SPENCER: John, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

JONATHAN: Thanks for having me on.

SPENCER: What does the phrase neurodivergent mean?

JONATHAN: Good question. It really depends on who you ask, which is part of the problem with it. Generally speaking, it means a person whose brain is different from the norm or the majority. Typically, the term neurodivergent is used in reference to neuronormativity or neurotypicalness, and so neurodivergent is a broad umbrella term that means that you diverge from the norm. Who is included in that will depend pretty heavily on who you ask, so sometimes it can include people with mild neurodevelopmental disorders. One of the first people who came up with it, named Judy Singer, said that when she used it, she pretty much only meant people with Asperger syndrome and other mild neurodevelopmental disorders. This was back in the 90s; however, when other people use the term, they mean it to be very expansive, and it can include things like old age or neurodegenerative conditions, like Alzheimer's or epilepsy. Some people use it to mean personality disorders, so the number of people potentially captured in that term will depend on who is using it and the context they're using it in; it will vary from person to person.

SPENCER: Sometimes people ask me, having run lots of studies on human psychology, do I have any takeaways about human psychology? My number one takeaway is that the human mind is much more different than people realize from person to person. People project their own internal experiences onto everyone else, but when you actually study the way people think, the way people decide, and how people feel, you're like, "Wow, human minds are incredibly diverse." By that metric, we might be like, well, we're all neurodivergent from each other. Of course, not all equally so; some people are more similar, and some people are more toward the center of the distribution.

JONATHAN: Typically the term has connotations of disability. It doesn't always have connotations of disability, but the way most people use it implies you have some sort of disability because of how your brain is different.

SPENCER: What's the problem with the term?

JONATHAN: I think it's just too broad, and it's not entirely clear who we're talking about when we do it, and so this leads to a lot of specific issues when you're talking about, "What are we going to do about neurodiversity or neurodivergent people?" Neurodivergent people are disadvantaged; it's like, "Okay, well, who's in that group? Which people are disadvantaged, and how are they disadvantaged? Are they all disadvantaged in the same way, or are they disadvantaged in different ways? Are there competing interests within the neurodivergent umbrella? Are there some changes that you would make to society that would benefit some neurodivergent people, and other changes that would benefit other neurodivergent people that are mutually irreconcilable?" Making a change for the better for one group could make it worse for the other. We talk about neurodivergent as though we are a coherent lobbying group for whom we can make decisive changes or changes to everyone's benefit, and I don't think that's the case. I think this is a very complex, heterogeneous term for a set of very complex, heterogeneous conditions. As you've said, the human mind is very complex, and it's even complex within specific disorder categories. To think that we can have these sort of good one-size-fits-all solutions for people in these categories is naive and can end up being harmful in some cases. Now, it isn't always harmful; sure, people with neurological disabilities will have some general needs that will overlap, like broad-based disability accommodations in the ADA or something like that, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, but this isn't all of us. And that isn't always made clear. People talk about neurodivergence as though we are a unified group with coherent goals, coherent aims, and desires, and that flattens a lot of very meaningful complexity that actually needs to be addressed in a fairly serious way. We need to get into conversations about trade-offs and conversations about triage, and lots of difficult conversations, instead of what the term is usually used for, which is a rhetorical tool to say we have this group of people who are oppressed and they need liberation, and so these are the things that we must do to make society better and equitable for these people. I'm not sure we can do that. Neurodivergent is like the term European. When you say, "Well, Europeans want this, are you talking about Russians or the Spanish?" Currently, you have Europeans who include both Russians and Ukrainians, and it's fair to say that at the current moment they would have some disagreements on what is best for them, and some pretty significant mutually exclusive differences. When you talk about these broad-based terms, and then you try to lobby for things politically or policy-wise, or you want to change structures and change society to accommodate these people, you need to have better, more accurate, more concise, and clear terminology and ways of thinking about these things that I don't think the term neurodivergent really lends itself to. I think that's sort of the main problem.

SPENCER: It seems to me that it's useful to have a way of talking about non-typical minds, and so maybe, in that sense, it's a useful phrase to have. It's also useful to be able to point out that some people are mistreated, that some people need accommodation, etc. That also seems useful, but it reminds me, in a way, of LGBTQ, where some people have wondered, "Is that true? Are we trying to put too many letters together, and does it actually create more problems?" For example, sometimes I think bisexuals feel they are left out, or that their needs are different than other people in that group, or trans people might feel that their needs are different. For one, we can have a coalition fighting for rights. On the other hand, sometimes, as you point out, different groups in coalition want or need different things, and they may even be at odds at times.

JONATHAN: Yeah, I think that's very much the case that we're dealing with here, where you can draw so many interesting parallels between LGBT movements and neurodivergent movements, and various things like that. While I totally agree with you, it does have use in it; there is some signal to the term neurodivergent, meaning basically this very broad group of other people, in the same way that European is a useful term to generally indicate they're from this area.

SPENCER: Especially if you are far away.

JONATHAN: Exactly. If you're in America and you say that guy's European, that has a lot more use or meaning than if you're in Europe and you say, "That guy's European." Most of us here are European, so it has uses at a sort of abstract, broad level to indicate a general difference that might come with specific important considerations. The types of considerations you can draw from it are very broad and high level, and the problem I have with it is a lot of people aren't trying to do that broad high level stuff. They want to make specific pronouncements about what we need to do for neurodivergent people. I constantly run into things where I'm like, I don't actually think that's good for neurodivergent people; I think that's good for this one particular slice of neurodivergent people, and we should just say that. We should talk about the individual slice that we're trying to address instead of attempting to invoke this very broad coalition of people that might not have interests in common.

SPENCER: What's an example where there's a push for a certain kind of change or a certain kind of policy that you think actually is not good for all the neurodivergent people, or maybe even bad for some?

JONATHAN: A good example would be just to look at autism itself. So, within autism in America and Canada, sort of under the DSM-5, we have three categories: level one, level two, level three. So, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which is now what level one autism is.

SPENCER: What extent is that equivalent to level one versus a subset of level one?

JONATHAN: Before DSM-5 you had DSM-IV, and in DSM-IV you had three distinct categorizations: one was PDD-NOS, one was Asperger syndrome, and one was autism, and then you had high functioning autism. The issue was, if you looked at PDD-NOS, Asperger's, and high functioning autism, there was often very little discernible difference between them. The difference between high functioning autism and Asperger's was that people with Asperger's had acquired speech before the age of five, and so once you're past the age of five — is that a useful or meaningful differentiation? The answer is probably not. PDD-NOS is a pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. It's sort of like a basket that you put things that are close to autism. It isn't quite autism. It isn't quite Asperger's; you're missing one of the necessary criteria for this, but it's clearly something, so we're just going to put you in this bucket. Sometimes people with PDD-NOS had intellectual disabilities, sometimes they didn't, but what happened with DSM-5 is the powers that be came together and created autism spectrum disorder and took everyone, so people who have profound autism with severe intellectual disabilities — and then people like Elon Musk, and threw them all together in one category, autism spectrum disorder. Within the autism spectrum disorder, they then created three differentiating categories: level one, which is low support needs; level two, which is high support needs; and level three, which is very high support needs.

SPENCER: So, does Elon Musk have low support needs?

JONATHAN: Yes, yes. If you have an Asperger's diagnosis, you have low support needs, so you are likely ASD-1. It is not necessarily the case that you will be ASD-1. You might be ASD-2 if you had Asperger's; it really depends on a whole lot of other contextual factors, but you are very likely to be ASD-1 if you had Asperger's under the new categorization system.

SPENCER: Did they ever explain why they got rid of Asperger's and why they kind of restructured in this way?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so there are a lot of different reasons, and some of them are the one that I just explained, which is you had these three categories of functionally identical people once they got past a certain point. I had a clinician friend who's been at this for 40 years, specifically working with Asperger's, and he told me that if you took 200 adults, a third of them had Asperger's, a third of them had autism, and a third of them had PDD-NOS, and you weren't allowed to ask them questions about their early childhood, you just had to talk to them about how their day was or what they were interested in. He said that most clinicians at the time would not be able to say, "That guy has Asperger's, and that one has autism, and that one has PDD-NOS." So we basically have three different names for a category that should only have one name.

