I’ve recently read this paper by Bryan Caplan, which argues that many neurodivergences can be understood, from a microeconomic standpoint, as very unusual sets of preferences.
I think Caplan does seriously overstate his case. In particular, his argument for why delusions should be viewed as extreme preferences fails. There is no reason to believe that people with fixed false beliefs should not be responsive to incentives. I have a fixed true belief that two plus two is four, but if I were involuntarily imprisoned and drugged unless I said that two plus two is five, I would certainly do so. That doesn’t mean that I “really” believe that two plus two is five, or that my belief in basic addition is any less fixed. In addition, the fact that some people can reason their way out of delusions does not make their impairment any less real. It is possible to believe things on one level but not another. Most people discard the hypothesis “all my friends are secretly conspiring to hurt me” without even thinking about it; having to carefully gather the pros and cons of that belief and laboriously work out whether it’s true is, in fact, believing “all my friends are secretly conspiring to hurt me” far more than is warranted.
Similarly, his “gun to the head test” for telling apart impairments and preferences does not make very much sense. If you put a gun to the head of someone with a migraine and said “dance or I’ll kill you,” most people with migraines would manage to dance. But it would be very strange to think that migraines are actually the desire to lie under a blanket with a bottle of painkillers and moan “owwwwwwww”. Being able to overcome one’s constraints if one’s life is at stake is not the same thing as not having constraints.
However, I think it’s interesting to think about how many neurodivergences are actually unusual preferences.
Some neurodivergences are just odd preference sets. Transness, for instance, is the unusual preference to be a different gender than the one you were assigned at birth. Bodily identity integrity disorder is the unusual preference to have one of your limbs removed. Paraphilias (which are still in the DSM!) are unusual sexual preferences.
Some neurodivergences seem to be pure impairment. Caplan’s protests aside, delusions seem to be clearly in this territory. Similarly, depression is perhaps the most crippling impairment that exists; other impairments are bad when they make it harder to be happy, but depression is literally an impairment in one’s ability to feel happiness.
On the other hand, a lot of neurodivergences seem to be a combination of impairment and unusual preferences. Consider autism. An autistic person has certain impairments: for instance, they may lose the ability to speak under stress, or not be able to tell people’s emotions from their faces. An autistic person also has unusual preferences: they might only want to eat certain foods, or like flapping their hands when they’re happy, or collect lots of information about a special interest, or play by lining their cars up in a row.
Similarly, borderline personality disorder comes with certain impairments: for instance, I do not have an instinctive understanding that when people leave the house they continue to exist, and I’ve been known to have fixed false beliefs (although more “cognitive distortions” than “delusions”). BPD has less unusual preferences and more unusual strength of preferences: as best I can figure out, I’m some sort of mild utility monster who gets much, much happier from some stimuli and much, much sadder from others.
Probably most of you have figured out by this point that yesterday’s post was not entirely motivated by abstract concern about tiling the universe with things. Basically: many solutions to the tiling problem– average utilitarianism aside– make eliminating unusual preferences at least morally problematic. On the other hand, I think this lines up pretty well with my intuitions about eugenics: eliminating BPD and autism– much less paraphilias and transness– seems to be wrong in a way that eliminating depression or delusions does not. So that is useful.
Thing of Things 
Maybe this is silly of me, but I’m not sure I ever would’ve linked this issue to the orthogonality thesis before. Even though it makes a lot of sense to do so.
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huh. So hypothetically, if transness were caused by a single gene, and that gene didn’t cause anything else except transness, and there was a perfectly safe way for parents to cause their children not to have that gene, would you be against using it?
It seems like being born places a burden on a child in a way that being born gay or autistic does not, in that even if everyone else is super nice and accepting, a trans person is still internally unhappy with their own body.
Would it make a difference if the gene therapy changed the physical phenotype rather than the mental one? That is, instead of being born a trans woman, the child would be born an ordinary woman?
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oops! that’s “being born *trans* places”
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Compare: ~100% of alloromantic people will experience heartbreak at some point in their lives, most of them multiple times. Even if everyone is nice and accepting, alloromantic people will experience this pain. Is it right to make everyone aromantic?
