Are people with autism borderline sociopaths?

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If by "useful and legitimate information" you mean distortion, spin, arbitrary rationalization, etc. then, yes, I agree.

i haven't seen you providing any scholarly information that opposes her points. you attack her personally instead of attacking her arguments, and i think that could speak volumes as to what you are really trying to accomplish. if you would also like to be taken seriously, i would suggest that you approach the debate intellectually instead of trying to undermine her character.

Mostly, I let the record speak for itself.

As far as it goes, though, my days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.

Ha! Yes.

Let me see if I can help you out...

Lets say you're on your way home from work and your car breaks down. You call the nearest towing service and have your car towed to the nearest dealership mechanic. You then have to call for a family member to come pick you up and drive you home. This makes your family member late for his scheduled doctors appointment.

Was your riding home with this family member intentional?

My brain can see paying the extra dollar for the cup the same way, as an unplanned and unfortunate necessity en-route to an unchanged original goal.

It seems like what's going on is my brain can interpret "intentional" as have two separate, but possibly overlapping, meanings.

1.) Something is intentional if it conforms to a preconceived plan or scheme.
2.) Something is intentional if it is done willfully.

It seems like in the free cup story the NT brain can only interpret the question in the context of meaning 2. When I read the question I felt slightly confused by it. My immediate reaction was "what's the point of this question, is the author trying to trick me somehow?". After the first story my mind jumped to the thought "Was there ever some kind of scheme to obtain the free cup? .... Of course not! ... It was entirely incidental." After reading the second story my mind was already thinking in a parallel manner "Was there ever some kind of scheme to pay an extra dollar? ... Of course not! ... Who in their right mind would want to pay more for something? ... He obviously didn't know ahead of time that the vendor had raised the price."

So obviously in interpreting the question I was drawn to meaning 1 rather than meaning 2 in the first story. In the first story 1 and 2 give the same answer - unintentional. Obtaining the free cup was neither willful nor planned. However the second story has a different answer depending on the precise meaning of "intentional". Paying the extra dollar was willful but it wasn't planned.

The reason why we interpret the question differently still baffles me a bit.

+1

I couldn't let it go. I think whatever the solution is will be an important crowbar into human perception.

One thing I noticed is definition 1 is completely unambiguous. You either planned something or you didn't.

The question of willful intent OTOH is very murky. In a lot cases there is clearly an attached moralizing tendency. There is a clear bias towards saying an act is intentional when the outcome is harmful vs when the outcome is neutral or positive, even when the level of knowledge is the same in all three cases. There was a paper demonstrating this posted in another thread. Don't have the energy to dig it back up at the moment though. It clearly shows that the notion of willful intent is in part a social construct with a strong connection with the need to assign moral responsibility to certain actions.

I've read the other papers, by Knobe and those people. There was an inconsistency they were struggling to deal with, which I think got fixed if you saw ToM as just another value system.

Actually I'll start a new thread.

Last edited by fraac on 24 Nov 2011, 2:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Meh. I'll never be able to do "witty banter" properly for most groups. If I'm really open about it my sense of humor is either extremely dark/cutting/sarcastic or it's off-the-wall silliness that nobody else gets. I can't be so fake as to tell jokes that might be funny to others and pretend to laugh with them when in reality I don't find them funny at all. I suppose some jokes don't have to be funny or break people into laughter. A lot of times the attempted humor only serves as a tool to keep a conversation from getting too heavy or awkward. I understand the purpose but I still feel fake doing it and it drains on me. I find the masks annoying at times when I can't break through. A lot of people easily rub off on me as jerkily flippant and emotionally evasive/dismissive when I'm not in the best mood.

If I really wanted to be evil and manipulate people I would be more of the propaganda artist or demagogue.

Please refrain from insulting cats.

i get soooooo confused by this. as far as i can tell, he INTENDS to get the biggest drink possible, price and freebies notwithstanding. i based my conclusion on the information provided... the author tells us Joe's intention in the statement "Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available".

can someone please explain to me how they came to any other conclusion?

You can 'intend' to do everything you actually do. That's why it's an odd way to see it, if you ask me. By that definition of intent, how do you unintentionally do things that aren't by accident? It would be impossible so the question has no meaning. The only version of the question that admits both possible answers is where intent = plan. Autistic ToM looks into the mind of the storyteller, not the characters in the story. (Another reason Jesus was autistic, btw.)

ok, i think i am halfway to understand this, thank you.

so if i accept that he intended to pay an extra dollar (because he actually did it), why wouldn't i also accept that he intended to accept a commemorative cup (because he actually did it)?

Perhaps it is because the decision to receive the fancy cup or not was out of his control (decided by the service worker), whereas the decision to pay the extra dollar was withing his control (could have left and gone to different store.) Really, though, he could've refuse the fancy cup and gone somewhere else as well, so accepting the fancy cup had to be intentional as well.

??

The cup was incidental. The extra dollar was instrumental in obtaining the smoothie. Or that's how Machery and Knobe explain that. Good point though, I never thought about where we answered the same but maybe for different reasons.