[michaelochurch]

This brings me to one of the ways in which humans fail. People understand that ethical character is important-- far more important than talent-- but it's also hard-to-impossible to assess at an individual level based on real-world imperfection of information, so they fall back on social polish and low-signal bullshit that might even be negatively correlated with genuine moral decency, autism and psychopathy being opposites of a certain spectrum.

People just don't have the tools to assess others' intentions or real character. Instead of admitting that their machinery for doing this is error-prone, they come up with stories about other people that have no basis in reality. The socially marginal or unskilled get screwed.

If anything, I think that people with Asperger's are, on average, slightly better (morally speaking) than the general population. Most people get stuck at Kohlberg's Stage 3 of moral development (although, in the corporate world, they speak a Stage 4 language, dressing social smears up as "performance problems"). People with Asperger's tend to skip Stage 3 (because they fundamentally don't get it) and land early in 4, which means they have an above-normal likelihood of progressing to 5-6.