True Neurodivergence
Saving Normal
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic introduces a new systems thinker as we collaborate to tease apart the drivers of the nerodivergent craze. In doing so, we’ll discover just how broad neurotypical really is, how that unlocks appreciation of diversity, and how the truly neurodivergent aren’t who we, or they, think they are.
I’ve been having some great conversations with Karina Schneidman and Kit Perez regarding personality proclivities and pathologies. There’s a tension in which personalities do change over time due to trauma and other events. On the other hand, in the effort to claim everyone is special, or in the modern language, ‘Neurodiverse’,1 we quickly lose sight of what neurotypical or normal might even be.
If you haven’t done a dive into your personality yet, I recommend checking out Investigating Personality Proclivities and following through to any of the free personality profiles. It’s not required, but it’ll be helpful to consider your lens as we begin to help people reclaim their healthy personality from the clutches of pathology and the siren call of neurodivergence.
Let’s just state the obvious up front: people are different!! Hell, I’ve written about this several times with Embrance the Divergents, Are You Asking a Fish to Climb a Tree?, and more. For example, I’m an ENTJ (Extroverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging), which makes up ~1.8% of the population. That means 98.2% of you are quite different from me when it comes to just the 16 Myers-Briggs archetypes, and it’s taken me a while to figure out what makes me tick. The second point to ensure we all understand is that these are proclivities, not permanent, not indelible, and not perfect.2 The third point is that any personality measure exists on a gradient and not a binary. For example, I’m middling on my E and J but pegged hard on N and T.
The issue is that, as we looked at in Personality or Pathology, there’s a dangerous tendency to ignore personality and put healthy, human behavior into the language of clinicians, pathologies, and pharmacuticals. Today, we’ll explore a few of the mechanisms that incentivize that behavior and what you can do to avoid the problems.
Take this fellow, Nicholas Kircher, who posted about being added to a ‘secret’ AuDHD group. Now, those not up with the lingo, this Frankenstein word is a fusion of Autism and ADHD, two of the most conflated and error-prone ‘diagnoses’ of the last 15 years. We covered the latter in ADHD; Pathology, Superpower, or Out of Context, and as for Autism, well… we collapsed Asperger’s into Autism as level 1 and then EXPLODED the diagnoses of Autism. However, it should be noted that Levels 2 and 3, which were known as classic Autism, haven’t grown at all! Not to go too far down that Rabbit hole, but a problem emerges, as Sarah | Profound Autism Mom, writes about, that what used to be Autism now has to be called Profound Autism, as so many people dilute the original meaning. So, to simplify, ADHD isn’t typically a pathology, and the explosion of Asperger’s conflates and complicates things.
Back to Nicholas instead of AuDHD, consider instead that he’s in Software Engineering, which is heavily dominated by ISTJ/P (Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging / Perceiving) types. They’re not terribly social, highly sensing, meaning they go deep into topics, are analytical thinkers, with a mix of J/P, which, in the Big 5, is continentiousness or orderliness. So, Nicholas is likely an ISTP. The I-S-T can get coded as Asperger's (social awkwardness, hyper-discrete/literal and analytical), and the P throws the equation out of whack with disorderliness (read ADHD). Granted, they’re a smaller subset of the overall population at 5.4% (see list in footnotes), but it’s still one of 16 personality archetypes, not something to accommodate, let alone medicate away.
It’s important to note, as we looked at in Eliminating Bias in AI/ML, Silicon Valley is designed around people exactly like Nicholas. What I mean is that tech companies select for the nerdy male was noted by James Damore in his infamous 2017 ‘Google Memo’ where he proffered that different personality proclivities of women3 didn’t line up well with the organizational personality of Google. Birds of a feather flock together, and that’s still not a pathology.
The other irony is the claim of a ‘secret society’ because there’s nothing quiet about the neurodivergent craze. It’s everywhere on social media and, to be a broken record and remind you, Freya India has talked about how Nobody Has A Personality Anymore, where a healthy personality is pathologized, drugged, yet celebrated as a ‘superpower’ all while demanding accommodations and special treatment. And these folks are LOUD and aggressive when challenged. So, let’s shift to Kit to find out why:
Dr. Robert B. Cialdini spent years studying the role of influence, codifying the principles of scarcity and social proof, among others. When talking about neurodiversity, the label creates a sense of scarcity and rarity, thereby making it special and desirable. The label is the ticket to a group, and entry to the group comes with social proof, which is perfectly demonstrated by Nicholas’s ‘secret’ group.
