Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
An institution that watches someone produce a long manuscript, a published book, or a technical research programme sometimes concludes that person cannot also need help with paperwork, timekeeping, or task-switching. That inference has a name in the ARC/Eden working paper on the Polymathic Neurodivergent Profile. It is the Capability-Adjustment Fallacy. Clinical guidance, disability law, and the lived-experience literature all say the same thing about it. It is unsafe.
NICE Clinical Guideline 142 on autism spectrum disorder in adults (2021, updated 2025) directs professionals to recognise the discrepancy between intellectual functioning and adaptive functioning. The formal name for what the guideline is pointing at is that intelligence quotient and day-to-day self-management are not the same construct. A person can score in the top decile on cognitive ability and be unable to reliably pay a bill on time. The guidance does not treat one as evidence about the other. Modern strengths-based assessment (Woods and Estes, 2023, Survey of Autistic Strengths, Skills, and Interests; Ferreira, 2025) extends the picture: the same neurodivergent trait can be advantage or impairment depending on context. The monotropism framework (Murray, Lesser and Lawson, 2005) explains why. An attention system that tunnels extraordinarily deep in favoured domains does not distribute the same way across multiple routine demands.
The Equality Act 2010 duty is functional, not diagnostic. Section 20 requires reasonable adjustments where a provision, criterion, or practice puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage compared with people who are not disabled. Section 149 imposes the public sector equality duty. CPR PD1A provides procedural protections for vulnerable parties in civil proceedings. None of these frameworks requires a specific diagnostic label as the trigger. The trigger is functional disadvantage in the domain where the adjustment is sought. The Capability-Adjustment Fallacy, treating output in one domain as evidence that there is no disadvantage in another, is an institutional practice that pre-empts that functional assessment.
The fallacy operates through a specific cognitive error. The observer sees high output in a favoured domain and infers that output could be replicated across all domains if the person "tried harder." This conflates domain-specific hyperfocus with general executive function. It assumes that the cognitive architecture producing intense, sustained, self-directed work in high-interest domains is the same architecture that manages time, tracks deadlines, and processes low-stimulation administrative communication. It is not. The defining feature of the profile the working paper describes is that these two architectures are different systems, and one of them works dramatically better than the other. The asymmetry is the pattern.
The correction is not a diagnostic upgrade and not preferential treatment. It is a functional assessment carried out in the domain where the disadvantage arises, uncoupled from output in the domain where the person is thriving. Clinicians assessing capable neurodivergent adults can explicitly document the asymmetry between domain-specific output and routine adaptive functioning, because institutions will otherwise use the former as evidence against the latter. Legal representatives seeking reasonable adjustments can point to NICE CG142's IQ and adaptive-functioning direction as the clinical anchor for what section 20 already requires as a functional matter. Employers, universities, and public bodies can build assessment procedures that read strengths and difficulties simultaneously rather than trading one against the other.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.