Lol I don't necessarily agree or disagree with this but this line is blatantly ableist and I doubt very much true at all:
> NSA hackers are given specific tasks to achieve, they must play by the rules, and the paperwork involved is more arduous than the actual hacking. Such autistic kids would not do well in that environment.
Author seems to have only pop culture fidelity knowledge of autism. The first error is talking about autists as a group - no two autists are alike in their sociability or tolerance for bureaucracy. Infact, some even like and thrive in bureaucracy.
It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated.
They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad.
The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved.
When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors.
I do agree with your sentiment that pop culture has been mostly „nice“ to autists. But I‘d argue that it has focused mainly on savants and very high functioning, very intelligent autists. That‘s IMO positive ableism. Most autists are neither exceptionally intelligent, nor are they savants.
If a conceptual framework we're using, that a large heterogenous set of people are "autistics", results in any portrayal or generalisation of that group of people feeling inaccurate, maybe the conceptual framework itself is what's wrong?
I would love for people to move past talking about "Autism" and start talking more about anxiety, Social difficulties, digestive issues, obsessions, compulsions, and so on. If treating autistic people as homogenous is wrong to begin with, why is giving them all the same label a good idea?
That's a rhetorical question - the answer is that "Autism" became insurable, so ever since then there has been this pressure to describe increasingly diverse groups of people using the same label, and for people to NEVER lose this label. I had a psychiatrist re-diagnose me on the grounds that "Autism" had more funding than "Asperger's" at the time. I think pop cultures autistic savant obsession is just a reflection of this, and the root cause of nonsense portrayals and generalisations is money.
I personally think the term is useful for research purposes. The upshot is that there‘s interventions you can do today to improve symptoms, and they can be found by searching for the term.
Maybe the confusion comes from „no two autists are alike in their symptom signature“ (which seems to be true), vs „most autism cases can be treated by X“ (which seems to be true at least sometimes). While it’s a highly individual syndrome, the metabolic and other causes could be more general. If that’s not the case - then we might actually need sub-syndromes, and I think this is actually WIP. Eg there‘s now pathological demand avoidance (PDA) which could, if it occurs outside of autism, become its own disorder.
On the contrary, my experience with autism is interventions which simply treated me as if I had a mental age which was maybe 5+ years behind my actual age. Since about age 7, I was actively resisting my autism treatment, and by age 9 I started to do so in a more deliberate way where I tried to appeal to the bureaucracy, to no avail since the school had no legal right to deny me the treatment that I nominally needed. It was scaled back only by age 11, and never totally stopped until adulthood.
"Autism" as a diagnosis sort of prescribes people be treated in standardised discriminatory ways from early childhood for their nominal best interests, rather than simply giving you a set of advice you can pick and mix from. This is likely to result in homogenous and harmful treatment in practice.
I'm also DEEPLY sceptical of autism I.E. clinically significant differences in social behaviour all being caused by some unified biological cause, given the decades long failure to find this smoking gun, my conclusion is that DSM-V categorisations are a social construction which don't map 1:1 with what is going on biologically. The more I learn about the sheer variance autistics really have in symptoms, and how we see clusters of symptoms like insomnia or digestive issues which don't even appear on the DSM-V at all, the more convinced I get that autism is really more than 1 thing. We even know about things like fragile X syndrome, which most autistics don't have, but which reliably causes a high incidence of autism. The project which seems to have the most momentum in overhauling DSM-V taxonomy is the RDOC framework. I honestly think that autism is multiple overlapping conditions is downright obvious, and I think the main reason it isn't taken more seriously is that Autism has become a useful brand.
The reality is that it depends on the person, because autism spectrum people have various intensities of various traits that might make them practically useless in even the most trivial job, or a strict adherent of the systems to a problematic degree, or somewhere in the middle but incapable of working with others in a way that's really difficult to manage, or they're just luckily well-suited for the context.
Doing well in that sort of environment is a skill or disposition that's well-suited to a low degree of volatility and a high degree of predictable behavior, both of which are not so likely to be present in someone with autism. Seeing how people who become managers in tech fail to adapt to someone who works in a marginally different way than they'd like, I don't have so much optimism unless their superiors have specific training and possible accomodations.
Some autistic people are no-doubt brilliant and super productive, some can't do anything on their own, much like the general population I suppose, but I'd wager with a lower chance of being productive in a very typical office setting, even if they're brilliant.
All of the focuses wholly on the various ways that autistics can be weak.
It also seem to ignore the reality that relative to other domains, there's more autistic employment in cybersecurity and government than elsewhere. What exactly explains that, if autistics are supposedly so unsuited to the work, despite this apparent stigma in the form of this common sense view that autistics obviously can only uncommonly succeed at such work?
In this case, the full context is very important, and I would say it shows more nuance and understanding of autism than the general member of the population does. Honestly if anything was ableist it was the combination of these two non-consecutive paragraphs:
"The one thing that would be valuable to the NSA is autistic obsession with tech... ...You don't have to 'train' them, they'll train themselves"
"If you are an organization with zero skills of your own, then sure, hiring such kids will at least get you started. But you'll exhaust their value *within 3 months*, after which you've got a *sociopath* on your hands"
To put it another way, Autistics being good at hacking is nothing else but a matter of them doing extra training out of self-interest, but their inferiority is permanent. The reason why autistics get interested in tech is because they're innately good at technology leading to a positive feedback loop. They don't just wake up one day and decide to be obsessed about tech.
