tell me about it

Ask a burgler

Where should you hide your money?

In the bank? Well, actually, that's what he says right off the bat.

The case for autism

Tyler Cowen writes an interesting article on the advantages of autism, something that isn't presented in the usual cluck-clucking:

Autism as Academic Paradigm
By TYLER COWEN

Thinking back on history, maybe you've wondered how it was that American colleges and universities could ever have contributed to racist discourse. But Princeton and many other institutions kept out Jews, and "academic" defenses of slavery, segregation, and eugenics were commonplace until broader social changes rendered such views unacceptable.

The sad truth is that dehumanizing ideologies are still with us in the modern university, although they take very different forms. Prime examples include the unacceptable ways we sometimes talk and think about the autism spectrum.

A few years ago, Michael L. Ganz, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health, published an essay titled "Costs of Autism in the United States." Nowhere in the essay does he consider whether autistic people have brought benefits to the human race. Can you imagine a comparable essay titled: "Costs of Native Americans"? Ganz might think that autism is strictly a disease, but he never mentions or rebuts the fact that a great number of autistics reject this view and find it insulting.

[...]

I've cited some of the more obvious examples, but the underlying biases are much more deeply rooted. A lot of people at colleges are aware of dealing with autism (and Asperger's syndrome; I will refer generally to the autism spectrum) in their "special needs" programs. The more complex reality is that there is a lot more autism in higher education than most of us realize. It's not just "special needs" students but also our valedictorians, our faculty members, and yes — sometimes — our administrators.

That last sentence is not some kind of cheap laugh line about the many dysfunctional features of higher education. Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.

Working in academic research, it's been interesting to see the sort of cold war that goes on between the professors/scientists/engineers and managers/business guys. In any lengthy stalemate, there is some strength to either position (or both are equally weak, kumbaya my lord). This why the folks over at the Harvard Business Review endlessly rattle on about emotional intelligence, and I think they have a point. You may want Dilbert designing your widgets, but you do not want him running the show, as any college faculty meeting will show.

In any case, I think Cohen makes some very good points, and perhaps the goal shouldn't be to reduce or "fix" autism, or that it's increasing presence is a crisis, but rather recognize their virtues and channel them effectively.

On a very tangential note, this reminds me a lot of the Money Ball philosophy in baseball, in which the goal is to use cheap players whose skills go unharolded due to a social bias to efficiently win. In baseball, certain statistics are glamorous - like RBI's or ERA or Saves, despite the fact that they correlate poorly with skill or contributions to wins. You can pay a lot less per win if you achieve them with average hitters with tremendous defense skills.

This may not directly apply to autistics vs everyone else, because even within highly autistic cultures, like academia, there is poor evaluation - e.g., paper citations if your real interest is in intellectual achievement.

I can partially relate

The importance of stupidity in scientific research
Martin A. Schwartz
Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia
Accepted 9 April 2008

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

Let the pissing contests begin

GRE scores by graduate field.

Science Conferences

Biocurious: Anatomy of a seminar*

They don’t all go like this, but the vast majority of seminars I attend seem to follow this general outline.

1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from “well, not THAT long ago” is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh).

[more]

By all means, click through, but I will say that the short talks (which are what I give/gave) which follow the plenary speakers aren't that much different. Basically, the quickie-version. Hopefully, you won't repeat the previous speakers, but they'll have been similar enough that you can hit the ground running. Wham, bam, thank-you ma'am. My advice is to use non-serifed (helevtia et al) fonts for legibility, tell a story, and use the whole thing for a poster which you run in parallel (posters are easy to get at OSA conferences).

*for those keeping score at home, I'm an idiot.

Because you Kan't, you won't, and you don't stop

Metaphysical attack ads. Back in school, the stop signs were tagged with "Kant" every Spring, which is just the inevitable outcome of making four hundred Freshpersons slog through (partsof) Critique of Pure Reason in a week. Nietzsche wasn't popular because of his ideas. Nietzsche was popular because he was easy to read.