Also, autistic preferences can be difficult to satisfy as well: even if everyone is nice and accepting, the world is going to continue to contain sirens. And I’m sure a lot of gay people don’t appreciate how often they get crushes on heterosexuals.
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I don’t understand the analogy. Alloromantic people experience heartbreak but also experience romance, and most such people probably think the tradeoff is worthwhile. What do trans people get that compensates their dysphoria? There must be something fundamental I don’t understand (which wouldn’t be surprising because I’m cis), but isn’t binary transness more or less equivalent to the desire to become a cis person of the opposite sex?
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Some trans people experience ‘gender euphoria.’
But you’re right, it’s a weakness in the hypothetical. Change it to “ugly alloromantics”. 🙂
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Hmm, I think that if I was in a situation in which I was destined to forever experience only heartbreaks and no actual romance I would prefer to become aromantic.
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I’m not sure I agree; removing a value from your personal utility function because it’s unlikely to be satisfied seems like it’s a pretty good road to wireheading to me.
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Is gender euphoria not just starting lower on the hedonic treadmill and thus having further to climb?
Should we paralyse children so they can be happy to gain the use of their legs when they grow up?
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@Lambert — But how do you know that gender bliss is not actually way better than not having gender bliss? Which is to say, what if it’s actually better to be trans, modulo all the bigotry?
“OMG that cannot possibly be true cuz {reasons}…”
Except if I could get a lifetime do-over, I would pick trans again.
I’d want to figure shit out earlier. And I would hope that in my next life I get born into a more understanding world, but still.
They used to make us priests and shamans and stuff. I think this was probably smart, as smart as you can be in a superstitious culture. We trans folks live across a big cultural divide, which cis folks just go along without perceiving. That seeing, that knowing — it is priceless.
I sometimes feel sorry for cis people. For reals.
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@dtsund: I don’t think so. The primary reason you don’t want to change your preferences is because changing them makes your original preferences much less likely to be satisfied (since you won’t be trying to satisfy them anymore). However, if a preference is impossible to satisfy then you don’t lose anything by removing it.
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@veronica – two questions:
1. If a magic fairy appeared and offered to transform your body into the body of a cis woman, would you refuse?
2. Imagine a world in which everyone can modify zir body anyway ze wants, any moment (including switching sex, becoming intersex, whatever). In this world, would the cis/trans distinction be meaningful?
I’m not implying any answer, I’m genuinely curious.
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@Vadim Kosoy —
1. It depends on the cis body. If I pass better and remain basically healthy, then yeah. Likewise, I would like to be somewhat smaller, like maybe 5’8″ or 5’10”. And I’d LOVE to be skinny and beautiful. (Many cis women would say the same.)
But on the whole I accept my body, just as cis people must learn to accept theirs. Except I didn’t like the dysphoria that came with my pre-female-horomal body.
But I no longer have a pre-female-hormonal body. I have a female body. Which used to be a “sorta male” body. But now it’s soft and womanly. Much of my dysphoria is gone.
It’s complicated. I would love to have a normative working vagina. That would be cool. The neo-vaginas we get are really cool, miracles of science no doubt, but they are not without their complications. A cis-type vagina would be great.
I don’t want kids, so I don’t really care about uteruses. I’ve never had strong feelings either way about menstruation. (Many trans women feel quite differently about this.)
But here is the thing, whatever you do to my body *now*, I am still trans. You cannot take my history from me.
(Then again, I would have made a cool girl scout. So there is that.)
(On the other hand, the Girl Scouts accept trans gals. So yay Girl Scouts.)
(Seriously, YAY Girl Scouts.)
2. I don’t know.
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@veronica: Thank you for this detailed and personal answer! I have some food for thought now. 🙂
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I think we can separate transness into two different things:
1. Having a very strong sense of what gender you are.
2. Being born with a body that doesn’t match that sense, and which causes other people to assign you a different gender than the one you sense you are.
Item 1 is an unusual preference. Item 2 is a physical impairment. According to Ozy’s thoughts on eugenics (which I think I largely agree with) eliminating unusual preferences is bad, but eliminating physical impairments is not.
