Natural Selection

Post Reply New Topic

Here: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/07/1 ... -get-them/

Btw, that author claims that she has Asperger's, she's a regular columnist at Bnet.com (now cbsnews).

Despite the detractors on this thread disagreeing with me, I will still stick to my guns and say it's still better to be an Aspie in today's society rather than past ones when fishing, hunting, and brawling skills were the way of life. An Aspie (who lacks physical prowess and social skills) would've been left out for dead by him or herself.

It's true that intelligent people have their ideas stolen or get taken advantage of. But the point is, Aspies with certain talents have made their marks in this world and can still make their mark. Without their intelligence or special talents being acknowledged or capitalized upon in today's society, how would they prove their worth in another time like the caveman days for example?

Social skills and Bsing through life is the way of life but like I said one doesn't need to partake in this herd-like mentality. Find ways to survive but staying true to oneself is important.

Career or jobs don't have to be the endeavor that defines a person. That's why I mentioned "create your own game and devise your own rules." To obtain immortality (if that's what one wants) or establish one's legacy (no matter how small or big), one should find unconventional ways to accomplish it. Unrealistic? I don't know. I prefer to think positively. Anything's possible with hope. I like to think I can accomplish anything with the imagination of a child rather than go in with the pessimism of a bitter adult.

But hey...That's just me...I am proud to be different and I want to lie on my death bed knowing I chose to follow what my heart tells me instead of following the conventional definition of what is success.

But really...stay positive and dare to be different...That's my message.

How old are you 9512? And what do you do for living? What did you achieve so far?

The OP might be interested in Evolutionary Psychology.

Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.

Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry

Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/ewater ... rimer.html

I am not answering any of those questions.

I don't have to prove anything. My initial post was to provide encouragement for the OP who was obviously down and needed a different perspective. But detractors on this thread decided to play devil's advocate. They dissected and interpreted my post too literally (which I can understand since Aspies tend to take things too literally).

Stay positive and dare to be different.

I'd probably just settle for friends and people that respect me.

As a side note, I've never understood the "be positive and good things will happen" mantra. Isn't the point of positivity is that you have it when good things happen to you? I've hardly known anybody naive enough to be positive and to think positively when stupid stuff happens to them over and over and over. Similarly, just because you're positive doesn't mean you'll get along with others either. Again, there's bullshitting around for that. Telling people what they wanna hear, basically. Every positive person I know has had things handed to 'em in life for their whole life or at the very least has not had bad enough hardships where they couldn't overcome them easily. Again, this is just my experience.

Negativity doesn't lead anywhere either, per se, but it's better than sitting there acting like nothing is happening. Frankly, I'd be surprised if MR20 or anyone who feels this way was going through all this and DIDN'T complain. That is not normal. A realistic approach is best, but it's often hard to tell where that ends and where one of the other two begins.

I firmly believe that positivity/negativity isn't the cause. It's the effect.

Sorry, just thinking out loud here. Maybe I should make a new thread about this.

Not only are people turned off by negativity, but you dig a hole deeper than the one you were already in. For example, the more you tell yourself "I'm a loser", the more it's true. You don't feel the motivation to want to do anything to improve your life. No one is going to want to help someone who is extremely negative because the message that person sends is "This person doesn't even want to try or has given up". When you think positive however, you're more likely to set healthy goals that will help bring you out of whatever rut you're in.

I definitely recommend the book Get Off Your But by Sean Stephenson.

I feel quite the opposite. Part of it is because, I'm put in positions where I know I can beat the hell out of someone/something, but can't because it's bad social skills. IE, school, school in the 50s, if you beat up someone, all that would happen is in school punishment of some kind usually, no legal proceedings. Now, schools have cops, and you're much more likely to get arrested for a fight now. I can show statistics that prove this, ie, if you look at crime stats for assault in the 1950s to now, you'd have to conclude that now more things are being counted, if you believed in the statistics alone, you'd have to conclude the world is now 10-20 times more violent than it was back then.

So now, especially in school, etc, the most "NT" people can basically rule, as they can use emotional subtleties against people and less socially apt people, or Aspies, don't know how to respond back, and can't use violence. This is my hypothesis of why there's been an obvious increase of school shootings and stuff, as kids who would before use violence just by hitting the person now can't solve the problem like that from the get-go, and it all builds up into one big rage act like a school shooting. Or they're just as*holes. But still...

My theory is, there's simply more people, and more social skills are required now due to there being more people, and more media to determine how people act socially, and give people more of a baseline of how people are supposed to act, and then people make judgments based on that. Like one example I read of, supposedly, the American South people used to talk almost entirely differently from people in the North. Culturally, both regions were entirely different and had different values and morals, which is why we had a civil war with them. Now, I mean, people are different, but it's not as drastic, just because we're all more connected and there's more media. Hell, before the late 1800s and early 1900s, there wasn't even compulsory education, so all the hell of high school we go through didn't exist.

I've stated this before, I think Aspie-ness is basically an anachronism leftover from humanity's past. We used to be very well needed by society, the difference between being an Aspie in the past and now was huge. Being an Aspie in the past might have meant you were the only person in your town that was literate, for example.

ANYWAY, I can go on and on about my theory of this, but I won't. Maybe I should write an essay. Hell, I should maybe just go write some essays every night, then if I go to college, I can just hand in papers instantaneously, that'd be sweet.

Anyway again, me personally I'm actually quite good at traditional outdoor activities like fishing and all that stuff. I don't know how "naturally" good I am at them, maybe quite bad, but I really enjoy them, so because I try at them, I'm better than most people I know. And physical power, too, is easy to get. Everyone's born mostly equal in that regard, so the variables for that have nothing to do with Aspergers or being an NT.

I don't know, it seems a lot especially on this board equates Aspergers to being a nerd, and I simply don't feel that's so.

There's a hypothesis that the "epidemic" in Autism seen in Silicon Valley is resultant of people in technological fields (who are joked to all be a bit Aspie) interbreeding with one another.

With the explosion in systemizing and data processing fields, I don't know how it could possibly be asserted that there aren't many niches within which Aspies might thrive, niches which weren't there before.

I have good reasons to believe that natural selection still operates on humans on the sub-conscious level.

If you can't get a girlfriend or at least you can't get the kind of women you want then I have good reasons to believe that this has everything to do with her genetics and your genetics and your brain and her brain. And brains sometimes repel.

And no, I don't believe in life after death.