SPENCER: They could have kept Asperger's; they could have used autism to refer to, let's say, level two and three, or something like that.

JONATHAN: So they could have done that, but unfortunately, when it comes to things like insurance coding, funding, special education funding, and all these types of things, Asperger's was basically a no funding category. If you got that, the chances that you would receive disability supports or help that you might very well need would require you to fight tooth and nail for it. A lot of the lobbying arms of the autistic self-advocacy networks, specifically guys like Ari Ne'eman and Steven Kapp, who were lobbying for autistic adults with Asperger's or high-functioning autism, started an organization — Ne'eman started an organization called Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) — and they advocated on behalf of this. One of the things they wanted to do was to break down these differentiations so that insurance coding couldn't exclude you from it. Autism is a spectrum. You have people who are on the high side of level one, or level one but on the border of level one and two. They just fall to the left, so they're technically level one, but they're pretty close to level two. Then you have individuals all the way to the left who are level one and really don't need much support.

SPENCER: But what does that mean? That's a spectrum, because when you say the word spectrum, my mind immediately thinks, "Oh, you can be zero to 100, right?" There's one scale, but isn't that literally not what it means? What is the spectrum? It

JONATHAN: It isn't like that at all, unfortunately. It's sort of like a multi-axis spectrum, it's like a 10-dimensional spectrum of various different sliding things, and it is itself sort of a mess, where within the spectrum you have different clusters of traits and types. There was recently a very big study that came out of the Spark study. Are you familiar with Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK)? Okay, so SPARK study, they took a whole bunch of diagnosed people with autism, and they took their genetic profiles, so they got them all to do a cheek swab, and then they got their families to do cheek swabs and things like that, and they were doing data analysis on their genetics that they got from the study. There was recently a study from Litman. Litman basically did a decomposition of the autism phenotype, and so they took various different genetic clusters, and then they tried mapping those to behavioral types, or they took behavioral types, and there are lots of different variations of them, and they found that within four genetic clusters, there were four sort of distinctive genetic clusters, and what we now refer to as something like profound autism, or level three autism, had the highest associated number of de novo mutations and things like that. So, when we're talking about what is the spectrum, it is a little complicated, because there are no definitive biomarkers for autism. There are genetic risk factors that increase the likelihood of autism. There are environmental risk factors that increase the likelihood of autism, but it isn't like something like Down syndrome, where you can do a genetic test and Trisomy 21 or something like that. There is no definitive biomarker.

SPENCER: Aren't there specific rare variants where, if you have it, you're very likely to have autism, even though it explains very few cases, but if you have it, you're very likely?

JONATHAN: Yeah, there are specific gene sequences that tend to be heavily correlated with, SYNGAP1 is one of them. SYNGAP1 is a mutation that codes for protein sheathing for your neurons. Typically, SYNGAP1 is associated with profound autism. It isn't always associated with profound autism, and there are a range of functions for people who have SYNGAP1. SYNGAP1 is just one example of something that tends to heavily correlate with autism. There are many people who have profound autism who don't have the SYNGAP1 mutation, and what we mean by spectrum is essentially a broad range of behavioral clusters. What we have now is a broad range of behavioral clusters, and sometimes when you talk to autism researchers, they won't talk about autism, they'll talk about autisms. That is not in fashion with certain researchers, but it is in fashion with others, and the whole autism research field gets unnecessarily politicized, unfortunately. There are lots of other complications with that, but the spectrum, broadly speaking, is a term we use for various behavioral clusters across the spectrum. It leads to a lot of things where, within my data set, I primarily collect data on people with ASD level one. I joke that it's a series of bimodal distributions where you will have people who are either hypersensitive or hyposensitive, with people skewing on both sides of a distribution curve and fewer in the middle. It's very hard to say autistic, "People do x, because for every time you say autistic people do x, there will be a cluster set who do the opposite." It's sort of hard to pin down precisely, but that is the easiest way I can try to explain it.

SPENCER: What would you say the core features are that nearly all autistic people have, or are there literally none?

JONATHAN: Yeah, this would be the DSM criteria. So, if you look at the DSM criteria, there are two criteria: one is deficits in social communication and emotional reciprocity across multiple contexts, and that's things like having difficulty with reciprocal conversation, back and forth conversation, having difficulty reading social cues and struggling socially to build, maintain, and sustain relationships. The second criterion is stereotyped movements, behaviors, and things like that. Autistic people tend to have special interests, where they become hyper-fixated on certain topics. They tend to do things like stimming, where the most common one is hand flapping, but it can take many different forms, a need for routine, sameness and structure, and things going very poorly if that breaks, excessive rigidity, and other things like that. Those are sort of the core symptoms in the DSM, but what those actually look like in autistic populations that get the diagnosis looks very different. If you look at those symptoms in someone with level one autism and someone with level three autism, you're talking about very different ball games. People with level one autism usually are fully verbal, often hyperlexic, and have very advanced vocabularies, but people with level three autism often can't speak. They just don't have a vocabulary, so when you're looking at a deficit in social communication for a person with level one autism, that deficit in social communication looks very different from a deficit in a person with level three autism.

SPENCER: That's quite the spectrum from slight deficits and very difficult eye contact, too, you cannot speak, right?

JONATHAN: Yeah.

SPENCER: Tell us about your data set, how you collect it, and why you collect it.

JONATHAN: I have always been interested in religions and religious formation, and sort of the sociology and anthropology of religion. I was raised as a conservative evangelical, and then I deconverted from that, and then I found a bunch of other autistic people who also deconverted, and they had a very similar story to mine, and I thought that's kind of weird that this happened almost the same time with all these different people. How did that happen? I looked at the peer-reviewed literature, and I looked at the research that existed at the time. This was in 2014, and I found that the literature held that there was a negative correlation between autism and religious belief, but the reasons they gave I thought were insufficient. So I thought, this seems like an interesting research project; I can do it myself. I'm just going to start doing it because it seems really interesting.

SPENCER: Before this conversation, I was checking the data on autism and religion, because we have a date on as well, and in our data we did find a slight negative correlation. It wasn't huge, but there was a slight negative correlation with religious belief.

JONATHAN: Yeah, and what does religious belief even mean? It can mean so many different things. When you're talking about something in the context of Christianity, are we less likely to be Christian than our neurotypical peers? Are we less likely to be confessing Christians, in accordance with creedal statements and creedal formulae, or do we tend to be more heretical? There are all sorts of these questions that are very interesting that I just didn't have answers for and was really curious to know, because I have autism, and I am very interested in religion and religious belief. So I basically just was like, "Okay, I am going to write a bunch of scripts, write a bunch of bots. I had been working on a different project unrelated to this that had inspired me to do this," and so I used a lot of the tools that I had built and developed, and the experience that I built and developed with that, and I just went on data scraping autistic people. I would find autistic people online, and then once I found them, I would pull all their posts.

SPENCER: I wish it would be people who don't self-identify, like publicly.

JONATHAN: Yeah. A person says I'm autistic, or they're on an autism forum talking about religion, that type of thing. There are lots of inherent limitations to this process, but then I started reaching out and sending people surveys, asking, "Hey, do you want to fill out this survey?" I did lots of data collection via survey, and then I thought I would love to get deeper. There's only so much data you can collect from surveys, and there's only so much data you can collect from just passively scraping what people write online. I started reaching out to people and established a 90-minute interview protocol. I've been interviewing Christians and ex-Christians for about 10 years. I've been doing the data collection for around 12, so around 10 years is when I started doing interviews, and I've done well over 600 at this point. I think I'm at 650 something.

SPENCER: Are you still learning or you hit diminishing marks of return at that point?

JONATHAN: Yeah, you sort of hit diminishing returns at some point. I have a pretty well-established cluster system for it, but autism is a really unstable diagnosis, so how we think about autism and what autism is changes over time. It has changed pretty significantly since 2014, and now there are a lot of people who are being diagnosed with autism who would not have been diagnosed in 2014. So it's like, "Okay, what are these people? Are they different, or are they discernibly different from their peers who would have been diagnosed in 2014?"

