Chess and Medical Conditions

Llama deserved it.

Adults always use being drunk as an excuse.

  So in all your wisdom your logic is that getting him muted from posting,..will get him the help that he needs.?    Did you ever think that the action of reporting an insult could be the trigger mechanism that has us reading about tomorrow's active shooter?  I notice you use the "blame the victim" defense........"llama deserved it".   Does that attitude extend to women who get raped?....blame the victim.?  I'm not trying to start a fight with you, I'm just saying........                                                                                                                 

someone else also got muted... weird

oh it was Ronald

What surprises me is we never had anyone with severe autism be a Super Grandmaster high level player.  A Rainman type of player.  

I have high functioning autism and I’m pretty sure I’m top 10 all time in 1 minute puzzle rush (with a best of 31). The people I knew for sure that are faster than me are ray robson, jimis98, Casper, Tani (still wr holder with 34?), the chess bot, and maybe 1 or 2 more. Puzzle rush has been dead for like a year or so, but feel free to correct me if there are other faster players.

I also believe that I could have gotten much higher than my 2201 uscf rating achieved 2.5 years ago if not for Covid and high school extracurriculars that I had to do to get into college. I was barely studying other than playing bullet online and was frequently playing super accurate games in otb chess.

Is the hidden text a part of how the condition manifests?

Aw, heck, and here I thought it was some kind of secret decoder ring thing...

I have high-functioning autism and am mediocre at best at chess. I've also read up quite a bit on savantism (most autistic people are actually not savants, including myself) and autism (in addition to being autistic I work with autistic kids), and I may have an explanation for why a "Rain Man of Chess" so far hasn't manifested. Most autistic savants have "splinter skills" (e.g. very specific skills in a very specific area), and since chess mastery requires a very broad range of skills and approaches, most autistic savants, especially those with severe autism, probably wouldn't be able to immediately grasp it. To further illustrate this, I've actually known two savants with autism who are "calendar counters", e.g. they can tell you what day of the week it is given any date. This reflects the scope of savant abilities - usually, they are so obscure and relatively minor (still impressive nonetheless) that they probably can't be put to practical use. There are a few exceptions, like Daniel Tammet (a high-functioning autistic savant with mastery of both math and languages), Jacob Barnett (an autistic former child prodigy with an IQ of 180 who was studying college-level physics when he was 8), and Kim Peek, the actual inspiration behind Rain Man (who had extreme intellectual disability in every area except for having one of the most prodigious memories on record, it's debated as to whether he was truly autistic though). These are called "prodigious savants", and they are very, very rare. So hypothetically yes an autistic chess prodigy could happen, but they would probably have to be exposed to chess from an early age Polgar-style. In addition, it would depend on how their brain works. Temple Grandin (also an autistic savant) has a theory on how autistic people's brains are wired. She groups autistic people into "visual thinkers", "math/music/pattern thinkers", "audio thinkers", and "verbal thinkers". I am somewhat of a mix between a pattern thinker and a verbal thinker, so my mind isn't really wired for chess, plus I started way late, which probably partially explains my mediocrity.

People, like batgirl, who choose to type in black have nearly invisible posts to those of us who use the dark theme (like me).

I haven't seen it before now, but I guess people who choose to set their text as white (presumably for the same reason: increasing contrast) are invisible to those with the default theme (light theme).

@slipperyspeedster said he got 36 if I am remembering correctly, which is just inuman. My record is also 31, I'd be surprised if that's top 10 of all time.

And all this time I thought there were all these nutty wise guys who typed in white to mess with everyone or it was some kind of inside gag.

this misunderstands the disbalance of high functioning autism

I've known a few people with autism. None of them were especially good at anything and a few of them were clearly at a disadvantage.

Of course I've heard of savants, but I've never met one. I think that, you know, a character like Rainman is nice for movies, but in real life Kim Peek had an IQ of, like, 80 and needed someone to help him dress and feed himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mcd5P2VM1M

autism isnt just kids screaming due to over-stimulus and the rare savant. You step into your average physics or CS department and the rate of ASD increases substantially. 

I don't know what we're disagreeing about, but ok. Maybe more STEM people are on the spectrum than I realize.

I guess it was my old post that started it... I don't think that people who are especially good at something are automatically especially bad at something.

Terence Tao is (people say) the greatest living mathematician, and he's married and has kids. He's not some brain in a jar (so to speak) who can't tie his shoes or feed himself properly. That sort of thing is fun for movies, but it's not real life.

most high functioning autists can get married and do basic chores , they just struggle with certain aspects of communication. I dont know why you keep reducing ASD to either the fullly handicapped or the "idiot" savants.

Nor do most high functioning  autists need to be above average in certain areas but the data on rates of ASD in certain academic endeavors as significantly higher than the general population is quite clear. E.g if you listen to Professor Grandin, who is herself a high functioning autist, she literally thinks in pictures because of her condition. This is extremely useful in many STEM disciplines including her own.  Other unique brain propensities like Synesthesia are more common in this group as well.

Funny you mention Terence tao, because another contender for that title, Grigori perelman, is known to live off mainly cheese and bread, lives with his mother, sometimes has been seen looking  disheveled  and rejected the 1 million dollar prize for proving  the poincare conjecture on general principles despite others pleading him to take it.  in Fact, Mathematics is a perfect microcosm for the phenomena, most mathematicians are at best mildly eccentric, but it is pretty  clear above average levels of eccentricity is far more common in this group than the general population. A similar distribution happens between ASD and fields like mathematics.

as someone who has many friends on the spectrum and has even dated an aspie (and in all likelyhood, i am on the spectrum as well), i can tell you why these people are not even more common in STEM and other difficult domains despite considerable talent. They are inflexible as hell and to succeed often require very attentive parents with resources and/or a partner that is there to negotiate and stop them from rage quitting when dealing with deviations of plans and unyielding bureaucracies. Hans Asperger's called them "little professors" for a reason, they have a VERY hard time caring for almost little else.  What is a minor inconvenience for most people is halfway to a breakdown for them all too often.

You ask why I'm mischaracterizing ADS but I wasn't talking about ASD specifically, I was speaking more broadly, that people have the tendency to believe someone who is very good at something is equally bad at something. In Tao's case, since he is exceptionally good, for him I pointed out that he doesn't have an exceptionally bad disability to balance it.

Grigori Perelman. I didn't recognize the name but I know the story. Ok, but it seems to me this is more the exception that proves the rule because mathematicians are all the time working with others in their research, including teaching and holding conferences. Is there a higher rate of eccentricity? I'm sure the general public likes to imagine so. First of all "eccentricity" is poorly defined, and I have no data on the average mathematician so I can't say one way or the other.

It's too bad about breaking down easily. It's true that to excel in a field you need more than intelligence. Personal connections (rich parents are useful) and a person's personality play a big role.