Will I find autism (or rather, allism) to be an ideology during 2023?
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😅 Today in "tailcalled makes weird markets"...

Context

Ever since finding gender conservatism/gender progressivism as major explanatory factors in some surveys, I've been really into analyzing things as ideologies lately. Probably a good way of understanding what I mean is by contrasting to what I believed about ideologies before discovering gender conservatism/gender progressivism.

If you think of your stereotypical extreme conservative, then there are all sorts of things they've historically wanted to cancel. Gnosticism, rock and roll, divorce, gays, lesbians, boyfriends for teen girls, mild drugs, dungeons and dragons, video games, Harry Potter, therapy, etc.. Often, the justification for this cancellation is that it is a "bad influence" in some way. E.g. Harry Potter being said to promote witchcraft.

Previously, inspired by twin studies and I suspect ultimately informed by people like Steven Pinker, I had dismissed this sort of thing, with the justification being that it seems lacking in statistical evidence, that if there are supposed correlations with the claimed stuff then it's probably genetically confounded, and that it doesn't really make sense on priors. Because I suspect this answer was popularized by Pinker's The Blank Slate, I call this answer Pinkerism (though I haven't read The Blank Slate so it may be a total misnomer; I think I got it from Scott Alexander, and that Scott Alexander directly got it from The Blank Slate, and also got it from various communities that indirectly got it from The Blank Slate).

Anyway, I now reject Pinkerism, because I now see the potential for various social groups to be carriers for ideologies. Not only that, but I also think ideologies have the potential to influence actions a lot. An examples is in order. I know a guy who is heavily into PUA/macho ideology, and he considers it perfectly reasonable to trick women into sleeping with him to increase his body count. Meanwhile, I think someone who is into feminist ideology might believe that using deception to get sex is coercive. (Though the exact opinion seems to vary, since we live in a culture that performs widespread deception as a matter of course - another matter that is probably down to other ideologies.)

It is probably necessary to define the term "ideology" more precisely. Usually people associate it with classical political perspectives such as communism, conservatism and capitalism. And I agree that these (with mild clarifications) are ideologies by my definition. But I have a very encompassing definition of ideology:

An ideology is a system of ideas, especially ideas about relevant policies, purposes, conflicts, grand societal facts, etc.. Being a system of ideas, it is socially contagious; by Aumann's agreement theorem, if you trust someone then you should adopt their ideas. And some of the ideas have some direct implications for your behavior, so the entire system of ideas can have grand effects on your behavior.

Allism as ideology/culture

Other than classical ideologies, what other ideologies are there?

Well, consider our society's culture. Culture is basically the dominant system of ideas within a group of people. So, culture is synonymous with the dominant ideology.

Culture includes norms about how to socially interact, beliefs about how people work, and information about status relations and similar. These are all ideas, and so by my definition they constitute an ideology. And it seems to me that if someone was not aware of some of those ideas, then they would face social difficulties while interacting with others who have been encultured into them, in perhaps exactly the way autistic people do.

So strictly speaking it would not be autism that is an ideology. Rather, it would be allism that is an ideology, and autism that is its negation, reaction or ignorance. I experimented with this, talking to ChatGPT about autism symptoms and trying to identify underlying ideological drivers of allism. I came up with an 8-item scale:

Below, you see a set of statements about how communication can or should work, or related cultural opinions. For each of the statements, please evaluate the extent to which you agree with them. If you think a statement is good or true, choose agree/agree strongly. If you think a statement is bad or false, choose disagree/disagree strongly.

