mean "socially retarded".

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The whole point of having the DSM is that psych diagnoses aren’t supposed to be social constructs; in practice some are more subjective than others.

Self-diagnosis of autism isn’t very accurate, based on this study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992806/

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