Thursday, June 7, 2012

Neurodiversity = handicap

A reader sent me this comment posted on this Jezebel article about autistic people having a difficult time finding a job.  She said that it was a good reminder of the sort of "methodically-necessary thinking involved in trying to get through everyday things that many folks take for granted."  I thought it was a good example of how so many things in our society are geared towards the majority.  People will sometimes complain about special accommodations being made for those outside the norm.  Once I heard a blind person say, "special accommodations, like street lamps at night?"  Hilarious.  The comment is really long and boring, but I think it sort of has to be to make the point it's trying to make:

It is so much more than just social issues. Let me go through a day from when I worked at a retail location.

1) Get dressed for work. 
------ 
The cheap khakis itch all over, the waistband makes your torso hurt, and you are constantly thinking about sweat stains and panty lines. The polo is itchy, full of static electricity, is either too short so your abdomen might become exposed, or too large so you look huge. The shirt lets too much air through and is so thin that it hugs the lines of your bra, making you ever conscious of it. It is YELLOW so you can't even wear a shirt under it because you do not own white shirts because they are usually sold out of your size. You have to wear closed toed shoes which don't work well with your strange walking style, they're too tight and make your feet hot, and you have to wear socks or your feet smell HORRIBLE. Your sense of smell is strong that if any part of you sweats or is unclean, from feet to armpit, you can smell it while standing upright with your arms at your sides, so you slather yourself in deodorant and keep a bottle of body spray in your purse. You have to debate bringing in your purse, which is very much a comfort item, because your boss will have to search it when you leave, and it's internal organization is precarious at best.

2) Drive to work. 
------ 
You have to get in your car which is extremely hot or cold depending on the season. You have to pay attention to everything on the road as you try to remember where your workplace is based on carefully memorized landmarks. Do not speed. Do not run red lights. Do not cut people off. Do not switch lanes when a car is in your blind spot. Ignore the sounds and flashing lights of the other cars. Do not cry when you make a mistake and get honked at. Hope there are no closed roads on the way, because you cannot "make up" a new route on the fly without first going back home.

Leave with enough time to make it to work on time. 
(Should I be early? How early? How bad is it to be late? What is the difference in my watch, my phone, my car clock, and my work place's clocks? Do I have to just be at the building when my shift starts, or is that when I have to be clocked in and at my station?)

Park. Stay between the yellow lines and do not go too fast. Watch out for pedestrians and other cars in the parking lot. 
(Should I park close to the door or far? Do I need to hide my GPS? Can I leave my purse in the car?)

3)Start Work 
--------- 
Put packed lunch in employee room. If you run into a coworker, smile and say hey. Try to notice them so they do not think they are being purposefully ignored. Try not to smile like a frightened chimp. Try to ignore how hot the entire building is. Clock in, then stand at your register. Say hello to coworkers who come by. Do not tell them what your pets did last night. Do not tell them about cool things in nature or otherwise you have seen lately. (No one cares that you saw a bunny at school or that you had to manually install a new fan for your Wii last night.) Try to respond appropriately to their comments. (Do not say "Oh gosh I'm sorry" when they tell you their wife is pregnant.) Keep your vocabulary simple. (Celerity, facetious, and psyche are not as common as you think.)

4) Work 
------- 
Smile like a human at customers. Do not talk through your math at the customers. Do not set money down on the counter before a bank drop. Do not try to warn customers about their purchases. Do not reference obscure British pop culture with the customers. Maintain simple vocabulary to avoid offending the customers. Learn to respond to mispronunciations of your name. Learn to respond to mispronunciations of most words. Learn to cope with improper grammar and speaking patterns. Do not talk to the children. Do not ignore the children. Do ignore the screaming children and their screaming parents. DO NOT say anything about parenting methods. Do not cry when customers yell at you, and do not get upset when they are mistaken but stay mad at you. If customers start conversation, try to respond appropriately. You don't have to go along with jokes you find offensive, but at least humor the bad ones. Do not freak out when customers linger to chat. Do not mention any of your own interests or tastes outside of acceptable mainstream, with customers or co-workers. Do not ask your boss for any schedule accommodations. Learn to yell loud enough to summon a manger when you need one. Do not get upset over what the customers have to purchase for their weekly groceries. Do not offer to pick up remainders if they cannot afford their food.

