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What starts off as performative becomes internalized as personality given enough reinforcement. It's how frat bros are minted and why Mar-a-Lago face is contagious among MAGA.
SBF is a child of 2 law professors at Stanford with no indications of social-dysfunction in how they present themselves. He, like other autists could have learned to mask his autism and would've coopted the elite culture around him. ADHD kids need to be taught executive function, Elite sportsmen need to be taught financial restraint and autists need to be taught social behaviors. It's standard upbringing. Yes, he was more susceptible to peak autism. But so are millions others, and most of them turn out alright.
SBF ended going down an autistic spiral and that tells me his parents failed in raising him right. Parents didn't teach him coping mechanisms. And his behaviors were likely reinforced by the hyper selective spaces he found himself (MIT, Jane Street, mathcamp, stem prep school). Just the terrible sleep + stimulant abuse would explain half of his autistic spiral in his adult days. Add in hyper hedonism (esp. the orgies), EA psychosis and the insane amount of money in the mix, and it ended up in a predictable place.
Alex Karp of Palantir is a good example of an autist undergoing a autism reinforcement event well into his 50s. Look at any of his old interviews, dude was great at giving the appearance of normal.
Also,
In what world are 2 tenured Stanford professors considered upper middle class ?
This world. Upper class is the people who have names on buildings, not the people who work in the buildings.
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'Two accomplished professionals with a touch of the 'Tism that's sufficient to give them professional success but not go overboard produce children a bit further out on the spectrum' is superduper common. My mom spent 20 years teaching at a school for essentially bottom-tier autistic Children and other learning difficulty havers, and the rate at which the parents would be dual high-flyer doctors, surgeons, academics, engineers or whatever and then the child just gets too much of the secret sauce... It happens. Without even going into the whole 'the parents were born into more typical households in a better socialized environment whilst the children got born into the internet era with permissive enlightened avant garde parents' aspect.
That's the core thing to go into though. My grandmother was left handed, until the nuns beat it out of her.
A weirdo kid who is taught to not-be-weird and raised in a culture where weirdness is punished might not turn out "normal" but will just be a little weird. A weirdo kid who is raised in a cultural setting that doesn't just allow him to be weird, but actively honors the weirdos around him as the highest examples of humanity, will cultivate his weirdness and become even weirder.
Plus the filter of the ones that manage to have children of a given cohort of the light-moderate autistic are likely going to err towards the shallower end of the spectrum and then it's a whole new roll of the dice with their kids.
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