The mechanism is that these two forces/principles are operating on two sides of a line as a boundary control system. Outside the group, it’s scarcity; inside the group, it’s social proof. Now bring in your and Karina’s thoughts on personality. You have a raw trait/foible/quirk. But instead of owning it as both something that exists on its own AND is potentially changeable, you slap a label on it. Neurodivergent. ADHD. etc. Now it moves from individual quirk to a recognized category, and because clinical language carries weight and credibility, you go from “weirdo” to “set apart.”
This serves as a ticket to a community, where the need for social proof kicks in. That proof also allows you to introduce a moral layer and social signaling. This is what gets you the entitlement, which is expressed in a two-fold form:
You demand accommodation
You deny accountability/agency
Together, that is a closed system that resists correction.
While it seems like “I am rare” (scarcity) vs. “there are many like me” (social proof) are contradictory, here’s where it gets fun: When the labels get widespread, the scarcity collapses. So the specificity of the label must escalate. Instead of PTSD, it’s c-PTSD. ADD became ADHD, and now it’s AuDHD and on and on. The point is that they have to keep coming up with more hyper-specific identities and labels.
All of this leads to the closed feedback loop. Instead of “what should I do?” it becomes “What do others with this label do?” They’re all self-reinforcing in the group. That means no growth, and instead of a positive trend or even a neutral one, entropy rules. The group becomes more trashy, more fractured, and more in need of new labels.
But it gets worse when we bring in Cialdini’s Unity Principle, which postulates that the more we identify ourselves with others, the more we are influenced by those others. Therefore, being in the group that you identify with through your label(s) eventually creates a scenario in which only those people influence you.
There’s a nuance here in which you’ll only allow the people in the group, with your same label, are allowed to speak into your life. In more extreme cases, they’re only allowed to speak if they identify with your label AND agree with your positions. Having the label isn’t enough. Therefore, Michael and I are heretics in this conversation.
The challenge is that the person’s identity is tied to the group so the only way they will change/let go/work on said quirk or to grow at all is if there is another group, more attractive to them than the current, that is willing to offer them membership if they leave their current on or, more rarely, they do the work to break out of the pattern.
Back to Michael, let’s let that sink in quickly. This tendency, to treat people as unique and to claim neurodivergency, suppresses your ability to grow at all. You’re special, unique, and protected. You need accommodations. Accommodations from whom?
This is where it gets even more interesting because neurodiversity requires neurotypical. So I asked Nicholas how he defined typical, but in answering my question, he skirted with vague statements about holding a standard job, maintaining social connections, and navigating daily life without significant distress. Which I’d like to find a single human who does this with frictionless ease.
So, what is the ‘standard’ of neurotypical set by society? You could say that it’s based on the educational system or the work environment, which is great, but you quickly learn that both were designed for factory workers to perform a specific function. They wanted someone who could sit at a desk/station for eight hours a day, cranking out rote products. These are not your iNtuitive (big picture) and Perceiving (disorderly) types. Moreover, these expectations are not typical throughout human history. Humans evolved in groups of mixed types, from hunters and gatherers to crafters. Each benefits from different personality proclivities, not everyone being the same.
Then, add the inclusion of women in the workforce over the past century, and a whole new dynamic sets in, with a greater focus on Agreeableness and Feeling.4 It’s no wonder that ADHD and Autism perceptions have skyrocketed when, largely boys, aren’t content to sit in a ‘factory’ all day long and communally code.
Now, let’s just complicate it a little further because, even among typical personality types, there are different levels of maturity, experience, and both cognitive and emotional intelligence. Clearly, there’s a risk of claiming someone has Autism or ADHD when what they lack is emotional intelligence and discipline on top of personality proclivities.
Adding another layer on here, Holly MathNerd wrote how spectrum-type diagnoses, which have terrible diagnostic tools, can mislabel common trauma response as autism, and how plugging our children into dopamine machines like cellphones can code both Autism spectrum and ADHD symptoms, both of which are behavioral, not neurologically wired in this case.
