[extropy-chat] H+, autism, selection effects, biases

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Sun Jul 2 07:31:13 UTC 2006


From: "P.J. Manney & E. Gruendemann" <atomictiki at yahoo.com> :

>I met Sky Marsen on the Caltech campus earlier this year, while she was
>a visiting professor there.  I had never visited Caltech before and I
>had two interesting moments that support Spike's experience:
    [...]
>  but he was so
>introverted, his entire physical and psychological demeanor had
>collapsed in on himself like a black hole.  He refused to establish
>eye contact, but muttered just loud enough for me to hear, "Never turn
>around... Never."  He kept on walking past me, eyes glued to the
>ground.

Occasionally I've worked with people like this, my recent example was
one man in my previous working group in Heidelberg who went to extremes
to avoid all social contact with others in our working group as well as
with our colleagues and people generally around. We have a collection
of stories about this man, not out of ridicule, but because we were
continually amazed at the efforts he went to in order to block himself
from the society. This particular man and I shared an office in my first
6 months in Heidelberg with our desks 1/2 meter apart from each other.
He used to pull out the drawers of his desk and leave them open in order
to create the boundary for his private space. I didn't know the
situation of his social fears until I bumped my chair a couple of times
into his desk drawers and then noticed them always open.

>2)  Sky and I walked around the campus and we found a photocopied
>announcement for a special seminar the next day on how to meet people,
>talk to people and create and maintain relationships. [...]

During the years I worked at JPL (1982-1984), the Caltech exit off of
the 210 freeway had a bumper sticker: "Girls wanted. No experience
necessary." It looks like Caltech's students have been grappling with
this issue for a while. [1]

Amara

[1] from :
http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%205/04-21-05/guide.html
"Students also sized up the social scene, with Caltech men described
variously as "antisocial trolls" by one student, "annoyingly nerdy" by
another. On Caltech women, one student provided this insight: "In too
many relationships, women realize they have control of the situation and
take advantage of it, developing a boy toy." Another student summed it
up with, "The attractiveness of both sexes is below the norm.""


Amara

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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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"Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy."
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