Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently
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During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about who’s vaccinated and who’s not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers
I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. That’s all I’m going to say.
Well, if it’s OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if you’ll answer or not.
That’s a subject where that’s pretty much all I’m going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I don’t have to worry about going to the hospital. I’ll leave it at that.
You’ve written so much about being a visual thinker. How does a thinker like yourself think about moral problems, which often begin as abstractions?
I have to convert it to a picture with a specific example. As I’ve gotten older and loaded more and more pictures into my mental database, then I can search that database — sort of like Google for images. So when I think about moral things, I see them as little video clips. Now let’s explain how I categorized things as a young child. Let’s take dogs versus cats: All the dogs in my neighborhood when I was 4 years old were large. I sorted horses, dogs and cats by size. But when a dachshund came into the neighborhood, I could no longer sort dogs by size because it was smaller than the other animals I’d sorted as dogs. I had to find other sensory-based features that dachshunds shared with dogs: barking, nose shape, smell. I had to use the different criteria to put the dachshunds in the dog category. I’d like to talk now about three kinds of thinking: There’s an object visualizer like me, who thinks in photorealistic pictures; then the other kind of thinker is the visual spatial, pattern thinker; then of course you’ve got your verbal thinkers. One of the big problems with verbal thinkers is they tend to overgeneralize. They’ll talk about some concept like an “inclusive classroom,” but they’ll have absolutely no idea of “How do I implement that?”
On the idea of moral questions and visual thinking: You’ve been asked a million times about the morality of someone like yourself, who’s concerned with animal welfare, being part of the meat and poultry industry
I’ve done a lot of thinking about that.
I understand how one could visualize something like a more humane slaughterhouse. But how do you visualize the moral aspect of something that might be harder to see, like, say, the negative ecological impacts of the industry?
I’ve been thinking about that very much. About four years ago, I went to a really important departmental seminar, and we had an older agronomist, a crop person, come talk to all the livestock people in our department, and he told me something that was a game changer on how I thought about things. I learned that the animals made some of the best crop land. If you do grazing wrong, it wrecks land. If you do grazing right, you actually improve the soil health and improve the land, and you can also sequester carbon. Also, there’s research on things like seaweed that you can feed cattle to reduce the methane they put out. Now, that’s not going to be sustainable — you’d strip the oceans of seaweed if you did use that — but we need to find out what’s in the seaweed, and then you could probably manufacture that ingredient. The other thing we need to think about on sustainability with some of these plant-based burgers is that they have a whole lot of ingredients — different grains, peas, stuff like that. Each one of those ingredients has a supply chain, and that involves diesel-powered trucks and equipment to harvest that crop, grow that crop. Some of that could get unsustainable.
Do beef manufacturers have enough incentive to change to more sustainable behaviors?
I learned a long time ago the importance of economic incentives. Some of the first research I did was on bruising. What I learned from that is if you had the wrong economic incentives, you had more bruises. If you had the right economic incentives, you reduced the bruises. I don’t like to — I have a “no politics” policy, so I’m not going to get into specifics, but the United States and other countries have subsidies that motivate practices that are not sustainable. I’ll leave it at that.learned a long time ago the importance of economic incentives. Some of the first research I did was on bruising.What I learned from that is if you had the wrong economic incentives, you had more bruises. If you had the right economic incentives, you reduced the bruises. I don’t like to — I have a “no politics” policy, so I’m not going to get into specifics, but the United States and other countries have subsidies that motivate practices that are not sustainable. I’ll leave it at that. a long time ago the importance of economic incentives. Some of the first research I did was on bruising.4 What I learned from that is if you had the wrong economic incentives, you had more bruises. If you had the right economic incentives, you reduced the bruises. I don’t like to — I have a “no politics” policy, so I’m not going to get into specifics, but the United States and other countries have subsidies that motivate practices that are not sustainable. I’ll leave it at that.
I’m not going to ask you the specifics of your politics
I’m not getting into politics.
But given that politics touches everything, what does it mean to have a “no politics” policy? And why have it?