SPENCER: We know it's caused by Tylenol, that changes everything, right [laughs]?

JONATHAN: [laughs] Exactly, exactly.

SPENCER: So, would you mind telling us your story, a little bit of how you said you deconverted from evangelical Christianity?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so basically, it's not extremely exciting, but what happened is I was raised sort of conservative evangelical, holding most conservative evangelical beliefs, young earth creationism, and all that.

SPENCER: Like 6,000 years old?

JONATHAN: Yeah. There are dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, that type of thing. I believe the Bible is literally inspired, perfect in everything it says, and that there are no flaws and no faults in it. Then I got to university and started encountering a lot of different ideas that I had not previously encountered. I started learning about evolution and realized people have really good reasons for believing this stuff. There's actually good reason to think that we are evolved and have common ancestors, and there's really good evidence for it, especially in something like the genetic evidence for evolution. I think that was what did it for me, where I was like, "Okay, this is sort of undeniable in reading it." I went, "Okay, well, now I need to rethink this part of my religious belief and religious conviction." So then I started doing a historical analysis of the Bible, and I started to read a lot about textual criticism, how we got the books of the Bible that we got, and how we learned all these things about how Christianity came to be.

SPENCER: Really, there are many people who think differently. It's like you really dig into it, you realize that the common stories about it are not really accurate.

JONATHAN: Yeah, you get there, there's a lot more uncertainty than I was raised to believe there was. I'll say that, and far more questions than there are answers to. I sort of got to a point where I was like, "What am I even doing here? What's the point?" I started rapidly deconverting, and I left. This is a very common model; I call it the cognitive dissonance pressure cooker. I have this idea where you have a pressure cooker that can hold so much cognitive dissonance inside of you. Everyone experiences cognitive dissonance from a variety of sources, but for some reason, autistic people tend to have less tolerance for cognitive dissonance. The things that cause cognitive dissonance in most people tend to cause autistic people more cognitive dissonance. The opportunities to experience cognitive dissonance are much larger within a Christian context if you also have autism, and so you get this sort of perfect storm of conditions all colliding with each other. Within religions, they have ways of trying to alleviate cognitive dissonance, and a lot of those techniques don't work very well for autistic people because they weren't really designed with autistic people in mind. You have cognitive dissonance increasing significantly more within these populations, and the release valves for managing it becoming significantly worse. Eventually, enough pressure builds up; something happens, like there's typically an inciting event, or you say something, you read something, you get in an argument with someone, and then boom, it kind of blows up and starts to all rapidly unravel. That's pretty much exactly what happened to me.

SPENCER: One thing I wonder about, so I've never been a believer, but when I think about what it would be like believing, I imagine that there are some things that, if you took them really literally, would be really difficult to deal with, for example, the idea that people who don't believe are going to hell and burn for eternity. Now, not all Christians believe that, but many Christians do believe that. If you take that really seriously, it gets terrifying. How do you know that you're definitely going to be saved? What if you had impure thoughts? Did you really believe in Jesus enough? What about that person you met who seemed really nice? Are they really going to go? That doesn't seem good, that they're going to burn for eternity. What does that say about you if you don't try to convert them? All this stuff, if you took it really literally, seems like it would be such an intense psychological experience, and it seems to me that most people somehow have a way of softening it. They believe, but they don't fully see all the implications of it. It seems to me, please correct me if I'm wrong, that autistic people are more likely to take it truly seriously and go through the logical implications of it.

JONATHAN: Yep, we tend to bite the bullet, I say a lot. We tend to be bullet biters when it comes to religion and religious practice. I ended up reconverting to Christianity. I didn't think I would, but I ended up doing it. There are really two ways to handle it. You either need to really bite the bullet on a lot of very deeply uncomfortable things, or you need to sort of become mis-system pilled and be like, "Ahh. I don't know, a lot of it really depends, and there's a lot we don't know," and so on and so forth. When I reconverted, I reconverted a lot more into that sort of mysticism side of things, a lot of apathetic theology, in that we don't know the will of God, but we can sort of know what isn't the will of God, that type of thing. That's how I handle it. Eternal conscious torment is something that I can't get on board with, but there are Christian traditions that are universalist, and I go with those universalist traditions. Christianity, it turns out, is also a pretty broad and heterogeneous religion, and there are many different things in it that you can explore. Typically, you get two options: you either bite the bullet and just accept the deeply discomforting conclusion because you think it's right, or you go through a very convoluted process of making your own bespoke theology that no one else in the history of Christianity has ever come up with. You sort of go with that, and so that's yeah.

SPENCER: What led to your reconversion? Was it a certain set of experiences?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so a lot of it, I was in the military, and a lot of it was sort of trying to reckon with everything that went on. It's a trope. A guy goes to war, sees some stuff, and it makes him rethink a lot of things that he thought were important.

SPENCER: ...in the trenches.

JONATHAN: I wasn't in the trenches or anything like that. I was in cyber warfare, so I wasn't in any immediate danger of being killed or anything like that, and I wasn't in combat, but I was doing a lot of operational stuff. When you make those decisions, you start to learn things about yourself, things about yourself that you may not like, and come to conclusions that may be a little discomforting. Religion has a lot of ways of dealing with those feelings and those issues that my sort of new atheist Sam Harris acolyte phase didn't really have the tools to deal with or grapple with. So, I went from sort of LessWrong rationalist to sort of weird Anglican, I guess.

SPENCER: It might be hard to control for other changes in your life, but do you feel that just thinking about the religious aspect, going from evangelical to new atheist to wherever you are now? I don't know quite about Anglicans. Which do you think you're happiest with?

JONATHAN: Probably where I currently am. The religious tradition I'm in is highly ritualistic. It is very formulaic; all the prayers are in a book. You can read the book; every service happens in accordance with a strict liturgical cadence. There's a phenomenon I found in my research called high church drift. Within Christianity, you have a sort of low-church evangelicalism, but then you have high church Christianity, which is your smells and bells, incense and chanting, and ritual, and less focused on personal experience and more focused on participation in the liturgy. I really like the participation in the liturgy aspect of it, whereas I find the sort of personal relationship with Jesus, emotional side of things, still kind of baffling and confusing. It's not a language that I've ever fit well with, and it's not a language that I currently fit well with. Most autistic people are in the same boat. If you look at autistic religious people and you ask them questions like, "Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?" Within my data set, 85% say, "No".

SPENCER: And that's probably much higher than your typical Christian.

JONATHAN: It's like inverted when you look at control groups.

SPENCER: I think Mormonism is a really interesting example where they teach people that you can have sort of a direct feeling of God influencing you or being present or telling you stuff, and I don't think most of them experience literally a voice in their head or something like that, but they just have this sense of, "Oh, I'm interacting with God in some way," and there are even certain rituals where this happens, where a man will lay his hand on his daughter and he's supposed to channel God, and it creates this real sense of a direct personal connection. It's not this sort of abstract concept.

JONATHAN: Yeah, and so there are lots of similar things within evangelical Christianity, and most autistic people that I talk to are like, "I know what they're saying, but I don't experience that." I don't understand what's happening there, and that is just a behavior and a set of experiences that feel completely foreign and alien to me, and that is also my experience. If that is how I had to practice Christianity, I would not have reconverted; I would have just stayed an atheist.

SPENCER: I saw a very interesting talk by someone who used to be, I think, a preacher, and they were talking about how they used to feel they were communing with God, and then they actually became an atheist. The talk was about how even now, as an atheist, they can get into the same state and have this feeling of connection to God, which was fascinating to them and to me, because it seems like it is a state that some people can get into. I've never had this state. I don't know if you've had it; you've probably never had this state, but it seems to be a thing that humans can do.

JONATHAN: It does, and I think this is a very real phenomenon. When I talk to Christians and they say they have a personal relationship with Jesus and have these sort of ecstatic emotional experiences, I don't doubt that they're having those experiences. I just have no idea what that's like. I have no idea what that internal feeling of those experiences is like, and I suspect that has something to do with autism, because a very large portion of us also don't have those experiences and never have had those experiences. These are all people in environments where those experiences are expected, where you are trained to have those experiences, where the environments are set up to have those experiences, and about 15% of us get through to that. So I tend to think that autism is some sort of factor in it. How it works, why it works, I'm not entirely sure, other than I'm fairly certain this is a thing.

