No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work.
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Epistemic status: fairly high confidence. Say 80%. These ideas are my own and I wrote this myself, but then polished with AI.
LessWrong and its surrounding ecosystem are magnetic for a very particular kind of mind: logical, system-oriented, verbally and spatially strong, unusually comfortable with abstraction. If you’re reading this and feel unusually seen by that description, you should at least consider the hypothesis that you are autistic.
Not in the pop-culture sense. Not in the “likes trains” sense. In the cognitive-architecture sense.
Why LessWrong specifically?
Superficially, it’s about community norms: truth-seeking, careful examination of evidence, low regard for credentials, explicit reasoning over vibes. Evidence matters. Arguments are supposed to cash out.
But at a deeper level, early LessWrong was a sustained, unusually explicit examination of social patterns — incentives, coordination problems, signalling, status, self-deception, motivated cognition. This is exactly the category of information autistic people are systematically missing by default. And so they are often intensely motivated to learn it explicitly.
For many autistics, LessWrong isn’t just intellectually interesting. It feels like discovering the user manual for a world you’ve been interacting with blindfolded.
This raises a natural question: What does it actually mean to be autistic? And how would you know?
The core difference is not intelligence, empathy, or “social skills” in the naive sense. It is the difference between affective and semantic reasoning.
Definitions (because hand-waving here is disastrous)
Qualia Qualia are the basic units of subjective experience — the irreducible “what it is like” of perception. The redness of red. The bitterness of coffee. They are not definable in terms of anything else. I can tell you that I see a red apple, but I cannot tell you whether my experience of red is the same as yours.
Affect Affect is the qualia of emotion. The felt experience of anger, shame, desire, pride, fear, envy, joy. Not the label — the sensation.
Affective reasoning Decision-making driven primarily by affect. I act because it feels good, or because it relieves discomfort, or because it feels right. This is not necessarily stupid or irrational; it is simply optimized for a different domain.
Semantic reasoning Decision-making driven by explicit models, logic, evidence, and type-2 cognition. This is how you get technically correct answers to scientific or systematic questions. It is largely orthogonal to popularity, consensus, or social reward.
Two ways of orienting to the world
The largest cognitive difference between autistic and allistic (non-autistic) people is not intelligence or morality — it is which of these two reasoning modes is primary.
Allistics rely heavily on affective reasoning. Their emotions guide their decisions, their speech, their timing, their social positioning. This mode is optimized for operating inside a social environment: coalition-building, norm-tracking, status negotiation. Most allistics still have access to semantic reasoning — many are excellent scientists, engineers, and thinkers — but it is not their default compass.
Autistics primarily rely on semantic reasoning. If affective signals are present at all, they tend to be discounted, mistrusted, or overridden. This cognitive style is extremely powerful for understanding systems: engineering, programming, mathematics, strategy, abstract theory. It is catastrophically bad at navigating human social environments without explicit compensation.
This difference alone explains a remarkable amount of observed behavior.
Why autism doesn’t disappear
Autism appears to be evolutionarily stable at around 1–2% of the population. Push it much higher and large-scale coalition behavior breaks down; push it much lower and societies lose their system-builders and error-correctors.
It is better, evolutionarily, to be part of a large coalition that is wrong than a small coalition that is technically correct.
Autism is highly heritable, but not via a single gene. It seems to be composed of many partially independent traits. Inherit a few and you get useful analytical advantages. Inherit too many and the brain undergoes a developmental phase change — you get a qualitatively different cognitive architecture.
Even if autistic people did not reproduce at all, autism would continue to re-emerge as a latent possibility in any population with enough of the contributing traits present.
If affective reasoning is “irrational,” why does it persist?
From a purely semantic perspective, affect-driven behavior often looks insane. Inconsistent beliefs. Motivated cognition. Obvious self-deception. Groupthink. Moral contortions.
So why hasn’t evolution stamped it out?
The answer is vibes — and the extraordinary coordination power they provide.
Vibes, properly defined
A vibe is the subconscious broadcast of affect through the body.
If you are anxious, threatened, ashamed, dominant, relaxed, joyful — this leaks automatically into posture, facial expression, muscle tension, movement speed, vocal cadence, micro-expressions. You do not need to intend to signal. The signal is continuous and involuntary.
Neurotypicals are exquisitely sensitive to this channel.
They do not consciously parse it. They simply feel it.
Interoception and alexithymia
Interoception is body perception — the ability to feel internal bodily states. For most people, emotions are embodied experiences: anxiety is a hollow stomach; righteous anger is pressure in the chest; shame is a sinking, contracting sensation.
Alexithymia — literally “without words for emotions” — is the reduced ability to map these bodily sensations onto emotional labels. Many autistic people experience bodily sensations without automatically identifying them as emotions. The stomach sinks — but it’s just a sensation. The chest tightens — but it isn’t named.
This matters enormously.
How affective coordination actually works
Imagine two neurotypicals meeting: Alice and Bob.
Bob is sad. That sadness is his affect. He broadcasts it unconsciously through his vibe — slower movements, lowered posture, reduced energy.
