So, while waiting for a simulation to finish running, I've just taken the "Essential Differences" quiz at the Guardian. According to my (unfeigned) answers, I'm an emotionally normal woman (which my wife finds laughable) and an autistic man. How I managed the latter while admitting a complete lack of interest in car engines, stereos, household wiring, freeways and sports statistics, I dunno. (The Jungian explanation, perhaps, is that my anima has Asperger's syndrome.)
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Maria Farrell [permalink bloggered], Kieran Healy and Matt Yglesias are all saying the right, intelligent things about how appalling it is that something like this is being presented as evidence of hard-wired gender differences. What I want to know, though, is what happened to Simon Baron-Cohen, who wrote the book occasioning this quiz: he used to be a pretty good cognitive scientist.
Posted at April 18, 2003 12:46 | permanent link