If a society is to thrive, it needs a healthy intellectual ecosystem – a consortium of minds of many different kinds, in proportions that depend on their roles within the ecosystem and society.
Consider, for example, the two kinds of minds illustrated by the animation below. One mind can see a high level of local detail quickly, but is slow to see the big picture. The other is quick to see a blurry and indistinct version of the big picture, but slow to see any part of it in detail. The first mind learns by growing a fully-resolved piece of the picture larger until it has become all of the picture. The second learns by gradually increasing the level of detail with which they see the entire picture.
It is not hard to imagine society finding ways to utilise both of these ways of learning; and it seems likely that a symbiosis between them would benefit society more than if they worked independently or competed with one another.
In a symbiosis it is unlikely that the proportions of the society’s population with each kind of mind would be equal, because natural selection would be unlikely to make them equal: Participants in a symbiosis have different roles, by definition, and the numbers of minds needed to fulfil different roles are different, in general. So one kind of mind would be in a majority, not because one way of thinking is better or more useful, but because different ways of thinking are suited to different roles.
The overzealous pursuit of uniformity of practice is very bad for society because it invariably means designing practices for the majority and imposing them on minorities for whom they are inappropriate. Does it make sense to force a hive’s drones to adopt work practices that make it impossible for them to do their job simply because they are suitable practices for worker bees, and worker bees outnumber them? Should policies and practices within a hive be designed to optimize the productivity of the hive or to optimize the productivity of its majority subgroup at the expense of its minorities? If it is the latter, who is going to tell the queen?
The point of this simplistic two-neurotype example is that imposing structures on an intellectual ecosystem should be done with awareness of the ecosystem’s neurodiversity, and only then with great care. Terms like best practice and standard procedure rarely refer to ways of doing things that optimize the efficiency and productivity of society as a whole. They tend to refer to societal structures that benefit the performances of members of the “neurotypical” majority and their interoperability. And when structures have that purpose, they usually disadvantage, or even paralyse, those whose brain architectures are so different from the majority that the description “neurodivergent” is accurate and appropriate.
Imposing structures designed for the neurotypical majority indiscriminately, and without flexibility, can make it so difficult for those in neurodivergent minorities to operate that they become unproductive and fall by the wayside. This is catastrophic for them, but it is bad for everyone: It deprives society of niche abilities that were naturally selected for the benefits they bring to society’s collective mind.