Based on that framework, I would conclude that it would be bad to eliminate transness by getting rid of genes for strong gender identity and making everyone cis-by-default. But it would be okay to get rid of transness by making sure that all people born with a strong sense of gender identity get a body and gender assignment at birth that matches their internal sense of what gender they are.
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@Ghatanathoah:
Isn’t 1 a very, very usual preference? Almost everyone has a strong sense of what gender they are. It’s just for almost everyone, it matches up with their body.
I think that just amplifies your basic point, but still …
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Approaching this from the other side: perhaps rather than delusion being preference, preference is delusion. Perhaps the ideal being is one for whom there is no possible gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be. (This doesn’t seem quite the same as having a solitary preference that the speed of light be 186,000 miles per second. I’m thinking more about the writings of Joko Beck and other members of mystical traditions.)
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What do you mean by ‘ideal being’, here?
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Yeah, that’s the rub, isn’t it?
I want to say something like “one in a state of consciousness such that suffering is eliminated”, but a an insistent voice keeps reminding me: the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.
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I was alluding to the point that ‘ideal being’ sounds like a preference-ish statement. Surely you’re not going to convince a paperclip maximizer that it should prefer your ideal being to a paperclip?
Also, what would distinguish your ideal being from a rock? Both the revealed, self-reported and coherent extrapolated preferences of a rock are satisfied.
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Well, by definition you can’t convince Clippy that the ideal is anything but a paperclip, right? Nor could you convince a perfectly zealous hedonic utilitarian that anything but wirehead-tiling would suffice. This problem dogs all of meta-ethics equally.
Rocks are not conscious. As far as I know. 🙂
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> Basically: many solutions to the tiling problem– average utilitarianism aside– make eliminating unusual preferences at least morally problematic. On the other hand, I think this lines up pretty well with my intuitions about eugenics: eliminating BPD and autism– much less paraphilias and transness– seems to be wrong in a way that eliminating depression or delusions does not.
If I understand you correctly, you are alluding to lose of diversity due to such elimination. Which makes sense, but as Alicorn points out in http://carcinisation.com/2015/05/01/il-faudrait-linventer/, this doesn’t imply the current frequency of various “anomalies” in the populations is optimal. Some it might be better to make rarer while other to make more common.
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I’m not even sure where to begin figuring out the optimal level of people with various utility functions in the population.
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Indeed it sounds like a difficult problem. However some special cases might be easy, for example it seems preferable to replace rare condition X by rare condition Y when Y is at least as rare as X and is otherwise advantageous (for example because of causing less suffering to the person).
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> I’m not even sure where to begin figuring out the optimal level of people with various utility functions in the population.
Actually, I might have a take on that. If we somehow quantify the utility of having a certain type of person in itself, for example by measuring it in QALYs, we can take diversity into account by adding a term to the total utility proportional to the information-theoretic entropy of the distribution over types of persons. The optimum is then a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, that is the frequency of person of type T is proportional to exp(-beta U(T)) where U(T) is the QALY figure from before. This leaves the unknown parameter beta representing the tradeoff between diversity and “hedonism”. How to determine this parameter I have no idea but the overall direction might be lead somewhere…
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Sorry, got a wrong sign there. That should have been exp(+beta U(T)) (utility behaves like minus energy in the analogy to thermodynamics)
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this is why I love this blog (also, the wider rationality movement).
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>If you put a gun to the head of someone with a migraine and said “dance or I’ll kill you,” most people with migraines would manage to dance. But it would be very strange to think that migraines are actually the desire to lie under a blanket with a bottle of painkillers and moan “owwwwwwww”.
Aren’t they, from an economic perspective?
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“Desire” and “prefered activity given ones current state of being” aren’t the same thing.
Basically, the same.conversation as last thread.
From an economic perspective, we can’t tell if you prefer a Hyundai to a Lamborghini if you don’t make enough to money to buy a Lamborghini free and clear after all other expenditures. Rather we can only say that you prefer a house, electricity, food, water, clothes and a Hyundai to owning a Lamborghini and being homeless and starving.
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Sure we can. Offer people a Hyundai and a LAmborghini for the same price, see which they go for. Or, if you believe in even weak versions of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, you could just check which one people are successfully charging more for.
