Inhibit ‘inappropriate’ speech with 100% reliability in all social contexts that might be reported or recorded by others;
Predict with 100% accuracy what’s likely to trigger outrage by peers, student activists, social media, or mainstream media – any of which might create ‘adverse publicity’ for the university and a speech code inquisition, without due process or right of appeal, for the speaker.
Speech codes assume a false model of human nature – that everyone has the same kind of brain that yields a narrow, ‘normal’ set of personality traits, cognitive and verbal abilities, moral temperaments, communication styles, and capacities for self-inhibition. This neurotypicality assumption is scientifically wrong, because different people inherit different sets of genes that influence how their brains grow and function, and every mental trait shows substantial heritability.
These heritable mental traits run deep: they are stable across adolescence and adulthood, and they span everything from social intelligence to political attitudes. They also predict many aspects of human communication – probably including the ability to understand and follow formal speech codes and informal speech norms. The neurodivergent are often just ‘born that way.’
Why Speech Codes Stigmatize the Most Creative Thinkers
When universities impose speech codes, they impose impossible behavioral standards on people who aren’t neurotypical, such as those with Asperger’s, bipolar, Tourette’s, or dozens of other personality quirks or mental ‘disorders.’ Historically, neurodiversity was stigmatized with extreme prejudice, but recently the Autism Rights Movement, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and other advocacy groups have fought for more acceptance. Neurodiversity is even celebrated in recent books such as Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin (on Asperger’s syndrome), A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (on schizophrenia), The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton (on Dark Triad traits), and Quiet by Susan Cain (on introversion).
Most of the real geniuses I’ve known are not neurotypical. Especially in evolutionary game theory. They would have a lot of trouble comprehending or following typical university speech codes.
I suspect this would have been true for most of the brilliant thinkers who built civilization over the last several millennia. Consider just a few geniuses who seem, given biographical records, to have been on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum: Béla Bartók, Jeremy Bentham, Lewis Carroll, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Sir Ronald Fisher, Sir Francis Galton, Glenn Gould, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Kinsey, Stanley Kubrick, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Bertrand Russell, Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, Alan Turing, H. G. Wells, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Aspies like me enjoy making lists.) Moreover, the world’s richest tech billionaires often show some Asperger-like traits: think Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. And in movies and TV, outspoken, insensitive aspies are no longer just ‘mad scientist’ side-kicks, but heroic protagonists such as Tony Stark, Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House, Lisbeth Salander, and Dr. Strange.
On the upside, the civilizational contributions from the neurodivergent have been formidable – and often decisive in science and technology. On the downside, Asperger’s traits seem common among academics who have suffered the worst public outrages against things they’ve said and done, that weren’t intended to be offensive at all.
The Varieties of Neurodiversity
Restrictive speech norms are a problem for people on the autism spectrum, which includes about 1% of the general public, but which is a much higher proportion of academics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields) – like Sheldon Cooper, a Caltech physicist on the TV show ‘The Big Bang Theory.’
Apart from the autism spectrum, a much larger proportion of students, staff, and faculty at any university have other neurological disorders, mental illnesses, or personality quirks that make it hard to avoid ‘offensive’ speech all of the time – even if they’re ‘high functioning’ and have no trouble doing their academic work. For example, speech codes make no allowance for these conditions:
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (3%) imposes high impulsivity and a tendency to blurt out inappropriate comments;
Tourette syndrome (1%) can include irresistible compulsions to say obscene or derogatory things;
Social (pragmatic) communication disorder (a newly recognized disorder, prevalence unknown) impairs abilities to use language ‘appropriately,’ to match communication styles to different contexts and listeners, and to read between the lines given subtle or ambiguous language;
PTSD (8% prevalence) increases sensitivity to reminders of past trauma (‘triggers’), which can provoke reactive anger, verbal aggression, and offensive speech;
Bipolar disorder (4%) can trigger manic phases in which beliefs become more eccentric, and speech and sexual behavior become less inhibited;
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders (5% prevalence) often lead to unusual communication styles, social awkwardness, and eccentric views that fall outside the Overton window;
Paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal (‘Cluster A’) personality disorders (4% prevalence) involve social awkwardness, eccentric behaviors, and odd speech patterns, which can come across as insensitive or offensive;
Histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial (‘Cluster B’) personality disorders (2% prevalence) involve impulsivity, attention-seeking, emotional instability and/or lack of empathy, which result in speech and behavior that often violates social norms.
Some of the prevalence estimates are imprecise, and many people have more than one of these disorders. But together, mental disorders like these affect at least 20% of students, staff, and faculty. That’s higher than the percentage of American college students who are Hispanic (17%), Black (14%), LGBTQ+ (7%), or undocumented immigrants (5%).
And for many of these mental disorders, symptom severity peaks at the ages of typical college students: universities are demanding that the neurodivergent inhibit their speech most carefully when they are least able to do so.