Do not stim when handed damp or otherwise gross money. Do not stim when a customer's hand accidentally touches yours. Do not attempt passive aggression on rude customers. Notice when a customer is flirting, and politely shut it down. Do not freak out when acquaintances come to the store and want to chat during their transaction. Do not obsess over the sweat under your arms, on your chest, on your feet, around your thighs or behind your knees. Do not obsess over the slight BO smell. Do not obsess over slight dandruff.

Do not gag or obviously rub germ-x on your upper lip when a customer smells bad. Do use Germ-x. Buy multiple good scented varieties and keep two on your person at all times.

Do not get frustrated at slow or quiet speakers. Remember that just because you are not being smiled at, does not mean that the customer hates you. Try to talk like a human.

5) Co-Worker Rules 
--------------- 
Do not talk about pets. Do not talk about fandoms. do not talk about zombie survival plans. Do not talk about grades. Do not talk about TV shows. Do not talk about science. DO NOT TALK ABOUT RELIGION. Refuse to give straight answers on affiliation, political or religious. Pretend to agree with their views using silence. Do not talk about money. Do not talk about children. Do not ask them the questions that pop into your head. Do not offer to share your lunch. Do compliment accessories. Do not be overly friendly with male co-workers, they will assume you are flirting. Never talk about your boss with the co-workers. Do not get upset when co-workers seem not care about helping customers, or about ignorance of food borne illness causes. Do not get frustrated at slow or quiet speakers.

6) Lunch 
------------ 
Bring your own, it is cheaper and better tasting. Bring your own soda, but do not leave more than one in the fridge. Do not worry that your co-workers think that you eat "too healthy" and nag you about eating "normal" food. Do not offer to let them taste your lunch. Try to keep from appearing as if you are "showing off" your intellect. Do exaggerate a southern twang for sympathy. Do not talk about school. Do not talk about grades. NEVER talk about "bad" grades. Do not clock in from lunch early. Do not clock in from lunch late.

7) Clock out 
---------- 
Make sure you know for sure when you are leaving. Do not pester the manager for the official end of your shift. Do count your drawer. Do not clock out late. Do not clock out early. Try to work extra hours if your boss asks. Try not to cry before the end of the shift. Do not hate yourself for being so "weak." Do not leave too quickly in case your boss needs to say something to you. Do not help customers after you have clocked out.

8) Closing Shifts 
-------------- 
Clean what your co-worker tells you. Ignore pain in arms and legs. Do not gag at company cleaning supplies. Do help move heavy outdoor displays inside. Do not get upset when closing takes over an hour.

9) Misc 
------- 
Do not expect a weekend off. Do not expect an afternoon shift right after classes. Do not ask for these things. Your boss will call during class. Do not expect sick days. Do not go to work and thro up. 
Try to stay employed.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Famous sociopaths: Viktor Bout

