Would you sacrifice your social skills in order to be a savant?

I admire these geniuses, but I value socializing too much. I think wanting to be extremely smart sounds great theoretically, but I would probably feel different if I suddenly gained those abilities. Although I don’t know what it’s like to be very smart, but it could be pretty awesome.

I already have lousy social skills. I’d be tempted—so long as I was guaranteed an amazing skill, not one that would be the equivalent of what I’d be giving up.

No, I like the balance in my mind and my life.

No. I’d rather get my intellectual abilities the hard way, through lots of mental exercise. Almost a third of my colleagues have Asperger syndrome, and another third are socially awkward in some way or another. For all the advantages they might seem to have at times, I think I am happier. And being happier not something I’d trade.

Social skills? Have you seen the shit the comes out of my mouth?
My memory is waning, and I am noticing myself struggling more than I should with simple things like peoples names. I have never been good at that, but it is getting worse.
I would love better memory, but I will take whatever I have over what I don’t. I know I have been blessed.

No.
I don’t need the ability to retain every piece of information I’ve ever stumbled upon in order to be fulfilled or happy or considered valuable to others. I know what I know based on what interests me, what my passions are and what I deem important to my life. Being able to learn new things from people, places and things on a constant basis is a joy in itself.
Sacrificing my social skills to improve my memory is really only exchanging one problem for another and if you trust yourself and embrace your own level of intelligence, then it’s not really considered a problem in the first place.

What social skills?

”...what it would be like to have the abilities of say, Kim Peek.”
“He can read any information at an extreme speed and memorize it all by only reading it once!”
Just to state a fact, Kim Peek could read any information.
He died December 2009.

For me, it has generally been the other way around. I would gladly have become an idiot if it meant I could get laid more. But nowadays I am happy with the balance as it is.

I have a pretty “sticky” mind for information. That has been pretty useful in some domains of my life. But frankly I’d gladly trade a good chunk of that for an upgrade in social skills.

Things are different now. Information lives in the cloud. As my memory loses traction with age, I take great comfort in knowing that I can just let it go and let Google retrieve it as needed. As long as I maintain some general schemes in my brain, I don’t worry too much about the data.

Also changing is the importance of people in my life. My responsibilities have shifted over the years from being thing-centric to being people-centric. That’s been a rough transition for me. I can no longer get a pass on the social stuff just because I’m good at understanding things. It would be much more useful now to have the same level of comfort in interpersonal situations that I have with the material world. I’m getting there, but it’s a struggle.

Nope.

Social skills are better than to be a good savant.
I prefer being unimportant ^^

@rebbel Oh right, thanks for clearing that up, I forgot it while thinking about all this.

@Lightlyseared Well that is basically my question to you: What would you sacrifice? If that means being excessively shy, or unable of having small talk, or really worse things like the inability to go outside of your house.

The concept of happiness has been mentioned a few times already. Intelligence and happiness have then been separated, but maybe they are fundamentally intertwined? This seems to be a rather bold statement, so I ask you another question, the first question turned negative: Would you sacrifice intelligence in order to become happier?
I would not, so I must conclude that, for me, intelligence and happiness are connected somehow.
But of course this can be again falsified by your answers if they differ from mine =)

@Hacksawhawk And my resoponse was I don’t have any social skills so i would be unable to sacrifice them. I surprised you didn’t get it.

Too late; already did :D

Thing is, I learned to adapt. Social skills are skills. Just because autistic people don’t learn them as intuitively as normal people, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn them (within the limits of our intelligence). It just takes us a little longer and is a little harder since w don’t have a natural affinity, just as many people don’t pick up technical skills a easily as I do.

@Lightlyseared I sort of did, but I assumed it was a joke, and if so then I sort of ruined it, for which I’m sorry. The fact alone that you’re here having a conversation with me proves you’ve got at least some social skills (and I haven’t even spoken of your capacity of making casual jokes! :D).

@jerv That’s actually a very interesting point, seeing you could also classify these so called skills as knowledge. So ultimately it depends on wether you have an affinity for one sort of knowledge or the other.
“Thing is, I learned to adapt.” This rather saddens me as it implies that you’re the one having to adapt, like you’re the ‘different’ one. If everybody were to lack all these social skills, nobody would be ‘different’, there wouldn’t be any pressure to adapt on anybody…

Since I have no social skills to begin with, it would be an improvement, not a tradeoff.

