Asperger's Syndrome

[Tim May]

A symptom of our weird, statist, collectivist times is that many who 
excel at math, science, and business are now being increasingly 
characterized as "having Asperger's Syndrome." (Cf. www.google.com for 
hundreds of references.)

In one line, Asperger's Syndrome is said to be a variant of autism, a 
kind of "able to function in society" variant on autism.

Bill Gates is described as having Asperger's. In the past few weeks, we 
hear that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were "probable Asperger's."

Maybe a biochemical or DNA link to a real syndrome, besides brightness, 
will be found, but I suspect that a lot of people with the ability to 
concentrate are characterized as being some kind of second-rate 
Rainmans just because they don't watch "Oprah" and "Survivor" on t.v.

I've never met Bill Gates, though I did meet some of his contemporaries 
(Gary Kildall, Steve Wozniak, and of course all the folks at Intel). He 
seems a little weird at times...but no more so than a lot of the folks 
I meet at Cypherpunks, Hackers, PenSFA, etc.

My tentative conclusion is that calling someone successful a "case of 
Asperger's" is just another form of envy or trash-talking. (Or of the 
popular meme in the past 30 years where child actors are fed lines 
showing their putative precociousness as they psychoanalyze the adults 
around them.)



--Tim May
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can 
only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves 
money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority 
always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the 
Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over 
loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander 
Fraser Tyler