[extropy-chat] Libertarianism and the Autistic Spectrum (fwd from fehlinger at un.org)

[Eugen Leitl]

Forwarded with permission.

----- Forwarded message from James Fehlinger <fehlinger at un.org> -----

From: "James Fehlinger" <fehlinger at un.org>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 14:44:24 -0500
Subject: Libertarianism and the Autistic Spectrum
X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.0.7  March 21, 2001


Liz,

You know, I got all hopped up a year and a half ago
when I discovered stuff on the Web that convinced me
that a lot of folks in the Extropian/transhumanist community
exhibit many of the characteristics of Narcissistic Personality
Disorder (as described in DSM-IV), a fact which makes
them seem abrasive and alarming to the general
population entirely apart from the content of their
particular enthusiasms.

However, it now seems to me that some of this atmosphere
(and my perception of the atmosphere remains the same -- a smug,
self-satisfied lack of empathy with people who don't share
their particular hobby-horse -- and for that matter, a frequent
lack of empathy with each other!) may be due
to a concentration among this group (as with folks in SF fandom,
the Trekkie world, the Role-Playing Game world, computer
programmers, mathematicians, and science/
engineering types in general) of a sub-clinical "shadow syndrome"
of autism.  Not quite Asperger's Syndrome, even,
just a mild echo of it.

Many symptoms of mild autism seem to mimic aspects
of Narcissistic Personality Disorder,  OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder), and Avoidant Personality Disorder (am **I**
mildly Asperger's, or am I simply Avoidant or Social Phobic?
Dunno.)

Anyway, I just stumbled across an interesting Usenet exchange
that attributes the legalistic, rule-bound, verbal-contract
orientation of many libertarians to the dependence on
explicitly rule-governed behavior (as opposed to fluid,
intuitive, reciprocity in social relations) characteristic
of people on the Autistic Spectrum:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=MPG.16b93cafec85cfe8989a9c%40news.earthlink.net
-----------------------------------------------
From: Ulrika O'Brien (uaobrien at earthlink.net)
Subject: Fewmet du jour
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Date: 2002-01-23 21:32:38 PST

I wonder if there's a correlation between a high score on the
Asperger's test and Libertarian tendencies.  Which is to say I
wonder if discomfort with social discourse and non-enjoyment of
civic life might not predispose one to like a political slant that
is, pretty fundamentally, antisocial in its approach.  Why not deny
the existence and importance of the communal, if the communal makes
you uncomfortable?  In particular, I see both tendencies in my
reverend parents.  And I was wholly unsurprised to find that Mark
deprecates the importance of the public aspects of architecture, and
the value of beauty in buildings and cities, in favor of purely
anti-social cocooning values in buildings.  That which is held in
common may be unpleasant, because it is unimportant and undesirable
anyway.
-----------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------
From: Ulrika O'Brien (uaobrien at earthlink.net)
Subject: Re: Fewmet du jour
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Date: 2002-01-27 12:14:40 PST

In article <a31jpd$1un$1 at panix2.panix.com>, kfl at KeithLynch.net
says...
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaobrien at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > One datapoint does not a correlation make, or break.  I also scored
> > fairly low -- 12 -- but find that the anti-social aspects of
> > libertarianism are among the ones that make me most uncomfortable
> > as time goes on.
>
> *What* anti-social aspects of libertarianism?

The tendency to attract primarily social maladapts, for one.  The
central conception of liberty as a freedom from expectations of and
obligations to other people, except for those spelled out in
explicit contract (and that strikes me as a very Aspergian trope
right there -- the insistence that obligations don't exist except
when they are made verbally explicit and agreed to explicitly seems
very much like a coping mechanism ideally suited for folks who do
not otherwise easily read social signals) and the not unrelated
tendency to pretend away any social evils that market forces do not
naturally rectify by various species of victim-blaming.

> The ones made up by our enemies?

Enemies like me, perhaps, a libertarian of 25 years standing?
"Making up" these aspects by observation of fellow libertarians?
Your observations may differ, but I think it doesn't speak well of
libertarians that you are assuming that this sort of criticism must
necessarily be external and invented.  Then again, self-criticism,
or rather the lack of it, is another of my disappointments with the
run-of-the-month strain of libertarian thinking.

> It's precisely because I care about other people that I'm a
> libertarian.