+ You can tell whether someone is interested by their facial expression

+ If a person who is usually out of touch is insisting that they know of something important that most people haven't noticed, people are entitled to ignore them

+ Talking with people about their weekend plans, current events and similar shows that one cares about them

+ You can learn a lot about a person by asking about things like their weekend plans

+ If you want to know whether your presence is wanted, you should not ask directly, but instead bring up a conversation (e.g. "What are you doing?"); if they simply answer the question without inviting you further, you are probably not welcome

+ If someone proposes an idea and gives an argument for it, it is rude to point out flaws in that argument, as it shows that you are opposed to their idea

+ If someone says something that sounds extreme, it is probably a misunderstanding or a joke

- Trends are not important enough that it's worth following them if it means getting mildly inconvenienced

- If one of your friends comes to you for support with a conflict they have with a stranger, you should try to figure out whether the stranger is right, rather than simply supporting your friend

- If you know a topic in-depth that someone else doesn't know, it is kind to step back and begin teaching them lots of specifics of the topic in-depth when it comes up

- If you don't have anything informative or productive to do with a person you care about, then you shouldn't be trying to hang out with them, to avoid wasting their time

(+ means that it is positively coded so allists would believe it, - means that it is negatively coded so autists would believe it. Scale order was randomized, + and - were not shown to participants.)

I call this an ideological scale because it primarily is about norms/policies (e.g. "If you want to know whether your presence is wanted, you should not ask directly, but instead bring up a conversation (e.g. "What are you doing?"); if they simply answer the question without inviting you further, you are probably not welcome") and abstract sociological facts (e.g. "You can tell whether someone is interested by their facial expression").

I tried collecting a small dataset on it, and while I haven't analyzed numerically, just eyeing the data it seems to me that the above scale was a near-complete failure. (I should probably do a proper statistical test, though.) I don't think it really measures autism, and ChatGPT suggests that it instead measures INTP (which admittedly I am pretty confused about how is different from autism, though perhaps that confusion is due to me being both INTP and autistic).

Resolution criteria

If I create an ideological scale to measure autism, and I discover it to be highly correlated with childhood diagnosis of autism (arbitrarily for market objectivity, say Cohen's d>1), then I will write up my methods in detail. If nobody pokes any serious holes in my methods, I will resolve this market YES.

If 2023 passes without me finding it to be an ideology, I will resolve this market NO. If I somehow collect the data during 2023 but the publishing/critique isn't done by the end of 2023, this market may also resolve YES.

Wait huh, didn't you just say your ideological scale didn't work?

Yes, but I might make changes.

Most strongly, I currently intend to replace ChatGPT with actual autistic people, asking them about social situations they've found confusing, and seeing if I can interpret it in terms of the dominant ideology, and construct a new scale. (If you are autistic, and you have found some social situation confusing, it would be neat if you could describe that situation in the comments! I might try to interpret it ideologically.)

Secondly, many of the items are quite abstract, so I suspect some people might find them unclear or misleading. I might choose to revise the items to make them easier to understand, which might change my original scale from not working to working.

Also maybe eyeing the data instead of running a proper statistical test was a bad idea and actually the current scale does work.

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I started collecting data. I probably won't have the analysis done by the new year, but per the "If I somehow collect the data during 2023 but the publishing/critique isn't done by the end of 2023, this market may also resolve YES." criterion, I guess this market isn't going to resolve N/A.

This market is also about autistic people, but since I have sent out the survey to collect the data already, it should resolve very soon, unlike the OP which will take a long time to resolve:

(Posting because it seems likely of interest to people here?)

I'm gonna add a condition to this market, hope you understand and agree that it is fair:

I have not gotten around to constructing a new ideology scale yet, and therefore also not gotten around to collecting data on it. (In fact I suspect I should collect some more stories, but from the allistic PoV, before I continue.) I expect that I will get around to collecting the data eventually this year, but in case I don't, I think I should form a plan for the resolution.

First, part of the point of this market is to tell me whether it is a reasonable idea. Which sort

ooops accidentally posted before finishing.

Which sort of implies that it should resolve YES if I succeed and NO if I fail. But if I don't even get to collect the data by 2023, does that imply failing?

I think it depends on why I don't get to collect the data. Maybe as I think more about it, and also collect more stories and attempt to make the scales and such, I come to realize that allism is not at all an ideology. And then I abandon the project. In that case, presumably the market should resolve NO.

But if I get distracted or get too busy but still consider the project worthwhile, then that doesn't seem like a good reason to avoid it, so I think in that case I should not resolve the market NO. Instead, I should resolve it N/A.

