Some would say Williams Syndrome. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1262248...
Sure some of the symptoms seem opposite (but others are actually kind of similar), but the genetic component of that disease is pretty specific and well understood. Not like autism which has been much harder to pin down on any single chromosome.
Maybe AnthonyMouse could've been more precise and said "personal behavior opposite of behaviors characteristic of people on the autism spectrum", but that's awfully wordy and pretty clearly what he was getting at.
If I had to guess, it'd be the extravert. The social butterfly, life of the party, comedian. The one who wins all the popularity contests and the weekly sales competitions. The person who finds math (and any math-related technical field) to be arcane and impenetrable but has all the business class profs eating out of his/her hand.
Nearly every disease has an opposite which is also bad. If something was an unmitigated evil then there would be strong selective pressure for it to not happen and nothing pressing in the other direction to cause it to actually occur in the population.
> Would you say there is a scale ranging from having the flu, to being normal, to... having the opposite of flu, I guess?
Contracting the flu is a failure of the immune system to fight off the virus, so the opposite of contracting the flu would be an autoimmune disease.
[citation needed]. Also, you can't use evolutionary arguments like that, to justify everything. What about the plague? What about an anvil to the head? What's the opposite of getting a heavy object dropped on your head and if there is none then why didn't we evolve a titanium skill? You see where I'm going? It just didn't because we don't immediately evolve defenses against every single danger and disease in existence. Evolutionary arguments aren't worth very much and certainly can't be applied in such a maximalist way.
"[citation needed]" is the claim that an argument is flawed because it lacks an appeal to authority.
An immune system that is too lax leads to infections, too stringent leads to autoimmune diseases. Pick almost any substance in the body -- glucose, sodium, serotinin, etc. Too little is one kind of bad, too much is a different kind of bad.
And as to the original point:
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/file?type=prin...
> What about the plague?
That seems to be in the same category as the flu.
> What about an anvil to the head? What's the opposite of getting a heavy object dropped on your head and if there is none then why didn't we evolve a titanium skill?
Are you asserting that there are no trade-offs there? Flexibility, self-healing, availability of carbohydrates vs. titanium compounds in available food sources, etc.
> It just didn't because we don't immediately evolve defenses against every single danger and disease in existence. Evolutionary arguments aren't worth very much and certainly can't be applied in such a maximalist way.
Evolution is not a divine engineer creating things that are maximally perfect, it's a brute force pragmatist that destroys anything that can't out-compete its neighbors.
It isn't that purposeless flaws literally cannot exist at all, it's that they are selected against. Something that beat improbable odds due solely to dumb luck.
The assertion that something is the exception to the rule is the one that needs independent support.
Autism is a spectrum and there is no clear cut between a perfectly neurotypical person and a profoundly disabled. You can measure number of autistic traits in general population and see that there are differences between groups, look e.g. here:
- The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ): evidence from Asperger Syndrome / high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A100565341147...)
There is no a single paper proving that HFA is a binary condition, and many hints that it isn't.
(BTW: I dived into this topic some time ago, with already linked here http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster...)
So the opposite of autism would be something like hallucinations and delusions.
(Idea not mine, it was somewhere in http://www.afieldguidetoearthlings.com/ book.)
Nonetheless I'd like to point out that there are broad, statistical, gender differences between those who are "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented", that would need to be addressed before we could hope to see 50-50 splits of M/F ratios in every subject today: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-m...
Donald Trump
The scale exists because it's a scale of severity in diagnostic criteria. The scale exists to distinguish between "non-verbal and incapable of ever caring for oneself" to "experiences impairment but can generally hold a job and live independently". It's not a scale of how good you are at finding boxes in colored square pictures.
Frankly it's kind of insulting to imply autism is just a grouping of logical behaviors and anyone who is good at those things has some "level" of autism. It's a disability. I got picked on, I got mocked, I struggled to understand basic things and it took me a lot longer than my peers to get this communication thing down.
Besides, if programmers had enough incidence of autism to justify this level of imbalance, would pair programming really be a thing? (this was a joke).