Said Bill Gates, quoted in "Bill Gates: 'I would be diagnosed with autism if I were a kid today'" (Yahoo News).
Just because there's a treatment doesn't mean you need to take it. There's a balance between eradicating symptoms and unleashing side effects, and we should be careful not to pathologize human behavior.
Where the treatment doesn't yet exist — like Gates's anti-autism pill — it's easier to decide I wouldn't want it anyway. The unreachable grapes looked sour to the fox in the old fable. It's harder to think critically when the pill is right there — the pill or the surgery. Is effeminacy in a young boy a condition that ought to be treated, or can we embrace human diversity and discourage medical treatment? There might be something parallel to "I needed my neuro diversity to write that software." I needed my effeminate maleness to.... What? What is lost in the pathologizing? What sort of highly valuable person are we medicalizing out of existence?
This made me think of that classic of Critical Race Theory, "The Michael Jackson Pill: Equality, Race, and Culture" by Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. (Michigan Law Review, 1994). I tried to get Grok to talk about it, and it engaged in blatant censorship: "There is no well-known or credible critical race theory article that discusses or imagines a pill to turn black people white...."
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४३ टिप्पण्या:
Interesting take on pathology being treated or not. The opposite has been the case for decades now, normalizing the previously recognized problem behaviors and mental issues, to the point that schizophrenics wander the streets homeless and pedophiles demand acceptance. Odd, that.
"With money you are handsome and dance beautifully". Chinese proverb.
"but I needed my neuro diversity to write that software; I could do all that stuff in my head."
I thought he stole it?
Is effeminacy in a young boy a condition that ought to be treated, or can we embrace human diversity and discourage medical treatment?
It's (sadly) ironic that the "gender is a spectrum" people have the most narrow definitions of genders. They can't just let people be people; instead every tic, every foible, gets its own gender.
Is it any surprise that they are so susceptible to fascist tactics?
Will Trump release the Epstein files? What did Epstein have on Gates?
No pill is possible. Autism is rooted in genetics and biology. Their brain machines are built with 'imbalanced' potential. See the condition known as "Savant Syndrome," or formerly "Idiot-Savant." Tech people are often born with abnormally good potential here, but abnormally bad potential there. Actors are born with an abnormally good ability to control, modify, or fake emotions, where most people are stuck in their real emotions, etc.
No, he bought from the guys who "stole" it. Except they didn't really steal it, they just copied it.
Gates is using "neurodiversity" as an excuse to minimize or justify his bad behavior. "I can't help cheating on my wife, I’m just neurodivergent.” Seems like BS. He just wants to do whatever the hell he wants without without consequence.
The only significant piece of software he was involved in writing was the BASIC language interpreter for the Altair computer.
He gave 50 million to Kamala.
Jesus please forgive all the dopey comments.
Without neurodivergent males we’d all still be digging our food out of the ground with sticks.
Grok lies for our own good.
I'm more inclined to think that GROK lies to keep the "See, Musk is a Nazi!" people from getting more ammunition. Make answers like that one at least two questions deep.
If a pill or magic wand made all blacks white, nothing would change. As evidence, look at Ireland. The Prods and Caths are genetically almost identical, but culturally different (or they were during the Troubles - nowadays they are converging culturally).
If we’re all the same color, we would still remember that my great-gramdpappy enslaved your great-grandpappy, or that your play-cousin carjacked my brother-in-law. Blacks would still be trying to overcome the utter crap education system that’s been foisted on them. Even if the pill changed the vocal chords and speech centers to remove all traces of dialect, a ten-minute conversation would tell you who came from Africa and who came from Austria.The Brexiteers most feared the Polish plumbers, the whitest men possible. It’s always been about culture, not color.
JSM
I'm really good at programming, at least was before they came up with strongly typed languages. Strong typing is for weak minds. There's even stuff you can't do with strong typing
while(x=(*x)());
that keeps calling a function and then whatever it returns until it returns null. There's no legal declaration for x with strong typing.
Prole, ref neurodivergent males bringing progress:
I have often thought that so many mental illnesses are survival adaptations, and we still have them because tribes with a few of each had an evolutionary advantage.
Got some OCD’s? They can gather all the berries, or track the giant elk, to feed the tribe.
ADD’s? They will notice if a sabertooth is tracking you while you’re tracking the elk.
Depressives? They can reduce their signature to zero by staying in bed while predators or enemy tribes are trying to find you.
Bipolar? If you can synch their swings with the situation, they can fight like mf’s when needed, then hide in the bushes when not.
Paranoiacs? Sometimes things really are out to get the tribe.
Etc.
JSM
Not every condition is "aberrant," treatable nor permanent. Children who work through the different phases of childhood naturally with the love and compassion of their parents gain the necessary resilience to be healthy functioning adults.
Actors and psychopaths.
Remember the old "It takes all kinds"?