Note that this only applies if I don't collect the main data which my original market implied I would collect:

Most strongly, I currently intend to replace ChatGPT with actual autistic people, asking them about social situations they've found confusing, and seeing if I can interpret it in terms of the dominant ideology, and construct a new scale. (If you are autistic, and you have found some social situation confusing, it would be neat if you could describe that situation in the comments! I might try to interpret it ideologically.)

If I construct such a scale and collect data for it, then this new condition does not apply, i.e. if the scale doesn't prove that allism is an ideology, but does leave the possibility open enough that I consider it worthwhile to do more research in this area, but I decide to not do more research, then the market resolves NO.

So basically what I'm saying is (roughly speaking) that if I do less work than I implied I would in the market description, the market resolves N/A.

predicts YES

@tailcalled sounds fair

bought Ṁ10 of YES

@tailcalled Thank you for clarifying publicly. This tips my position from (slight) NO to (slight) YES

I think a lot of these stories are much less INTP-like than the stories I originally analyzed to make my autism scale. However, I can still find the sorts of behaviors in the stories relatable, though not necessarily to quite the same extent as for stories that are more INTP-like. But I think they also might sort of help distinguish autism from introversion and other similar things.

I can sort of see some ideological elements to them, and I plan on attempting to create an ideological test from them.

@tailcalled (But of course also some of these stories seem obviously driven by non-ideological elements, e.g. story 10 is a particularly strong example, being mostly driven by hypersensitivities rather than ideology.)

Story 10:

I was in a local coffee shop (Starbucks) which my Auntie and Mother having a catch-up. The background was quite noisy and music was playing. I think this made it even more difficult when being in this setting due to the noise and other people chatting away in the background.

Due to the background and the setting I felt like I was overwhelmed especially with all the noise I ignored quite a few people and didn't speak to them due to being overwhelmed by everything, in these situations I tend to go quiet and not interact with others.

I think that I was rude and I was criticised for not being more involved when I should have been, I do understand this criticism but I think I did my best in that situation and I would prefer to be quiet and rude instead of being coming loud and rude especially in a public place.

Story 9:

I was at a family gathering with a large number of my immediate and extended family for a Christmas party. This was at my dad and stepmum's house on Christmas day. We were generally enjoying the festivities, eating, playing games and talking.

One of my cousins became very intoxicated and began to make homophobic comments in front of the whole group. My family knows I'm gay but nobody intervened, I was disappointed in my parents for not defending me, and siding with him. All I did was defend myself, however when I woke up the following morning I was told by my parents to pack my bags and leave, so I did.

I don't think I acted poorly, my aunt was also upset with what my cousin was saying. I was criticised for defending myself, but in reality what I was really criticised for was likely to do with my dad thinking that I made him look bad because I'm gay. I didn't raise my voice, shout or curse, nor insult anyone. My healthy perception of myself is intact and know my dad is liable to get upset about things that don't bother other people. He also is very concerned with appearances. The only thing this affects is how I perceive my father, my opinion of him was already low but this just reaffirmed my perspective.

Story 8:

One situation where I feel uncertain how to act would be about paying for the meal when grabbing food with a girl where you don’t know whether its a date or not. Society says the guy should always pay for the girl on the first date, but I wasn’t sure if we were on a date or not.

I decided not to pay for the food and assumed that we were just grabbing food as friends, even though I was romantically interested in the girl. I acted this way because I didn’t want to come off as too interested in the girl since I wasn’t sure if she was interested in me.

The girl was a little confused as to why I didn’t pay but I told her that we were just hanging out as friends. I agree with the criticism she gave me but it wasn’t harsh and very easy to manage. This didn’t affect the way I think about her.

Story 7:

I was at a Live motor race at Silverstone watching the British Grand Prix, with some friends. They asked me who I was supporting and they did not like my answer. We got in to an argument, which was embarrassing, in front of the other people in attendance. I got really upset as the argument was not necessary, so I told them where to go.

I was annoyed as it was out of character of my friends over something petty. I then decided to give in as I did not want to cause a scene in front of the other supporters. I decided to cool things down by walking off and get some refreshments

I believe that the way I acted was correct, as the situation needed to be cooled down. When I returned they just said hello, and nothing more was said about the argument. I did not agree to the criticism, but did not let it affect me at that point in time. It was mad moment and will will not affect my way of thinking or acting in the future.

