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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1129 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Ah yes, "engineers."

I don't know what you're trying to say here.

Sorry, I thought you were speaking euphemistically and answered somewhat elliptically.

My point was that sometimes there may be some overlap between people using the term "engineer" and a more clinical ASD-type terminology. For example, consider the case of someone who:

  • Has a preference for highly systematized thinking
  • Has poor conversational reciprocity
  • Experiences high cognitive load from focusing on specific social responses, leading to missed social context
  • Has unusually specific interests
  • Has a low tolerance for ambiguity

It might be socially acceptable to say, "That person is very engineer-brained." An alternate explanation might be: "I'm no psychologist, but I'm not ruling out level one ASD."

Epistemic status of the following: I'm no psychologist; illustrative only.

More generally, there's probably a group common in engineering that has some combination of high intelligence and ASD-like cognition. This combo would allow highly adaptive compensation, specifically through systematized, internalized social cues and intellectually derived rules. This might suppress clinically significant impairment, but might not constitute a separate type of cognitive cluster.

With respect to clustering, if you do a clustering analysis on what you might term natural kinds, for example from fMRI, genotype, or other biomarkers, or from clinical agreement on severity levels, you may actually find significantly better silhouetting within the "group," specifically on bimodal projections such as verbal versus non-verbal. If you extract the cluster from latent space that is most highly associated with ASD, I expect the most stable cluster is likely to contain both members who are clinically diagnosed with ASD and other people. That is, members who are not dysfunctional by clinical standards but have similar cognitive habits. The members who do have "dysfunction" may not be a pure representation of their natural kind in the state of nature, but rather an interaction between the environment and the natural kind. The non-pathological members of that group might be those with:

  • Unusually high capacity for explicit system-building
  • Learned social rules
  • Selected into an occupation with explicit norms
  • A peer group that is tolerant of unusual communication
  • A profession that grants enough autonomy to structure their environment

And they would not appear dysfunctional, but may belong to the same latent cluster as ASD. So they are "level 0": no apparent support needs. But like the other support levels, this is a function of the current environment, not latent cognition.

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