My opinion is that it’s caused by internal limitations placed on the general-intelligence component (see footnote 2). Autistic people can reason about deception formally, same as anybody, but they can’t easily translate that understanding into practical social acumen, because humans don’t have write-access to their instincts/shards/System 1.
And they have worse instincts in the social domain to begin with because of… genes that codify nonstandard reward/reinforcement circuitry, I assume? Suppose that in a median person, there’s circuitry that reinforces cognition that is upstream of some good social consequences, like making a person smile. That gradually causes the accumulation of crystallized-intelligence structures/shards specialized for social interactions. Autistic people lack this signal, or receive weaker reinforcement from it[1]. Thus, by default, they fail to develop much System-1 expertise for this domain.
They can then compensate for it by solving the domain “manually” using their fully general intelligence. They construct good heuristics, commit them to memory, and learn to fire them when appropriate — essentially replicating by-hand the work that’s done automatically in the neurotypical people’s case.
Or so my half-educated guess goes. I don’t have much expertise here, beyond reading some Scott Alexander. @cfoster0, want to weigh in here?
As to superintelligent AGIs, they would be (1) less limited in their ability to directly rewrite their System-1-equivalent (their GI components would have more privileges over their minds), (2) much better at solving domains “manually” and generating heuristics “manually”. So even if we do hamstring our AGI’s ability to learn e. g. manipulation skills, it’ll likely be able to figure them out on its own, once it’s at human+ level of capabilities.
Reminder that reward is not the optimization target. What I’m stating here is not exactly “autistic people don’t find social interactions pleasant so they don’t engage in them so they don’t get experience with them”. Rather, it means that the optimization process that’s shaping their cognition literally doesn’t pay much/any attention to improving their socialization-related cognition.
If a neurotypical person has some thought, and acts on it, and that successfully manages to make someone smile, their cognition automatically changes to be more likely to have such thoughts in the future. An autistic person’s cognition would not be changed such.
I’ve seen several smart autistic people on the internet say some variation of “they learn to emulate in software what normal people do in hardware, and that’s how they manage to navigate social life well enough”. Essentially as you describe. And I’d add that a major component of high intelligence likely means being good at doing things “in software” (approx. “system 2”).
Thanks for your comment and your perspective, that’s an interesting hypothesis. My intuition was that worse performance at false belief inference → worse at deception, manipulation, etc. As far as I can tell, this seems mostly born out by a quick Google search e.g. Autism and Lying: Can Autistic Children Lie?, Exploring the Ability to Deceive in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, People with ASD risk being manipulated because they can’t tell when they’re being lied to, Strategic Deception in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
My opinion is that it’s caused by internal limitations placed on the general-intelligence component (see footnote 2). Autistic people can reason about deception formally, same as anybody, but they can’t easily translate that understanding into practical social acumen, because humans don’t have write-access to their instincts/shards/System 1.
And they have worse instincts in the social domain to begin with because of… genes that codify nonstandard reward/reinforcement circuitry, I assume? Suppose that in a median person, there’s circuitry that reinforces cognition that is upstream of some good social consequences, like making a person smile. That gradually causes the accumulation of crystallized-intelligence structures/shards specialized for social interactions. Autistic people lack this signal, or receive weaker reinforcement from it[1]. Thus, by default, they fail to develop much System-1 expertise for this domain.
They can then compensate for it by solving the domain “manually” using their fully general intelligence. They construct good heuristics, commit them to memory, and learn to fire them when appropriate — essentially replicating by-hand the work that’s done automatically in the neurotypical people’s case.
Or so my half-educated guess goes. I don’t have much expertise here, beyond reading some Scott Alexander. @cfoster0, want to weigh in here?
As to superintelligent AGIs, they would be (1) less limited in their ability to directly rewrite their System-1-equivalent (their GI components would have more privileges over their minds), (2) much better at solving domains “manually” and generating heuristics “manually”. So even if we do hamstring our AGI’s ability to learn e. g. manipulation skills, it’ll likely be able to figure them out on its own, once it’s at human+ level of capabilities.
Reminder that reward is not the optimization target. What I’m stating here is not exactly “autistic people don’t find social interactions pleasant so they don’t engage in them so they don’t get experience with them”. Rather, it means that the optimization process that’s shaping their cognition literally doesn’t pay much/any attention to improving their socialization-related cognition.
If a neurotypical person has some thought, and acts on it, and that successfully manages to make someone smile, their cognition automatically changes to be more likely to have such thoughts in the future. An autistic person’s cognition would not be changed such.
I’ve seen several smart autistic people on the internet say some variation of “they learn to emulate in software what normal people do in hardware, and that’s how they manage to navigate social life well enough”. Essentially as you describe. And I’d add that a major component of high intelligence likely means being good at doing things “in software” (approx. “system 2”).