What if it is more like Vegeta's super saiyan 2. A false super saiyan 2 form. Just like the real SS2 maintains both power and agility the real Übermensch will attain new levels of IQ while maintaining if not advancing a strong EQ.
’round these parts it's not atypical. Merely a categorization. Goddamn auties are so stubborn though, my way or the highway all the way. Okay bub, go explore and ignore the team priorities.
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper.
Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes?
The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities.
Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.
IANAG but the idea is that women get two copies of the X chromosome (XX), and men only one (XY). This explains why women have squared the colour blindness rates of men - women have to get two bad copies, men only one.
Many intelligence related genes are on the X chromosome, so it makes sense you get more variation in men. However, not all genes interact in this way.
Boys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't actually a difference.
However, the "greater male variability hypothesis" in terms of IQ scores is not terribly well supported by studies, and the difference isn't significant enough to account for the 4:1 ratio of autism diagnoses. As such, I imagine there's more at play here.
I think boys just present symptoms that are more obvious. Girls with autism are very often much better at masking than boys are.Young girls also tend to fixate on more 'socially acceptable' topics that make that fixation less obvious
In general, anyone not crossing medical taboos in evolutionary biology and neurology will never understand the horribly simple reality of modern humans.
Also, most savants score as cognitively deficient on IQ tests. =3
> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation.
I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
> The study links evolutionary neuroscience with neurodevelopmental disease, suggesting that the unusually high incidence of autism in humans might be a byproduct of selection shaping our brains.
> It suggests that key neuron types in the human brain are subject to particularly strong evolutionary pressures, especially in their regulatory landscapes.
> If valid, it opens a new lens through which to think about neurodiversity: certain vulnerabilities might be inextricable from the very changes that made human cognition distinctive
My father’s (extended) side of the family seems to have once a generation severe autistic case and many of us less severely on the spectrum. Doesn’t seem to exist on my mother’s side with any regularity with similar cohort sizes.
Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people
There are certain genetic markers you can test for, but not all forms of autism appear in the tests we have today.
Then there's things like the folate blocking antibody (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/) which you can do a blood test for, but again not all people with autism have the antibody.
The article is about how the fundamental nature of intelligence has certain weaknesses that will manifest.
For example, a species sufficiently intelligent to discover acetaminophen is doomed to also create the sort of idiocy that is the current US administration.
This makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits.
If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
You could imagine that an ever more intelligent person could solve your IQ test pattern puzzle quicker and quicker, or could solve bigger and bigger puzzles of this kind.
I've wondered if it's something akin to an LLM with the wrong temperature or a GPU that's overclocked. If human intelligence is right at the evolutionary bleeding edge you'd expect some proportion of outcomes like that just due to randomness of various kinds.
IMO ideas which make the believer feel better about themselves, particularly about their weaknesses, should be viewed with skepticism.
Maybe those bright people with poor social intelligence are more likely to be labeled as very intelligent by others…which would be the kind of thing a social species would do.
High functioning autism exists, but autism in general doesn't seem to give any advantage to general intelligence. And the low end of functioning in autism is really, really low.
The spectrum doesn’t work that way, it’s more like a grab bag of traits than a “low to high” thing. High functioning is often just a way to dismiss the needs for certain autistic individuals who can mask very well.
I'd say otherwise. My wife has a student in her riding academy who is a severely autistic adult who is not independent and gets intensive support from her mom and aides that she hires who turn over rapidly because of the difficulty of the job. She has several seizures on some days. One beautiful day when they were tacking up the horse she thought it was a great day to take a walk (it was!) and took off down the driveway and they pressed me into service looking for her. She wandered onto the neighbor's property and when they asked her what was up she took one of them by the arm and started walking back to our place, she then let go of their arm and grabbed onto mine and I brought her back to everyone's relief.
If it wasn't something people were flocking too like neurotypicals that is a valuable part of their identity they'd just be honest and say that a lot of these people would have to give up their diagnosis. Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...
An observation I've made is that the most people ("the general population") will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals. I.e.: They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back even if the instructions are total nonsense or impossible to physically implement.