Caring about other people doesn't, per se, address the issue of
being social or anti-social, however.  It's a non-sequitur.  It's
perfectly possible to be a gregarious misanthrope.  I sometimes
suspect that I am one, myself, though it's hard to say how much of
that is naturally misanthropic tendencies and how much is a social
fabric that promotes alienation and misanthropy.

> I could probably thrive under almost any political
> system except for the very worst.

Again, I'm not sure that speaks to the issue I'm raising.  Your
being able to thrive under any system doesn't really say anything
about whether the structure and approach and princilples of
libertarianism are more attractive to a certain socially
handicapped personality type than they are to people in the more
normal ranges of socialization.  I'm not suggesting that all
libertarians have Aspergers, or that all persons with Apergers will
end up as libertarians, but merely that the limited rule set,
explicit contracts only, no-tacit-social-contract, liberty-means-
people-leaving-me-the-fuck-alone-to-do-what-I-want belief set that
comes with libertarianism seems likely to be particularly appealing
to those with Aspergers tendencies already in place.
-----------------------------------------------

Apropos of the relations between libertarianism
and transhumanism, I also came across
the following article on the
W[orld]T[ranshumanist]A[ssociation]-talk
bulletin board:

http://www.transhumanism.org/bbs/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=5000;start=45
-----------------------------------------------
[wta-talk]My doubts about Libertarianism and volitional morality
« Reply #47 on: September 14, 2003, 05:53:54 PM »
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2003 6:24 AM
Subject: Re: [wta-talk]My doubts about Libertarianism and volitional
morality

> Again:  Please take this conversation to wta-politics!

Again:  The body voted that "political" discussions were *not* to be
confined exclusively to WTA-politics.  (Which in any case is less like a
salon these days than like the Senate floor, with a few Senators
interminably filibustering by reading out loud, one by one, all the stuff
they surf into.)  When facile libertopianisms are proffered on this list,
you should expect them to be exposed and responded to.  You *never* throw
your exasperated fits when the political statements against which I offer
my
responses are initially made.  I can only assume that this is because you
don't notice them because you agree with them, or because you like them
because you agree with them, or maybe because you don't take them as
seriously as I do (in which case I think you're wrong, but probably you
think that discussion doesn't belong on this list, in which case I think
you're wrong yet again).  Part of the problem is that the more
libertarian-inclined members of the list often like to imagine that they
are
more objective or scientific or "consequentialist" than those with whom
they
disagree, with the consequence that they participate in political discourse
all the time, all the while imagining themselves to be talking about
engineering.

It's fine that there are libertopians among transhumanists -- it's mostly a
vestige, but it's fine.  However, if transhumanism wants to produce real
effects in the real world, it is crucial that libertarianism not represent
or seem to represent the default vocabulary or common sense of
transhumanism
as a whole.  If transhumanism is identified with libertarianism, then
transhumanism is as needlessly dead in the water as cryonics, which suffers
from comparable identifications.  Indeed, the recent growth in
transhumanism
is primarily attributable to a conscious and painful effort to disidentify
transhumanism with libertopians.

Politics is part of life, CERTAINLY it is part of any "movement" hoping to
change the world, or effectively respond to a changing world.  It is deeply
symptomatic that you would want to ghettoize political discourse --
especially political discourse of "a certain type" -- onto another (and at
that, dysfunctional) list.

My best regards to you, Eliezer.  Dale Carrico
-----------------------------------------------

And you know, speaking of Mr. Y., the sort of old-timey emphasis
on explicitly-algorithmic, rigid, rule-based inferentiality
among some of the AI enthusiasts on the Extropians' and
elsewhere in the transhumanist community may also have
something to do with this shadow-autistic mind blindness,
this overreliance on explicitly-verbalized rules of
conduct.

Hmm...  I'm also reminded of C. S. Lewis's view that explicit
ethical rules -- the Ten Commandments, the Torah, the Talmud,
and so on, are stopgap measures for a fallen world.
He suggests that the essence of harmony with the Tao,
or with God, or the social fabric, or whatever, is a much more
fluid, evanescent phenomenon than could be captured in a net of words.
(I suppose that even in the here-and-now, judges have
often to deal with this inconvenient fact of life -- at least so I gather
from watching _Judging Amy_ on TV!  ;->  ).