Apart from diagnosable mental disorders such as Asperger’s, a substantial minority of people on any campus are on the extremes of the Big Five personality traits, which all have implications for speech code behavior. Low Conscientiousness predicts impulsive, reckless, or short-sighted speech and behavior – i.e. being more likely to violate speech codes. Low Agreeableness predicts being ornery, offensive, and disagreeable – i.e. violating speech codes. High Openness predicts adopting unusual beliefs and eccentric behaviors – i.e. violating speech codes. High Extraversion predicts being hyper-social, hyper-sexual, and hyper-verbal – i.e. especially violating codes about sexual behavior and speech.
Since the Big Five traits all show substantial heritability, any speech code that can’t realistically be followed by people who score at an extreme on these Big Five traits, is basically punishing them for the genes they happened to inherit.
Beyond mental disorders and personality quirks, many people on campuses at any given time are in states of ‘transient neurodiversity’ – altered psychological states due to low blood sugar, life stressors, medication side-effects, or ‘smart drugs’ such as caffeine, Ritalin, Adderall, or Modafinil. Also, sleep disorders affect over 20% of people, and the resulting sleep deprivation reduces inhibition. These kinds of transient neurodiversity can also interfere with social sensitivity, Theory of Mind, and verbal inhibition, so can reduce the ability to comply with speech codes. Unless universities want to outlaw fatigue, hunger, heartbreak, meds and coffee it’s hard to maintain the delusion that everyone’s speech will be 100% inoffensive 100% of the time.
How Neurodiversity Makes It Hard to Understand Speech Codes
Since speech codes are written by the neurotypical for the neurotypical, the neurodivergent often find them literally incomprehensible, and it’s impossible to follow a rule that doesn’t make sense. For example, a typical set of ‘respectful campus
,’ ‘sexual misconduct,’ and ‘anti-harassment’ policies prohibit:
‘unwelcome verbal behavior’
‘unwelcome jokes about a protected characteristic’
‘hate or bias acts that violate our sense of community’
‘sexist comments’
‘degrading pictorial material’
‘displaying objectionable objects’
‘negative posters about a protected characteristic’
These quotes are from my university’s recent policies, but they’re pretty standard. I don’t understand what any of these phrases actually allow or prohibit, and I worked on free speech issues in our Faculty Senate for two years, and in our Sexual Misconduct Policy Committee for one year, so I’ve puzzled over them for some time.
Lacking good Theory of Mind, how could a person with Asperger’s anticipate which speech acts would be ‘unwelcome’ to a stranger, or might be considered ‘sexist’ or ‘sexually suggestive?’ Lacking a good understanding of social norms, how could they anticipate what counts as a ‘hate act that violates our sense of community,’ or what counts as an ‘objectionable object?’ Lacking a good understanding of current civil rights legalese, how could any 18-year-old Freshman – neurotypical or not – understand what a ‘protected characteristic’ is?
The language of campus speech codes is designed to give the illusion of precision, while remaining so vague that they can be enforced however administrators want to enforce them, whenever personal complaints, student protests, lawsuits, or adverse publicity make it expedient to punish someone for being ‘offensive.’ So, students, staff, and faculty are expected to be able to ‘read between the lines’ of speech codes to understand what is actually forbidden versus what is actually permitted.
But people differ in their ability to understand spoken and written language, including the dry intricacies of administrative policies, the ever-changing euphemisms of PC culture, and the double standards of Leftist identity politics. Deciphering speech codes requires high levels of verbal, social, and emotional intelligence to discern the real meaning behind vague euphemisms and social justice shibboleths, and the neurodivergent may not have the kinds of brains that can make those kinds of inferences.
Speech codes are also intentionally vague so that anyone who’s upset by someone else’s speech can make a complaint, with the subjective feelings of the listener as the arbiter of whether an offense has occurred. In most campus speech codes, there is no ‘reasonable person’ standard for what speech counts as offensive. This means that even if an aspie or schizotypal person develops an accurate mental model of how an average person would respond to a possible speech act, they can’t rely on that. They’re expected to make their speech inoffensive to the most sensitive person they might ever encounter on campus.
The result is the ‘coddling culture’ in which administrators prioritize the alleged vulnerabilities of listeners over the communication rights of speakers. In fact, the only lip service given to neurodiversity in campus speech codes is in the (false) assumption that ‘trigger warnings’ and prohibitions against ‘microaggressions’ will be useful in protecting listeners with PTSD or high neuroticism.
Administrators assume that the most vulnerable ‘snowflakes’ are always listeners, and never speakers. They even fail to understand that when someone with PTSD is ‘triggered’ by a situation, they might say something in response that someone else finds ‘offensive.’
Systematizing Versus Empathizing
Autism spectrum disorders are central to the tension between campus censorship and neurodiversity. This is because there’s a trade-off between ‘systematizing’ and ‘empathizing.’ Systematizing is the drive to construct and analyze abstract systems of rules, evidence, and procedures; it’s stronger in males, in people with autism/Asperger’s, and in STEM fields. Empathizing is the ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, and to respond with ‘appropriate’ emotions and speech acts; it’s stronger in females, in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and in the arts and humanities. Conservative satirists often mock ‘social justice warriors’ for their ‘autistic screeching,’ but Leftist student protesters are more likely to be high empathizers from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, than high systematizers from the hard sciences or engineering.