Oh, and while we are at it, did you know that culture even has personality, with the best example captured as the difference between the Dutch (of which I am as well) and India, where they are shockingly separated in communicating, evaluating, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and scheduling. Stick a Dutch person in India, and they’re going to look very autistic. Put an Indian person in Holland or the US, and they’d take on characteristics of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) or Avoidant Personality Disorder. Hell, there's a book that highlights this absurdity titled, Am I German or Autistic?
So here’s the main point: All these layers of personality, biological wiring, behavior, and environmental/situational wiring are… Normal.
And back to the beginning, when we mix personality types of both individual and cultural, where the US is an amalgamation of dozens of cultures, what is neurotypical? Ironically, for Nicholas and the rest of the Nuerodivergent bandwagon… They are. Currently, 20% of the US population and a whopping 53% of Gen Z self-identify as neurodivergent.
Quite the oxymoron, yet it makes complete sense given what Kit shared with us earlier about influence and identity. AJ Vora ✦ Obelisk captures this perfectly in the following note which Bart Bounds accurately describes as Nueroconvergence.
However, that leads us down a very bad route where 53% of Gen Z hold their pathological diagnoses as core to who they are, have invested a great deal of social capital, are reaping accommodations based on that, and are often medicating healthy personality. Worse, they’re now able to skirt the very difficult challenges of emotional and intellectual maturation, discipline, agency, accountability, and responsibility.
And that is also a very typical human behavior because doing hard things is… hard. To quote Kit again: “That means no growth, and instead of a positive trend or even a neutral one, entropy rules.” That’s because entropy is easy, and growth requires energy. Pop-psychology ‘neurodivergency’ is easy, anyone can do it, and everyone is.
Dr. Roger McFillin nailed this home in Wait... I’m the Problem? where he shares the story of a young woman who came to a realization during therapy:
“I had to make a choice,” she concluded. “I could keep collecting diagnoses, keep explaining away my life as a series of symptoms and disorders. Or I could reclaim my story. Not by denying what happened to me, or pretending I don’t struggle with things, but by accepting that I’m the author of my life now.”
Ironically, what is nuerodivergent are those who lean into the hard tasks, seek their own agency, avoid being non-player characters, stretch their brains, and grow!
Given that’s what Polymathic Being has been advocating for nearly four years now, it looks like we’re on a mission of saving ‘normal.’ In this case, it’s resisting the siren call of pathology, recognizing and appreciating diverse personality variations, and embracing the challenge of maturation. As we do that, we learn resilience, which puts us in an elite category of humans typically reserved for gurus, sages, senseis, prophets, and more. That’s how you get to be truly neurodivergent!
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Mostly Harmless Ideas Computer Science for Everyone
Consider how far this has gone when you have the term Neurospicy working its way into the mix.
Love it or hate it, the Myers-Briggs provides the best-known and reasonably well-aligned grouping of personality types. Because it’s the most studied and because there are sixteen different buckets, it also allows us to analyze it more effectively. Because when we talk about Neurotypical, who are we talking about? Here’s the breakdown of each group:
ISFJ: ~13.8%
ESFJ: ~12.3%
ISTJ: ~11.6%
ISFP: ~8.8%
ESTJ: ~8.7%
ESFP: ~8.5%
ENFP: ~8.1%
ISTP: ~5.4%
INFP: ~4.4%
ESTP: ~4.3%
INTP: ~3.3%
ENTP: ~3.2%
ENFJ: ~2.5%
INTJ: ~2.1% - This is Kit… less unique than me 🤓
ENTJ: ~1.8% - This is me… way down here along with Karina
INFJ: ~1.5%
He used the language of the Big 5 Profile that many like. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. What I think that one misses is the Intuitive vs. Sensing of the MBTI, but I find value in both.
The most significant split between men and women in the MBTI framework occurs in the Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F) dichotomy. While other preferences like Introversion vs. Extraversion are relatively balanced across genders, the T/F preference shows a stark contrast:
Men: Approximately 68-70% prefer Thinking, which prioritizes logic and objective data in decision-making.
Women: Approximately 61-70% prefer Feeling, which prioritizes personal values and the impact on others.
https://personalityjunkie.com/01/masculine-feminine-myers-briggs-mbti-vs-big-five/
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