New York state herded all the smart kids together. I always figured it was to keep us from mucking with the general population. Me and my friends would all be on the drugs…well, the boys anyways…
I think that the approach they take now is more like the one from A Clockwork Orange.
Mostly it's the male of the species affected by this stuff. We are far more variable because of the math of risk reward and natural selection. Society can afford to lose a number of disposable men, especially if in return, it gets a number of high value men. It's not the same with women, in terms of the millions of years of human evolution, it has not been possible to afford to lose a percentage of women as "waste" the way you can with men, so quality control is much higher. As long as you remember that "quality" is measured as conformance to design standards, I am not saying that all women are "above average."
Diversity (e.g. Critical Racists' Theory), transgender spectrum (e.g. homosexual orientation), autism or a basket of evolutionary symptoms, medical panacea, and therapy, too. There is much that can be reasonably tolerated, much that has no redeeming value to society or humanity, and some choices and solutions (e.g. abortive ideation) that should be rejected with prejudice.
I don't know about that. Cavemen, Vikings, Mongols had to be able to fight as a disciplined group. The neurodivergent wouldn't last long. Neurodivergent chiefs and kings would tend to be overthrown while the ordinary eccentric Joe or Jane wouldn't have much opportunity to express their originality.
How much software did Gates really write by himself?
Yeah, if his 'autism' made him anything, it wasn't a software developer.
so, the secret to success is:
* be "autistic"..
* have there be some HUGE corp, that is tied up in anti-trust lawsuits..
* have that HUGE corp decide to outsource their new project, to skirt anti-trust..
* have a company that wrote valuable code be "too busy" flying around in an airplane
* have the HUGE corp look for a company that WANTED a contract
* have your mommy be on the same United Way board as the HUGE corp CEO
* have the job dumped in YOUR lap
do i have that right? or did i miss a few steps?
Maybe if it was in the form of a vaccine Bill would take it.
I've had this discussion with myself. I went through a period of anxiety (long time) and depression (shorter time) and thought I was 'on the spectrum' (I think most math/engineering/science types are some sort of on-the-spectrum types). I do tend to fixate on things, thankfully not in OCD fashion, and tend to social awkwardness, and after reading my old grade school reports that my mother had kept for decades, it was all full of "He's smart but if he'd JUST SETTLE DOWN" and junk like that. I'd be diagnosed with something if I were a kid today.
And it did have some negative effects, not just socially but also career-wise. My siblings both stayed with basically the same employers their entire adult lives. I've had like 25 different ones. They have pensions or good retirement accounts, and I'm going to be working until I die, most likely. (This kind of doesn't bother me, obviously)
I'd thought about going on some sort of medication to make it all go away. But then......would I have gotten a PhD of which I'm immensely proud? Published? Worked out (exercised) stupidly regularly my whole adult life? Delved into old poetry enough to actually enjoy it? (Buy 23 typewriters and write amusing letters to people. . . ) Would I lose all of that with medication?
In the end, I decided learning to live with it was the best option since I'm not really self-destructive to a large extent.
The world needs some magnificent weirdos.
Bill Gates needs the anti-asshole pill.
Spiros is correct. Bill Gates is a bad person, not excused by his autistic spectrum neurodivergency. He's badly behaved, enormously self-entitled, ridiculously self-important, corrupt "master of universe" mogul, and meglamaniac monster who's imposed his opinions on world health policy and terrible health care implementations.
ADVANTAGEOUS mutations (neurodivergence) are beneficial. Most neurodivergence is merely odd or a dead-end that results in sleeping on a sidewalk or living in prison. Or being rejected by the tribe. Sometimes a good biological attribute (e.g., dark skin protects against sunburn in the tropics) becomes a bad one with different conditions (e.g., light skin helps with vitamin D production in the clouds of Europe).
There is an (often censored) evolutionary theory that human migration from Africa to lands with winters led to the rise of intelligence and discipline. Only those who planned, gathered, stored, and metered their food resources made it through the cold season. Those who could collect wood, build warm shelters, and make warm clothes had the ability to move farther north. Young males were sent out to fend for themselves to prove they could survive --> hunting and teamwork.
These were the cultural ancestors of the Vikings, Mongols, Chinese in recently cold areas. Before that, the northern pioneers were the Bronze Age people moving from the tropics to the mediterranean when northern Europe was just ice (e.g., Greece, ancient Persia, ancient Turkey, etc.).
Angry at the sham of it all, Eve takes the Venus Drug to prove a point and becomes beautiful even though it was really a placebo. Kirk gets his dilithium crystals, Eve and Childress live happily ever after, and we all learn a valuable lesson.
Gates was a selfish, predatory pig back in the 1980s and 1990s. "DOS isn't done until Lotus doesn't run." Microsoft lost an employee lawsuit where there were "employees" and "contractors" doing exactly the same work, but the contractors didn't get stock options. Monopolist Gates destroyed many, many smaller competitors. He anointed the equally evil Zuckerberg, and the fact that Zuck is also a monopolist was no accident.
