Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Rand: "Was there some affirmative action going on here?"

Jesus Christ, Rand. "Gun grabbers," English department Marxists, and now affirmative action? You'll be blaming the Sierra Club and positing an Iranian conspiracy before you'd rethink your position on gun control, let alone (gasp) consider that there's no deeper meaning to this horror.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 09:12 AM

As usual, I ask a simple question, and Brian goes off on one of his insane and inane rants.

The question remains--how was he admitted to the university?

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 20, 2007 09:48 AM

The question remains--how was he admitted to the university?

Well, if his major was in English and not one of those mathy majors...

Posted by D Anghelone at April 20, 2007 10:07 AM

Though if he was autistic being placed in the English Department was probably the worst thing for him.

Empathy and creativity aren't necessarily strengths in an autistic individual and one would have to at least conjure these qualitites to come up with any decent creative writing. It appears all he could come up with was a transcript of a violent video game.

Posted by Toast_n_Tea at April 20, 2007 10:28 AM

I dunno. Would he be stalking girls, as he did to the point of getting the police involved, if he was autistic? Seems unlikely. I believe autistics are generally pained by human contact and avoid it. Cho certainly seemed to want human contact and understanding, at least in the sense of being respected and sympathized with.

As for how he got into college: I think we need to draw a line between the kinds of mental disability that disconnect you from reality and the kinds that make you unfit for social living. Cho didn't have the former problem. It doesn't sound like he heard voices or hallucinated, or did things wildly inappropriate to a situation (stripped naked in the laundromat, defecated in class, et cetera). Had he been forced to live alone on a desert island, he probably would have done OK. Had we needed an astronaut to make a one-way trip to Mars to plant the flag and die heroically of oxygen lack afterwards, he might have been the right choice.

His problem clearly lay in social functioning. It seems likely he was unable to "connect" and empathize with people, or get them to empathize with him. But that didn't mean he wasn't capable of intellectual activity. He could clearly write, and write reasonably well. What he wrote wasn't ungrammatical word salad, it was parseable and even compelling. It was just also awful and sadistic, the kind of thing that would repel a reader.

A college generally doesn't measure your ability to get along with people as part of its admissions process. It's not part of the SAT. In principle this kind of thing can become apparent from recommendations, but people are very careful about recommendations these days, given the threat of legal retribution (thanks, lawyers!). It's a rare and courageous individual who might say: yes, this person has decent analytical and functional skills, but their character is awful, and I think you'd be better off giving that place to someone more humane and human.

Posted by Carl Pham at April 20, 2007 11:50 AM

There is a wide range of autistic behavior, Carl.

It seems likely he was unable to "connect" and empathize with people, or get them to empathize with him.

That is a key element of autism.

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 20, 2007 11:57 AM

Rand: "The question remains--how was he admitted to the university?"

My guess is it didn't involve expressing a desire to commit mass murder, if that's what you're wondering.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 12:01 PM

Thanks for the other asinine response, Brian, but I wasn't asking how he didn't get admitted.

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 20, 2007 12:04 PM

I've not watched the coverage, the videos, etc. but I'd guess that the days of the face-to-face college interview have passed.

Posted by philw at April 20, 2007 12:59 PM

Rand, I'm not saying he wasn't autistic. I'm not qualified to do so. I'm just saying he doesn't sound like it to me. I realize not connecting to others is a key element of autism. But it's also a key element of all kinds of nonsocial and antisocial problems. Even Brian has this kind of problem, and he's not nuts at all, or at least not very.

The distinction I think is important -- and I admit up front I'm guessing, this isn't my field -- is that autistics don't want to connect to other people. It hurts. They find other people as abrasive as sand. They can't imagine why anyone would find the experience pleasant. (I assume this is one reason high-functioning autistics, e.g. the Asperger's people, end up in creative but solitary fields, like mathematics.) I think the only reason autistics try to connect is because they see that there are benefits to it, or at least, there are problems when you don't. So they'll try, but they don't really want to. (And I recognize there are various levels of autism, so this statement, even if generally true, can easily be specifically not very true for a given individual.)

In the case of the Murderous Wretch at VT, it sounds like he wanted human contact -- he wanted girls to like him, was hurt by his classmates emotional rejection, had fantasies of revenge because no one liked him or respected him the way he wanted. That doesn't sound autistic. It sounds less like he found human contact a priori painful than that he found some human contact nice, and some not nice, and wanted to increase the nice stuff. That's normal. Where he deviates from normal is in being unable to figure out how to increase the nice stuff.

He's also, of course, abnormal in the sense that when he gets angry at the failure of others to like and respect him enough -- which is normal -- he is unable to control the impulse to put into action his fantasies of revenge.

