Why business needs people with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and dyslexia

http://www.economist.com/node/21556230?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/inpraiseofmisfits

by shill • 14 years ago

62 55 14 years ago

poundy• 14 years ago

Dr. Temple Grandin, an adult with autism who became a successful engineer, academic and speaker, believes that her disorder is an asset. She once famously called NASA a sheltered workshop for people with autism and Asperger Syndrome. She believes that people with autistic spectrum disorders are the great innovators, and "if the world was left to you socialites, nothing would get done and we would still be in caves talking to each other."

gaius6• 14 years ago

I'm sure the special needs teachers who made that possible, and the taxpayers who fund them, are delighted to hear that. Maybe the socialites would still be in caves, but the "aspies" would be outside starving.

The symptoms of Asberger's are so indistinguishable from "being a dick" that they might as well be synonymous.

windsurfer• 14 years ago

Your post angers and insults me. Everything you said is negative and mean, while the original poster was at least trying to add to the conversation. Even calling those with Asperger's "aspies" is condescending.

refly• 14 years ago

You're getting downvoted, but not being told why.

Asperger's is a lot more complex than just "being a dick". Unfortunately some people use it as an excuse for undesirable behaviors. Regardless, that does not extend to all sufferers. Sometimes it manifests as intense, uncontrollable interest in certain narrow topics and a sensitivity to certain sounds, foods, smells, etc, and a shy or awkward disposition. That isn't being a dick by any means.

I'm sorry if you had a bad experience. It may stem from the fact if you've interacted with people who were diagnosed at a young age, they tend to be on the very far end of the spectrum and as a result may exhibit more extreme symptoms. There are a lot of people who have Asperger's who simply don't disclose it and have developed coping mechanisms that help them blend in. There might be many around you, but they might never have come out as such.

patio11• 14 years ago

You have sufficient social acumen to understand that this comment is critical of you. Many people with Asperger's don't.

s8qnze982y• 14 years ago

People is not either autistic or socialite. Following the same (rhetoric) logic, "if the world was left to you autistic, humanity would extinguish in two generations tops".

drzaiusapelord• 14 years ago

I'm not a fan of this quote. It really does dismiss the arts, the power of socializing, society, government, and largely the human experience.

I'm much, much closer in mentality to Temple and to be frank, her strawman socialite is weak sauce. I've spent much of my adulthood learning social skills I never picked up as a child or teenager and they in themselves have an incredible amount of power. Without the socialites we wouldn't have gotten on the moon because we'd be too busy in our basements making toothpick replicas of various Lord of The Ring battles. Honestly, NASA is a pretty poor example. The amount of politicking, career maneuvering, inter department competition, giant egos, public policy changes, new administrations, etc going on there would be unbearable to someone like Grandin.

Different evolutionary neurotypical strategies exist because they have value. One isn't "better" than another. Let's stop playing this game and accept that from a macro view there's a lot going on and its unfair to piss on or put one group on a pedestal. Its just too easy to do so. Ease and psychologically pleasing conclusions should always be seen with a critical eye.

I think this is also why extremist right-wing politics appeals to the geeky crowd. We like simple answers that rely on systems (free markets, no taxes) and don't understand how the social aspects (regulation, control, subsidizing for the poor) matter. To many they're just roadblocks to some idealized system that 'must work' because it makes sense on paper in a very simple way.

Oh well, here come the downvotes, but I really wish on a personal level that my own issues were addressed when I was younger. I learned long ago that, yes, I'm smart and creative and am able to do difficult things, but the price for that for a long time was misery, loneliness, confusion, and depression. I know its a cliche but the balanced really life is the best life. I don't want to be Temple Grandin the same way I don't want to be Paris Hilton. I wouldn't mind being Temple Hilton though.

gaius6• 14 years ago

There are a lot of people, on Slashdot in particular, and also here, who have self-diagnosed themselves with Asperger's in the belief that it makes them Homo Superior.

jere• 14 years ago

"Recruiters have noticed that the mental qualities that make a good computer programmer resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome... an addiction to repetitive tasks"

I think someone is forgetting one of the three virtues of programming: laziness.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris

Sunlis• 14 years ago

I thought the same thing. If there's anything a good programmer shouldn't be doing, it's repetitive tasks. If you're coding the same thing over and over again, you're doing it wrong.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

By the time I find myself doing something for the third time, I start thinking: automation.

