> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".

The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.

Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.

A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.

I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.

I am on the autism spectrum. I have a deep interest in systems as well, and I like systems and so forth. Things and so forth. Social skills is not what I am good at and I still struggle with but improving with time.

There is an art in which I basically don't do that kind of thinking, that's improvisational comedy.

Improvisational comedy is an art in which I do by honed instinct. There's a system to it, and I can sometime recognize patterns, but most of the work I do is subconscious processing and rather autonomous.

To this day, I think I would have something to teach to the community if I could articulate the unique skills I possess.

I can relate. It's an advantage for sure not being in tune to human social conflicts. I am to a degree, of course, but I don't consider the same things offensive and that has only helped me in learning a lot quickly. In this regard I wish autism was seen as less of a disability and more of a "you are different from most people but sometimes that is good."