From: Chen Yixiong, Eric (cyixiong@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 17 2001 - 02:49:34 MST
<< btw, what is an NT, what is an AC??? Poor social creature wants to know... >>
For the newly initiated:
NT = Neurotypical, the vast majority of the population who have no social handicap
AC = Autistic & Cousins, the socially handicapped sector of the population
(covering both low and high functioning as well as Asperger's & other PDDs)
Having AC does come with a heavy price, especially when the vast majority does not understand your behaviour. Personally, it feels
kind of like crash-landing on some strange planet and having to find your way among apparently native inhabitants who constantly
display unusual behavior that catches you unawares.
The worse thing you discover: You can't get another alien ship to leave (or to put it more bluntly, escape) this strange and
sometimes nasty planet.
> Robert, my dear pal and benefactor--I think I'd have to counsel you against
> making placing such revelations on the net. They'll come back to bite you
> (and maybe the rest of us, by contagion) on the ass.
I start to suspect that a significent load of mail will come when significent numbers of extropians realise they might belong to the
AC catagory.
> I think it was Eric who mentioned that Dr Allan Snyder is also autistic. Cf.:
I don't quite recall saying anything about Dr Allan, but of course you might mean other Erics.
> But I think that announcing one's autism or Aspergerish nature might prove,
> at least in the short term, the social equivalent of confessing to being a
> kleptomaniac or a compulsive womanizer. The public might tend thereafter to
> disregard one's utterances, however unfairly (especially if they involve
> plans to tear down the solar system for spare parts).
I think you might find it better to say so yourself rather than having others discover that the Extropian community contains a large
number of "space aliens" who want to "take over the solar system" and dismantle it.
I think we ought to have a better understanding of ourselves if we want to execute such "ambitious" projects (though to me they
sound a little mundane as I have the whole universe in mind). I suggest having an AC survey to determine the exact proportion of ACs
in this mailing list, for starters. At least those "alien conspiracies" would leave us alone.
Don't lose sleep over your alienness so much, at least those of us ACs might get along better with sentient AIs than NTs.
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