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You just illustrated the difference between preference and desire.
I desire the Lamborghini, but not at the price at which it is offered. My preference is not to own the Lamborghini.
I desire to walk around doing my normal activities, but not at the price of the increase in pain doing so will incur while my head feels like a 16 penny nail has been driven through my eyeball. My preference is to lie under the sheets and moan until the pain has subsided.
If your situation changes, your preferences change. Your desires are relatively static. In economic terms, preference is a function of both desires and resources.
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Another thought: it might sounds callous, but I think that diversity considerations in present society have a much smaller weight than in a hypothetical future utopia. In present society, the overwhelming consideration is driving the future towards scenarios in which human values survive and prosper. Therefore, eugenics has to be optimized towards producing people with the best capacity for this purpose.
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But the ultimate question is: which things threaten human values? I doubt it’s the things Ozy mentioned (autism, BIID, paraphilias, BPD and transness); instead, it’s probably something much more, uhm, simple? Anyway, the only threat I can think of that can be handled by eugenics is if people want lots of children. Are you thinking of something specific?
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I think you misunderstood me. I’m not saying any of those conditions threaten human values. I’m saying that with the growth of technology we are rapidly approaching scenarios in which human values are threatened (extinction due to nanotech / biotech / nuclear warfare; UFAI; race-to-the-bottom transhumanism etc.). Dealing with these threats requires people with certain skills. It is these skills I would use to eugenics to optimize.
For example, in “Have Lyle” Ozy argued that children with Down syndrome should not be aborted. However, it seems fairly evident that replacing a child with Down syndrome by a neurotypical child (or a child which is aneurotypical in certain other ways) will make zir more likely to contribute towards optimizing the future.
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I doubt the most effective way of helping the economy is to introduce eugenics. It would take generations for eugenics to be effective, it would be extremely controversial and in general a pain, compared to other things you could work on.
Maybe ‘soft eugenics’, such as encouraging intelligent people to become egg/sperm donors, would work.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “introduce eugenics”. I understood “eugenics” to mean any deliberate intervention in the genotype on one’s children. For example, aborting a child with Down syndrome and having another child instead is “eugenics” in this sense.
I’m not calling for “introducing eugenics”. I’m just saying that assuming you already have some method of influencing the genotype, the direction of influence should be determined by the effect on long term civilizational outcomes.
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“I understood “eugenics” to mean any deliberate intervention in the genotype on one’s children.”
Ah, I use eugenics to mean systematic intervention in the genotype of the children of a group of people.
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I feel like making a list of preference-ish neurodivergences would be enlightening. You’ve already mentioned autism, BIID, paraphilias, BPD, and transness. What others are there? Would sociopathy, which AFAIK is related to lack of empathy, count?
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Even if something like sociopathy is mostly a set of preferences, it would be okay to eliminate it if no one (including existing sociopaths) prefers there to be more sociopaths, and a lot of people prefer there to be less. I don’t think it’s even morally problematic under most systems of ethics.
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I think the place where sociopathy differs from the others is that it is unfriendly (in the AI sense).The interesting thing, however, is that we now also have an example of a preference-ish neurodivergence that we might be able to agree should be removed. Of course, it’s probably mostly for “just” for pragmatic reasons, so we should probably search for other examples.
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But sociopathy, defined by lack of empathy, is exactly an impairment type neurodivergence. It comes with a lack of certain preferences, caused by the impairment, just like, say, a specific delusion that your friends are conspiring against you might cause additional odd desires (to be continually reassured with ever-more-conclusive evidence that this is not the case) or the (relative) elimination of some desires (to have friends in the first place, perhaps).
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But if you’re going to say that sociopaths ‘actually’ have friendly preferences, but they are disabled by lack of empathy, why not also say that for, say, UFAI?
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I’m not claiming that there exist invisible preferences that are disabled by a lack of empathy, any more than I’m claiming that secretly your favorite color is actually the 21 cm hydrogen line, but this preference has been disabled by your inability to see in the infrared. All I’m trying to say is that psychopathy, because of the lack of empathy, is not strictly a preference neurodivergence.