-----------------------------------------------
"The dance is a particularly interesting expression of important
issues in that it connotes an intensity which avoids the burdensome.
This is because dance is a form of playing not working. . . . The
seriousness
of play as opposed to the seriousness of work reveals a mode of
being totally given to its raison d'etre while work is always done fo
 the purpose of something else. . . . Play, then, is a highly ordered
but totally free experience which can also be said of sacred activity.
Freedom and order (the law) are perennially the watchwords in religious
thinking. Freedom in its relation to sacred order means freely willed
rather than constrained obedience to law.

Lewis summarized it well:
'For surely we must suppose the life of the blessed to be an end in
itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the complete
reconciliation of boundless freedom with order -- with the most delicately
adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order?' (Letters to Malcolm, p.
94).

It is in the dance that the reconciliation of freedom and order can
perhaps be most vividly imagined.

'The pattern deep hidden n the dance, hidden so deep that
shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild,
free gestures that fill it, just as the decasyllabic norm gives
beauty to all the licences and variation of the poet's verse,'
Lewis writes when talking about Milton's world view.

In some sense we could say that the dance reconciles the
two poles, but at the same time freedom and order generate
the dance. A result of their fusion is a concrete and dynamic
third reality, or, more appropriately, freedom and order are a
dance. . . . The distinctions, freedom and order, generate the
dance: their reconciliation is a dance. The material not only
has religious significance in the dance, but is, along with the
spiritual, essential to the dance. And this spirituality is not
burdensome because the seriousness of dance is the
seriousness of play."

Marcia Tanner
The Image of Dance in the Works of C. S. Lewis
(quoted in http://www.lomcc.org/2003%20sermons/02-16-03.pdf )
-----------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------
Another approach to hierarchy is taken in [Lewis's]
_That Hideous Strength_. The first passage is dealing with
equality and how it guards life, it doesn't make it.

"Ah, equality!" said the Director."We must talk of that
some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal
rights from one another's greed, because we are fallen.
Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason.
But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes,
ripening for a day when we shall need them no longer.
Equality is not the deepest thing, you know."

"I always thought that was just what it was. I thought
it was in their souls that people were equal."

"You were mistaken," said he gravely. "That is the last
place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality
of incomes ? that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn't
make it. It is medicine, not food."
(Lewis, _Hideous_ 148)

The next thing the Director does is the illustration of hierarchy
and the provisions the higher ranked make for the lower.
He uses mice to do this:

"Now, Mrs. Studdock," said the Director, "you shall see a
diversion.  But you must be perfectly still."  With these words
he took from his pocket a little silver whistle and blew a note
on it.  And Jane sat still till the room became filled with silence
like a solid thing and there was first a scratching and then a
rustling and presently she saw three plump  mice working their
passage across what was to them the thick undergrowth of the
carpet, nosing this way and that so that if their course had been
drawn it would have resembled that of a winding river, until they
were so close that she could see the palpitation of their noses.
In spite of what she said she did not really care for mice in the
neighborhood of her feet and it was with an effort that she sat still.
Thanks to this effort she saw mice for the first time as a really
are - not as creeping things but as dainty quadrupeds, almost,
when they sat up, like tiny kangaroos, with sensitive kid-gloved
forepaws and transparent ears.  With quick inaudible movements
they ranged to and fro till not a crumb was left on the floor.
Then the blew a second time on his whistle and with a sudden
whisk of tails all three of them were racing for home and in a few
seconds had disappeared behind the coal box.  The Director
looked at her with laughter in his eyes. ...

"There," he said, "a very simple adjustment.  Humans want crumbs
removed; mice are anxious to remove them.  It ought never to have
been a cause of war.  But you see that obedience and rule are
more like a dance than a drill ? specially between man and woman
where the roles are always changing.'
-----------------------------------------------
http://campus.kcc.edu/faculty/cstarr/C.S.%20Lewis%20Course/C.S.%20Lewis's%20-%20Hierarchy%20In%20C.S.%20Lewis.htm
http://ourworld.cs.com/lkrieg45/quotes_l.htm


