alt Hacker NewsI don't think this is even sarcastic.
There are some theories that Autism was more useful in the wilderness. More adapted to the old world, not the modern world.
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I don't think you're wrong, but I do think that the "modern" world - which I guess I'd label as anything that happened after the invention of writing and cities - really let those individuals thrive, and let their work become very useful for the world at large.
Trying to diagnose people across millennia is a fool's errand, but I'd wager a lot to say that people like Newton & Tesla were at the very least neurodivergent in some way, and they've had wildly outsized impacts on the world.
The Percy Jackson series posited that in their magical world, ADHD is actually a strength on the battlefield, not a weakness.
I wonder what a book series that tried to do that with autism would look like.
(I can think of exactly one book where autism - or something close enough to it - was treated as a serious "what if" plot device, but I don't want to name it because it is a little bit of a spoiler, I guess.)
I think of it as a different algorithm to crawl the problem space of the real world.
In a general sense, humanity needs to be generalist (especially in the past) to accomplish all the things you need to do to stay alive. Having all 20 members of your tribe geek out and stare at a problem for 48 hours straight means a bear sneaks up and eats you. But having that one oddball (hey me) fall into a rabbit hole of observation and mental computation can lead the group out of a local maxima into a new paradigm of doing things.