Story 6:

There was a program I was to attend with my friends in the country side, as the Mr planner that everyone knows me with, I am always concerned about the perfection of the trip to the program, from our schedule to tye transport, to feeding and lodging.

All these flopped because I was undergoing some downside few hours to the trip, most of them were concerned about what could be wrong because they knew something must be wrong for me to be making some of the silly mistakes.

I later laid it down to them on why I was making the silly mistakes, unknowingly to me that if I had told them about what's going on, I would have come back to my normal self.

Because our discussion leads to something practical and personal, every one was so concerned about my situation and it feels good to be among them.

They didn't really criticised me after learning what's wrong, they equally provide a solution to what's actually happening, it meant a lot to me because it equate to the quality of our relationship.

I would have been criticized if I had kept it to myself without laying it to them, because they wouldn't know what's really going on and there will no way to proffer a solution.

Story 5:

a colleague in my workplace was making jokes about me behind my back and someone told me about it so i confronted him and called him out, he said some really horrible things and claimed he was just joking but i knew he wasnt so i shouted at him and swore at home and never spoke to him since. my other colleagues think i went to far but he got what he deserved.

the reason i acted out like this was because i was very stressed at the time as my mother was going through cancer treatment and i may have overexaggerated.

looking back on the situation i do realize i over exaggerated and could've acted better and im also quite embarrassed about it. ive thought about apologizing but we haven't spoke for so long i think it would be pointless.

Story 4:

with friends in a cafe having lunch, we had planned our weekly lunch meetup, i had ordered a latte and a salad and we were talking about various topics when the topic of being friends with men had came up as one of my friends had been having issues.

i had stated that i did not wish to be friends with men as i felt uncomfortable around them and had difficulties getting along with them. my friends were shocked and looked down on me for it, saying i was being unfair and a misandrist

i think my feelings were valid as i have a bad history with men and how they treat me, i do not agree with the critisisms at all, i do not hate men, i just do not wish to be friends with them. it makes me less inclined to be honest with my friends going forward.

Story 3:

I was out with colleagues for a work event in London, I was new to the company and was nervous. we left the office and went to a moroccan restaurant which was nice but i was worried about where i would sit

I was very drunk and sloppy and drank someone else's drink from a pitcher they had purchased themselves (they were a colleague but not a friend) with their own money not the companies that they had paid for without realising until later

I felt embarrassed when I realised and left pretty much straight away and the next day when I messaged the group nobody responded to me, and later on someone made a joke about how expensive the drinks were

Story 2:

I was camping with some friends, I was maybe 17 or 18 at the time. We used to camp regularly but supervised by a parent or adult. I t was our first time camping alone but it wasn't exactly remote and there was a good 9 - 10 of us. A friend of mine who came camping brought with Psilocybin Mushrooms which are a hallucinogen shroom. He was never really the kind of guy to do that sort of stuff but he got them from his uncle and wanted us to all try them. I'm not really cool with drugs and stuff so I got pretty angry and ended up chucking them in the fire. Everyone started getting mad at me saying I'm a party popper and I owe him money for it. I felt a little bad afterwards because maybe it was right to let people experience that and I took it away.

I was criticized for trying to control the fun and taking the fun away. I think the criticism is warranted but at the same time I feel like my actions were justified because none of us did drugs before and the first time we are not supervised he brings drugs from his dodgey family member.

Story 1:

I was with my parents at their house, I was engaged and going to get married, however, we had made the decision to take my wifetobe's surname instead of my family's. I intended to explain the decision to them and hoped that they would understand. I had originally just gone over to theirs to have lunch with them after I had finished work.

I had lunch with them and felt unsettled and nervous about approaching the discussion as I know it is the social norm and general assumption that the wife always takes the grooms family name in marriage. After lunch, I said to them that I wanted to discuss something important with them, we sat down and discussed our decision. Initially they seemed confused, I explained why we wanted to marry in this way and they seemed somewhat calm about it. However, after leaving their house, I got a phone call from my dad saying that my mum was not happy about it and thought it was wrong.

