> I have a bit of difficulty trying to understand what ASD means for such individuals as adults. If one is highly intelligent one can just spend time studying people to determine how they respond to situations. I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.

I personally see three points:

- People often expect that one reacts "intuitively" instead of analyzing the whole situation first

- Humans don't behave in an "easy" way like physical systems. So extracting the "hidden laws" is in my opinion nigh impossible.

- Even if one tries to find possible hypotheses, one has to run a huge amount of "experiments" to extract rules. What does "running experiments" here mean? Behaving in very weird ways all the time just to obtain data on the behavior of the people. And the required data volume is insane, so it means behaving consciously weirdly rather for decades.

I genuinely spend a lot of time studying people offline and online.

I think someone who can't do this from first principles is probably going to struggle if they try living in a very foreign country or amongst a different subculture of their own nation. Most people can't cope outside their comfort zone.

> I don't really grasp why understanding people is any different from analyzing any other kind of system.

It's not, but people tend to be able to spot the difference between studied and natural behaviour if you know them long enough. Studied behaviour is called 'masking' and has a tremendous mental toll. Over time, someone will eventually see you tired, and therefore unmasked.

As a seven year old I studied Peter Curry (the most popular boy in school) and Michaelangelo (the most well liked ninja turtle) because it seemed everyone else had been given a set of social instructions and I had not, and that by adopting their behaviour I would be less isolated.

It was still a nine year wait until I had a friend.

A person with balance disorder wont be able to walk straight and will trip a lot. You can't just study physics and fix your balance, those calculations are too hard to make quickly enough to be used in practice. Understanding physics might help a bit, but their walk will always feel clunky and unnatural.

ASD is the same kind of problem but with social situations. No matter what they do their social interactions wont feel as natural and smooth as what normal humans do. And interestingly enough many with ASD also have unnatural and clunky walking styles as if they had a problem with balance, it is a known red flag to check for a diagnosis.

I guess, just feels weird that someone who is #2 on Twitter describes themselves in this way. Kind of a high bar

A person who got ahead even though their social skills are shit probably has a lot of other things going for them, not everyone judges a persons worth just based on their social skills.

I would have judged him to have good social skills if he managed to drum up such a following to help raise money for his ventures.

Obviously depends on the crowd

And a person with a balance disorder can be great at physics, not sure what you think is strange here.

If he is able to successfully maintain an audience on social media and date celebrities while juggling multiple CEO roles it sounds to me that this disorder is mostly cured.. unless you can prove there is a region of the brain that is responsible for being tactful.

He just needs to work on not firing or picking fights with random people when in a bad mood.

We call both social skills, but they are very different, just like how balance and theoretical physics are different things. Managing a company or a large crowd requires more intellectual understanding, he has that, managing direct social interactions requires more of the intuitive parts of your brain, he might have a disorder there and it would classify him as having autism.

And just to clarify, people with autism can have great theoretical understanding of people, doesn't mean that they perform well in direct social interactions.

But this discussions doesn't seem to go anywhere, you hate the guy and want to say he is evil rather than him having a disorder. There isn't much to argue about then.

No, he's not cured, he's just rich.

Money makes A LOT of problems and difficulties and blockers go away.

I agree that no level of any autism-like issues should absolve him of being a massive narcissistic cunt though.

I don’t think he does fire people when in a bad mood. As we’ve seen in the last week he fires people when they give ridiculous reasons for poor performance though.

So what you're saying is that it's possible to study human behaviors enough to be able to put up a good performance and convince people to give you money, analogously to how someone with an inner ear condition could study physics enough to become a gymnast? Aren't contradicting yourself?

The ASD person could write a paper explaining what he wants to do because he has studied English and people enough to understand what to say to make others understand, and when others read that paper they agree and give the ASD person money.

Similarly a person with balance disorder can write a paper explaining how balance works, and others can read that paper agree and fund the persons project for making self balancing robots.

Doesn't mean the ASD person can fluently navigate social situations, but luckily modern technology means he doesn't have to. When writing papers and proposals you can spend a lot of time thinking and preparing general statements, you can't put that sort of effort into more immediate interactions.

> can fluently navigate social situations

the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.

They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.

most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.

(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on??)

fake small talk and go-to phrases and jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and happy voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc

Both people know it's fake and that's okay

----- it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll

it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)

'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe

Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested etc

Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, when they are angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.

(hence all the psychological patterns like projection, transferring, passive ag, guilt complexes, attention seeking etc)

> the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

Most humans have friends, at least as children. They’re certainly not hated so much to be thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten to the point of being hospitalised as young Elon was.

I'm not sure how that's directly related, but I venture bullying among boys seems to be about the weakest / smallest / poorest/ easiest to harm and get away with it, not necessarily social skills or autistic stuff.

Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.

Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....

Kinda like the peacock's tail being attractive because it is harmful to the individual. The bigger the tail, the better the peacock, if he made it this far without getting eaten!

You can actually use autism to have good social skills. It takes a lot of work but once you realise you will never fit in, and have the same issues speaking to a thousand people as you do speaking to one person, you can speak honestly to a thousand people. Very few NTs can do this.

Autism can create success. Does Elon seem like someone who is fashionable and deeply prioritises the opinions of others over the truth?

> You can't just study physics and fix your balance ...

Heh Heh Heh. Can totally imagine an engineering type person would figure out a way.

Back sized gyroscope, hidden in a backpack maybe? :)

I remember hearing of someone that had blown out their inner ear and had balance issues. The issue was solved with a gyroscopic plane that sat between their molars and covered the back of their tongue.

It does mean that tactful social interactions require conscious mental effort for a person with ASD. If you’re busy using your mind for something else, tact might get lost along the way. Or so I understand.

Masking behaviors are strongly correlated with worse well-being and increased mental health issues (generally depression, suicidial ideation and attempts).

Huh, have you experienced, or have been with a close person experiencing shutdown because environment is too loud, smelly, or there is someone acting in a provoking, humiliating manner? How analythical knowledge of social skills can be of help in that situation?

Suppose three armed persons draw a weapon and give you contradicting orders while threatening you. How will deep understanding of those individual orders help you reconcile them and decide how to act?