SPENCER: Do you experience awe?

JONATHAN: Depends. Depends what you mean when you say awe. In a certain sense, yes. In a certain sense, I'm impressed by things.

SPENCER: But that's not awe.

JONATHAN: Yeah, it's not awe. So it depends, how would you define it?

SPENCER: Let's say you're looking at a giant mountain or a giant crashing wave, or the night sky, and you feel a sense of tininess relative to it, and you feel a high feeling, like you're almost high.

JONATHAN: No, I don't feel that.

SPENCER: I don't feel that either. I actually always thought that I felt awe, and the reason I thought it was because I misunderstood what everyone else meant by it. People would look up at a mountain and say, "Oh my gosh, it's awe-inspiring." I'd be like, "Yeah, it's a pretty mountain, it's big." I've actually wondered whether this is partly why I've never been able to connect with what people are talking about with religious experience. I wondered if it's connected to, I think I'm incapable of feeling. I think I've never felt it for even a moment my whole life. I wouldn't describe myself as neuro-atypical, but this is something I think is neuro-atypical about me. It's just interesting that you seem to have that similar experience.

JONATHAN: I think there's something to that. I don't think you necessarily need awe to be religious, but I certainly think it helps. It's one of those things where if you have it, a lot of religious language and imagery will make a lot more sense than if you don't have it. I am sort of religious and acutely aware that I don't have the cognitive capacities to engage with or experience many of the things that are described to me. I talk to priests, I talk to pastors, I talk to other religious people about religious experiences like this, and they'll say, "Oh no, no, you feel this, you clearly seem like you do." I have to take them down and explain what I'm actually feeling, and they go, "So you've never felt this feeling ever?" and I'm like, "No, not really."

SPENCER: That's so interesting. I have another weird question for you. Do you experience collective effervescence? To give it a rough definition, it's when you're in a group of people and everyone's doing kind of the same thing, like dancing, chanting, rowing, or marching, and it's a high ecstatic feeling where you feel like you're merging with the crowd.

JONATHAN: No, I don't feel that at all, and I've never felt that. I actually call this the universal autistic experience of Christianity, not because it's universal, but because it happens so much. There are these worship nights that you go to, sometimes called "cry nights," where the band will get up and play, the music will be emotional, and everyone will be moving. A guy up front is like, "I can feel the spirit moving here today. I can feel God's presence," and everyone seems super into it. You're sitting there like, "What's going on with these people? What's wrong with them?" That is an incredibly common experience for autistic people to have in Christianity, where they are completely lacking that feeling. It's often called triadic joint attention. Triadic joint attention is a similar experience where you're watching a movie, and there's a difference between you watching the movie and you watching a movie with a friend. When you're watching a movie with a friend, you're not just watching the movie, but you're thinking about your friend's experience of the movie while you watch it. I just don't have very strong feelings of triadic joint attention. I used to eat lunch by myself all the time, and people would be like, "Why don't you come eat with a group?" I was like, "Why would I? I don't think I need help digesting my food." I didn't realize that people had these feelings, and yeah, no, I've not experienced it. It's very common for autistic people to also not experience those in religious contexts, even when they're specifically trying to have those experiences.

SPENCER: I've never had group effervescence either, and it was kind of a mystery to me. I would go to a nightclub or something, and I'd just be very confused about what's actually happening. Now I've found ways to enjoy experiences like that, but it's not what's happening. My brain is now what's happening in other people's brains, and I don't believe I'm autistic; I actually test quite low in most of the things. But I think these are two things that I've wondered about that kind of make me sort of almost incapable of having spiritual experiences.

JONATHAN: I don't think any of these things are unique to autism. In fact, I don't think there's anything that is particularly unique to autism. I think most autistic experiences are human experiences. It's just how frequently do you experience these things, and at what intensity do you experience these things? Everyone misses social cues; everyone misreads a social situation. But do you misread nine out of ten social cues? Do you misunderstand or misinterpret most people, and do they misinterpret and misunderstand you most of the time? I'm not surprised; I know for a fact one of my close friends is not autistic and also just has no experience of awe, no experience of group effervescence, so no really emotional ecstatic experiences. He's not a very spiritual person. He also doesn't have autism, and he's tested for it and has specifically been assessed for it, and he just doesn't have it. Like you, he tests quite low on the scores for it. But yeah, I don't think this is exclusive to autism. It is just very, very common in autism.

SPENCER: I'd be curious to ask you about the charismatic movement for a moment, because it's actually this incredibly powerful force, and there are hundreds of millions of people in the movement, and yet when I've talked to people about it, mostly in New York, most people are like, "What is that? What is that charismatic? I've never heard of that." I'm like, "How have you never heard of that? This is a massive movement that has a lot of political power as well."

JONATHAN: Yeah, charismatics are a fascinating bunch. There are actually quite a few autistic charismatics. They are not the majority by any stretch of the imagination. They are underrepresented in charismatic traditions; however, charismatic traditions often attract weird people and just odd individuals, and so within them are cultures that really cater to people who don't fit the normal mold of what you're expecting. You actually do find a lot of autistic people within them. I usually don't find autistic people while they're in those movements, because typically when they're in those movements, they have pretty strong anti-mental health messaging in them, to put it mildly. A lot of them don't believe it's a real thing or believe you're demon possessed. Many of them try to cast out the demon of autism from these individuals, so I usually catch them after they've left the movement, and they're reflecting back on their experiences. But yeah, it is a whole thing.

SPENCER: What would you say are the major differences in belief between charismatics and non-charismatic Christians?

JONATHAN: The biggest one is gifts of the spirit. Many Christians have various orientations towards things like miracles or spirits. Many Christians you meet will say, "Yeah miracles happen," and in a vaguely spiritual sense, they'll acknowledge angels and demons, but charismatics are like, "No, miracles happen all the time, demons are real, and they're possessing you, and we need to get rid of them." A lot of the charismatic movement has to do with the belief in the real power of moving spiritual forces in the world today, how you interact with them, and how they interact with you. It's not distinctive to those Christian traditions; most other Christian traditions tend to be a lot more mild on that side than charismatics.

SPENCER: It's almost like most Christian traditions view the world today as different from the world of the Bible, right? We're like, "Yeah, miracles were happening all the time in the Bible, but today it's kind of different. Maybe they happen now," but it's rare or something, and charismatics are more like living in the same world as is being described in the Bible. Is that fair?

JONATHAN: Yeah, that's fairly similar. Within Christian theology, there is the debate of cessationism versus a more charismatic view. Cessationism is the idea that basically miracles, or miracles of the type described in the Bible, sort of petered out with the development of the church. There are various degrees to which people believe that, but yeah, that's generally your impression, is sort of how it is.

SPENCER: I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but Mike Winger, he is a charismatic preacher.

JONATHAN: Very familiar.

SPENCER: I find what he's doing fascinating because he teaches about Christianity as his main thing, but his side thing is finding people in the charismatic church who are essentially frauds, who are pretending to do miracles, pretending to be prophetic, and he gathers evidence that they're lying or full of shit, and then he basically makes videos that go viral about it. I'm curious to hear your reaction to that.

JONATHAN: I'm glad he's doing it. I don't see eye to eye with Mike Winger on most things, but there is a lot of abuse within charismatic circles, and there is abuse in every religious tradition. It isn't like there is one without it, but charismatic circles seem particularly uniquely poised to be vulnerable to it, and so there are a lot of grifters within these places, and I'm glad there are people from within the movement trying to clean up their own house.

SPENCER: It's interesting to think about it from the point of view of someone like myself who doesn't believe in these prophetic words or miracles. If you take my view for one second, then it's like, "Well, everyone who's claiming prophetic things or miracles is wrong." But it doesn't mean they're all lying. From my perspective, they're all wrong. Some of them are genuinely self-deceived, and they're like, "No, I really think this is a prophetic word," and some of them are lying. Mike Winger is trying to pick out the ones that are actually lying rather than just self-deceived. It's obviously a very different perspective than how he sees what he's doing.