There were several phone calls and further discussions between my parents and I, where they expressed their dissatisfaction in us and threw several insults at us as a result of this. Unfortunately, to this day I have now been estranged by them and no longer talk.

I acted the way that I did as I wanted to give my wife a chance to have her mother's side of the family's surname as I knew how important this was to her. She had lived her life up to that point with her abusive father's surname and I knew how much it would mean to her to have the name she always wanted. I knew that doing this, I was challenging the social norm and what I decided to do was ultimately frowned upon by my parents who have very traditional values.

As a result, I am left mentally scarred by the situation and the conversations following what happened. I have very little fear of dying or anything bad happening to me and have a constant fear that everyone will abandon me such as my parents did.

I'll be posting some threads with the new social stories I collected from some autistic people. You are welcome to analyze the interactions and take guesses for ideological contributors, if you want. I will likely also post my thoughts about them.

sold Ṁ30 of YES

I'm not 100% sure what the thesis is, is it "the difference between autistic and allistic people is caused only by believed ideas, and not unchangeable cognitive differences"? Because that would contradict available data. Or is it closer to "there is a large set of prescriptive ideas neurotypical people in the western cultural sphere generally believe and autistic people do not"?

If it's the second the test does not seem to focus on those, here are my definitely-not-neurotypical-but-spent-a-lot-of-time-trying-to-pretend comments:


+ You can tell whether someone is interested by their facial expression

It does seem that is mostly possible for most people.

+ If a person who is usually out of touch is insisting that they know of something important that most people haven't noticed, people are entitled to ignore them

Generally more true than false, with a limited amount of available time spending it on somebody's 100th "this time I've blown the cover off that whole thing" seems suboptimal

+ Talking with people about their weekend plans, current events and similar shows that one cares about them

It somewhat does, or at least that you are invested in them thinking you do, it's basically costly signalling burning your time.

+ You can learn a lot about a person by asking about things like their weekend plans

That also seems more true than false?

+ If you want to know whether your presence is wanted, you should not ask directly, but instead bring up a conversation (e.g. "What are you doing?"); if they simply answer the question without inviting you further, you are probably not welcome

I'd rephrase this, probably to something like "'Are you hungry?' is a natural way to communicate you want to make eating arrangements with somebody"

+ If someone proposes an idea and gives an argument for it, it is rude to point out flaws in that argument, as it shows that you are opposed to their idea

This is too clearly false to get yes answers, something like "When somebody gives arguments for or against the idea it is better to address the idea itself and not waste time looking for holes in the arguments" should work better

+ If someone says something that sounds extreme, it is probably a misunderstanding or a joke

Yes, that is factually the case most of the time, the difference would be in being able to deduce it in the moment.

- Trends are not important enough that it's worth following them if it means getting mildly inconvenienced

People don't follow trends because they "are important" a priori despite the inconvenience, they do it because it provides them with indirect value such as status, acceptance and other social benefits

- If one of your friends comes to you for support with a conflict they have with a stranger, you should try to figure out whether the stranger is right, rather than simply supporting your friend

This one is a banger, no notes.

- If you know a topic in-depth that someone else doesn't know, it is kind to step back and begin teaching them lots of specifics of the topic in-depth when it comes up

I obviously see the point, but I'm not sure if kind is the classifier that would elicit the largest response.

- If you don't have anything informative or productive to do with a person you care about, then you shouldn't be trying to hang out with them, to avoid wasting their time

Anegdotically it seems like a lot of neurodivergent people value spending time with people they care about even if they are not actively and productively interacting and non-productive ways of doing so, such as consuming media.