It's funny how Gates has staked a hard left political position (see MSNBC & Slate magazine) while Zuck bowed down to Trump this year. Generational opportunism.
Elon Musk wannabe.
He was a typical tech geek in the right place at the right time. Computers of that era were quite simple, and they initially scaled down mainframe software for new and affordable desktop systems . He likely wrote or ported some early MS software, but after that he was the owner/manager.
It's easy to turn down that pill now, after he knows how everything played out. His choice in high school or college would probably be different. And, for all the people who didn't found Microsoft, being more at ease socially would probably have worked out better for them than some perceived ability to concentrate better.
If I had been in school when my children were- I'd have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. If I had been, I probably wouldn't be married with 5 children and 10 soon to be more grandchildren. It would have become an excuse, a crutch, something to fall back on.
Most people like me don't do as well in school as they should. Why? We're bored silly. I had the highest SATs in my HS- back before privacy rules prohibiting the posting of such things. Last person in top 10% of HS graduates. 40 of 401... At the time the internet didn't exist and looking things up was difficult. Every standardized test I took placed me in the 99th percentile- 99 out of a 100 people scored lower. A few years back I looked up my SAT scores and found that 9,999 of 10,000 people scored lower then me...
Now, what if they had taken all the 99th percentile students in the county on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, or whatever other one they might use, and put us in the same school starting right at completion of 1st grade? And then at 6th grade separated out the 99th percentile students of the 99th percentile students out statewide and placed us in state boarding school? Well, first, both the groups would have had BS/BA learning by age 18, and finding teachers able to teach them would be a real challenge. But if students were in competition with students who could be competition, what would they be achieving? Would we already have fusion instead of it being 10 years in the future as it has been since 1973?
We do an excellent job of separating out the best athletes. If you can't hit the ball (I couldn't) you sit on the bench, and eventually stop playing. And we do that so they can achieve excellence. But the high IQ ones are supposed to fend for themselves. After all- they're smart! They can figure it out!
After a long time with great difficulty...When you're 8 years old behaving rationally ad all the other 8 year olds are doing stupid stuff- how are you supposed to know you're supposed to be doing stupid stuff with them? Or should you be?
“It was an oversight” LOL
“A metaphorical discussion”….
Which I was hoping you didn’t know about…
You missed the fact that Dad was a partner in Seattle'z biggest law firm., and Mom's charity work brought her in close contact with IBM at a time when IBM had to off-load it's pc operating system.
I’m with Gates here. My ability to concentrate better than anyone else in the
room was why I was able to excel in software engineering. I remember one night on a benchmark in Minneapolis. I had a listing literally a foot thick of a module of code, in assembler,
that had a bug in it. I remember saying good night to the rest of the team at 7 in the evening They were going back to the hotel, for dinner and sleep. It didn’t seem that much later, and they were back. It was now 7 in the morning. But I understood the module, and knew where the bug was. Called up the development center, and tried to explain it to them. “No” they said, I was wrong. But they couldn’t explain why. So, I escalated. And finally got to the guy whose job it was to maintain that module, and nothing else. Walked him through it, and he admitted that I was right. There was a bug it, and the next revision had my fix. Now there were two people in the company who understood the module.
Of course, Gates really only wrote one good piece of code - their compilers. That was what the company was known for in its early years. And how he got his breaks. They got DOS by effectively stealing the OS from Gary Killdall and Digital Research. IBM came to Gates because they found the OS they wanted for their PC packaged on a disk with Gates’ compiler. When they couldn’t do a deal fast enough with DR, they went to Gates, and he acquired a clone (QDOS) of the DR OS (CPM-86) for them. Then with Apple, they needed Gates’ compilers, and brought a group of developers they were using to see their new Lisa/Mac graphical interface. Gates went back to MSFT, announced that that new Apple graphical interface was the wave of the future. And it took another decade before that company had a decent competitor in Windows NT.
Andrew Sullivan commented on the issue in a way that's similar to your hypothetical. (I needed my effeminate maleness to....)
He said thank goodness he didn't grow up now, when his interest in fashion and dolls might have gotten him turned into a girl. He is happy as a gay man, and I guess he needed his effeminate maleness to grow up into who he is now.
Its disappointing that Bill Gates, who should know better, dumbed down autism to be being obsessively focused. If all autistic kids grew up to be socially awkward billionaire geniuses, the very idea of an 'anti-autism' drug would sounds stupid. But people with autism are just as likely to have a low IQ and be incapable of truly taking care of themselves. Gates foray into the autism arena opens it up to the very online crowd that autism is just another word for a jerk who wasn't spanked enough as a kid. As a parent with a low IQ autistic adult son who will always need a caregiver, I find this all pretty offensive.
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