Alice perceives this subconsciously. Her mirror-neuron systems automatically reflect Bob’s body language. She begins to feel the same bodily sensations associated with sadness: a lump in the throat, a heaviness in the chest.
Without conscious effort, Alice and Bob’s emotional states partially synchronize.
This is empathy — not as a moral virtue, but as a mechanism.
Because of this mechanism, neurotypicals can “read the room” effortlessly. Their subjective feelings are surprisingly accurate instruments for measuring social reality. Doing what feels right usually is socially correct, because their feelings are already tracking the group state.
Most of social life, for them, is smooth, rewarding, and largely subconscious.
Memory is where the divergence deepens
This brings us to a crucial difference in memory formation.
Episodic memory is memory of events unfolding over time — conversations, interactions, scenes. These memories are typically tagged with affect. The emotional state you were in helps index and retrieve the memory later.
Neurotypicals accumulate a vast library of emotionally tagged social episodes. Over time, this becomes an implicit model of social reality: what works, what doesn’t, who is safe, who is threatening. They rarely need to articulate this model because they feel it.
Autistics, by contrast, tend to form semantic memories instead: decontextualized facts, rules, patterns, abstractions. Social interactions are not naturally tagged with affect, so they are not automatically compressed into usable heuristics.
Instead, the autistic person often does something far stranger: they attempt to reverse-engineer society explicitly.
They ask questions like:
What are people optimizing for?
What does this behavior signal?
What incentive structure would produce this outcome?
Why did that interaction fail even though the literal content was correct?
This is not because autistics are incapable of empathy or morality. It is because the default affective compression layer is missing or unreliable.
Why this creates mutual incomprehension
From the autistic perspective, allistic behavior often looks dishonest, inconsistent, or irrational.
From the allistic perspective, autistic behavior looks cold, arrogant, inappropriate, or socially blind.
Both sides are partially correct.
They are running different cognitive operating systems, optimized for different problems, trying to coexist in the same environment.
LessWrong — at its best — functioned as a rare translation layer. A place where social dynamics were dragged out of the affective fog and made explicit, inspectable, and discussable.
For autistic minds, that feels like oxygen.
Closing thought
If you are autistic, the world will often feel confusing, hostile, or absurd — not because people are evil or stupid, but because you are missing an entire abstraction layer that most others take for granted.
And if you are not autistic, autistic people may feel uncanny or difficult — not because they lack empathy, but because they are reasoning in a different currency.
Understanding this difference does not magically fix the mismatch.
But it does dissolve a great deal of unnecessary shame, as well as point helpfully in the direction of other resources which could help you navigate your life.
Epistemic status: fairly high confidence. Say 80%. These ideas are my own and I wrote this myself, but then polished with AI.
LessWrong and its surrounding ecosystem are magnetic for a very particular kind of mind: logical, system-oriented, verbally and spatially strong, unusually comfortable with abstraction. If you’re reading this and feel unusually seen by that description, you should at least consider the hypothesis that you are autistic.
Not in the pop-culture sense. Not in the “likes trains” sense. In the cognitive-architecture sense.
Why LessWrong specifically?
Superficially, it’s about community norms: truth-seeking, careful examination of evidence, low regard for credentials, explicit reasoning over vibes. Evidence matters. Arguments are supposed to cash out.
But at a deeper level, early LessWrong was a sustained, unusually explicit examination of social patterns — incentives, coordination problems, signalling, status, self-deception, motivated cognition. This is exactly the category of information autistic people are systematically missing by default. And so they are often intensely motivated to learn it explicitly.
For many autistics, LessWrong isn’t just intellectually interesting. It feels like discovering the user manual for a world you’ve been interacting with blindfolded.
This raises a natural question:
What does it actually mean to be autistic? And how would you know?
The core difference is not intelligence, empathy, or “social skills” in the naive sense. It is the difference between affective and semantic reasoning.
Definitions (because hand-waving here is disastrous)
Qualia
Qualia are the basic units of subjective experience — the irreducible “what it is like” of perception. The redness of red. The bitterness of coffee. They are not definable in terms of anything else. I can tell you that I see a red apple, but I cannot tell you whether my experience of red is the same as yours.
Affect
Affect is the qualia of emotion. The felt experience of anger, shame, desire, pride, fear, envy, joy. Not the label — the sensation.
Affective reasoning
Decision-making driven primarily by affect. I act because it feels good, or because it relieves discomfort, or because it feels right. This is not necessarily stupid or irrational; it is simply optimized for a different domain.
Semantic reasoning
Decision-making driven by explicit models, logic, evidence, and type-2 cognition. This is how you get technically correct answers to scientific or systematic questions. It is largely orthogonal to popularity, consensus, or social reward.
Two ways of orienting to the world
The largest cognitive difference between autistic and allistic (non-autistic) people is not intelligence or morality — it is which of these two reasoning modes is primary.
Allistics rely heavily on affective reasoning. Their emotions guide their decisions, their speech, their timing, their social positioning. This mode is optimized for operating inside a social environment: coalition-building, norm-tracking, status negotiation. Most allistics still have access to semantic reasoning — many are excellent scientists, engineers, and thinkers — but it is not their default compass.
