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Writer's pictureJose Arrieta

Online Neurodivergence and the Liberal University

I often read and hear two conversations online and at work. Although quite different in nature, I feel they are essentially the same. The first focuses on the abrupt increase of neurodiverse content creators. It seems as if everyone who posts online has some form of neuroatypicality. Second, universities are becoming bastions for the liberal agenda. Hardly any scholar is conservative, and religious scholars are scarce.


This begs the question: What is going on on the Internet and our universities?

To which I answer: Nothing bad, just sheer progress.


In an Iconoclastic Nutshell

Nothing good has come from avoiding change, and a lot of bad has come from change. But progress is antithetical to stagnation. Therefore, if the world is to become better, we need some forms of change. And given that a plethora of indicators show that the world IS becoming a better place. Then, the only logical explanation is that conservatism is a flawed foundation for a better world.


Diversity

"[Humanity]] Women ha[s] served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of [WEIRD WASP] m[e]n at twice its natural size.". -- Virginia Woolf. A Room of One's Own

These Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed, White, Anglosaxon protestant dudes could be mediocre, and the whole world would arrange itself to sing them praise. Not so anymore and as the unfair magnification is turned off, a plethora of unseen and underrepresented communities enter the limelight.


NOTE: I have praised before what I hope will be the extinction of machismo from our society. Indeed, if we all were to filter out on our first dates anyone who is not a truly convinced and committed feminist, we could have all machinists become INCELs and fail to reproduce within a generation—a true Darwinian marvel. Yet, I digress.


Queer

I will incur in a form of relativism. Years ago, my former in-laws were incredibly homophobic people. At one point, when they came to visit Zurich, they complained about the number of queer people on the streets.


I told them a story. When I grew up, there had been. an explosion of left-handed children. Just a decade before, any left-handed child would be forced to write with the right hand in Costa Rica. The thing is that in Spanish, the left hand is called "siniestra", i..e. sinister, and the right hand, "diestra", i..e. dextrous, so avoiding sinister children was paramount for societal order. But at some point, common sense hit the fan, and people realized this made no sense. Soon, the number of left-handed people skyrocketed. However, it never exceeded a small percentage. This did not prevent people from freaking the hell out.


Relativism


I told this story as the parallels were quite clear, and I won an argument. It was a highly flawed argument. Left-handed people did not survive the pandemic. We never had to come out to our loved ones and be shunned. The parallels are stronger to the neurotypicality conversation. Namely, a group of people who used to be shunned into the dark places of our Zeitgeist, are not making content online and sharing their worldviews. And importantly enough, it seems that some aspects of the neurodivergent psyche make them/us better at sharing stories than the neurotypical population.


Neurodivergent people are f***ing interesting

Although the German health system has made it so that I have not yet been diagnosed with ADHD. I would be extremely surprised if I turn out not to have some form of executive dysfunction. More importantly, for the sake of this argument, I experience strong hyperfixations.


I can share the last one I had. It started on Tuesday last week. I was on my train back from Amsterdam to our house. It was 20:30. The train lasted three hours. In these three hours, without access to the internet, I managed to perform a data analysis I had never done before and write the commentary of said analysis to my coauthors.


We would have a meeting the next morning, and I had been paralyzed for almost a year with this analysis. Yet, due to some marvel I managed to make it work. A coauthor even wrote me that "I am not sure you are aware of how unique your skill set is and how unbeatable you are as a co-author"! Crazy stuff, no?


The dark side of this is that I terrorized myself for months. I could not open the files, and I effectively forgot the programming language I needed to use for the data analysis so that I would see the data and have no idea what to do. It really sucked. But somehow, my ADHD made it so that it all worked out. I got an emotional hang over after, but the deadline was met.


Show and Tell

The Internet is filled with people who experience similar symptoms. They get into rabbit holes, learn how to do something very well and report it to the world. These hyperfixations require you to share what you find. It might be mediocre but it needs to be shared. I cannot believe that neurotypicals experience a similar need.


If you work for months and perform more and more complex analyses, compile them in a document, and eventually, after some proofreading, send it to your team of coauthors, I cannot imagine that you feel the same Eureka moment you get hyperfixations.


With a hyperfixation, your world shatters. Nothing matters but sharing the crazy thing that just happened. Given this, our online fora tend to be overrepresented by these highly unique and quirky neurodiverse personalities. Again, nothing bad, we just step away from magnifying the contributions of one single group of people and allow the ones who want to share more loudly do it as well.


Progress

Human progress is the second element we need to consider. As the world starts to suck less and less, more people are allowed to reflect on their lives. As they do, they come to appreciate the value of this leisure and the unfairness that whole groups of people were excluded from being idle throughout history. This is a very common thing and an inherently liberal observation. It requires a highly hurt person to believe that all their leisure comes from their exceptionalism.


Furthermore, as empirical social sciences develop, we have failed to find evidence that conservative policies help make the world a better place. Think of minimum wages, which conservative politicians claim help employers and decrease unemployment. Evidence shows they do not. Therefore, keeping minimum wages low directly hurts society as a whole. Again, this is a highly liberal notion.


Eat what you kill

Do not get me wrong, science is highly elitist. Indeed, new faculty is often hired on temporary contracts and allowed to continue only after showing they have succeeded in publishing their ideas. This tenure process is highly selective. If people have ideas that do not represent reality, these people fail to continue in academia. It is a highly flawed system, but one thing it produces is an evidence-based continuation of contracts.


Importantly, people with highly conservative ideas tend to find it hard to find empirical evidence for their claims. Without empirical evidence, their strawman theories fall apart. Eventually, if you continue the process a myriad of times, you end up with a university composed mostly of highly liberal scholars.


Survivorship bias

An interesting development, though, is that in both spaces, the biases might not be perceived by their inhabitants. Neurodiverse people love hanging out with one another, so they might think the fact everyone they know is neurodiverse is a filter bubble.


Similarly, scholars might not see themselves as liberals, as they are actually, as many of them might be as conservative as empirically possible. It is just that politicians on the right tend to sell fairy tales that resonate with the public. Fairy tales lead the public to see universities as bastions of the left.


The reality, though, is that for non-content creators and non-academics, these spaces might seem biased and filled with some ideological agenda. In reality, this is just a symptom of a system working optimally.


CODA

I wonder, however, how one could communicate this information to a neurotypical conservative person. I could imagine they might feel excluded from our spaces.


Clearly, we should not turn neurotypical people into neurodivergent. Someone needs to run the show while we hyperfixate. But as an educator, I believe it is important to show that some (not me) in universities are as empirically conservative as possible. Having people see them as biased fuels populist agendas.




PS

The ADHD argument is mostly copied from @TheSpeechProf's video: https://youtu.be/w-kBb_Gj3mw?si=PALH17-Vd_zZ2tRg

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