What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you,
I suspect that autistics are far more willing than neurotypicals to be true iconoclast because many neurotypicals find autistics incomprehensible regardless of what the autistics believe. So the price of being an intellectual iconoclast is lower for autistics than for most other people.
Sounds plausible on the surface, but if the reasoning is “An autistic person will suffer about the same social cost whether or not they are perceived as an intellectual iconoclast, so if they are inclined to be an intellectual iconoclast, they will realize that they may as well allow themselves to do so”, then there might be a problem: the real reason might just be that they don’t process social costs as well (if at all) in the first place. But then this hypothesis might work if we adjust it to account for that: “An autistic person will be less likely to realize or care about the potential social cost of being perceived as an intellectual iconoclast, so if they are inclined to be an intellectual iconoclast, they will see little reason not to allow themselves to do so”. Any thoughts on this?
A relevant comment from a few years ago (on _Lonely Dissent_):
Sounds plausible on the surface, but if the reasoning is “An autistic person will suffer about the same social cost whether or not they are perceived as an intellectual iconoclast, so if they are inclined to be an intellectual iconoclast, they will realize that they may as well allow themselves to do so”, then there might be a problem: the real reason might just be that they don’t process social costs as well (if at all) in the first place. But then this hypothesis might work if we adjust it to account for that: “An autistic person will be less likely to realize or care about the potential social cost of being perceived as an intellectual iconoclast, so if they are inclined to be an intellectual iconoclast, they will see little reason not to allow themselves to do so”. Any thoughts on this?
Could be both, e.g., it starts as the latter and the person becomes more aware and it becomes the former.