Because politics interferes with the stuff I care about. Right now, at the age of 74, one of the big things I care about is I want to see the kids who think differently having successful careers, successful lives. I’m seeing a lot of parents that overprotect their kid. They’ve got a 16-year-old who might be doing well in school, but he has never gone shopping. You’ve got to get them out doing things. That’s stuff I care about.
Do you find politics too abstract?
One of the things that bothers me is when it’s all gobbledygook, because they’re not talking about how you’re actually going to fix something. Like when they had the power failures in Texas,they just talked gobbledygook. My approach to that — and I know a lot about equipment — is I would visit each of those power plants and find out exactly what froze. I wouldn’t be fighting over who owns them, because I only have one goal: I don’t want that mess to happen again. But I don’t want to talk to suits. Get me alone down in the maintenance shop in that plant, and I’ll find a guy who will sing to me. He’ll tell me everything. As soon as the suit walks in the room, that guy will clam up because he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble. I’ve got to talk to the good technical people. They’ll tell me what’s wrong, and they can’t tell me much abstract BS.
What about when people talk about issues of race or polarization? Is that abstract?
I try to figure out specific ways to solve something. One of the things that’s really shocking is the résumé studies.You put different names on them, and they’re not called back for interviews. It’s disgusting. I’ll discuss that because that’s hard scientific data that is specific, and I can look those papers up on Google Scholar.
I was just reading about how nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of the cattle industry. Do you think we should be moving toward a future where we eat less beef?
One of the things we need to be doing is reducing food waste. The amount of food that we throw out is absolutely disgusting.
And reducing food waste would be a sufficient counterbalance?
It’s certainly going to help. There’s simple ways you can reduce it. A lot of university cafeterias got rid of giving you trays, because if you put your food on trays, you take more stuff and waste more stuff. But, you know, there’s methane emissions, but there are also carbon emissions, and the power plants and transportation put out the most carbon emissions.
Do you feel protective of the beef industry?
I want to work on improving the beef industry.
In Oliver Sacks’s New Yorker profile8 of you, it’s evident that your search for meaning in life was driven by anxiety and fear. Why those emotions?
I think I’ve got that simplified now: The meaning of life is if something that you did made something better. Like, I get an email from a parent: Thank you so much. My kid is employed now because I read one of your books. That is a little piece of the meaning of life right there. That’s something that I did. I also think, having spent so many years in heavy commercial construction, it’s about finishing a project and making it work. I take that same approach to working with some of these autistic kids. If a smart autistic kid ends up on a disability check playing video games all day, that’s a failed project compared with, let’s say, he could learn a skilled trade and now owns a metal fabrication shop.
Do you feel social-justice issues are intrinsically important?
Yes, they are important, but I want to avoid the politics. I’ll give an example of a social-justice thing I totally believe in: We use DNA testing to prove that a prisoner did not do a crime. That’s a practical application of something that involves social justice.
Going back to that Oliver Sacks profile: You didn’t give an answer for why it was fear and anxiety that motivated your search for meaning.
When I was young, I was totally driven by anxiety. I found out my amygdala was three times bigger than normal. I’ve been on antidepressant medication, an old form called desipramine, since 1980, and it stopped all that anxiety, that frenzied looking for the meaning of life. That made the frenzy go away. I have done some of my best work when it comes to design after I went on that drug. I just visited one of my projects: It’s over 35 years old, and I’m so pleased. None of the gates are broken off — got the best gate hinges in the industry. Yeah, I’m proud of that.
I only posted part of it but the interviewer kept badgering her about vaccines when she was very clear she was not going to answer any further on the subject. She is vaxxed and boosted, that tells me all I need to know.. Interviewer was really bad. I am surprised she did not have a meltdown. I would have. She must have needed a few days to decompress after that interview.
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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
It is Autism Acceptance Month
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 24 Jan 2022, 11:21 am, edited 2 times in total.
24 Jan 2022, 11:09 am
Clutching at straws, much?
