April 15 Summary

Below are the items shared on April 15

How to work with someone with autism

The new guy in the office is loud and aggressive, can’t read social cues, won’t wait his turn in meetings, and talks obsessively about the same things every day. And yet, sometimes, he shares extraordinary insights.

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Autistic Adults: Socially Impaired or Socially Different? 

 Many of us almost take it for granted that individuals with autism have fewer and poorer friendships than others. Even worse, this assumption is usually assigned reflexively to the autism itself. This isn’t just true of our culture at large, either; it is true of researchers and professionals.

    Fortunately, some in the field are starting to challenge existing ideas about social deficits and autism. Authors of a recent paper published in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Brownlow, Bertilsdotter, and O’Dell, drew on a theoretical perspective that casts autism as a neurological difference rather than a deficit.

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Peter Thiel: Asperger’s can be a big advantage in Silicon Valley

He avoids hiring MBAs, since he says they tend to be “high extrovert/low conviction people,” a combination of traits that “leads towards extremely herd-like thinking and behavior.”  Similarly, he says that “people end up behaving more lemming-like” in places like San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where tons of tech companies are crammed into a .635 square mile area. All that socialization leads to conformity, he argues, preventing people from coming up with original, innovative ideas.


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