alt Hacker NewsBTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.
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I don't think there's much underlying relationship. True they will both impact social relationships. But it's more like how being blind or being deaf will impact social relationships. The mechanics might be the same but the cause is very different.
IMHO schizophrenia is a breakdown in the barrier between imagination and processing of reality.
Autism and the like is an inability to process social cues like a blind person might have a damaged visual cortex.
Something fascinating that has been noticed by many people is that LLMs with a low temperature setting produce output similar to autism and high temperature is schizo in style. You even see the AIs get stuck in repetitive loops at very low temperature settings.
Yeah, the "mirror image" idea makes a lot of sense to me. Both groups feel out of sync socially, but for opposite reasons: autistic cognition leans too hard on raw sensory input, schizotypal cognition leans too hard on internal interpretations
Wouldn't the implication of them being "opposite" be that in some sense they are mutually exclusive? I don't really see evidence of that. Your example of sensory input vs world model weight is a bit flawed, because both of those are extremely multifaceted. One can have extreme weight in sensory input in one sense but not others, as well as extreme weight on world model for certain aspects of life.
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.
And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:
What's your interpretation of this study?
That is fascinating, I have seen the schizophrenia model of having "trapped priors" before.
I figured that this is probably something Scott Alexander has written about, and lo and behold: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...
I think I understand what you mean.
You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?
I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.
I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.
If the mind is a kind of "prediction machine", wouldn't that make ALL psychiactric disorders a specific variation of faulty prediction mode though?