Some ideas (phrasing could be improved):
- The most obvious way of responding to somebody telling you what they did / happened to them is with a related story of your own.
+ Gender is something everybody intuitively understands.
+ People with more authority / age / money deserve more respect.
+ Not keeping eye contact in conversation is a sign of disrespect/dishonesty/disinterest
+ It's rude to ask people personal questions / too many questions / questions in general.
+ You should pretend to like everybody you interact with regardless of your real feelings towards them
+ If you want to tell somebody about your day you should first ask them about theirs.
+ It's rude to answer placeholder questions like "how are you?" with negativity/problems/anything but the preset answer.
+ In general you should strongly consider what answer the other person expects when answering a question.
+ Most people are good, and it's the few bad people who do bad things.
+ When somebody tells you about a problem it's better to respond with empathy and understanding, not try to help.
+ It is rude and disrespectful to directly tell people they are wrong, especially people higher in the social hierarchy.
+ It's bad to give excuses for bad behavior instead of just apologizing.
+ Autism Speaks should be allowed to keep existing /s

I'm not 100% sure what the thesis is, is it "the difference between autistic and allistic people is caused only by believed ideas, and not unchangeable cognitive differences"? Because that would contradict available data. Or is it closer to "there is a large set of prescriptive ideas neurotypical people in the western cultural sphere generally believe and autistic people do not"?

@CodeandSolder It seems like there's a bunch of neurological symptoms of autism too, e.g. stimming or hypersensitivity. These can presumably not be caused by ideology, so I agree that it would contradict available data.

I am basically unsure about what the relationship between the neurological symptoms and the social symptoms are, and thus also what autism really is. But if I had to describe the OP as a thesis about these, I would say:

There are a variety of poorly-understood neurological disorders that can cause various sorts of difficulties. Beyond a certain point, they start interfering with one's enculturation, making it more difficult to pick up the dominant ideology. However, these neurological disorders are not the only thing that can interfere with picking up the dominant ideology, as e.g. a sense fairness might lead to wanting to avoid being complicit in the dominant ideology's oppression. These various factors all contribute to autistic social difficulties in various ways.

I'm not sure whether this is correct, and I'm not claiming the OP is a specific test of this. Rather, the OP may be one step towards investigating it.

If it's the second the test does not seem to focus on those, here are my definitely-not-neurotypical-but-spent-a-lot-of-time-trying-to-pretend comments:

Yes, I acknowledge in the OP that the second test does not measure autism.

I constructed it by going to ChatGPT, asking it to write stories that illustrate autistic behavior, noticing how in all of those stories the autistic behavior seemed quite justified to me, and finding (partly through prompting ChatGPT about why the autistic behavior would be wrong) that the dominant ideology has some memes that oppose the autistic behavior.

As an example, one of the stories I based the test on was this one (written by ChatGPT):

Richard, a young man with autism, enjoys spending time with his close-knit group of friends. They often gather for dinner at a quiet restaurant they all favor. Today, however, the friends decide to try a new restaurant that has recently opened.

On their arrival, they find the restaurant bustling with more patrons than they anticipated. The host informs them that there will be a 30-minute wait for a table. Richard's friends, familiar with such situations, seem unperturbed. They casually decide to wait in the lounge area, strike up light-hearted conversations, and start checking their phones or chatting about their day.

Richard, on the other hand, struggles with this unexpected change. He was prepared for a quiet dinner and not a noisy, crowded environment with an unanticipated delay. He feels the loud chatter and laughter around him is overwhelming, adding to his discomfort.

Moreover, he isn't sure how to navigate this period of waiting. He sees his friends engaging in idle chit-chat, a practice he's never fully understood. He's uncertain about how to contribute to the conversation that seems pointless to him and is based on topics he doesn't find interesting.

Feeling a mix of discomfort and confusion, he suggests they should leave and find a quieter restaurant. His friends seem surprised and try to convince him to stay, saying the wait won't be too long. They don't fully grasp his discomfort, as they take the unexpected changes in stride – a tacit social rule Richard finds challenging to adhere to. Richard's suggestion to leave, despite their reassurances, leaves a tension among the group, as his reaction appears disproportionate to the situation from their perspective.

Empirically, I found that this test does not really measure autism. I'm not sure what it measures instead; ChatGPT suggested INTP, and that seems plausible enough to me, as I am not just autistic but also INTP, so maybe I introduced some INTP biases while extracting information from ChatGPT.

The market is not about this test, it is about future tests I will construct this year, most notably my current plan of replacing ChatGPT with autistic people telling their stories. I've collected 10 stories of social interactions and I plan on trying to analyze them for ideology.