It's a rare breed (1-2%) of the population that will actively push back, insist on facts, and stick to only the "hard, unyielding reality" of physics, chemistry, mathematics, physics, logic, etc...
There is a very high correlation between these types of people and autistic people.
You have to not care about how other people "feel" or what their conflicting priorities might be to prioritise reality above the personal whims of others.
To be truly intelligent, you have to be able to call the emperor naked.
PS: It's easy to disagree with the above, but this is invariably an instance of "the fish is the last to know it lives in water" idiom. Something like 80% of the adult population goes along with Santa for Grownups because of peer pressure, also known as "mainstream religions". Don't get me started on partisan voting against one's own interests. Etc...
I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.
I have level 1 ASD and rated pretty high in masking when tested. I show up the way I’m expected to show up. I don’t let people see what it costs me. I deal with that later in private.
What if it is more like Vegeta's super saiyan 2. A false super saiyan 2 form. Just like the real SS2 maintains both power and agility the real Übermensch will attain new levels of IQ while maintaining if not advancing a strong EQ.
https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade
lol that’s an interesting comparison. Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself.
’round these parts it's not atypical. Merely a categorization. Goddamn auties are so stubborn though, my way or the highway all the way. Okay bub, go explore and ignore the team priorities.
This feels true.
>Things not even an LLM would write.
That's how you know LLM's aren't AGI.
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper.
Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes?
The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities.
Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.
IANAG but the idea is that women get two copies of the X chromosome (XX), and men only one (XY). This explains why women have squared the colour blindness rates of men - women have to get two bad copies, men only one.
Many intelligence related genes are on the X chromosome, so it makes sense you get more variation in men. However, not all genes interact in this way.
Boys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't actually a difference.
However, the "greater male variability hypothesis" in terms of IQ scores is not terribly well supported by studies, and the difference isn't significant enough to account for the 4:1 ratio of autism diagnoses. As such, I imagine there's more at play here.
I think boys just present symptoms that are more obvious. Girls with autism are very often much better at masking than boys are.Young girls also tend to fixate on more 'socially acceptable' topics that make that fixation less obvious
Personal experiences play important roles. As for the hypothesis, if not represented in studies, it is certainly reflected in penitentiaries.
In general, anyone not crossing medical taboos in evolutionary biology and neurology will never understand the horribly simple reality of modern humans.
Also, most savants score as cognitively deficient on IQ tests. =3
> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation.
I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
It is a long paper, so not immediately obvious.
> The study links evolutionary neuroscience with neurodevelopmental disease, suggesting that the unusually high incidence of autism in humans might be a byproduct of selection shaping our brains.
> It suggests that key neuron types in the human brain are subject to particularly strong evolutionary pressures, especially in their regulatory landscapes.
> If valid, it opens a new lens through which to think about neurodiversity: certain vulnerabilities might be inextricable from the very changes that made human cognition distinctive
My father’s (extended) side of the family seems to have once a generation severe autistic case and many of us less severely on the spectrum. Doesn’t seem to exist on my mother’s side with any regularity with similar cohort sizes.
Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
On which side?
Father’s.
Even when it's Fathers all the way up it's turtles all the way down.
Gordon Claridge thought the same about schizotypy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
Reminds me of the armchair medical theory about autism being a disorder of brain density/dimensionality:
https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...
as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people
Is there a blood test for autism?
There are certain genetic markers you can test for, but not all forms of autism appear in the tests we have today.
Then there's things like the folate blocking antibody (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/) which you can do a blood test for, but again not all people with autism have the antibody.
How many ppm of Tylenol
Why do you ask?
no.
Something's off. I didn't see one mention of Tylenol in this paper.
The article is about how the fundamental nature of intelligence has certain weaknesses that will manifest.
For example, a species sufficiently intelligent to discover acetaminophen is doomed to also create the sort of idiocy that is the current US administration.
You haven't heard about the "cure"? You must not have seen Trump's big med bed announcement "on Fox" on Truth Social on HN earlier today.