JONATHAN: I would sort of mirror what you're saying. There are people who are genuine true believers, and then there are unscrupulous people who are manipulating others for malicious ends. He's specifically trying to go after those people. All power to him; go after them, they suck.

SPENCER: You could see why I'd be right for abuse, because if you have a worldview that says, okay, there are these miracles happening, these prophetic words happening, etc. Someone can just pretend that that's happening. It's very, "How do you know they're wrong?"

JONATHAN: Yeah.

SPENCER: And especially if they're willing to look up information about someone to make a prophetic word that just happens to match what's on Facebook.

JONATHAN: Yeah. And then there are lots of built-in things about hierarchies and how questioning the leader is questioning God or the Holy Spirit, and that type of thing comes in a lot where there are a lot of cult dynamics and things like that, and unfortunately, autistic people tend to join a lot of cults. It's something that happens a lot.

SPENCER: Why do you think that happens?

JONATHAN: A lot of reasons. Cult dynamics are very complicated, but a really big part is when you are a socially ostracized, socially marginalized person who doesn't get along with most people, and you find a group that specifically preys on people with those inherent vulnerabilities. It's very easy to get trapped in them. Cults have lots of techniques, like lots of things that autistic people have as well. Black and white thinking, extreme rigidity, this is the right thing, this is the wrong thing, that's a defining characteristic of autism. It's one of the DSM criteria, and so you get this rigidity, black-and-white thinking, lack of nuance. It's very easy to socially isolate autistic people from their environment because they have social issues, and so you're not likely to have lots of friends. It's likely that you will be easily socially isolated, and so they'll be like, "We're your only family, and we're the only ones taking the Bible seriously," and stuff like that. It's a constellation of a whole bunch of sociological factors with how cults work and the social experiences of autistic individuals. But then also I think there are certain forms of autistic thinking that tend to lead themselves to cults.

SPENCER: So you've done an incredible amount of research on understanding autism and Christianity. You've done these hundreds of interviews, plus analyzed literally 20,000 profiles or something?

JONATHAN: Yeah, yeah.

SPENCER: Tell me about some of your big takeaways?

JONATHAN: Okay, so big takeaways: autistic people, when you control everything, seem to be less likely to be Christian than their non-autistic counterparts. The effect seems to be much more significant when you go into more secular places. If you are raised in a heavily religious environment, the extent to which an autistic person will be less likely to be religious will be less. If you go to a more secular environment, the chances that they will be less likely to be religious will be greater.

SPENCER: It makes sense to me. There's less if there's intense social pressure for everyone to be religious; it's harder not to be. You're going to have less freedom and flexibility.

JONATHAN: They'll still be less likely. It's just when that social pressure to do it goes away, we seem to be significantly less likely. That's one factor I found. Autistic ways of participating in religion are, I already talked about high church drift. As you get older, the chances that you will stay in this sort of evangelical, charismatic, low church setting become significantly lower, and if you do practice religion, you will tend to go towards a more formulaic, ritualistic form of Christianity that doesn't require emotional relational buy-in or input. We talked about lacking that feeling of awe or group effervescence, and the more a religious tradition emphasizes the importance of that, the less likely you are to participate in that form of religion. We tend to just gravitate towards forms of religion that don't require that or that don't accept that. There are also a lot of weird quirks that come out of autistic people and the way they think about and process religion. The way we tend to process religion is intellectualizing it, so if you ask an autistic person how they practice their religion, they'll often give you a list of books they read or something like that, which isn't necessarily the way most people do. We tend to really struggle with formulaic prayer or with non-formulaic prayer, so with verbal spontaneous prayer, you just close your eyes and talk to God. We tend to really struggle with that type of religious experience or that mode of religious expression, and we tend to be a lot better at engaging with written prayer or liturgical prayer, where you read something someone else wrote down for you. There are lots of different other avenues I could go down in talking about the various trends in different religious denominations, but yeah, that's sort of the high-level interesting points from the research.

SPENCER: You downloaded all this data on people who said they were autistic. You got all the writing that they did, and my understanding is that you were then able to analyze other people's writing and look for what writing looks like it could be autistic. What did you learn from doing that?

JONATHAN: I learned that autistic people have some pretty distinctive ways of posting on the internet in ways that I didn't actually think about before. I looked at a whole bunch of things. One of the things I did is I made node meshes. You take an autistic person, then you take all of their followers, and then you take all the autistic people that you know, and then you cross-reference their followers. You look for specific heat groups, where lots of autistic people all follow this person, or this person follows lots of autistic people. The more node connections a person has, the more likely they are to be autistic. This is something typically called homophily, where people clump together, find each other, and form these communities online, and then they don't interact with the other autistic groups.

SPENCER: They don't interact with the other autistic groups, or not autistic groups?

JONATHAN: The other autistic groups.

SPENCER: Oh, and really. So they separate different groups, subgroups?

JONATHAN: Yeah. So you get these distinctive autistic cultures of posting that sort of pop up where you'll have a sort of rationalist LessWrong type of autistic posting, but then you will also get a certain form of Tumblr autistic posting that's very different in quality and style. You get these groups that form, and then people who don't have autism will join these groups and start to adopt their norms for how to speak and how to interact. I frequently false positive these people who are not themselves autistic but have just learned to speak like an autistic person because they've been in these autism-heavy communities. You get these really interesting effects where once you get a critical mass of autistic people, other people start to develop autistic mannerisms by just being in the presence of a lot of them, which makes sense. Humans are social creatures, and we mimic each other. If you're around a bunch of autistic people, you will probably start mimicking their autistic mannerisms. That gets into a really interesting question of what is autism? If we see autism as this external set of characteristics, we don't have any internal test for it. We know it's a neurodevelopmental disorder, but what happens when a person who was not born with this neurodevelopmental disorder now starts adopting the communication norms of people who have it? This leads to some really interesting philosophical questions, which I'm not sure I have the answer to. In a lot of startups, you get this phenomenon where you get a bunch of autistic engineers together, and they start talking a certain way, they start acting a certain way, and then the other people around them — autistic people tend not to socially assimilate very well to groups, we tend not to mimic people as well, and we tend not to mimic other people's mannerisms — but other people naturally mimic the mannerisms of people around them. You have this weird phenomenon where you have this group of people who do not have autism becoming more like the autistic people when there's a critical mass of them. This usually only happens when there's a critical mass. That was a very interesting finding that I had that I didn't think I would find before because I kept getting these people who I was like, "Okay, based on all the connections you have, based on how frequently you post about topics, based on the way that you're saying things, the way you're couching things, the way that you're caveating things, these all seem sort of distinctively autistic." I reach out to them, be like, "Hey, you know, I'm doing this research, do you have autism?'" They're like, "No, not at all. I just like posting on these forums," or "No, but I have lots of autistic friends."

SPENCER: Are people ever really shocked or bothered when you reach out and say, "Are you autistic?"

JONATHAN: Sometimes? But you know what? What can you do? Sometimes you send unsolicited emails and people get upset. That's sort of the nature of surveying, you know. No one likes getting a call to answer someone's 10-question survey.

SPENCER: I feel you value their privacy or something about analyzing the way they write, which is obviously public data you're analyzing.

JONATHAN: Yeah, I usually go, I was reading your posts, and if I wouldn't join a private Facebook group and then read a person's posts, and then be like, "Well, I joined this private Facebook group, and I correlated all your private Facebook posts together,"

**SPENCER:**So it's not like that?

JONATHAN: It's just like, "Okay, I found your profile, I read a bunch of your tweets, I read a bunch of your forum posts, or I found your Substack. Do you want to talk?" And they're usually pretty cool with that.

SPENCER: Yeah, so you're positively rated?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so it depends on which group, but generally speaking, with the current batch of algorithms that I have, it'll be between five to 15%. It significantly increases the younger they get; the younger they get, the more internet lingo they start to adopt. Their posting habits tend to be false positive a lot more, and a lot of younger people will tend to use autistic as just an adjective, where they're not talking about autism itself, they're talking about someone who's socially awkward. Instead of saying, "That guy's awkward," they'll say, "That guy's autistic," or instead of saying, "I'm a bit awkward," they'll say, "I'm autistic." That tends to throw lots of false positives because saying, "I'm autistic" has a high weighting in any detection algorithm. Saying I am this thing will tend to have a higher weighting than other things.