Legendary arms dealer Viktor Bout may not be famous in the same way that A-list Hollywood actors are famous (although the Nicholas Cage film "Lord of War" is basically based on him).  If anything, Bout is most famous to Interpol or other government organizations.  It's not surprising.  I bet most sociopaths are more likely to be infamous than famous.  Here are the selections from a New Yorker profile on Bout that make me think he is a sociopath:
  • Although he had arrived in the Emirates not knowing much about Arab culture, he had a cosmopolitan ability to adapt to new circumstances. 
  • Bout, who had the brash confidence of the autodidact, didn’t have a source of weapons, but he knew that he could find one. 
  • “Viktor is a fast learner and he is very easy with the contacts,” Mirchev told me. “He could reach the right people at any time.” 
  • Schneidman, who once termed Bout “the personification of evil,” told me that Bout was “directly undermining our efforts to bring peace.” At the same time that Bout was delivering weapons to Savimbi’s forces, Schneidman said, he was also flying arms to the Angolan government. I asked Bout whether Savimbi knew about his mixed allegiance. Of course, Bout said. Didn’t Savimbi mind? “If I didn’t do it, someone else would,” Bout said. 
  • Officials in Washington began to see Bout as the quintessential figure of transnational crime. He was distinguished not by cruelty or ruthlessness but by cunning amorality. “If he wasn’t doing arms and all the vile stuff, he would be a damn good businessman,” Andreas Morgner, a sanctions expert at the Treasury Department, said. 
  • Bout told me, “My job was to bring shipments from Bulgaria to Zaire, and then to Togo. . . . I did it. I understood my limits.” He added, “How, after that, someone else wants to squeeze it? That’s not my business.” In this view, he and Mirchev were not doing anything wrong; they were simply filling gaps in the global economy.
  • “Why should I be afraid?” he said. “In my life, I did not do anything that I should be concerned about.” Bout began leaving a trail of inconsistent statements. He either refused to address difficult matters—“It’s not a question to discuss what we transported”—or lied outright. 
There are plenty of other small indications.  It's a pretty interesting article, particularly reading people's reactions about how Bout would both ship in weapons to revolutionaries and peacekeepers, for instance:
  • Soon after the raid, [U.S.] Department of Defense officials entered the names of the companies under sanctions into their databases. They made a surprising discovery: some of Bout’s companies were now delivering tents and frozen food to troops in Iraq. His planes had flown dozens of times in and out of Baghdad, according to flight records, and Bout was profiting from it. The Pentagon eventually voided the relevant contracts, but, by then, the war in Iraq had helped Viktor Bout get back on his feet.
I guess not everyone fits into nice, neat bad/good boxes.  

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Tips on lying effectively

In a New York Times article on lying, scientists suggest that excessive detail and meandering narratives help liars avoid detection:
The new work focuses on what people say, not how they act. It has already changed police work in other countries, and some new techniques are making their way into interrogations in the United States.

In part, the work grows out of a frustration with other methods. Liars do not avert their eyes in an interview on average any more than people telling the truth do, researchers report; they do not fidget, sweat or slump in a chair any more often. They may produce distinct, fleeting changes in expression, experts say, but it is not clear yet how useful it is to analyze those.
* * *
Kevin Colwell, a psychologist at Southern Connecticut State University, has advised police departments, Pentagon officials and child protection workers, who need to check the veracity of conflicting accounts from parents and children. He says that people concocting a story prepare a script that is tight and lacking in detail.

“It’s like when your mom busted you as a kid, and you made really obvious mistakes,” Dr. Colwell said. “Well, now you’re working to avoid those.”

By contrast, people telling the truth have no script, and tend to recall more extraneous details and may even make mistakes. They are sloppier.
* * *
In several studies, Dr. Colwell and Dr. Hiscock-Anisman have reported one consistent difference: People telling the truth tend to add 20 to 30 percent more external detail than do those who are lying. “This is how memory works, by association,” Dr. Hiscock-Anisman said. “If you’re telling the truth, this mental reinstatement of contexts triggers more and more external details.”

Not so if you’ve got a concocted story and you’re sticking to it. “It’s the difference between a tree in full flower in the summer and a barren stick in winter,” said Dr. Charles Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, who has tested it for trauma claims and among special-operations soldiers.
They are also training police to gradually introduce known facts during interrogations, however, which makes it tricky because if you are purposefully trying to embellish to hide a lie, you need to be extra careful that the embellishment is not about something easily ascertainable. Embellishments should be about things no one could possibly know about, like your feelings, the underwear you wore, how you slept the night before, etc. The worst would be for people to say random things like "it was a full moon" when there was no moon at all, etc. Check yourselves, fellow sociopaths.