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I’m not sure we can say sociopaths are somehow disabled by their lack of empathy. Can such people believe others are disabled by not lacking empathy? Would they prefer to start feeling it? Would a person be disabled by feeling empathy in a world consisting of sociopaths? If most of the answers are “yes”, then I believe it’s probably a preference neurodivergence.
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Should have added “not” to the second question.
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I can turn my ability to see on and off by wearing a blindfold, or closing my eyes, or turning out the lights. This does not mean that being unable to see is not a disability. If psychosis involves lacking the ability to empathize (or, possibly, to do so intuitively), then it is not strictly a preference neurodivergence. Transness is a preference neurodivergence because it involves a preference (some kind of gender transition) that we define to be non-neurotypical. It involves no impairment of any kind except those that come from a failure to have the preference satisfied.
Sociopathy is an impairment-type neurodivergence because sociopaths generally have an impaired faculty (empathy) compared to non-sociopaths. Their preferences have nothing to do with it. Unless you claim deafness is not an impairment, due to the existence of a community of people who wish to remain deaf and for people to continue to begin their lives deaf?
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Dangit that should be psychopathy/sociopathy, not psychosis. Psychosis is a totally different thing.
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A good point about the deaf people. I still feel that if X is not a superpower in a world of non-X, then non-X is not exactly a disability in a world of X. Though I may be horribly wrong in some cases, it covers most “normal” situations. Skin color, main hand, deafness, etc. And while I agree that sociopaths (as far as I know about them) lack empathy, I’m not sure they’re impaired because of that any more than a person who can’t switch their empathy off is impaired. Or we may try to taboo disability.
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Asexuality is caused by not feeling sexual attraction, right? Does this mean it is not a preference neurodivergence, but instead an impairment-type neurodivergence?
If you bite that bullet, is monosexuality actually an impairment neuronondivergence, compared to bisexuality?
Imagine a planet like Earth, but where the humans evolved without empathy. Would these people also be impaired, compared to Earth-humans? Or if there was a minority there that had empathy, would that minority be the impaired one?
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It’s almost as if the impairment model is fuzzy and uncertain.
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Yes, and so I would say that it is entirely fair to treat sociopathy as a preference divergence.
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What does the archetypal preference neurodivergence look like, versus the archetypal impairment neurodivergence? First, both are neurodivergences, so we’re only treating conditions currently classed as such. Neurodivergence is in some cases an arbitrary category, but whatever. A preference-type neurodivergence is, as I see it, one that is best described by a statement of the form “I would (not) rather…”, while an impairment-type neurodivergence is best described by “I can not…”. Irrespective of whether or not empathy is a standard human superpower, I have trouble seeing its lack as well described by “I would (not) rather…” versus “I can not…”.
I also wonder why you’re working so hard to put sociopathy in this category. Ozy’s OP seemed to me to state, roughly, that some neurodivergences are not actually that bad, or are not exclusively bad, despite the implications of the “neurodivergence” label and other labels typically applied to that class of conditions. A check on whether the neurodivergence under consideration is actually a bad thing to have or not is whether or not the neurodivergence is actually well described as an impairment, rather than as an odd preference. The “sociopathy is a preference” thing seems to have come up as an attempt at an example of a preference neurodivergence which is actually a bad thing and/or should be gotten rid of. Except I already thought that sociopathy wasn’t so great, both because of what I know about it and because it was well-captured by the impairment category.
So I guess I have to ask: what do you want me to think about preference neurodivergences, and what do you want me to think about sociopathy, and how are those ends served by putting sociopathy in this category we’ve created?
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here’s a preference: sex repulsion. (subset of asexuality consisting of visceral dislike of sexuality.)
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“So I guess I have to ask: what do you want me to think about preference neurodivergences, and what do you want me to think about sociopathy, and how are those ends served by putting sociopathy in this category we’ve created?”
Well, as background. We have a class of neurodivergences that we don’t want to remove. For simplicity, let’s take the set Ozy mentioned: autism, BIID, paraphilias, BPD, and transness. Let’s skip any discussion about whether they should be removed and just go by Ozy’s conclusion that they shouldn’t. I can’t really think of a better name for the neurodivergences that we don’t want to remove than ‘good neurodivergences’.