Posted by Carl Pham at April 20, 2007 01:00 PM

The difference between Autism and Asperger_syndrome was probably little know when the kid was diagnosed at 8 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

In a nutshell many Asperger's folks are (a) less than social (b) able to concentrate on a problem to an intense degree. This leads many of them into computer fields as these are accepted or even assets.

According to the wikipedia article some AS researchers speculate Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton might have some form of Asperger's so you can be pretty freaking highly functioning. I've also seen Bill Gates mentioned but he's not in the article and I have no idea where I read it.

Posted by rjschwarz at April 20, 2007 01:25 PM

"I wasn't asking how he didn't get admitted."

I don't think you're asking anything at all. You're trawling for excuses to attack politically designated targets in lieu of dealing with reality. Whether he was admitted due to good grades, a good essay belying his abominable fiction, affirmative action, or because a Leprechaun granted him a wish is totally irrelevant. You seem determined to learn nothing from this you don't already believe you know, and determined to wield it as effectively as possible for totally unrelated agendas. In short, your response to this is identical to what I hear from you on 9/11, on the Iraq war, on tensions with Iran, and practically everything else with even a speck of emotion involved. Disgusting. Utterly, completely, disgusting.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 01:32 PM

Squidward says: ...practically everything else with even a speck of emotion involved...

Ah ha! So you're saying that college admissions are based on emotion? (ducking)

Posted by Mac at April 20, 2007 02:04 PM

To speak to Cho's social problems, and Rand's questions about how he got admitted:

I have an "Autistic Spectrum Disorder". I was born with Asperger's Syndrome. This, by no means, will exclude people from academic achievement alone. In fact, people with ASDs show a pattern enhanced beyond what males normally do in IQ curves. They have a "double-humped" curve, with more of them smarter, and more them less smart, than average, compared to a normal gaussian distribution.

However, what most normals simply see as "social problems" comes from a neurological developmental difference in people with ASDs. The connections between different parts of the brain, particularly the Thalamic system, processing most emotional inputs, and the cerebral cortex, processing decisions and actions, are diminished. In the extremes of hard-core autism, deeply so.

This leads to social problems, since large amounts of social cuing depend on emotional cues in social interaction. I will often find myself realizing that the emotional context of another person's words at a party were inverted from what I'd assumed, as much as 30 minutes after their words were spoken. Aspies tend to take things quite literally, because we are so *bad* at interpreting the social dance around us, in any timely fashion. Note that Asperger's was only recognized in places like the Diagnostic Standards manual in 1994, IIRC. By 1998, I still had a counselor who had not heard of it.

This means that with the same social desires for friedship and attention and love that others have, people with ASDs face a normal population that is well-practiced in something they can do only by constructing "scripts". When they use these in some limited setting, to achieve some social success, they are often called upon by their peers to dance far beyond the point where their "script" stops. This is where even worse social disaster can appear, since normal peers assume the lack of response is due to hostility, or other nastiness, while the person with an ASD wallows in their social wake, wondering "what do I do now, dammit!"

This is the cause of substantial social problems, some even nearly as bad as Cho's.

As to Cho:

He may well have been admitted on the strength of either IQ or SAT scores. His social skill lacks *should* have attracted the attention of their disability office, which usually hunts for impairments to service. Obviously, if he had an ASD, they did not catch it.

In addition, the k-12 years may have already put Cho in a space where he was suspicious of counselors and others. Many times, such people were not only ignorant of Asperger's, they are looking for a way to change the subject's behavior to standards that subject is neurologically incapable of meeting. The ability of the theraputic community to fantasize about changing individuals is enormous, in my experience.

So, Cho, by college may have wanted English, or he may have wanted something else, and had to change his major to "something easier" to meet counselors "suggestions", and get his class schedule signed off on. If he prized the sort of degree that his elder sister is said to have attained, in a highly technical field, then that would have added to his depression.

We don't yet know all the facts, but I can tell you that navigating the emtional reefs of college is no easy task for any Aspie. If Cho were a stage beyond Asperger's, the difficulties would have been even worse.

Regards,

Tom Billings

Posted by Tom Billings at April 20, 2007 03:10 PM

Tom: "I was born with Asperger's Syndrome."

So was I, albeit milder than most others. Cho, however, clearly appears to have been more along the schizophrenia-spectrum than autism, and it isn't uncommon for children with either severe disorder to be misdiagnosed as having the other. Also, his avoidance of socializing, and failure to develop ways of working around his difficulties, suggests a psychotic disorder like paranoid schizophrenia rather than an ASD. I've never heard of an Aspie with such grandiose, paranoid fantasies as his videos exhibit--he clearly was *not* seeing the people around him as confusingly complex systems the way Aspies tend to, but as a bunch of utterly simplistic, almost binary emotional archetypes as with schizophrenia.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 04:33 PM

Psst - Rand! Please continue to be "disgusting." ;^)

Posted by Jay Manifold at April 20, 2007 04:35 PM

Mac: "So you're saying that college admissions are based on emotion?"