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

Typing out class and function declarations, if-then-else constructs, and recompiling on a regular basis is tediously repetitive to most people. It doesn't necessarily mean you're repeating the same program. Likewise, most techno music sounds repetitive to the disinterested listener, notwithstanding the large relative variations that occur within the music.

swedenborg3• 14 years ago

wannabe big soon companies want socially nice ppl . very few companies hire for shear capacity because their culture can not handle it ... capacity is looked at with fear since plain jon/jane can not simply grok ...

is it a problem ? well really its a opportunity ...

the most wanted ppl. is free for hire ...

swedenborg3• 14 years ago

seems there are some wannabe be big quick companies hanging here ... that did not get the message ...

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

I think this is more perceptive than people appreciate.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

Legitimate post, but you're probably being downvoted for the txtspeak and grammar.

brudgers• 14 years ago

I recently read Elizabeth Moon's Nebula Award winning Speed of Dark. It's about a cure for autism being forced upon employees by a corporation.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC1B2Y/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

kstenerud• 14 years ago

It wasn't forced upon the employees; they were free to choose to take the cure or not. Personally, I think Moon's portrayal of the protagonist was overly dark and depressing (probably to shed some light into the kind of nasty shit that can happen to an autistic). Given the choice, I'd refuse the "cure".

tmcw• 14 years ago

And maybe the way Bill Gates rocks in his chair is low-level aspbergers and the incidence of aspbergers in men explains why men dominate the computer industry and possibly these disorders are both indicative of strength in the area and encouraged by the usage of technology.

Yeah, either that, or pop-science doesn't actually have much explanatory or prescriptive power in this area until they clear up their own messes with ADD diagnosis and poorly crafted studies.

strlen3• 14 years ago

I don't know about Bill Gates, but several of the people mentioned (e.g., CEO of Jetblue) have clinical diagnoses and would not have been able to be where they are without understanding their conditions.

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

There is no such thing as Asperger's or ADD. It's just the term boring morons use for interesting clever people.

If we were in charge we would have medical terms for "unable to set the clock on a VCR" and "unable to read a book when Oprah is on"

But fortunately we don't care what a bunch of dreary moron office drones think of us - even when we bother to notice them.

cynicalkane• 14 years ago

I don't think you've ever met anyone with severe ADD, or severe Asperger's for that matter.

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

PhD in astrophysics, worked at Cambridge, Caltech, MIT and in a bunch of military space projects.

In my world 'Sheldon Cooper' is a wild party animal.

lmkg• 14 years ago

I met a friend in college with real ADD. The type where the medication he takes is about 2 chemical reactions away from straight-up cocaine. One day, he forgot to take his meds, and I was talking to him at lunch. He was in the middle of a sentence, and he just... stopped. Completely frozen. Motionless, mid-gesture, staring off into space. He stayed like this for close to a full minute, and just as I was about to ask him if he was ok, he yelled out "SHIT, WHERE'D IT GO!?!" Apparently the sentence he was saying evaporated from his head while he was in the process of speaking it.

So yeah, there really is such a thing as ADD. I won't contest that it's overdiagnosed to hell and back. I wouldn't be surprised if only 1 case in 100 is the real thing, or even 1 in 1,000. But there actually is a real thing, that exists, underneath all the misdiagnoses.

finnw• 14 years ago

Could that not have been withdrawal symptoms?

strlen3• 14 years ago

As cynicalkane said, you say this because you haven't met people who are very serious affected by these illnesses. These people will greatly disagree with you: yes, they are interesting and clever, but they do _suffer_ from their afflictions. Saying that these conditions do not exist discourages those individuals from seeking diagnosis and accommodations for their conditions.

For example, an individual with ADD [1] might be very intelligent but will be unable to focus on timed tests and will suffer from worse academic performance. If they're unaware of their ADD diagnosis they and others around them will think they are lazy and/or stupid; this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Being diagnosed with ADD doesn't just mean a prescription for medicine, it can instead mean being allowed to take more time on a test or to take the test in a closed office. This can mean they have a chance to be admitted to a university and be exposed to intellectually stimulating material (whether it's computer science, physics, economics, or philosophy).

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

>it can instead mean being allowed to take more time on a test

And is also widely abused for the same reason. In 2010 OFSTED (the UK govt school inspection agency) found that nearly 1/2 of the 1.6M pupils that were assessed by schools as ADD/Dyslexic/special-needs showed no sign at all of any condition. But did allow the school to either ignore their poor exam results in performance tables or claim extra funds for teaching them.