Consider the Empathy Quotient (EQ) scale, developed by autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen to measure empathizing versus systematizing.
Positively-scored items that predict higher empathy include:
‘I am good at predicting how someone will feel.’
‘I find it easy to put myself in somebody else’s shoes.’
‘I can tune into how someone else feels rapidly and intuitively.’
‘I can usually appreciate the other person’s viewpoint, even if I don’t agree with it.’
Negatively-scored items that predict lower empathy include:
‘I often find it difficult to judge if something is rude or polite.’
‘It is hard for me to see why some things upset people so much.’
‘I can’t always see why someone should have felt offended by a remark.’
‘Other people often say that I am insensitive, though I don’t always see why.’
Reading these items, it seems like a higher EQ score would strongly predict ability to follow campus speech codes that prohibit causing offense to others. People on the autism spectrum, such as those with Asperger’s, score much lower on the EQ scale. (Full disclosure: I score 14 out of 80.) Thus, aspies simply don’t have brains that can anticipate what might be considered offensive, disrespectful, unwanted, or outrageous by others – regardless of what campus speech codes expect of us. From a high systematizer’s perspective, most ‘respectful campus’ speech codes are basically demands that they should turn into a high empathizer through sheer force of will.
Men also score lower on the EQ scale than women, and Asperger’s is 11 times more common in men, so speech codes also impose ‘disparate impact’ on males, a form of sex discrimination that is illegal under federal law.
The ways that speech codes discriminate against systematizers is exacerbated by their vagueness, overbreadth, unsystematic structure, double standards, and logical inconsistencies – which drive systematizers nuts. For example, most speech codes prohibit any insults based on a person’s sex, race, religion, or political attitudes. But aspie students often notice that these codes are applied very selectively: it’s OK to insult ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘patriarchy,’ but not to question the ‘wage gap’ or ‘rape culture;’ it’s OK to insult ‘white privilege’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ but not ‘affirmative action’ or ‘Black Lives Matter;’ it’s OK to insult pro-life Catholics but not pro-sharia Muslims. The concept of ‘unwelcome’ jokes or ‘unwelcome’ sexual comments seems like a time-travel paradox to aspies – how can you judge what speech act is ‘unwelcome’ until after you get the feedback about whether it was welcome?
Even worse, most campus speech codes are associated with social justice theories of gender feminism, critical race theory, and social constructivism, which reject the best-established scientific findings about sex differences, race differences, and behavior genetics. Requiring aspies to buy into speech codes based on blatant falsehoods violates our deepest systematizer values of logic, rationality, and realism.
To test my intuitions about these issues, I ran an informal poll of my Twitter followers, asking ‘Which condition would make it hardest to follow a college speech code that prohibits all ‘offensive’ or ‘disrespectful’ statements?.’ There were 655 votes across four response options: 54% for ‘Asperger’s,’ 19% for ‘Schizophrenia,’ 14% for ‘Bipolar,’ and 13% for ‘ADHD.’ The results of this one-item survey, from a small sample of my eccentric followers, should not be taken seriously as any kind of scientific research. They simply show I’m not the only person who thinks that Asperger’s would make it hard to follow campus speech codes.
In fact, to many STEM
students and faculty, empathizers seem to have forged campus speech codes into weapons for aspie-shaming. In a world where nerds like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are the most powerful innovators, speech codes seem like the revenge of the anti-nerds. How speech codes impose disparate impact on neurominorities
When a policy is formally neutral, but it adversely affects one legally protected group of people more than other people, that’s called ‘disparate impact,’ and it’s illegal. People with diagnosed mental disorders qualify as ‘disabled’ people under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other federal laws, so any speech code at a public university that imposes disparate impact on neurominorities is illegal.
What is the disparate impact here? Given restrictive speech codes and speech norms, neurodivergent people know that at any time, they might say something ‘offensive’ that could lead to expulsion, firing, or denial of tenure. They live in fear. They feel a chilling effect on their speech and behavior. They learn to self-censor.
Consider how speech codes can feel wretchedly discriminatory to neurominorities:
Imagine you’re a grad student in the social sciences and you hear about peers getting into trouble making off-the-cuff remarks when teaching controversial classes, such as Human Sexuality, American History, or Social Psychology. You are deterred from teaching, and drift away into private industry.
Imagine you are a man with Asperger’s syndrome doing a science Ph.D. and you see social justice activists destroying nerdy male scientists for their non-PC views, trivial mistakes, or fictional offenses, as in the cases of Matt Taylor or Tim Hunt. You realize you’ll probably make some similar misjudgment sooner or later if you stay in academia, so you leave for a Bay Area tech start-up that’s more forgiving of social gaffes.
Virtue Signaling Page 10