>I've often remarked (informally) that autistic people seem to operate under the assumption that the explicitly-stated rules are the actual rules. Yes, and the

>I've often remarked (informally) that autistic people seem to operate under the assumption that the explicitly-stated rules are the actual rules. Yes, and the people who believe that this is not how things should work are, in a word, wrong. Polities and societies who believe this tend to be very economically prosperous; GDP per capita has a positive correlation with this concept (countries with common law but no meaningfully codified negative rights come a relatively distant are second, civil law countries come third, and despotic regimes a distant fourth). Immigration patterns of high-skill/high-educated workers follow this correlation as well; all high-achievers want to live in the US, those who aren't quite as autistic land in Canada or the UK, Continental Europe is not a meaningful destination for high-skill migration, and people will die trying to get out of China. The problem with autistic-minded people, when operating under the notion that society has rules, tend to leak an outsized amount of political power into that society. A society that successfully prohibits itself from trying to capture that power prospers; a society that does not eventually becomes corrupt and devours its own ability to properly motivate those people to bother driving it forward.