Similarly there is a statistically odd large increase in the number of children suddenly diagnosed as dyslexic/ADD in their final year at UK `public schools` (= private fee paying) - just before they take final exams - allowing them extra time, the assistance of a teacher or to use a laptop to write essay answers.

coridactyl2• 14 years ago

I appreciate the attempted compliment. It's nice to consider myself interesting and clever.

Unfortunately, it's not so nice when I'm unmedicated to lose my train of thought constantly, be totally distracted by small noises (think Doug the dog: "SQUIRREL!"), be totally manic and creative for two to four hours only to be beset by a terrible fog of malaise for the next few days or even week. But with a boost extra norepinephrine and dopamine, however, I can actually function as a human being and feel like I have control over my life.

Whatever peculiar chemical mixture I have, whether you'd like to call it ADD (or ADHD-PI) or some sort of minor bipolar disorder or depression or hypomania, has very real consequences on my life. Without medication, I am miserable. With it, I feel some semblance of what I would presume "normal" feels like. It doesn't fix all of my problems - my memory recording and recall skills are still very poor and my ability to manage my time is a challenge, which has taken years of practice to compensate for - but it stabilizes me emotionally and mentally so that I can actually focus on living my life vs. using all my faculties up struggling to do basic things like dishes or laundry.

Now I'd like to turn the discussion back to you: what's with your hostility to people who aren't like you?

excuse-me5• 14 years ago

"Oh my little darling could never sit down and read that 1000page book - it's not because he's lazy boring and stupid - it's because he has ADD".

You can sit down and read a 1000 page book? when Jersey Shore is on? You must have Aspergers.

Little "moonflower cherub" doesn't do well at school. It's because she's too delicate, fragile and artistic for math. She can't read either, she just sits in class eating crayons - she must be dyslexic.

refurb• 14 years ago

I had a co-worker with Asperger's Syndrome. It was actually quite fascinating to me, since I'm a big science/medicine geek.

The amazing thing was that you could pull a list of symptoms from wikipedia or the Merck Manual and put a check mark next to each one with this guy.

Smart guy and very pleasant, but it was apparent his lack of social awareness was very challenging to him. I would get frustrated sometimes and other coworkers would be very aware of my frustration but this guy was completely unaware.

Like I said, pretty interesting...

swedenborg3• 14 years ago

yes interesting in that "normal" ppl gets a chill from others who by will or ability differ ...

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

I have ADD, and my diagnosis comes courtesy of a leading researcher in the field. I like to think that I am also interesting and clever, and there are aspects of the condition that are a positive asset, but these are offset by considerable disadvantages. I can tell you meant your comment positively, but it comes across as ignorant and obnoxious.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

Two of the three of those have prevalence rates at around 10% of the population, so if nothing else not effectively employing such people cuts your pool of potential employees by 10%...

j_baker3• 14 years ago

I can't speak for dyslexia or asperger's, but there are documented advantages to not being able to pay attention: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/why-being-sleepy-a...

CodeMage• 14 years ago

I wonder just how much I'm overreacting by feeling disgusted about the way that Asperger's, ADD and stuff like that are suddenly a thing of fashion. It seems to be a trendy thing for journalists to discuss and a sort of a fashion statement for geeks.

Maybe I'm wrong, but to me this is a rather simple matter: there are great people who happen to have Asperger's syndrome, ADD, dyslexia, autism or what have you, but unless someone proves some sort of link between their greatness and things they were diagnosed with, then that's just what it is -- people who happen to be both great and have one of the above.

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

As someone with ADD, I have trouble gaining and maintaining focus while ignoring distracting factors. However, in an environment where distractions are minimized (eg a traditional library), or where there is an agreed-upon system for handling distracting factors - some kinds of workplaces, or an understanding about personal space/time boundaries - then the flip side of this is an ability to stay focused on something for hours, days, weeks, if necessary and a capacity for very rapid adaption and innovation.

In film production, which I used to work at, a lot of people have ADD - but the highly procedural (and proceduralized) nature of the work optimizes for this. You need to be willing to keep doing the same thing until you get it right 10, 20 or more times in a row, but also to drop it and switch to something completely different at short notice if other conditions change. I have a strong hunch that people with ADD are considerably over-represented in the military as well.

gshakir• 14 years ago

Sure, the outlook for people with these disabilities look good. But it is no fun raising a child with one, every day is a challenge.

Why business needs people with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and dyslexia

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