I am an autist in a family filled with autists - some of whom I think you would CLEARLY recognize as autistic, but some of whom you'd have this "absolute nonsense" reaction to. I say that because that is the reaction I had myself, I was very skeptical of this whole thing until I came to learn a lot about it after my daughter was diagnosed.
I don't think it's mainstream science, but monotropism is a theory of attention which has been theorized as the central underlying feature of autism and you might be interested in looking it up. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think the more mainstream way of talking about it is bottom up processing (details, the trees rather than the forest) vs top down processing (holistic, the forest rather than the trees).
Either way - you can get a very diverse set of results depending on how which sorts of things the individual's attention gets commandeered by, and by how much. Some people can't stop paying attention to individual sounds or individual tactile sensations or any other individual sensation, some people have difficulty putting sentences together despite having an excellent grasp of each word, some get stuck trying to process specific individual facial expressions and fail to grasp the actual social dynamics going on around them - it goes on and on.
Some have special interests (deep attention to a specific topic) that are extremely economically profitable (programming) or simply socially mainstream (music or movies) which give them social cachet. Some have special interests that mark them as weird and socially outcast (collecting bugs, memorizing bus routes). Some are very intelligent and are able to make up for a lot of difficulties with effort. Some have a great focus on social dynamics and come off quite charming. All of this can add up to very different experiences though life, very different sets of difficulties, and that of course can compound.
I think you should expect there to be a very wide variety of autistic people, if there is an underlying similarity in processing things. There is a very wide variety of non-autistic people, too. Heck, I think there's a wide variety of people with only one hand, just because Jim Abbott was a major league baseball pitcher doesn't mean he actually had two hands, and just because Muggsy Bogues was a great NBA player doesn't mean he wasn't short.
What's your thesis here? I'm getting "shy, slightly socially awkward and very intelligent is not what autism is," and "people who are intelligent, knowledgeable, socially tuned and socially integrated claiming to be autistic must obviously be lying, autistics could not possibly be those things."
There are social (cut me some slack, I'm autistic) and in socialized medicine systems, financial benefits to an autism diagnosis. So yeah, why wouldn't you claim to be autistic, what's the downside?
Add to that Gen-Z, socially awkward, isolated and poisoned by their obessive phone addictions frantically searching the internet "Why do I feel socially awkward?" and a million "Take out autism test!" links later get their answer. Yes indeed, they have autism, the test proved it.
Autism is much more than social awkwardness, and I'm sure you're not intending to be, but this post is extremely dehumanizing and insulting to people dealing with the issues that an ASD diagnosis typically presents with. and, by the way, many high functioning individuals have to fight for their entire lives to even get a diagnosis, so I'm not sure where you're getting your information from that these are being "handed out like candy" or whatever. I can point you to a variety of sources online if you're interested in learning what this actually is.
Unfortunate you have been downvoted because this is definitely the case. I am not actually sure that anyone disagrees with this, UK governments on both the left and right have identified this.
Ten years ago in the UK getting disability money for autism meant being non-verbal, requires extensive in-home care, unable to live independently, etc. Whatever you think about the definitions, it is very clearly not the same now and refers exclusively to some kind of social disorder. Rates of the former haven't changed significantly, rates of the latter are exploding.
When I say this, I don't think people understand the scale here: in some regions of the UK as much 40% of primary-school age children are disabled. Spending in this area is projected to bankrupt many local governments...to be clear, these are economic units with multi-billion pound budgets and responsibility for basic societal functions. It is difficult to understate the extent to which this is an issue.
I don't necessarily think people who engage in the over-diagnosis are ill-meaning: individuals are being given money to do this, psychologists are raking it in hand over fist, and the UK is now a place with a very effective disability lobby with lots of incentives to keep it all going. But it remains true despite all of this that it cannot continue.
Just imo, the damage done already is close to irretrievable. The situation in UK schools is dire: teachers are frequently attacked physically (in some regions in the UK, this is so frequent and so little support is provided because of the inability to exclude "disabled" children that there are frequent staff walkouts), typical classes have 5-6 ASD assistants at all times, behaviour is so poor that other children are unable to learn, parenting of these children is non-existent because parents gain financially and the incentives to blame a medical condition rather than poor parenting are clear, etc. If you consider other trends, it is dire...we are talking about most of the workforce entrants coming out: many unable to speak English, can't perform basic tasks without support, zero impulse control, usually claiming benefits straight out of secondary...it is so bleak.
Are you shy, slightly socially awkward and very intelligent? You must be "on the spectrum".
The most intelligent, knowledgeable, socially tuned and socially integrated people I see online claim to be autistic. I swear it is absolute nonsense.