People with HFA are fairly self absorbed

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Interesting thought.

All that I seem to care about, are myself, and The Kinks.

Most people on the spectrum don't hold people as their highest priority as NTs are so fond of doing.

My main priorities are my obsessions and money.

Very insightful, Mathgirl. I agree almost completely, I look back at my own words and when i talked about fact/data etc as the topic of discussion, I guess I overemphasized that part of it. Theory of consciousness is a favourite topic of mine as well, though i'm only just starting to get into much reading about it. I don't think i was trying to say facts and only facts... but I meant more that most of us don't really wanna talk about the weather... I can look outside myself, so I don't need to discuss it. I don't care about the local gossip about who's sleeping with whom... I don't know.. And it's not my business... It's the real things that I would rather discuss... I think i look at it another way too.. it's the larger, broader things i want to discuss too. I don't care about issues that affect just one person, or one small clique of people, unless it's me.. and then if it's just me it affects, I'm not always that interested in talking about it anyways.

I seek to understand the world, primarily because I don't fit in... I don't want to waste my time learning about individual members until such time as I can understand the way it works as a whole... I need to see the whole before i can understand the specifics... Society however is a very tough nut to crack that way... but unfortunately that's the only way my brain works.
Seeing the details before the understanding of the whole comes together, tends to confuse me more, because when you look at the details, you often see the outliers, the ones that give you a biased view of the whole system. Society is also a system where there is a larger standard of error, talking in statistic-ese. That is, that there are a lot of people far from the norm.. so much so that it is often difficult to determine the norm. Looking at the individual people doesn't help form opinions of the norm, because it's so variant.

Science and math aren't like that... Maybe deep down i want society to be like math, so that i can understand it.

In my case it's more lack of conversational skills than self-absorption. If I were self-absorbed I would not read other people's posts.

I've always been called self centered and if the shoe fits I'll wear it. I simply don't like people as a species and I'm too involved in my special intrests to even bother to attempt to make friends. My best friend thinks it's so cool how I can be so absorbed in meerkats and animals and she has never made fun of me for it. She thinks I am some kind of genius and my obsessions are a good thing. People who don't share her mindset can go jump in a lake. I don't care what other people think.

I vaguely recall that when reading all those info books about AS and ASD (just after diagnosis) being self-absorbed was considered a key characteristic of people on the spectrum. it's not like we're trying to be. we just all have our own little worlds, with our special interests at the center.

I don't find average "normal" people very interesting and I cant relate to them. I guess this makes me extremely self-absorbed.

"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt

I love this quote. Was Elwanor Roosevelt autistc?

How about people with HFA/AS who have people or psychology as a special interest? Are they self-absorbed?

"when i start talking about facts, and Mr. NT starts giving an emotional overview of it, and how it makes him "feel" (bleh!) we react by trying to take it back to what we know..."
This I find fascinating because, as a Myers-Briggs F type with strong emotional reactions to things, emotions, thoughts and motivations just seem like a part of objective reality for me, like any of the facts you guys would talk about. (Of course, even though thinking in terms of emotions and motivations is automatic for me, I'm not necessarily correct about WHICH ones are involved in a given situation. Socially astute I am not).

However, I've noticed that I approach feelings and motivations from a more analytical perspective than most NTs, and ask a lot more questions. NTs seem to really like to complain about some obnoxious thing someone did to them. The goal is to emote and be listened to and get sympathy, which makes them feel better. I understand what they're looking for, and I've wanted to just be listened to myself. But it bothers me that they don't ever ask why the other person did that obnoxious thing and try to look at it from their perspective...maybe because asking those sorts of questions is automatic for me, as part of my special interest in people. So when my NT friends complain to me, they sometimes get annoyed because I ask lots of questions about the people they're complaining about & why they would do such a thing. My NT friends want to get back to their self-absorbed emoting, which I've inconsiderately interrupted.

Is this way of thinking something you can relate to, or does it sound alien? I'm still trying to understand, socially, where my strengths and weaknesses are, and comparing my experiences with other people's can help with that.