Ozy’s post essentially justifies this by saying that they are preference-like, rather than impairment-like. It is true that this set is preference-like, but I don’t think that is the (only) property that distinguishes good neurodivergences from bad ones. As a counterexample, I thought a bit and came up with the example of sociopathy.
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@tailcalled:
Alright then, sure, sociopathy is a counterexample…if it’s preference-like. Earlier, Vamair gave the definition of “X is not a superpower in a world of non-X” for determining if X is preference-like, and claimed that under this scheme sociopathy is preference-like. I might dispute this anyway, but I first dispute the given test for preference-ness. I think preference-ness is better captured by the “I would rather (not)/I can not” test. Under that scheme sociopathy, if we define it as a lack of empathy, I claim sociopathy is plainly an impairment neurodivergence, and thus not actually a counterexample to the claim that ‘preference neurodivergences’ c= ‘nonnegative neurodivergences’, where c= represents the subset symbol. (also I think we should use nonnegative, rather than good. I don’t see how, say, transness is an improvement over cisness; it’s just a different preference). Though I think most of this was only implied; Ozy’s only literal claim seemed to be that preference neurodivergences exist, which for me is one of those things that was super obvious once someone pointed it out.
@Lambert: yup, that’s a preference alright. What exactly are we doing with it?
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@tailcalled forgot to get to the point there…
Do you claim Vamair’s scheme is superior to mine? If so, why? If not, how is sociopathy better described as preference-like?
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Both of your schemes seem to be focused on separating preference neurodivergences and impairment neurodivergences. Ozy has already mentioned autism as a counterexample to this, and sociopathy [as I understand it, which may be wrong] could also be a counterexample. Clearly, sociopathy is an impairment neurodivergence. In addition, it seems very preference-like, in that sociopaths place less value on other people.
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hmmmmm… am I ace because I prefer not to have sex, or because I have an imairment in by capacity for sexual attraction? preferences do not (always) exist in isolation: there are complex interrelationships with other factors. T
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What do you mean?
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Ok, I think I get what you’re after, tailcalled. As I understood Ozy’s post, autism (and BPD) are mixed neurodivergences because they come with a bunch of very distinct qualities. For example, an autistic person might have lots of trouble reading social cues (an impairment), and they might enjoy repeating certain words because of how they sound (a preference). Those two things aren’t directly connected; they’re just both part of this hypothetical person’s autism. With sociopathy, the devaluing of others seems to me to be directly related to the lack of empathy, so I don’t think it qualifies as a preference or mixed neurodivergence.
Lambert: I’d call asexuality a preference neurodivergence, because that better expresses what I want to say about asexuality (that an asexual’s preferences are different from an allosexual’s and it is not otherwise a big deal).
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Guy: my understanding of your categorization scheme is this:
Start out by sketching the neurodivergence as a causal model. We might, for instance, have three nodes, one for whatever made the neurodivergence develop, one for whatever differences in function it has caused and one for whatever differences in preferences it has caused.
For example, solely in terms of diagram shapes, we have
??? -> impairment: lack of empathy -> preference: less value on other people
??? -> no sexual attraction -> preference: ace
But we might also have
??? -> impairment: difficulty reading faces
\-> preference: collecting lots of information about a special interest
And there are simpler diagrams
??? -> impairment: delusions
Now, what you are saying seems to be that if the preference is caused by an impairment, you do not categorize it as a preference neurodivergence (and otherwise you do).
My primary objection to this is how you define impairment: to exclude aces, you put in the exception “and it is not otherwise a big deal”. This is closely linked to our current society (compare: a transhuman society), which I guess makes sense when talking about the current society, but it does limit its applicability somewhat. In addition, I think this means that it only ‘accidentally’ works, if it works. As a transhumanist, I strongly object to linking morality to the things ordinary humans in todays society are able to do.
Another objection is that it is still not clear what constitutes an impairment. Does BIID constitute an impairment because the body map is missing a limb?
Third objection: what if we discover that, causally speaking, people with autism end up collecting lots of information about a special interest because people are confusing? Essentially, your categorization scheme relies on ‘hidden details’.
