I hope emerging research that divides the autism spectrum into four phenotypes[0] eventually gets recognized and incorporated into research like this. I still believe comparing the entire spectrum at once is the wrong approach, especially since the variants of autism express so differently.

As an example: I'm autistic and I learn inside-out, building larger new concepts out of smaller existing ones; those with Asperger's on the other paw, learn outside-in instead, breaking down larger existing concepts into smaller new ones; both are part of the "autism spectrum", but differ very fundamentally.

Given that the origin of "autism" is simply "thinking that differs from usual", there's no evidence that there is a single underlying cause to find, nor that generalizations across the entire spectrum will reveal much of anything other than coincidence.

I believe we need to individualize new research to the variants that we now know exist, because otherwise we will continue to all-but erase anything that isn't common to the entire spectrum.

[0]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.15.24312078v...

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nicoburns 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> As an example: I'm autistic and I learn inside-out, building larger new concepts out of smaller existing ones; those with Asperger's on the other paw, learn outside-in instead, breaking down larger existing concepts into smaller new ones; both are part of the "autism spectrum", but differ very fundamentally.

To me this just sounds like the interaction of autism with other variances in neurotype. You can also reasonably categorise non-autistic people into people who learn outside-in and those who learn inside-out.

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truculent 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a really interesting observation - can you expand on this a bit more, please? How did you first notice this distinction?

When, for example, learning a new concept in math or physics, what would outside-in look like vs inside out? Would you characterise neurotypical learning in one way or the other?

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LoganDark 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> This is a really interesting observation - can you expand on this a bit more, please? How did you first notice this distinction?

A year or two ago I interacted with someone with Asperger's, and since that very rarely happens I hit a sort of uncanny valley with the way they wrote to me, because their writing gave me a lot of neurotypical vibes, but at the same time seemed a lot more logical and structured than actual neurotypical writing. They seemed to be building their writing and ideas out of logical tokens and constructs in an evidently autistic way, but so much of their writing looked neurotypical.

It was sort of like Scratch blocks, where they learned general templates for sentences and paragraphs from neurotypicals, and then substituted entire phrases at a time within them to achieve the desired communication. So while their templates and phrases were learned mostly from neurotypicals, the structure of their communication and usage of it still had a sort of logical system to it.

They remembered concepts by the phrases that had been used to explain it to them in the past, and reused those phrases verbatim, slotting them into the templates wholesale. They didn't fully parse everything like I do, they only broke things down as needed to create new logical tokens for new concepts. It's very interesting and fascinating. I mostly only know the one experience I've had, since I didn't get to speak to them again, but I've started to see it absolutely everywhere since.

Plenty of engineering blogs, for example, share that sort of tokenized writing style, like for instance this one I recently noticed: https://www.righto.com/2024/12/this-die-photo-of-pentium-sho...

> When, for example, learning a new concept in math or physics, what would outside-in look like vs inside out?

I can only guess, because I haven't interviewed someone with Asperger's about this, but I know what it looks like for me and I can guess what it could look like for them (at least for the purposes of the outside-in analogy).

For me, when I learn a new concept in math or physics, I want to build an intuition about that concept so I can come up with strategies about it and involving it. This actually mostly does not consist of algorithms related to the concept, but rather more of a fundamental intuition about the nature of the concept itself; what shape it is, what holes it fills, what types and classes of things it can do or model, etc. With this I can come up with my own algorithms on the fly, and also know when the concept might be relevant.

An outside-in learner, however, would be different. I have very little experience with the learning process or even with the execution process, but it's likely that they would not bother to break the concept all the way down and try to fully fundamentally understand it. Rather they might look to learn examples of it, algorithms and procedures relating to it, and ways to prove that their approach is correct. It would be less of "understand all the intricacies of this thing and every property it could possibly have and integrate that with everything else" and more of "fill a mental knowledge base with examples, applications, procedures relating to this thing".

> Would you characterise neurotypical learning in one way or the other?

I would not. I don't mean to imply that neurotypical logic is inherently more simplistic or inferior to autistic logic, but to me it seems far more like rote learning. They don't necessarily seem to break things down to understand the smaller details, but they don't really commit full logical tokens to memory either. They seem somewhere in the squishy middle, where they can be good at doing something that they don't understand at all, just because they practiced a lot, and they can be terrible at doing something that they understand far better, just because they're not practiced.

I've found that given I understand something well enough, I can perform better on the first try than some others who practice. That's not really a reliable indicator of much, but for me a lot comes from similar sources of truth, whereas it seems for a neurotypical they don't always necessarily organize or canonicalize their learnings, so their knowledge can be completely disjoint in areas that could totally be combined.

This is all just my personal experience/opinion though, fwiw.

	▲	throwway120385 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You could argue that outside-in versus inside-out is more of a temperament than it is a form of neurodivergence. For example, what you're describing is basically typical of how Keirsey describes concrete versus abstract reasoning in Please Understand Me. And it could be kind of alienating to be the one abstract reasoner in a group of concrete reasoners and if you believe his statistics it's kind of likely that you'll find yourself in that situation a lot because you gravitate toward the abstract rather than the concrete/operational aspects of a concept. I generally do the same thing when I'm learning something, and I have to fully understand a concept and then attack the concrete applications of the concept. But I've also learned how to go the other way when I need to because much of the technical writing I encounter is written for people who need a lot of examples but don't follow abstract concepts. So I've internalized building up the abstract concept from the concrete examples.
	▲	453yuh46 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I have been diagnosed with Aspergers not long before it became part of ASD. I don't really understand why you are disassociating yourself with Aspergers which was another word for "high-function" autism and is still used interchangeably. Reading from what you have written - that is part of my experience, though I don't think that it has anything to do with being Aspergers or even being on a spectrum, but being alone a lot and educating myself a lot - that basically is what "smart people" in general are doing - including NT. Yes, there are a lot of people that do not actively learn, but that can apply to Aspergers as well as NT. That is not the reason for differences. Just to save space and not to create another comment - "four phenotypes" are not new attempt to classify. To me it looks like rewording - before there was already quite clear distinction between Aspergers and Aspergers&ADHD combination - both of them are part of "high functioning autism", and they behave wildly differently(people with Aspergers&ADHD part might not be recognized as "weird" but even as NT - by other people). They were all part of spectrum anyway. And from reading the paper it seems, that they have made 2 other types for what was "low functioning" autism. Apparently putting them all in ASD was not helping for bureaucracy - especially when it comes down to finances - it is quite important in Trumps USA and might be also for other countries.
	▲	kens 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Plenty of engineering blogs, for example, share that sort of tokenized writing style, like for instance this one I recently noticed Hi, I'm the author of that blog. Can you tell me more about what you mean by a "tokenized writing style"? One confounding factor is that I have a PhD, so I was trained for many years to write in a formalized, academic style. Also, I deliberately put a lot of "signpost" phrases in my posts, since I'm writing about complex subjects and want to avoid readers getting lost.