Such notions are why at my last employer I veiled my autism diagnosis. Which was not good for me, or for my employer, but what choice do I have? If I worked for this man, and I disclosed on day 1, he would fire me immediately or in month 3 due to his pessimism about my potential. Whereas if he found out later about my autism, he could slap his head and say I must be "socialised" and that he made a good hire. It would be in everybody's interest if autistics were open about their diagnosis, but could be confident they would be given time and support to understand corporate social norms they may have extra trouble understanding.
So an autistic person is a sociopath now? Or am I just misunderstanding this "hot take".
Buncha oul lads shitting on a teenager is what it sounds like. Like no one here did illegal shit when they were younger.
Oh, and wait, of course the hacking stuff is overblown, but the property damage and assault he did while locked in prison is of course not overblow. Not perhaps, someone lashing out due to being stuck in a prison maybe? Someone who may have sensory problems, or autism. Getting forced to eat a type of food, or wear a type of cloths?
I'm not sure "he assaulted multiple people because he was lashing out due to autism" is an explanation that will garner much sympathy from people. From my perspective it makes him sound unstable and out of control - exactly the kind of person we should remove from society for our and his safety.
The argument here is that they're saying the misbehaviour is a result of the prison conditions essentially being torture, and under more humane conditions there wouldn't be the same degree of instability or loss of control.
If bringing up autistic people to a normal level of behaviour was as cheap as giving them some food stamps and money for clothes, this could be more affordable than prison, as well as more humane, as well as more likely to result in said autistic person to contribute to the tax base.
Autism is sometimes essentially a digestive disorder or sensory disorder which presents in the form of asocial behaviour. The difference between Autism and ASPD in this context is that changing the diet of somebody with ASPD won't make them any less sociopathic, but changing the diet of somebody with autism will.
This post is ridiculous. Had some more text here, but there's nothing else to say than that.
Anything I want to reply reads simply utterly stupid, like: do you really think there aren't kids able to hack corps? Did you really never read about previous hacks, and how easy they (partially) were?
I don't have much to say about Rob Graham's take on teenage hacking and I don't care about how someone did or didn't get access to Nvidia.
Two general thoughts about the "teenage hacking" and "NSA employee" phenemona:
(1) Being able to break into machines is a wildly distinctive set of skills from being able to engineer reliable exploits or to identify vulnerabilities (the latter two skills are closely related, and both are pretty far from "breaking in"). In the '90s and early '00s hacking scene, there was a pretty sharp division of labor between exploit developers and "hackers"; that division persists into professional red-teamy infosec. So, just, like, be aware that squeezing into a network and pivoting around is its own recognized specialization, and that being an expert software security person isn't a requirement to do it well. For all I know, those two kinds of expertise might even be inversely correlated.
(2) NSA doesn't need a feeder of enthusiastic savants. National SIGINT agencies seem to have zero problem at all recruiting people out of college to do this work effectively. There's a whole industry of people that do this work at an elite level, most of whom would roll their eyes like a Tex Avery character at the idea of participating in an HN discussion about it. This is, oddly (given our interest level) a corner of the tech industry that operates pretty far outside "Very Online" discourse.
"National SIGINT agencies seem to have zero problem at all recruiting people out of college to do this work effectively. There's a whole industry of people that do this work at an elite level"
If they are so elite/effective then why do their tools consistently end up in the hands of criminals? Not to mention getting hacked themselves
Most stories of hacking are sensationalized. Mitnick was kept in solitary confinement for 5 years because of it. Aaron Schwartz was driven to suicide because of it. All the way back to RTM, incidents of hacking are rarely understood even superficially by the media so they sensationalize it.
25 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] thread> NSA hackers are given specific tasks to achieve, they must play by the rules, and the paperwork involved is more arduous than the actual hacking. Such autistic kids would not do well in that environment.
They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad.
The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved.
When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising
I would love for people to move past talking about "Autism" and start talking more about anxiety, Social difficulties, digestive issues, obsessions, compulsions, and so on. If treating autistic people as homogenous is wrong to begin with, why is giving them all the same label a good idea?
That's a rhetorical question - the answer is that "Autism" became insurable, so ever since then there has been this pressure to describe increasingly diverse groups of people using the same label, and for people to NEVER lose this label. I had a psychiatrist re-diagnose me on the grounds that "Autism" had more funding than "Asperger's" at the time. I think pop cultures autistic savant obsession is just a reflection of this, and the root cause of nonsense portrayals and generalisations is money.
Maybe the confusion comes from „no two autists are alike in their symptom signature“ (which seems to be true), vs „most autism cases can be treated by X“ (which seems to be true at least sometimes). While it’s a highly individual syndrome, the metabolic and other causes could be more general. If that’s not the case - then we might actually need sub-syndromes, and I think this is actually WIP. Eg there‘s now pathological demand avoidance (PDA) which could, if it occurs outside of autism, become its own disorder.