+ You can tell whether someone is interested by their facial expression

It does seem that is mostly possible for most people.

Yes, and this also gets into a distinction in the OP. This belief does not describe autistic people well. However, it does describe most people well, and so it does become the dominant ideology, and will likely also be adopted by autistic people. This is one reason to doubt the 'prediction' in the OP; autistic people have reasons to adopt the dominant ideology.

+ If a person who is usually out of touch is insisting that they know of something important that most people haven't noticed, people are entitled to ignore them

Generally more true than false, with a limited amount of available time spending it on somebody's 100th "this time I've blown the cover off that whole thing" seems suboptimal

- Trends are not important enough that it's worth following them if it means getting mildly inconvenienced

People don't follow trends because they "are important" a priori despite the inconvenience, they do it because it provides them with indirect value such as status, acceptance and other social benefits

These are meant to be connected, sort-of, and this is one of the things I am referring to with "Secondly, many of the items are quite abstract, so I suspect some people might find them unclear or misleading. I might choose to revise the items to make them easier to understand, which might change my original scale from not working to working.".

I developed these items while analyzing the restaurant story above. My thought with the restaurant story was that if it is so great then you might as well come back to the restaurant on some later day when it is less overcrowded. However, ChatGPT emphasized the importance of staying on top of trends. I eventually came up with the idea that the dominant ideology considers knowledge legitimate pretty much only when it is in the pool of common knowledge that "everyone knows", so in order to show that one can find good information, one has to chase the trends.

I'm not sure this analysis of the trend dynamic is great, and as mentioned empirically it wasn't a great fit for autism. I mainly included the test as an example of what format the questions would have to take in order to be called "ideological" and therefore be appropriate for an ideology test.

+ You can learn a lot about a person by asking about things like their weekend plans

That also seems more true than false?

I should also note, the dominant ideology statements are not meant to specifically be true or false. Some (presumably most, due to rationality) parts of the dominant ideology are gonna simply be true (I regularly hear people make references to how various car brands or cities are indicative of a person's wealth, and I don't doubt that people have a good sense for this, but I don't have a sense for it), while others are going to be false (often meant to oppress and then cover it up), or not meaningfully true-or-false because they are policies rather than statements of fact.

+ If you want to know whether your presence is wanted, you should not ask directly, but instead bring up a conversation (e.g. "What are you doing?"); if they simply answer the question without inviting you further, you are probably not welcome

I'd rephrase this, probably to something like "'Are you hungry?' is a natural way to communicate you want to make eating arrangements with somebody"

Could be.

+ If you want to know whether your presence is wanted, you should not ask directly, but instead bring up a conversation (e.g. "What are you doing?"); if they simply answer the question without inviting you further, you are probably not welcome

I'd rephrase this, probably to something like "'Are you hungry?' is a natural way to communicate you want to make eating arrangements with somebody"

That could work.

+ If someone proposes an idea and gives an argument for it, it is rude to point out flaws in that argument, as it shows that you are opposed to their idea

This is too clearly false to get yes answers, something like "When somebody gives arguments for or against the idea it is better to address the idea itself and not waste time looking for holes in the arguments" should work better

That could also work.

+ If someone says something that sounds extreme, it is probably a misunderstanding or a joke

Yes, that is factually the case most of the time, the difference would be in being able to deduce it in the moment.

Yes, so this illustrates an alternative possibility to autism as an ideology. Rather than beliefs, it can be about cognitive abilities. I think cognitive abilities are the mainstream model of autistic social difficulties, and that does seem plausible to me too.


(to be continued)

(continuation)

- If you don't have anything informative or productive to do with a person you care about, then you shouldn't be trying to hang out with them, to avoid wasting their time

Anegdotically it seems like a lot of neurodivergent people value spending time with people they care about even if they are not actively and productively interacting and non-productive ways of doing so, such as consuming media.

Yes, this one was the one I was most dubious about I think. ChatGPT mentioned that my questionnaire lacked items about autistic inflexibility with regards to routine interruptions. It gave a story of someone being invited to an activity instead of doing his daily routine, and being upset about that. But it seemed like a bit of a stretch. If anyone has any ideological theories of autistic routine inflexibility, then I would be interested in hearing it.