Monday, June 4, 2012

In-group altruism

I happened upon two articles about the emergence and explanation of altruism within groups.  There was this New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer (sorry, not fully available to non-subcribers), which discussed the origin and development of the inclusive fitness theory.  Inclusive fitness basically holds that you are willing to be altruistic to another person in proportion to the advantage it will give your own genes in survival.  In other words, you share half of your genes with your siblings so you should be more willing to help them then, say, your cousin or even your nephew.  Here are some selections:


Charles Darwin regarded the problem of altruism—the act of helping someone else, even if it comes at a steep personal cost—as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection. After all, if life was such a cruel “struggle for existence,” then how could a selfless individual ever live long enough to reproduce? Why would natural selection favor a behavior that made us less likely to survive? In “The Descent of Man,” Darwin wrote, “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” And yet, as Darwin knew, altruism is everywhere, a stubborn anomaly of nature. Bats feed hungry brethren; honeybees defend the hive by committing suicide with a sting; birds raise offspring that aren’t their own; humans leap onto subway tracks to save strangers. The sheer ubiquity of such behavior suggests that kindness is not a losing life strategy.

For more than a century after Darwin, altruism remained a paradox. The first glimmers of a solution arrived in a Bloomsbury pub in the early nineteen-fifties. According to legend, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane was several pints into the afternoon when he was asked how far he would go to save the life of another person. Haldane thought for a moment, and then started scribbling numbers on the back of a napkin. “I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one,” Haldane said. “Or to save eight cousins but not seven.” His drunken answer summarized a powerful scientific idea. Because individuals share much of their genome with close relatives, a trait will also persist if it leads to the survival of their kin. According to Haldane’s moral arithmetic, sacrificing for a family member is just a different way of promoting our own DNA.

The idea of group altruism is interesting to me.  My father grew up in a large family and he has always prized a certain submission to the will of the group.  I quickly learned to speak in terms of "maximizing utility" for everyone concerned, in a very Bentham/Utilitarianism type of way, and my family would follow my plan over others.

Of course, as a sociopath I'm supposed to be a "cheater" -- someone who pretends to work for the good of the group while secretly not pulling my weight or siphoning off a disproportional amount of community output.

But I don't, or not always.  I guess it's because unlike bats or bees I'm not surrounded by idiots half the time.  Especially when I'm with my family or close friends who know better, it would be very difficult to defraud them consistently.  Maybe because I'm human and not a bat or a bee I can make higher cognitive determinations like it is better for me to be part of a group in which I support them and they support me in turn.

Could there be another reason why I engage in this sort of in-group altruism?  Is it because I don't just need specific things from the people in my group but actually need to associate with people in general?  From this Psychology Today post:

The idea that humans have a need to belong to social groups is so fundamental in psychology that one of the seminal papers on this topic has been cited 2572 times since its publication in 1995. Belonging doesn't just feel good — it's often essential for our very survival, even in modern times.

Do I also have an evolutionary drive to "belong"?  I actually think that I do, or at least I can feel in-group loyalty.  How about others?

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Conscience, the App

Psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely has a new app called Conscience+.  I knew that outsourcing our moral and willpower decisions was going to happen soon, I just didn't know it would happen this soon.  Here's what he writes about it:


I’m pleased to announce that I have a new app available at the App Store called Conscience+.

Conscience+ helps you reason through moral dilemmas by providing you with little “shoulder angels” that can help you argue either side of a decision. Simply flip the switch at the top of the app to move between good conscience and bad conscience. Whether you need the extra push to go through with a selfish deed or words of wisdom to resist a bad temptation, Conscience+ has you covered.

Get help with:
turning away the dessert menu
splurging on a new electronic gadget
staying faithful to your romantic partner
padding your expense report on your boss’s dime
lying on your college application
and much, much more!
Get Conscience+ free from the App Store here! Once you’ve played with the app yourself, let us know in the comments if you have any suggested excuses. If we like them, we’ll put them in the next update.

I guess like most apps, this app will get smarter and smarter the more people use it?  And pretty soon we'll be completely outsourcing our moral decisionmaking, the same way that no one really programs their own computers or drives a manual transmission anymore?
Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.