SPENCER: Do you need a Gen Z correction?

JONATHAN: Yeah, I literally have to. Over time, since I started this in 2014, the rates of false positives, especially for younger cohorts, have climbed. I think it's doubled or tripled because of that. So, it'll depend on the group, but five to 15 percent is usually where it's at.

SPENCER: What are some language differences you pick up on between autistic and non-autistic people?

JONATHAN: It depends if they are doing long-form posting or long-form writing. You will get an over-preoccupation with specificity and hyper-caveating everything they say. This tends to be a result of cognitive rigidity or black-and-white thinking, where they're constantly being like, "Okay, I'm going to say this thing. Oh no, that thing might be wrong. I need to add an addendum to the end," and then add another addendum to the end, and another addendum to the end. They initially start trying to write one post or one paragraph, and it ends up being like 10 paragraphs. The first paragraph contains all the information, and the remaining nine paragraphs are just caveats of them being like, "Well, if I control for this factor," other things like that, not being able to read tone through text, and not being able to sort of read the room. Now, everyone's bad at reading tone through text; everyone's bad at picking up on sarcasm and things like that. Autistic people tend to be uniquely bad at it in a way, where the famous tweet that's like Twitter's the only place where you can go and say, "I like pancakes," and someone will be like, "Oh, so you hate waffles." It's basically that phenomenon times 100, where you will say something and you will use an "and" when you should have used an "or," and instead of them being like, "Well, you know, I think you should have used an 'or.'" They'll be like, "You are very bad and dumb." They tend to morally ratchet up the stakes a lot, and so it isn't just that you made a mistake; it's that you have violated a deep moral principle, and your violation of this deep moral principle needs to be accounted for, and things need to be fair, and things like that, and so you get a lot of that.

SPENCER: Is that a kind of moral rigidity? Would you describe it?

JONATHAN: It is a moral rigidity. A lot of people say autistic people have a strong sense of social justice, and it's like, "Well, sort of, sometimes we do, sometimes we don't," and the autism doesn't have built-in morality to it. You will develop your morality in the same way that everyone else does. You will tend to believe you are right a lot harder than everyone else, though, right? The sort of cognitive rigidity, black and white thinking leads you to being really willing to die on a hill. Now, sometimes that's an amazing thing. Sometimes you need that moral courage to die on the hill for an unpopular but right position, and sometimes you kind of need to let things go because they don't actually matter that much, but it's often hard for autistic people to make the differentiation between the two, and every cause becomes the just cause of the right hill to die on, and that type of thing. So you get a lot of that as well.

SPENCER: It's interesting hearing about these different attributes. I'd be really curious to know if you ran your system on me, what it would score. I was reading some of my old blog posts from 10 years ago, which is always a cringing thing to do, but I was shocked at how many caveats and stuff I put in my post. I was like, "Oh my god, this is embarrassing, why would I put, you know, it's just way excessive." You're just trying to, you feel scared that you're going to say the wrong thing, and you know you're not going to get it exactly right.

JONATHAN: It would almost certainly be false positives on you. It tends to be false positive on people like you, so I wouldn't at all be surprised. It tends to be false positive, especially on people in tech, people in engineering spaces in tech who are doing long-form writing, and that's mostly just because the base data pool has a lot of confirmed autistic people in those fields. If you're writing in that style and on those types of topics in that way, sort of in that milieu, and you've been trained by it and formed by it, then those tendencies will get recapitulated. There will be lots of false positives, but I'm sure you'd be one of them.

SPENCER: There might be two forces at work there. One, as you point out, if autistic people are less conformist to other people's social norms, and then people are in spaces with lots of autistic people, they can form a movement towards a more autistic culture. Also, people who are not autistic but have some of these attributes might be more attracted to those spaces even if they're not autistic.

JONATHAN: Exactly. And so, you say that you aren't experiencing effervescence or feelings of awe, I have semantic sentiment analysis features looking for things like that. If you're talking about that in posts, it would increase your weighting. You would probably be more naturally drawn to autistic people discussing religion and religious experiences just because you share a common set of those things. Autistic traits are human traits, and the thing that makes autism autism is having a critical mass of them at a certain intensity. We used to have this concept, you don't hear about it much anymore, called the broader autism phenotype. The broader autism phenotype was developed by early clinicians of autism who were observing the parents of autistic children and noting that those parents do have a few traits of their children. Maybe there's this broader autism phenotype of subclinical autistic traits, where what makes it autism is the traits all being collected in a specific way at a specific intensity, which brings it to dysfunction. If you had all those traits at a slightly lower intensity, you would still feel a close kinship with these people; you just wouldn't have it at that same level. I think a lot of people in that broader autism phenotype range, which would be a lot larger than the pool of people who are autistic, would find kinship with autistic people and tend to cluster and clump with them as well. Quite a few people I suspect in my false positive lists would fall under the broader autism phenotype.

SPENCER: Is it true that if someone has two parents who are engineers or math people, that they tend to be much more likely to be autistic?

JONATHAN: Yep, so if you have one parent with autism, the chances that a child will be autistic are pretty high. If you have two, they're even higher. But if you just have a bunch of these traits, there is a chance that the child will have autism. So, if you're in that sort of broader autism phenotype range, early clinicians noticed this, where they said people with these traits are drawn to certain fields, engineering for example. When you have a kid, the chances that that kid will have a bunch of those traits dialed up a few notches is higher than if you didn't have those traits. It's sort of like a selection bias thing, where having these traits predisposes you to be in certain fields. It predisposes you to look for other partners with those traits, because people look for others like them for romantic partners. You will be more likely, if you have these traits, to find someone else with these traits, and then you'll be more likely to get along with them, so you'll be more likely to have a child with them, and that child will be more likely to have the combination of these traits. That's sort of how it goes.

SPENCER: It's always hard to prove these theories, but I'm of the viewpoint that a lot of things, such as personality disorders or some of these other mental health disorders, if we were able to trace them in their evolutionary history, we would find that there are some adaptive advantages to having those traits. However, in the modern environment, they can get pushed too far, and then they're no longer adaptive. Take an example of narcissism; people with narcissistic personality disorder, when they interact with others, tend to be rated more positively in their first interaction and viewed as more charismatic and persuasive. So, there may be an adaptive advantage to this, but if it's pushed too far, it may not be adaptive. You could at least speculate about that. Do you think that autism is like that, and do you think there's any credible theory of that?

JONATHAN: Yeah, I think that's true. I work in cybersecurity. In cybersecurity, many of my autistic traits are adaptive. There are things that, because I'm autistic, I tend to be really good at in a way that other people aren't. It's not that other people can't be good at this; it's just that certain modes of thinking predispose themselves to be better at working in certain fields, and I think cybersecurity is one of those that benefits autistic people. You can see that just by how many autistic people are in cybersecurity. There are definitely places where it becomes adaptive. It's just that there are lots of situations in which it's maladaptive. When I go to work, I have a lot of adaptive traits, but I also have quite a few maladaptive traits in that context. For example, when it comes to talking to marketing, I feel like I'm a zoo animal, and they're just looking at me, prodding this weird alien thing that happened to show up in their office. In those senses, it's maladaptive, but in other senses, it is adaptive. If you get too many of these traits, it can quickly become maladaptive. If you get too many of these traits, the load of them combines, and you can get into maladaptiveness. What you're describing is that the baseline trait has a lot of adaptive advantages in certain places, and it will get selected for under certain conditions. What we now see as autism is kind of what happens when all those traits come together and then start causing dysfunction.

SPENCER: And also this kind of niche thing. In the right niche, it can be advantageous, and in a different niche, it can be a disadvantage. Where do you see the biggest advantage from having it?