@Hacksawhawk Would you rather have a world full of people like Nikola Tesla and not a single Beethoven or Mother Teresa? I rather like the diversity.

And look at how many people are having trouble adapting to 21st-century life with it’s global economy and ubiquitous computing. Look how many people can’t figure out their computers, or even remember than taking your iPhone into the shower will kill it. Many people today can barely use technology (if at all), so I think that I’m not really that bad off except for the fact that I don’t do well at job interviews; I have to just let my skills speak for me.

@jerv I don’t exactly see why Beethoven is there, wasn’t he a little bit genius-weird as well? But anyway, I’m sorry if I gave the impression of wanting everybody to be socially impaired. All I wanted to say with that hypothesis was that (even in my previous sentence, with the word impaired) it seems wrong to me that those ‘geniuses’ are the different ones. Is majority really the norm? That seems rather arbitrary to me.

Nope I love my outgoing personality. I am happy being who I am, I wouldn’t change a thing even my inperfections!

@Hacksawhawk Beethoven was a different kind of genius from Tesla; that is why I mentioned him.

As for the majority being the norm, it pretty much is by definition, at least when they are >99%. Since I fall into the <1% minority, I have no problem with having to adapt, even if it is a bit of a hassle sometimes. I may have an ego, but I don’t think the world revolves around me.

I’m not asking you whether you’d want some form of autism, I don’t think anyone would want that

Both my husband and my son have Asperger’s, a form of Autism. I certainly wouldn’t have them any other way. Personally, I find social “skills” over-rated. Both of them are currently learning more techniques for acquiring said “social skills”. The more they learn, the more they question the blatant rudeness of non-autistics.

Ex: “Why did that is that lady talking on her cell phone ignoring her crying baby?” That’s a common type of question from my 5yr old son…we have a lot of mom’s walk by on our walk path during the day. Many of them are walking with one or more kids/babies, and are often ignoring their children while talking on the phone.

Both of my guys are incredibly intelligent, and both attempt to be outgoing. Would I sacrifice my social skills to be a savant? NO. I need my social skills to be the balance for my husband & son.

No. But I might sacrifice my savant skills to be more sociable.

I use my savant to help me become more sociable.

I’m happy with the balance I have.

@jerv You beat me to it, we are a lot alike

I don’t have any social skills to speak of. I would be willing to trade off some of my savantry for better social skills.

I wouldn’t. My social skills are the only skills I have.

No. What good is having skills like that if other people find it difficult to be around you so you can’t use those skills to their best effect?

I don’t know. I don’t have much of social skills, I’m not much of a people person at all and tend to avoid social situations as much as possible.

No, not unless my every need and curiosity was taken care of by truly loving people.

Since I only have rudimentary social skills to begin with, this would be an upgrade, not a tradeoff. I’m game.

@aprilsimnel Not all jobs require dealing with people, and us aspies tend to gravitate towards those jobs. Look at the IT industry. I work in a small machine shop and sometimes go most of the day with less than ten minutes of human interaction; just me, a hunk of metal, a blueprint, and a 50-taper Osaka Kiko CNC mill with a table big enough to sleep on. Now, it doesn’t matter how good your social skills are, most people won’t want to be around that machine as it sprays coolant and metal chips and makes hellacious noises as it hogs the center post out of a quarter-ton part.
Besides, people can be distracting; not good when you need to concentrate and/or have right deadlines. If people don’t want to deal with me, my job gets easier and things get done quicker.

What good is it? That depends on whether you are good enough to earn praise, respect, and a reputation that leads to you getting projects that test your skills. But that is just my opinion.

@jerv – But even aspies can’t be so off-putting to others that they can’t even get a job, which is my point.

@aprilsimnel Ah. That is true. As I said before, interviews are a bitch. Fortunately, this economy has leveled the playing field; normal people can’t get jobs either.

No.

But I respect and appreciate people like Mr. Monk. They do enrich our world.

Human diversity is a great thing.