-----------------------------------------------
      We just can't accept criticism or correction.
      Yet when we offer criticism it invariably comes across as harsh and
      pedantic.
      We just don't get the unwritten social rules, subtext and the
      unspoken communication such as stance, posture and facial
      expressions.
      We often fail to distinguish between private and public personal care
      habits: e.g. nose picking, teeth picking, ear canal cleaning.
      We often have a naïve trust in others.
      We're painfully shy.
      We have constant anxiety about performance and acceptance, despite
      frequent recognition and commendation.
      We're brutally honest.
      We're blunt in emotional expression.
      We have the infamous flat affect.
      We have either no apparent sense of humor or a bizarre sense of humor
      that stems from complex references that would be far too annoying to
      explain.
      We have great difficulty with reciprocal displays of pleasantries,
      greetings and small talk.
      We have a lot of problems expressing empathy, such as condolence or
      congratulations.
      We can't obscure real feelings, moods, and reactions. It's either
      nothing or overwhelming, there is no emotional middle ground.
      We will abruptly and strongly express our likes and dislikes.
      In an attempt to deal with all that small talk, empathy, jokes and
      the like we will adopt rigid adherence to rules and social
      conventions per Miss Manners. Ooops.
      We'll often fixate on and excessively talk about one, or a limited
      number of interests.
      We have a flash temper & occasional tantrums.
      We have incredible difficulty forming friendships and intimate
      relationships. Yet being desperate for emotional intimacy we have
      problems in distinguishing between acquaintance and friendship. We
      suffer from "one real friend at a time" syndrome, but can't really
      tell if the other person is reciprocating, and don't understand why
      they don't feel the same way.
      We're socially isolated and often have an intense concern for
      privacy, despite not being able to understand "personal space" all
      that well.
      We have limited clothing preference and will wear the same clothes
      for days at a time. We'll cut off all the tags on the inside of
      clothes and cannot wear certain fabrics.
      Which goes along with various sensory sensitivities. Certain
      sensations, such as particular sounds, colors, tastes, smells, will
      just set us off.
      We are the uberklutzen. We are clumsy. We have problems with balance
      and judging distances, height and depth. We have gross or fine motor
      coordination problems. And we frequently have an unusual gait,
      stance, and/or posture.
      We have great difficulty in recognizing others' faces (prosopagnosia)
      and the emotional expressions that play across your faces.
      We have difficulty initiating or maintaining eye contact.
      During periods of stress and frustration we'll raise our voices all
      right. But it won't be yelling. Call it "yelling" and you'll hear
      yelling. Then you'll know the difference.
      We have some strong and unusual food preferences and aversions, and
      equally unusual and rigid eating behaviors.
      Our personal hygiene is sometimes odd or leaves much to be desired.
      We will just shutdown in response to conflicting demands or high
      stress.
      We have a low understanding of the reciprocal rules of conversation.
      From person-to-person, day-to-day or conversation-to-conversation
      you'll find us interrupting and dominating, or not participating at
      all. We often have difficulty with shifting topics and will keep
      trying to steer things back on subject. It's just painful that we
      don't know how or when to start or stop a conversation.
      We take literalism to new frontiers.
      Our rage, tantrum, shutdown, and self-isolating reactions may appear
      "out of nowhere" but they really do have meaningful triggers. First
      there's a lot of self-anger, anger towards others and the world in
      general, and basic resentment. But where normal people are picking up
      non-verbal cues, we're picking up precise meanings and shades of
      meanings of the words that were chosen and how they relate to what
      may have been said months or years ago. Some clever turn of phrase
      may carry a lot of personal meaning that you just couldn't possibly
      understand.
      We have extreme reaction to changes in routine, surroundings and
      people. This, like some of the others, is a general autistic trait.
      It's summed up by the autistic credo, "All change is bad."
      Our conversational style is pedantic, as if we learned to speak
      English from watching Masterpiece Theatre. Which, in a way, a lot of
      us did.
      Needless to say, we don't play well with others. To quote the Aspies'
      TV role model, Daria Morgendorfer, "The team is the last refuge of
      the mediocre individual."
      We're often perceived as "being in our own world."
-----------------------------------------------
Jerod Poore
http://www.well.com/~jerod23/bp/AspergersSyndrome.htm

Jim

"To quote the Aspies' TV role model, Daria Morgendorfer. . ."
Uh oh.  I'm in trouble!  ;-/

(See attached file: highspeed.wav)




----- End forwarded message -----
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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