JONATHAN: For me in particular, it's being very good at thorough analytical systematic thinking and being able to stare at the same thing for hours on end, being very persistent on something. I often say the thing that differentiates a really good red team analyst from an okay red team analyst is your ability to just smash your head against the keyboard over and over and just grind out things that other people would find very hard to grind out, and not get bored of it, and just keep going over and over. Being very good at pattern recognition and pattern analysis is pretty common with autistic people, especially doing systematic analysis and understanding things as systems. I think we tend to be better at it than most people. A lot of people associate it with proficiency in STEM, but some of us aren't good at math or anything like that, but those same traits can be applied in a wide variety of different places. There are definitely some adaptive traits, but those traits are only adaptive within an environment. Once you pull them out of that environment, the trait is not universally adaptive. There are always going to be some traits or some environments in which the traits are maladaptive, and it so happens that most autism traits tend to be maladaptive across most contexts, which is why we call it a disorder. Because in most contexts, these traits cause dysfunction and dysregulation over time.

SPENCER: And I imagine it must be really confusing to people to have Elon Musk and famous physics professors in the same bucket as people who can't get dressed by themselves. That's just a confusing category.

JONATHAN: It is, yeah. So, I don't think we should have the autism spectrum. I think it is confusing to most people. I think we would be better if we split these off into subcategories, or maybe keep autism as a high-level label. When I use this term, people get mad at me, but I think it's a useful metaphor. In cancer, you have stage one melanoma, and then you have stage four lung cancer. These are both cancers, but they're very different. One of these is a death sentence, and one of these is you need minor surgery. I think it's fine to call them both cancer, but we need subcategories within them. We need to sub-differentiate under this broad umbrella and make sort of hard delineations to say, "No, you don't have this version, you have that version." While that isn't always going to be possible, there are always going to be edge cases and sorting problems, as there are with every disorder. I think some sort of harder delineation is going to be necessary, especially as the number of people on the autism spectrum who get diagnosed is increasing, that the necessity for differentiation is also going to be increasing.

SPENCER: I was looking one day, I was curious, what are the most popular TikToks on psychology, and I was just curious about this because I work in psychology, I put out a lot of content on psychology, and one of them was about how ADHD is a superpower. It was a very cleverly made video, very cute, but the gist of it was ADHD is a superpower that gives you all these advantages. I found that really fascinating because there may well be some advantages to having ADHD, but I think in our modern environment there are certainly some big disadvantages. Maybe there's something really powerful and compelling about this narrative that people want to believe that their traits are superpowers.

JONATHAN: This is one of the confusing things because half the people are like autism is a very serious disability, you need to take it seriously, we need accommodation and support, and then the other half are like it's a superpower. What accommodation do you give Superman? If it's a superpower, we shouldn't be labeling it with diagnostic labels like that. This is not the appropriate case for it. If you have a superpower, maybe if you wanted to use the framing, you have a superpower, but that comes with super weaknesses. When I used to do mentoring with autistic teenagers and they wanted to use autism as my superpower, I'd say yes, but keep in mind superheroes all have super weaknesses, and so you need to identify those super weaknesses so you can mitigate them. If you don't, oh boy, are you going to be in for a world of hurt,, or like the many flavors of kryptonite that you will probably have if you have autism. Even though you could have a superpower, you will also have super weaknesses that you need to be very cognizant of. I've done my own scraping of TikTok, and I'm hopefully going to be publishing a paper about this within the next few months. We'll see how long it takes me to get around to it, but I did data scraping of TikTok and other popular social media platforms just about things they said about autism. I extracted the text and built a whole bunch of analyzers and classifiers for the various claims being made, and at least 40-something percent of it was just misinformation. They were just saying things that were wrong, where they said, "Well, you referenced a study that failed replication and was based on a sample size of five people," so maybe this is not the best thing to say.

SPENCER: When I was looking at the data on religion and autism. I literally found a study that had interesting claims, and I looked at it, and it turned out it was 19 people, and I was like, "What, how are you thinking you're gonna conclude anything from this 19-person study?"

JONATHAN: Yeah, that happens a lot, that happens an enormous amount.

SPENCER: What are some other really common false beliefs about autism that are being spread?

JONATHAN: Man, where do I even begin? So it depends which side you want to go for, right? Vaccines don't cause autism, so that's one.

SPENCER: It's really crazy to me how popular that view is. I was talking to a bioethicist, and he's like, "There's literally one thing that we are certain doesn't cause autism: vaccines." Everything else, we can't be totally sure.

JONATHAN: Yeah, vaccines don't cause autism. That's a major one. There are many environmental factors that people think cause autism that don't. There is a lot of misinformation about autism treatments and interventions. At one point, there was an intervention where people would get their kids to drink diluted bleach to kill gut parasites, and it's like, you are going to seriously harm your child doing that. Then, you have misinformation on the complete opposite side, which is misinformation from autistic self-advocates who are like, "Autistic people don't actually struggle with reading social cues," We're actually really good at it," or "Autistic people don't lack empathy; we all have hyper-empathy." It's like, "Well, no, that's not the case." Some of us seem to genuinely lack cognitive empathy because there are a bunch of different types of it.

SPENCER: Yeah, let's talk about the empathy thing, because in my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, autistic people don't have less empathy on average, but maybe they're more likely to miss social cues that suggest an expression of empathy.

JONATHAN: It's sort of complicated when you talk about this. Because when we say empathy, it's like, "Well, what is empathy, and what are we talking about? Typically, within autism research, they split it into affective and cognitive empathy, where affective empathy is your ability to, if someone's feeling sad, you're feeling sad with them. We tend not to struggle with that one as much. I struggle with that one a lot, but we tend not to struggle with that one a lot.

SPENCER: But then there also requires picking up on social cues. You have to notice that a person's sad, and an autistic person might be less likely to notice it, and therefore less likely to express the effect of empathy.

JONATHAN: Yeah, and then there's cognitive empathy, which is your ability to model another person's internal state. Do you know what they are feeling and why they're feeling it? It's often called theory of mind, and this itself is also controversial because, in autistic children, you see these deficits, but when you grow up, you can kind of just learn how to do that analysis yourself. There's nothing preventing you from training yourself to develop cognitive empathy, and so a lot of autistic people end up developing that ability. Some of us still tend to be pretty bad.

SPENCER: Would you say that autistic people tend to develop in a bit more of a System 2 kind of analytical way, rather than an intuitive, just automatic?

JONATHAN: Yep, yep. So it tends to be very systematic, and you have to sit down and think about it for a while, but you can figure it out. There have been a lot of systematic reviews on this. The latest systematic review that I read about, coming out of the University of Montreal in Quebec, found that the meta-analysis of all the studies showed that when you looked at cognitive empathy, specifically, autistic people, the effect was negative when compared to controls. We tend to have less cognitive empathy, but we tend to have only slightly less affective empathy. When you don't take a mono-dimensional empathy measurement, but instead do multi-dimensional empathy measurements, a lot of these differences start to go away. If you use unidimensional analysis versus multi-dimensional analysis, where do these deficits exist? Where do they lie? It's sort of complicated, but if you're specifically looking at cognitive empathy, that one tends to have different effects. The tools used to measure cognitive empathy deficits are not standardized, and there are a bunch of different methods for testing it. Do those methods survive replication? Are all these validated? I'm sure you're well familiar with the replication crisis, and we're very much dealing with the same thing. The claim that we are hyper empathetic, not hypo empathetic, is just like, "Well, I'm sure there are some autistic people who meet that description, but a lot of us genuinely struggle with this specific element of cognitive ability. A lot of people conflate empathy with being a good person, or they conflate empathy with compassion." When people say autistic people lack empathy, others hear autistic people lack compassion, or autistic people are bad people, or something like that, and they push back against the claim. "We're not saying that we're bad people, we're not saying that we're not compassionate, we're saying that we're bad at understanding non-autistic people and what they say." Autistic self-advocates have come up with this model called the double empathy problem, where they say, "Autistic people don't lack empathy because we're very good at reading other autistic people." We're just bad at reading non-autistic people. Non-autistic people are good at reading each other, but they're bad at reading autistic people. This isn't necessarily an autistic empathy deficit. We're just bad at reading people who aren't like us. It's an interesting thought experiment. I don't think the data bear it out very well.