Autistics primarily rely on semantic reasoning. If affective signals are present at all, they tend to be discounted, mistrusted, or overridden. This cognitive style is extremely powerful for understanding systems: engineering, programming, mathematics, strategy, abstract theory. It is catastrophically bad at navigating human social environments without explicit compensation.
This difference alone explains a remarkable amount of observed behavior.
Why autism doesn’t disappear
Autism appears to be evolutionarily stable at around 1–2% of the population. Push it much higher and large-scale coalition behavior breaks down; push it much lower and societies lose their system-builders and error-correctors.
It is better, evolutionarily, to be part of a large coalition that is wrong than a small coalition that is technically correct.
Autism is highly heritable, but not via a single gene. It seems to be composed of many partially independent traits. Inherit a few and you get useful analytical advantages. Inherit too many and the brain undergoes a developmental phase change — you get a qualitatively different cognitive architecture.
Even if autistic people did not reproduce at all, autism would continue to re-emerge as a latent possibility in any population with enough of the contributing traits present.
If affective reasoning is “irrational,” why does it persist?
From a purely semantic perspective, affect-driven behavior often looks insane. Inconsistent beliefs. Motivated cognition. Obvious self-deception. Groupthink. Moral contortions.
So why hasn’t evolution stamped it out?
The answer is vibes — and the extraordinary coordination power they provide.
Vibes, properly defined
A vibe is the subconscious broadcast of affect through the body.
If you are anxious, threatened, ashamed, dominant, relaxed, joyful — this leaks automatically into posture, facial expression, muscle tension, movement speed, vocal cadence, micro-expressions. You do not need to intend to signal. The signal is continuous and involuntary.
Neurotypicals are exquisitely sensitive to this channel.
They do not consciously parse it. They simply feel it.
Interoception and alexithymia
Interoception is body perception — the ability to feel internal bodily states. For most people, emotions are embodied experiences: anxiety is a hollow stomach; righteous anger is pressure in the chest; shame is a sinking, contracting sensation.
Alexithymia — literally “without words for emotions” — is the reduced ability to map these bodily sensations onto emotional labels. Many autistic people experience bodily sensations without automatically identifying them as emotions. The stomach sinks — but it’s just a sensation. The chest tightens — but it isn’t named.
This matters enormously.
How affective coordination actually works
Imagine two neurotypicals meeting: Alice and Bob.
Bob is sad. That sadness is his affect. He broadcasts it unconsciously through his vibe — slower movements, lowered posture, reduced energy.
Alice perceives this subconsciously. Her mirror-neuron systems automatically reflect Bob’s body language. She begins to feel the same bodily sensations associated with sadness: a lump in the throat, a heaviness in the chest.
Without conscious effort, Alice and Bob’s emotional states partially synchronize.
This is empathy — not as a moral virtue, but as a mechanism.
Because of this mechanism, neurotypicals can “read the room” effortlessly. Their subjective feelings are surprisingly accurate instruments for measuring social reality. Doing what feels right usually is socially correct, because their feelings are already tracking the group state.
Most of social life, for them, is smooth, rewarding, and largely subconscious.
Memory is where the divergence deepens
This brings us to a crucial difference in memory formation.
Episodic memory is memory of events unfolding over time — conversations, interactions, scenes. These memories are typically tagged with affect. The emotional state you were in helps index and retrieve the memory later.
Neurotypicals accumulate a vast library of emotionally tagged social episodes. Over time, this becomes an implicit model of social reality: what works, what doesn’t, who is safe, who is threatening. They rarely need to articulate this model because they feel it.
Autistics, by contrast, tend to form semantic memories instead: decontextualized facts, rules, patterns, abstractions. Social interactions are not naturally tagged with affect, so they are not automatically compressed into usable heuristics.
Instead, the autistic person often does something far stranger: they attempt to reverse-engineer society explicitly.
They ask questions like:
This is not because autistics are incapable of empathy or morality. It is because the default affective compression layer is missing or unreliable.
Why this creates mutual incomprehension
From the autistic perspective, allistic behavior often looks dishonest, inconsistent, or irrational.
From the allistic perspective, autistic behavior looks cold, arrogant, inappropriate, or socially blind.
Both sides are partially correct.
They are running different cognitive operating systems, optimized for different problems, trying to coexist in the same environment.
LessWrong — at its best — functioned as a rare translation layer. A place where social dynamics were dragged out of the affective fog and made explicit, inspectable, and discussable.
For autistic minds, that feels like oxygen.
Closing thought
If you are autistic, the world will often feel confusing, hostile, or absurd — not because people are evil or stupid, but because you are missing an entire abstraction layer that most others take for granted.
And if you are not autistic, autistic people may feel uncanny or difficult — not because they lack empathy, but because they are reasoning in a different currency.
Understanding this difference does not magically fix the mismatch.
But it does dissolve a great deal of unnecessary shame, as well as point helpfully in the direction of other resources which could help you navigate your life.