+ Gender is something everybody intuitively understands.
+ People with more authority / age / money deserve more respect.
+ It is rude and disrespectful to directly tell people they are wrong, especially people higher in the social hierarchy.
+ It's bad to give excuses for bad behavior instead of just apologizing.
+ Autism Speaks should be allowed to keep existing /s

I think these are related to conservative vs progressive ideology?

I think autism is somewhat correlated with progressive ideology over conservative ideology, partly because conservative ideology normie and normies marginalize autists, and partly because conservative ideology is socially opaque, and maybe also partly because autistic people have a special sense of fairness or something.

However, I don't think the correlation is super strong, and I think the correlation might be overstated because communities made by autistic people for autistic people are more progressive. Similar to how a lot of LGBT people don't really feel connected to the LGBT community because the LGBT people are not as gender progressive as the LGBT community institutions are. Or similar, there's a bunch of other related social dynamics, like tokenism.

+ When somebody tells you about a problem it's better to respond with empathy and understanding, not try to help.
+ In general you should strongly consider what answer the other person expects when answering a question.
+ Most people are good, and it's the few bad people who do bad things.

These might work though I also wonder if one could make them less abstract or something.

+ You should pretend to like everybody you interact with regardless of your real feelings towards them

Reminds me, one time an autistic woman mentioned how when she was a kid, she was asked by this other girl whether they were friends, and she said something like "no, not really" because she didn't really feel that she was friends with her. And some people considered that cruel, but she stood by her decision and only wished she could have phrased it in slightly different manner.

I think something like this might be relevant to assess. For psychometrics reasons, I prefer concrete questions over abstract ones, so I have been thinking of something narrower than your suggestion. But it seems similar in spirit.

- The most obvious way of responding to somebody telling you what they did / happened to them is with a related story of your own.
+ Not keeping eye contact in conversation is a sign of disrespect/dishonesty/disinterest
+ It's rude to ask people personal questions / too many questions / questions in general.
+ If you want to tell somebody about your day you should first ask them about theirs.
+ It's rude to answer placeholder questions like "how are you?" with negativity/problems/anything but the preset answer.

This sound plausible, except a lot of them seem to have similar problems to the ones in my original test.

@tailcalled ChatGPT seems like an odd choice for a source here, to put it mildly.
I no not believe questions with an objective answer, especially identical to the mainstream opinion to be useful here as they will measure if autistic people know things which is not the relevant question.
The best approach would be probably to create a bunch of questions that you expect might work, make them into a survey with RAADS-R (and optionally other tests like MBTI) attached, see what correlates.

ChatGPT seems like an odd choice for a source here, to put it mildly.

@CodeandSolder 🤷 It's good at writing stories quickly and for cheap, but sometimes they kind of go off the rails.

I no not believe questions with an objective answer, especially identical to the mainstream opinion to be useful here as they will measure if autistic people know things which is not the relevant question.

I think knowledge is related to ideology. E.g. I ended up learning a bunch of stuff about market prices reflecting information from libertarians, giving me knowledge of things like prediction markets. Ideology includes things like who you trust and what you consider important to pay attention to, which surely affects your knowledge.

The best approach would be probably to create a bunch of questions that you expect might work, make them into a survey with RAADS-R (and optionally other tests like MBTI) attached, see what correlates.

I think going back and forth between qualitative data and surveys is helpful. Also I think recruiting a sample based on autism diagnosis in addition to RAADS-R would also be helpful as a further verification. I am also unsure how seriously to take RAADS-R variance in the normal range. People seem to suggest that one can be autistic and have a low RAADS-R score (and not just because of measurement error but because of compensation? or?), or that one can be allistic and have a high RAADS-R score. It's unclear to me what the philosophy behind the scale says about how to interpret such cases. Like for instance, one possible answer could be that RAADS-R's measurement is tainted by introversion, and that introversion is considered fundamentally different from autism. Another possible answer could be that they would assert that the subjects in question have misunderstood or misanswered the questions.