SPENCER: In what way does it not bear that? Because I wouldn't predict that autistic people are better at reading each other than reading non-autistic people.

JONATHAN: So we are better at reading each other, but are we better at reading each other than non-autistic people are at reading us? So the example I use is if a normal person is communicating across 10 different communication channels at once, and an autistic person is only communicating over three of them. Are they going to have better communications with another person who is only communicating on those same three channels than communicating with someone over 10? In this case, both of them having deficits might actually make it easier for them to talk to each other versus talking to someone who's communicating on a bunch of different channels that they can't understand. So in this sense, this still would be a communication deficit. It's just a communication deficit that contextually constructively interferes. One really big problem with double empathy research is they don't do a very good job of defining their terms, and there is a really good paper showing that a lot of conceptualization for the double empathy problem has a lot of derivation analysis issues, where they don't properly define their terms. Then they build a study and say, "Well, see, this validates the double empathy problem," and then you look at the study, and you look at the methodology, and it's like, "Well, you didn't actually measure empathy there." You measured rapport, or you measured people's feelings towards one another. Before they talk to each other, they disclose their autism diagnoses, so there are all these methodological problems with it. I use the double empathy problem as a very interesting sort of high-level abstract idea, in the same way that people will talk about left brain or right brain. Sure, we have two hemispheres, and those hemispheres tend to deal with different things, but a lot of the pop psychology idea of the left brain, right brain is a sort of useful abstraction for quickly explaining things to people. It's not what's actually happening. The double empathy problem is a useful conceptual model for quickly explaining to people that autistic people and non-autistic people tend to have asymmetric social communications, and the burden typically falls on the autistic person and not the non-autistic person. The autistic person has to meet them where they are at, and no one's meeting the autistic person where they're at. Instead, we should be trying to meet in the middle to effectively communicate with each other. On that level, it's a very useful framework; it is a very helpful tool for thinking about autistic communication differences or deficits, but it needs a lot more research to back it up, which is basically where I'm at on it.

SPENCER: One thing I've observed, I'm curious what you think about this is that people often confuse antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy with autism and vice versa. I know a bunch of people who are autistic, and I also know a bunch of people who have antisocial personality disorder, and I just noticed people doing the swap. They're like, "Oh, I think that person's autistic." I was like, "No!"

JONATHAN: It also happens a lot with ADHD. People confuse ADHD and autism, people confuse OCD and autism, people can confuse BPD and autism and anxiety and autism. It's because many people know about autism. So, a lot of people hear autism and think that's the thing I know what that is.

SPENCER: The person did behave the way I expected. Yeah, the handy kind of label to grab.

JONATHAN: And that's the first label they grab, because that's the thing that's in the news, that's the thing that they hear about online, that's the thing with a loud online community saying, "These symptoms are autism," when it's like, "Well, those symptoms are autism, and this, and that, and that, and that, and those symptoms aren't unique to autism?" Those symptoms could belong to 30 different groups. What makes it autism isn't that specific symptom set cluster, it is that symptom set cluster under certain conditions, and nosology discussions and taxonomical discussions aside, the tool that they have in their toolkit is autism, and so that's sort of just the one they reach for, and it happens with a lot of different things where people say, "Oh, this is autism,"" and it's like, "That's not autism."

SPENCER: With any sort of precise, or there's almost this inversion of empathy, where with autistic people, you suggest that they have, as you know, as much or close to as much affective empathy, but less cognitive empathy, and it may be reversed in people with antisocial personality disorder, where they generally have literal or no ability to have affective empathy, but they're trying to cognitively simulate what is going on in someone else's mind, and often they learn well. They at least learn to do that well, so they can kind of function in society. Maybe they're born with some deficit in doing that. I'm not sure.

JONATHAN: I'm not entirely sure. Antisocial personality is far outside of my wheelhouse, but it's an interesting way of thinking about it. I have a friend with antisocial personality disorder, and it's sort of funny how we often seem to mirror each other in opposites in that sense as well.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, the last thing I wanted to ask you about is kind of Silicon Valley culture. What aspects of it do you see as having autism influence, if any?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so we've sort of been talking about the phenomenon where autistic people gather in a critical mass, and in that critical mass, they don't mold well to other people, but other people start naturally mimicking and molding to them. I think that happens in Silicon Valley. I think that, I've been out of that bubble for quite a while, but when I was in it, it was like, "Yeah, there are a lot of elements of autistic thinking that are now being perpetuated by a whole bunch of other people, where it's like I've seen this pattern before, I've seen this pattern in autism, why is it being recapitulated on this greater stage by a whole bunch of these people?" I think the answer is because in these types of environments, autism can be quite adaptive, and people want to take on those adaptive traits. People want to adapt to their environment, and it just so happens that autism happens to be adaptive in some of these environments, so people will start cultivating in themselves these types of traits, and then those traits get associated with high status, like being a 10x engineer, or whatever. I've been described as a 10x engineer, and really I've come to think that what 10x engineer means is autism. When those things become high status and desirable, you have more people who want to mimic the aesthetics of it. There is a sort of social-political lens that also gets dumped on top of it, where you're not just thinking about things in terms of neurodevelopment, you're also thinking about terms of status and perception. Elon Musk, one of the richest, most powerful people in Silicon Valley, is open about having autism, and so clearly this marker gets associated with success. Musk is not the only one; it's a type of person that you find there, and it's a type of person that tends to have qualities and attributes that do well in those sorts of environments. You get all these pressures that push towards incentivizing people with autism to show up to the place, but then also those traits get amplified or turned into high status traits, and so you get these weird scenarios where this type of thing plays out.

SPENCER: What are some of the traits you think are adaptive there that are more common in autistic people?

JONATHAN: Yeah, so abruptness, just saying this is what we're going to do. There's a sort of brashness that comes with autism and is sort of unfiltered. This is how I think things should be, and I'm not going to pay attention to these pre-existing structures. I'm going to break things down, I'm going to innovate. There's a lot of emphasis on not going with a pack and going with the right thing, being disruptive, and that type of thing, but also just hyperfocus, being locked in and cranking out code, and being the 10x engineer is really valorized because it's super productive. It's awesome when you have one of those people on your team because they get a lot done. So it's traits like that, and then the other traits, so the things that get really helpful go in, but then all the other traits come in with them. The sort of rigidity comes in there, like cognitive rigidity, moral rigidity; these things also sort of come alongside and make their way there, even though they're not adaptive, because they come as a package deal with these types of things, not caring about appearance and just showing up wearing whatever you want to wear.

SPENCER: This one's really funny, because I've heard of people in New York going to Silicon Valley, not knowing the norm, and dressing in a suit, which might be appropriate in a New York business meeting, and being disgusted at them, for how could you wear a suit, I'm never gonna invest in you. It's almost this funny thing, because you want to signal that you don't give a shit, or you don't care about social norms, you wear something inappropriate, but then all these people who do know, who are good with social norms, are trying to read, "Well, how inappropriate do I just say, you know, what's the right level of inappropriate? Should I wear sandals to my VC meeting?"

JONATHAN: Yeah, things like that show up a lot, where it's like this is a sort of intentional defiance of social norms, and I am so good that I don't need to be in accordance with any of these things. Another thing that sort of comes up is you often get your 10x engineers, just like they're a massive weirdo, but everyone's like, just leave him alone, he's fine, just let him code, lock him in a room, shove pizza under his door. So then that guy's lack of conformity and his lack of presentation get associated with a high-status trait, and then other people who want to be seen as that high status will start mimicking that behavior, where that behavior had nothing to do with his success, but you want to sort of mimic the aesthetics of that success. A lot of autistic traits, ways of being, again, the abruptness and the lack of social conformity, tend to perpetuate themselves through these systems.

SPENCER: John, thanks so much for coming. Where can people learn more about your work?

JONATHAN: I'm on Twitter @ChristianityOn, I'm on Substack at ChristianityOn, and Dispatches from the Autism Wars is where I put all of my writings. You can find my podcast, Christianity On The Spectrum, wherever you get your podcasts, and you can email me at christianityonthespectrum@gmail.com.

SPENCER: Thanks so much for the conversation.