Social intelligence stratification as a potential factor in the autism epidemic

High intelligence means you go to college, then the IQ shredder cities, and then don’t have any children. But there’s a nuance in this process I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere: social intelligence is vastly favored. For example, the whole brain drain thing passed me over back in my very early twenties, and I can quite comfortably assert it was for lack of social intelligence. To give you an idea, I went off to the ROTC equivalent of boot camp having never watched a movie about boot camp or read a book about it, and let’s just say it was a culture shock for someone who was expecting a bit of exercise and maybe some training for fighting wars. It was real autism hours up ins. Turns out it’s a lot of standing around and shouting in between making your bed over and over, a very odd experience if you’re expecting something else.

So anyway, that relationship didn’t work out. It serves as an extreme case in what I suspect is a general phenomenon where social intelligence is the most highly preferred sort of intelligence in the modern world, mainly (I suspect) because the punishments for breaking social rules have become so extreme over time. Here’s a quote to reiterate the point, because why not:

The most important and the most highly paid form of intelligence in America is social intelligence, the ability to get along well with other people. Fully 85 percent of your success in life is going to be determined by your social skills, by your ability to interact positively and effectively with others md to get them to cooperate with you in helping you to achieve your goals.

Learning how to develop md maintain superior human relationships can do more for your career and for your personal life than perhaps anything else you can accomplish.

The bad news is that the inability to get along with others is the primary reason for failure, frustration md unhappiness in life and work. According to one study, more than 95 percent of men and women let go from their jobs over a ten-year period were fired because of poor social skills rather than lack of competence or technical ability.

According to psychologist Sydney Jourard, most of your joy in life comes from your happy relationships with other people, and most of your problems in life come from unhappy relationships with them. Most of your problems in life are people problems.

Fortunately, you can become extremely skilled at getting along with others, and in this chapter, you will learn how.

– Brian Tracy, Maximum Achievement

So what happens to the high-IQ autistic weirdos? They don’t get vacuumed into the IQ shredder cities, so they just stay put where they are, like the old days before cognitive stratification. We know they don’t breed directly, generally speaking, but could they be contributing positively to kin selection?

One of the problems with the stratification process is that when cognitive problems come up out in the countryside no one smart enough to fix them is around anymore. In the old days if you had a thousand people in one place and the printer broke you’d have someone around with a one-in-a-thousand IQ who could make the printer go brrrr again. Nowadays that guy goes off to the IQ shredder cities and the country bumpkins just go back to the old ways of writing everything down in crayon, or more realistically just not writing anything down anymore.

But if you have a high-IQ autistic weirdo around, and the problem is serious enough that you can put up with the discomfort of talking to him, then you always have the option of your printer going brrrr again. Now, armed with your beautiful printouts and copies, you can survive and reproduce at higher rates than the other country bumpkin towns with their pathetic flyers traced with crayon on paper held up to their computer screens (disgusting!). Country towns that have a higher rate of autistic genes will produce more autistic children, therefore also produce more high-IQ autistic men, and will therefore have a smart fraction that doesn’t get hoovered up like the other country towns’ socially competent smart fractions do. So you’d expect more autism over time. There’s also a feedback effect where populations that tend higher on the autistic quotient have better relationships with the people with outlier AQ, so they’ll get better bang for their buck.

Please note this is just a factor like it says in the post title, I’m sure other things like overdiagnosis are also factors.