The reason people often exclude autistic folks might be a 'brain hack' to save calories by not dealing with complex social situations.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Evolutionary Arbitrage: Metabolic Extraction and the Bio-Economics of Autistic Exclusion
SSRN · 6328078
The Takeaway
This paper reframes social bias as a thermodynamic resource problem, arguing that neurotypical brains evolved to devalue 'high-entropy' signals (like atypical eye contact or stimming) because they are metabolically expensive to process. It reveals that 'masking' to fit into society forces an autistic person's brain into a state that is 94% less fuel-efficient than normal, turning social interaction into a literal energy crisis.
From the abstract
<p>Prevailing clinical frameworks frequently attribute autistic social exclusion to intrinsic cognitive or motivational deficits. This manuscript advances a mechanistic alternative: the Evolutionary Arbitrage hypothesis, which reconceptualizes exclusion as an asymmetric bio-economic process. I posit that the human brain’s "expensive tissue" constraint necessitates strict metabolic conservation, favoring a statistically optimized, low-resolution "Normate" predictive baseline. Drawing on a bioecon