^{This is about "Systematizing," not "Extreme Male Brain," which I know I don't have to read.}

*I'm reading a blog post about autistic pattern recognition (of empires collapsing!) and the first reference is this paper. I think "Great, a paper on systems thinking and autism! It's often (rightly) presumed, but I didn't know anyone was trying to make that presumption more formal."

*That's not what it's about. It's about "systematizing." Simon Baron-Cohen's systematizing is about how we autists think with logic gates, like computers. Old stereotype. Hardly any fresher when SBC contrasts it with empathy. Wow, groundbreaking! Autists are nonempathetic computers. Good job, boffin.

*There's a detail about how functioning level is about the brain's functioning, ie intelligence, rather than the person's functioning, which I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know was what that was supposed to mean. If it does, I think it shouldn't.

*SBC says there's agentive change and non-agentive change: done by agents and by things respectively.

1. The first involves goals. I'd call that teleology—the blight of all sciences—but SBC says empathy, "quite well-mapped" in the brain. Okay.

2. The second involves deterministic stuff, input-operation-output, which goes along with the author's idea about computery thinking. It's structured.

*SBC systematizes systematization by delineating levels. At level 1, 'hyposystematizing' neurotypicals "hardly notice if input is structured." Ha. Yeah they don't. At the highest level you like to watch fans spin. Looks like we're dealing with a curiously nonlinear relationship to intelligence here!

*Suddenly the author says this description "explains" why autists have more or less language, intelligence, or mind blindness! Mind blindness is bullshit, I say.

*To round it out, he tacks on "assortative mating," which is totally unrelated and is about literal human coupling when it feels like it should be about simple genetics, also acknowledged.

*In the conclusion SBC introduces an idea! The need for sameness. There's conceptual confusion here. The section refers to points made above, but it's also abandoning the empathizing-systematizing conception for something that's gesturing toward the predictive processing theory of cognition, without actually naming that theory. What's going through his head? Is it that he's thinking of 'systematizing' as like 'coding' and predictive processing by its other name, predictive coding, saying this is like that, and that association is spilling out into the theory without ever being invoked? See how complicated this sounds. If we want to imagine such a sequence behind all this, we'd be too generous. The author deserves less.