Fake Asperger's guys?

The other day I wrote a Bloomberg View post about women in econ. Frances Woolley had some good criticisms of my piece. But others thought I was focusing on attacking Robin Hanson, a quote of whose I used to illustrate the fact that stuff considered "sexist" in other disciplines is considered "normal" in economics. Actually, I just used Hanson's quote for illustrative purposes - the meat of the article, if you will, was about the research by some economists who claim that women suffer more promotion and salary discrimination in econ than in the sciences. Hanson wasn't really the point, though I personally did think his quote was offensive.

But anyway, some right-wing types on Twitter thought it was all about me trying to sic a mob of SJWs ("social justice warriors", i.e. left-wing types) on Hanson. Steve Sailer jumped in to defend Hanson and all "Aspergery nerds":

Professor Hanson is a very nice, very innocent, very eccentric man who tries to come up with counterintuitive thought experiments (most of which aren’t very useful thoughts, but he means well)...It’s striking how it’s turning into Open Season on Aspergery nerds. Various Dilberts are being targeted as the Gender Enemy Oppressing Four Billion Women. Why? Because they are socially maladroit.

And righty pundit Randall Parker pursued the Aspergery Nerd Defense Crusade on Twitter.

This is something I'm hearing more and more often these days: right-wingers, at least the smart ones, are just people with Asperger;s, whose condition prevents them from being socially sensitive enough to feel the vibes of political correctness. In fact, I don't see any lefty types humble-bragging about their position autism spectrum. This makes me suspicious (and not just because Asperger's was removed from the DSM).

It occurs to me that it's not that hard to fake Asperger's. After all, most "neurotypicals" don't really know exactly what true Aspergerians are like. So just talk about nerdy stuff, get a blank stare on your face every once in a while, intentionally ignore social cues, etc. It'll take a little effort at first, but eventually it'll be second nature. And it'll be fun - if you meet a girl who you know is too pretty to sleep with you, instead of bowing and scraping ineffectually before her majesty and beauty, you can say un-PC stuff that sends her into spasms of ineffectual rage! Wheeeee!! 

Fake Asperger's seems like it could also be a signal of high intelligence, but I'm not sure whether it's a real or a false one. On one hand, social ineptness is a costly signal. If you choose to pay the social cost to become a Fake Asperger's Guy, you prove that you are confident in your ability to make it in this world on intellect alone. (An economist once told me this was called "countersignaling," but actually I think this is just normal signaling.)

But on the other hand, it could also be a false signal. We associate the autism spectrum with high quantitative and technical intelligence, so Fake Asperger's might be a way to spoof society's expectations and pretend to be smarter than you are by exploiting the Representativeness Heuristic. If so, expect the Fake Asperger's Party to run out of steam once folks catch on to the trick.

In any case, if we restrain ourselves from giving social censure to people who are perceived as "Aspergery nerds," doesn't that just incentivize the adoption of Fake Asperger's?

Generally, the possibility of a trend of Fake Asperger's Guys is sort of darkly, gently hilarious, but one thing about it annoys me. Real Asperger's guys are going to get a bad name from this. Real Asperger's guys are usually not right-wing types who brashly declare their disdain for social cues by talking about rape around girls. Most of them are kind, good-hearted people who occasionally say offensive or hurtful things simply by accident, and are very very slow to realize it - but when they eventually do realize (or are informed by friends), they are generally remorseful and distressed. They are people with a real, if minor, disorder, who almost all wish they didn't have the limitations they have. They're basically like Lawrence Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon (though Neal Stephenson took a bit of artistic license).

I wouldn't like to see those real Asperger's people given a bad name by swaggering right-wing jerks who decided Fake Asperger's was a fun and profitable way to shuck the pressures of PC.


Update: As usual, SMBC got there first. Hat tip to Adam in the comments.

Update 2: Legendary troll douchebag Chuck Johnson apparently refers to himself as a "neuroatypical".

Update 3: A thought occurs to me: Maybe fake Asperger's guys are just non-fake sociopaths. Real Asperger's basically means not being able to perceive other people's emotions, while real sociopathy basically means not feeling any emotions of your own when you do bad things to other people...