“Autism stolen valor”. What a concept.
The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.
I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.
It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.
Here’s what I think I know:
Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.
HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.
Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.
Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.
This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.
HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.
The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.
This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.
But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)
Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.
Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.
Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.
That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.
Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.
June 22, 2025
QotD: “Autism stolen valor”
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