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Tailcalled’s last sentence basically sums up my thoughts. Also, what is impaired sexual attraction but lack of volition to have sex with anyone.
(Is that how it works? It’s the visceral feeling of ‘if there were no consequences, I would consent to do sexy things with person x’, right?)
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That’s a pretty good summary of the model, firstly, though I think it’s missing a bit that might reduce your objections.
I suppose I wasn’t entirely clear with the discussion of asexuality – by “not otherwise a big deal” I mean that asexuality has no discernible features other than a difference in preferences from allosexuality. Whereas psychopathy has this big defining feature that is most definitely not a preference.
We have some neurodivergences that have these single defining features and some that are clusters of features that are often related. For those that have the big defining features, we look at what the feature is and see if it’s a preference or an impairment (or something else, maybe? In the hypothetical case that we can’t describe the feature by one of those statements I listed above I guess we need a new category).
Let’s take asexuality: the defining feature of asexuality is a lack of sexual desire. Loosely, a person is asexual if they answer “no” to the question “do you want to have sex?” in all or effectively all circumstances. Some asexuals are repulsed by sex, and so are incapable of desiring it, and some are simply disinterested – but they are united by their atypical (lack of a) preference. I could see an argument that repulsed asexuals have an impairment-type neurodivergence, but that wouldn’t be asexuality – that would be sexual repulsion, leading to asexuality.
To your second objection: an impairment is a thing you can’t do, some kind of ability you lack. A preference is a desire concerning the state of the world. If you have no eyes, your vision is impaired. If you choose to never open your eyes, you prefer not to see. So BIID would be a preference neurodivergence, since people with BIID have an unusual preference about the state of their body. In my mind, it’s essentially exactly like trans-ness, except that there isn’t a giant political movement opposed to BIID people having their desired bodies and oppressing them when they try to attain that goal. (this understanding of trans-ness and BIID comes directly from my own understanding of transhumanism, in fact)
To the third point: if we determine that the preference for collecting information is caused by being unable to read faces, we go nowhere from where we are now and the neurodivergence consisting of these two characteristics remains a mixed neurodivergence. If, on the other hand, we (somehow) determine that deleting the face-reading impairment deletes the preference for collecting information, then the neurodivergence collapses into an impairment neurodivergence. I don’t think that’s too likely, though, since there are plenty of people who share the preference but not the impairment.
I try to keep my categories pragmatic, not prescriptive. For neurodivergences that fall exclusively into one category or another, impairments should probably be removed from humans or set to switches and preferences should almost definitely be left alone. But that categorization is not dispositive, and mostly exists so that mixed neurodivergences can be pointed out (in which case the proper response is “slow down, think carefully”).
Does this answer your objections?
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“To your second objection: an impairment is a thing you can’t do, some kind of ability you lack. ”
“If, on the other hand, we (somehow) determine that deleting the face-reading impairment deletes the preference for collecting information, then the neurodivergence collapses into an impairment neurodivergence.”
So, for example, current human memory sucks. This means we are impaired compared to future ‘humans’. Future humans will get bored more easily because of their better memory. This should not get counted as a preference neurodivergence because if we got better memory, we would also get bored more easily.
If, on the other hand, the future ‘humans’ recalibrate their boredom feeling in such a way that they get bored at the same rate as us, that counts as a preference neurodivergence.
I guess that makes your version of the preference neurodivergence category natural enough for my tastes, but I feel like the fragility of this approach is *not* a property we want our method of distinguishing good/nonnegative neurodivergences from bad ones to have.
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There’s another difference, I think: I don’t see this as a method for distinguishing between good/bad or bad/neutral neurodovergences, and I don’t really want a general method other than “examine the features of each neurodovergences”. I see this as a heuristic check on the tendency for most people to say ” neurodovergences=bad”, nothing more. I don’t really accept that there can be a fully general rule at all – if two categorization schemes (preference/impairment or good/bad) are really the same, there’s no reason to talk about one or the other. In this case, one scheme approximates the other and has different connotations, so it makes a good check on my intuitive use of the second scheme.
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My girlfriend either has BPD or something like it – she certainly has far, far stronger preferences than I do – and your words kind of captured it perfectly: it is like living with a mild utility monster.
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