An Outsider's Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We Are

by Camilla Pang

The biology and physical chemistry that most of us have only glimpsed as diagrams in a textbook actually contain personalities, hierarchies and communications structures all of their own – reflecting those we experience in everyday life, and helping to explain them.

Supervised machine learning produces algorithms that can function with great efficiency, and have all sorts of applications, but at heart they are nothing more than very fast sorting and labelling machines that get better the more you use them.

Or we can start from the bottom, working our way upwards through the evidence, navigating through the detail and letting the conclusions emerge organically: the unsupervised approach. Using

This bottom-up approach is the first port of call for people on the autistic spectrum, since we thrive on bringing together precisely curated details to form conclusions – in fact we need to do that, going through all the information and options, before we can even get close to a conclusion.

can feel good to have clearly delineated choices, but that is probably a false comfort.

embracing disorder

Tree thinking

If you don’t delve deeply enough into the data set that surrounds every major decision, allowing yourself to consider the different possibilities and outcomes, and the branches of the tree that different decisions will simultaneously close off and open up, then you are effectively making your choice while blindfolded.

Good decisions don’t generally emerge from an assumption of certainty, but out of the chaos otherwise known as evidence.

feature selection:

Life isn’t linear but branched, and we need our thought patterns to match that reality.

Experiencing a setback of some sort is not sufficient evidence to conclude that everything has failed, or that a system or decision should be abandoned wholesale.

What might sometimes look and feel random usually comes down to the different personalities in a group, the nature of their interactions and the external factors they are responding to. If you’ve understood your proteins, then you’re a lot further on to understanding how the people around you think, act and decide.

And although it’s human nature to want to do everything, it’s better to prioritize the things that are likely to make the biggest difference, and to persuade yourself not to regret the ones you haven’t got enough time or energy for.

Without disorder, you might as well be living as an inanimate object.

By doing this, you map your fear, turning it from an intangible

It’s also unhelpful scientifically because people, like particles, don’t act entirely independently. We are part of a system, a wider environment of tangible and intangible components – from other people to inanimate objects, the climate and social conventions.

I know I am connected to the whole, part of the world’s most powerful and beautiful system, the one that allows us to fulfil our evolutionary purpose as a species: to stay alive.

As an Aspie you have no preconditions or preconceptions when meeting someone: everyone gets seen with totally fresh eyes.

people

would

Their defining feature is not what holds them together, but the

But

it isn’t always possible. Sometimes either the magnitude or frequency of their electronic demand is too great, unsustainable for a healthy friendship. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Humans may be wired to connect, but there is a limit to how much we can offer other people without eroding the strong force that protects our own personality, needs and identity.