On Asperger's Syndrome, Ethics, and Mass Murder

A lot of people will be becoming very afraid of people with Asperger's Syndrome now.  Suddenly "Aspies" are scary people who might kill you.  Well, I've got news for you.

First, most aspies are a lot more like they guys on "The Big Bang Theory" than they are like the Sandy Hook shooter.  I don't use his name because I want those who might follow in hopes of becoming famous, pause.  If we don't speak their names, then at least we deny them that motive and they may choose a less destructive form of suicide.

Most aspies are quiet, introverted, highly focused (some would say obsessive) people with one remarkable interest.  Most have useful, or at least harmless interests.  You will find them most commonly represented among college professors - who else could put up with a decade of Ph.D. studies on a single subject like "vibration in flexible drive shafts?", engineers, and other intensely specialized fields where day-to-day one-on-one personal interaction isn't the main job requirement.

We don't know yet if the shooter's obsession was shooting people, but maybe it was.  I can't say.

What I can say is that I am obsessed with the connections between things: the interactions of forces; the ties that bind us together; and the roads on the map rather than the cities; the grammar more than the words.  That's the second bit of news: I have Asperger's Syndrome.  I am an aspie.  I am a software engineer, and I'm very good at it.

I spent six years in the Marine Corps, where having order maintained rigorously was comforting.  That life was easier than the chaotic civilian life I now lead... even the day I had to draw my pistol on someone carrying a rifle.  I won that exchange without any shots fired, and for that I remain grateful.

I own a few guns, but almost never get to take them out to the range for a little exercise.  I like the discipline, the simplicity, and the immediate results that come with shooting targets.  The sound is good, too: the "pop" of the rifle and the "crack" of the target.  Yet I haven't fired them in years.  Why?  I'm too busy with the things that occupy my attention to make time for it.

What occupies my attention are my job, my family, my post-2008 finances, my insatiable appetite for new information (demon Interweb), and my duty to others.  I mention duty last because it is what underlies all the other interactions.  The connection between me and the rest of my world is duty.  In all things, I seek the solution that works best for the greatest number while doing no harm to any.  Normally, I get the lowest return - often it's negative.

In 2002/2003 I wrote a book on the subject of ethics.  I finished it 3 days before the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry.  I never found anyone who cared about the ethical musings of someone with a "syndrome" and no Ph.D. in ethics or philosophy.  Thanks to my sister, I've finally gotten some editorial review and I'm looking for a publisher again.

I tell you all of this because there are a lot of frightened people because one aspie went bad and you need to know that most of us aren't like that guy.  Most of us care deeply for the rules - far more so, in fact, than "neurotypical" people.  If the rules make sense to us, then we uphold them... sometimes quite inflexibly.  We expect everyone else to play by them, too, and we get very confused when they don't.

I was going to be more careful about revealing my condition until the media circus died down, for my own protection, but duty demands otherwise.  Please don't judge us - or any group of people - by the one very noticeable example.  I can guarantee you that any one very noticeable example is noticeable precisely because it does not fit in.  "One of these things is not like the others," and I do not speak its name.

Market Forces Cannot Regulate Health Care

You will forgive me if I repost something I wrote on another site in January of 2010, but it bears repeating.

One reason that it's impossible for the market to control the cost of health care is simple: there can be no fair market value for the service. That's right, Republicans, THERE CAN NEVER BE A FAIR MARKET VALUE FOR HEALTH CARE.

"That's just not true," say the free marketeers. "Fair market value would be set simply by doing away with any kind of socialized health care (some extremists even include private insurance in this) and making people pay attention to how much they pay for it."

But that's simply not true in this case because of the definition of fair market value: "The price agreed upon by a knowledgeable seller and a knowledgeable buyer when neither is compelled to the sale."

Except for routine checkups, where they buyer is not immediately compelled, you will NEVER have more than one of these three conditions: the knowledgeable seller. In most cases, the buyer is unknowledgeable, very much so relative to the seller, and is compelled to the sale. This means it's not just a seller's market but a robber's market made of unknowledgeable buyers (it takes YEARS of study to catch up) who are compelled to buy from increasingly savvy and well-organized sellers.

On Discovering Boxes

By the time the phrase "thinking outside of the box" came into common usage, I'd been through so many major life changes I couldn't understand the metaphor.  "What box," I thought.  "Why not just think about all the things that are and watch them in action?"  The concept of thinking symbolically was foreign to me since the great majority of my thinking is done by direct visual modeling and then only once the idea is complete is it translated into the symbols we call language.  It's kind of a disadvantage socially, as I just can't keep up in real time.  The advantage, though, is that I see things so differently from most people that when I can get my insights into the conversation it's usually a good thing.

A colleague of mine recently informed another colleague that not only do I not think inside the box, I don't even think inside the warehouse.  Well, what I do for a living consists quite unofficially of wandering around the warehouse looking for boxes and describing those boxes to their inhabitants.  You see, in order to escape from prison you need to know not only that you're in prison, but where the walls are and what they're made of.  Only then can you begin to think about the walls rationally and probe them for weakness.  If you see your prison as "just the way it is," then you're trapped by your own mind far more thoroughly than by the walls themselves.
For me the problem is the reverse, and just as troublesome in many circumstances.  I'm so far out I can't even perceive "the box," so I tend to expect people to be able to move freely also and understand me as I speak... but I've only recently learned how to speak with regard to the baggage of layered meanings that the boxes place upon words.  The box acts as a mistranslator, separating two people with a common language that isn't actually common at all.  The perspective from out here is very helpful, but until we both understand the box we have no common frame of reference.  Sure, some gems get through (both ways) undamaged, but for the most part that's by luck as much as intent.

So we come to A Night In The Warehouse.  In public, things are harder than dealing one-on-one.  It's dark, there aren't any lights, and nearly all the boxes are charcoal gray.  They're all similar, constructed out of symbols made from generations of teachings both good and bad, traditions, and local cultural practices.  They're all different, with bumps and bulges and dents from where their occupants have run into them or they've run into each other.  Some are old-fashioned wood or corrugated paper, some are high-tech carbon fiber, but most are some kind of hodgepodge of materials gathered in expedience.  The boxes overlap and share some space, yet the shared spaces have walls that only affect some.  The people in the boxes can see each other, but they still can't see through all the walls, just as they cannot see the walls themselves.

I can hear my footfalls on the hard floor, and they echo off the boxes.  The echoes are confusing at first, with all the different materials, sizes, shapes, angles and bumps.  The geometry is insanely complex.  It's hard to know what I'm hearing.  What are these things?  From one of the boxes I hear a clear, calm voice: "what's that?"

"It's just me."

"Just who?  Where are you?"

"I'm walking the warehouse floor.  Where are you?"

"What warehouse?  What are you talking about?"

I fumble around in the darkness, following the voice until I strike the box that contains its owner.

"There, I found you."

"I'm in a crowd of people and there's no one new here."

"To me it seems you're alone in a box, in a warehouse full of similar boxes."

"You're crazy."

"No, we're just both partially blind."

"How can that be?"

And so it begins.  For both of us.