Thirty or so people being murdered is an emotional event.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 04:36 PM

Thirty or so people being murdered is an emotional event.

You mean like every single one of your posts?

The fact that you were diagnosed as "autistic" explains much. We'll grant you the appropriate latitude in your hatred and derangement (as in fact we already have all along).

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 20, 2007 04:46 PM

Rand: "You mean like every single one of your posts?"

If you find the truth emotional, stop investing so much energy cocooning yourself in denial.

Rand: "The fact that you were diagnosed as "autistic" explains much."

Asperger's Syndrome, Rand. Yes, I know, "autism" sounds so much worse, and you perhaps delude yourself that I've "tripped up" and handed you a general-purpose ad hominem, but here's a free lesson in the mind of an Aspie:

I address directly the information content of your words, not you the person, nor you the social entity, nor any other emotionally symbolic abstraction one typically creates. To someone for whom emotional context is the dominant medium of communication, I sound callous, abrupt, contrarian, arrogant, and obtuse to "true meanings" they aren't even aware of assuming I should know without any verbal cue, explicit or implicit.

I am a problem-solver by necessity, an explorer of verbal nuance and shade, of cause and effect, feedback and equilibrium, and quite a lot is obvious to me that barely grazes the psychosocial haze of instincts shrouding your perceptions like a child's blanket. To me, your behavior is patterned like a tessellation, predictable and desolate, and I find the wide gulf between that perception and your own apparent self-regard vaguely grotesque. But, then again, I never really lose sight of the insignificance of these reflections nor of my ability to express them meaningfully, though I do enjoy contrasts for the subtle illumination they bring. (Yawn)

There are lessons in this for anyone who believes in their own potential, or who agrees that a "problem" auspiciously placed can lead to solutions superior to the original state. Challenges remain, of course, but TANSTAAFL.

Rand: "We'll grant you the appropriate latitude in your hatred and derangement (as in fact we already have all along)."

Well now, if you aren't just the kindest feller ever to barricade himself in a Montana cabin, I don't know who is.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 06:50 PM

Can't we all just be nice to each other?

Fifty years from now that might be the only thing that counts.

Posted by Offside at April 20, 2007 08:10 PM

I am a problem-solver by necessity, an explorer of verbal nuance and shade, of cause and effect, feedback and equilibrium, and quite a lot is obvious to me that barely grazes the psychosocial haze of instincts shrouding your perceptions like a child's blanket. To me, your behavior is patterned like a tessellation, predictable and desolate, and I find the wide gulf between that perception and your own apparent self-regard vaguely grotesque. But, then again, I never really lose sight of the insignificance of these reflections nor of my ability to express them meaningfully, though I do enjoy contrasts for the subtle illumination they bring. (Yawn)

Wow. Rand, you really need to start a Pseuds Corner for stuff like this. It's priceless. Though I'm afraid Brian might be the only entrant, week after week.

Posted by Jay Manifold at April 20, 2007 08:22 PM

Can't we all just be nice to each other?

Of course we can. But we don't want to. What's so nice about nice? Why is it something grown men, as opposed to fragile old ladies sipping tea, should prize? I'm much more amused by seeing Leland or Mac (say) slip a verbal rapier between the ribs of Berserker Brian.

Uncivilized of me, I know. Oh well.

Posted by Carl Pham at April 20, 2007 08:24 PM

Carl, Fragile old ladies can be quite bitchy once you get to know them better.

Posted by Offside at April 20, 2007 08:32 PM

Carl: "I'm much more amused by seeing Leland or Mac (say) slip a verbal rapier between the ribs of Berserker Brian."

Let me know when it happens, I'll take a picture for posterity.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 20, 2007 09:02 PM

Oh don't be such a martyr, Brian. You just concentrate on getting your breath back and stanching the blood. Really, it's no trouble for us bystanders to take trophy photos in between the odd gratuitous kick.

Posted by Carl Pham at April 20, 2007 11:13 PM

"You just concentrate on getting your breath back and stanching the blood."

I guess I'm a quick healer.

"Really, it's no trouble for us bystanders to take trophy photos in between the odd gratuitous kick."

Be sure to bring at least 10 friends to keep things fair.

Posted by Brian Swiderski at April 21, 2007 05:02 PM

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