I'm assuming the cure for paracetamol-related autism is equal parts bleach, ivermectin paste and hot sauce.
This makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits.
If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
If you believe in the intelligence -> compression thing, then the hard limit would be the komologorov complexity.
You could imagine that an ever more intelligent person could solve your IQ test pattern puzzle quicker and quicker, or could solve bigger and bigger puzzles of this kind.
I've wondered if it's something akin to an LLM with the wrong temperature or a GPU that's overclocked. If human intelligence is right at the evolutionary bleeding edge you'd expect some proportion of outcomes like that just due to randomness of various kinds.
Pretty clear theres a tradeoff between social intelligence and other forms of intelligence
IMO ideas which make the believer feel better about themselves, particularly about their weaknesses, should be viewed with skepticism.
Maybe those bright people with poor social intelligence are more likely to be labeled as very intelligent by others…which would be the kind of thing a social species would do.
Is there now?
High functioning autism exists, but autism in general doesn't seem to give any advantage to general intelligence. And the low end of functioning in autism is really, really low.
The spectrum doesn’t work that way, it’s more like a grab bag of traits than a “low to high” thing. High functioning is often just a way to dismiss the needs for certain autistic individuals who can mask very well.
And for girls in particular, who go mostly undiagnosed because they tend to present very differently to boys.
I'd say otherwise. My wife has a student in her riding academy who is a severely autistic adult who is not independent and gets intensive support from her mom and aides that she hires who turn over rapidly because of the difficulty of the job. She has several seizures on some days. One beautiful day when they were tacking up the horse she thought it was a great day to take a walk (it was!) and took off down the driveway and they pressed me into service looking for her. She wandered onto the neighbor's property and when they asked her what was up she took one of them by the arm and started walking back to our place, she then let go of their arm and grabbed onto mine and I brought her back to everyone's relief.
You know what they say, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.”
Yep it's like they're grouping all kinds of mental disabilities as autism
It is the so-called "autists" who do that. It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.
Look at the case of Kanye West
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sick-people-are-sick
There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study...
If it wasn't something people were flocking too like neurotypicals that is a valuable part of their identity they'd just be honest and say that a lot of these people would have to give up their diagnosis. Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...
https://spectrumofhope.com/blog/5-different-types-of-autism/
Now we need an "awareness of everybody who isn't autistic" movement.
An observation I've made is that the most people ("the general population") will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals. I.e.: They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back even if the instructions are total nonsense or impossible to physically implement.
It's a rare breed (1-2%) of the population that will actively push back, insist on facts, and stick to only the "hard, unyielding reality" of physics, chemistry, mathematics, physics, logic, etc...
There is a very high correlation between these types of people and autistic people.
You have to not care about how other people "feel" or what their conflicting priorities might be to prioritise reality above the personal whims of others.
To be truly intelligent, you have to be able to call the emperor naked.
PS: It's easy to disagree with the above, but this is invariably an instance of "the fish is the last to know it lives in water" idiom. Something like 80% of the adult population goes along with Santa for Grownups because of peer pressure, also known as "mainstream religions". Don't get me started on partisan voting against one's own interests. Etc...
I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.
> I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake.
One of the realities is more unyielding than the other.
Pi can’t be redefined to be exactly 3 no matter how socially important the legislator is.
Einstein seemed to have absolutely no problems with his social life. Newton on the other hand lived and died alone, possibly a virgin.
That’s called masking.
I have level 1 ASD and rated pretty high in masking when tested. I show up the way I’m expected to show up. I don’t let people see what it costs me. I deal with that later in private.
If anything, Newton was very well connected with other people and had extensive collaborations with them. He was very much social.
The fact he may have died a virgin says nothing about his social capabilities.
Maybe he was gay in a time when being gay was a death sentence ? Which would be really sad.
Feynman was also very charismatic
Ditto for John von Neumann
In Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now.
Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
Never being married did however.
It seems like there are a lot more gay guys than asexuals out there though.
Or "there's a fine line between genius and insanity".
It’s kind of rude to equate autism with “insanity”, but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.
Bit more than rude, historically.