alt Hacker NewsDon't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore.
I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
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If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.
I always think of the SMBC "old physicist" comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Autism spectrum highly favors jobs where it's basically person with data. I have seen estimates that a *majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum. I suspect I lie at the mild end of the spectrum--and I see programming as playing to my strengths and against my weaknesses.