"Autism" as a diagnosis sort of prescribes people be treated in standardised discriminatory ways from early childhood for their nominal best interests, rather than simply giving you a set of advice you can pick and mix from. This is likely to result in homogenous and harmful treatment in practice.
I'm also DEEPLY sceptical of autism I.E. clinically significant differences in social behaviour all being caused by some unified biological cause, given the decades long failure to find this smoking gun, my conclusion is that DSM-V categorisations are a social construction which don't map 1:1 with what is going on biologically. The more I learn about the sheer variance autistics really have in symptoms, and how we see clusters of symptoms like insomnia or digestive issues which don't even appear on the DSM-V at all, the more convinced I get that autism is really more than 1 thing. We even know about things like fragile X syndrome, which most autistics don't have, but which reliably causes a high incidence of autism. The project which seems to have the most momentum in overhauling DSM-V taxonomy is the RDOC framework. I honestly think that autism is multiple overlapping conditions is downright obvious, and I think the main reason it isn't taken more seriously is that Autism has become a useful brand.
Doing well in that sort of environment is a skill or disposition that's well-suited to a low degree of volatility and a high degree of predictable behavior, both of which are not so likely to be present in someone with autism. Seeing how people who become managers in tech fail to adapt to someone who works in a marginally different way than they'd like, I don't have so much optimism unless their superiors have specific training and possible accomodations.
Some autistic people are no-doubt brilliant and super productive, some can't do anything on their own, much like the general population I suppose, but I'd wager with a lower chance of being productive in a very typical office setting, even if they're brilliant.
It also seem to ignore the reality that relative to other domains, there's more autistic employment in cybersecurity and government than elsewhere. What exactly explains that, if autistics are supposedly so unsuited to the work, despite this apparent stigma in the form of this common sense view that autistics obviously can only uncommonly succeed at such work?
"The one thing that would be valuable to the NSA is autistic obsession with tech... ...You don't have to 'train' them, they'll train themselves"
"If you are an organization with zero skills of your own, then sure, hiring such kids will at least get you started. But you'll exhaust their value *within 3 months*, after which you've got a *sociopath* on your hands"
To put it another way, Autistics being good at hacking is nothing else but a matter of them doing extra training out of self-interest, but their inferiority is permanent. The reason why autistics get interested in tech is because they're innately good at technology leading to a positive feedback loop. They don't just wake up one day and decide to be obsessed about tech.
Such notions are why at my last employer I veiled my autism diagnosis. Which was not good for me, or for my employer, but what choice do I have? If I worked for this man, and I disclosed on day 1, he would fire me immediately or in month 3 due to his pessimism about my potential. Whereas if he found out later about my autism, he could slap his head and say I must be "socialised" and that he made a good hire. It would be in everybody's interest if autistics were open about their diagnosis, but could be confident they would be given time and support to understand corporate social norms they may have extra trouble understanding.
Buncha oul lads shitting on a teenager is what it sounds like. Like no one here did illegal shit when they were younger.
Oh, and wait, of course the hacking stuff is overblown, but the property damage and assault he did while locked in prison is of course not overblow. Not perhaps, someone lashing out due to being stuck in a prison maybe? Someone who may have sensory problems, or autism. Getting forced to eat a type of food, or wear a type of cloths?
Aaaand, sympathy isn't required. Empathy goes much further.
If bringing up autistic people to a normal level of behaviour was as cheap as giving them some food stamps and money for clothes, this could be more affordable than prison, as well as more humane, as well as more likely to result in said autistic person to contribute to the tax base.
Autism is sometimes essentially a digestive disorder or sensory disorder which presents in the form of asocial behaviour. The difference between Autism and ASPD in this context is that changing the diet of somebody with ASPD won't make them any less sociopathic, but changing the diet of somebody with autism will.
Anything I want to reply reads simply utterly stupid, like: do you really think there aren't kids able to hack corps? Did you really never read about previous hacks, and how easy they (partially) were?
Two general thoughts about the "teenage hacking" and "NSA employee" phenemona:
(1) Being able to break into machines is a wildly distinctive set of skills from being able to engineer reliable exploits or to identify vulnerabilities (the latter two skills are closely related, and both are pretty far from "breaking in"). In the '90s and early '00s hacking scene, there was a pretty sharp division of labor between exploit developers and "hackers"; that division persists into professional red-teamy infosec. So, just, like, be aware that squeezing into a network and pivoting around is its own recognized specialization, and that being an expert software security person isn't a requirement to do it well. For all I know, those two kinds of expertise might even be inversely correlated.
(2) NSA doesn't need a feeder of enthusiastic savants. National SIGINT agencies seem to have zero problem at all recruiting people out of college to do this work effectively. There's a whole industry of people that do this work at an elite level, most of whom would roll their eyes like a Tex Avery character at the idea of participating in an HN discussion about it. This is, oddly (given our interest level) a corner of the tech industry that operates pretty far outside "Very Online" discourse.
If they are so elite/effective then why do their tools consistently end up in the hands of criminals? Not to mention getting hacked themselves