People who are concerned this is a fad have some legitimate concerns.

But, they are at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This diagnosis opens up an incredibly insightful way of understanding much of human culture, history, and art. It is pretty easy to link up certain archetypes to aspergers syndrome. The Romantic Hero, for example, or the Shaman both read like descriptions of Asperger's as manifested in a certain societal context. This could partly be because storytellers often are Aspergian themselves and the characteristic identity diffusion leads Aspergian people both create idolized versions of themselves, study their world intently, and project themselves (and their aspergian traits) onto the stories of their culture. The greek god Hermes often presents as Aspergian (in that he is concerned with information, started technology, in the form of music, as an infant, relates to travel, never stays in the same place, etc). The lack of concern for societal norms maps perfectly onto the trickster's taboo breaking. Jesus at twelve in the temple speaking to priests as an authority mirrors Dr. Hans Asperger's description of his patients as "little professors". It's fractally recursive throughout human history.

This concept also cast light deep into the edifice of academic philosophy, in that many philosophers had asperger's syndrome and changed philosophies about the same time in their lives. Kant developed transcendental Idealism. Wittgenstein abandoned his picture theory of words. Etc. This correlates with a change in Asperger's whereby around age 40 the Aspergian or autistic aspects soften, and some measure of reciprocity is added to the personality, and relates to observed changes in the brain. Understanding Wittgenstein's picture theory in light of the difficulties of aspergers illuminates both aspergers and the reasons Wittgenstein's theory was the way it was. At a meta level, one of the next tasks in at least AI and consciousness studies, will be to disentangle autistic and non autistic theories about consciousness. This could also shed light into AI, because Aspergian or Autistic people doing AI with an impaired theory of other minds won't succeed, and will make certain characteristic errors in their reasoning rooted in the way Asperger's projects onto their academic work.

Some people say that everyone is a unique little snowflake and so special and that these boxes can't be applied easily or posthumously and blah blah. Those people are idiots. You are not a unique little snowflake, and are not special. Without exception (for any 'you') You are an instantiation of the same patterns that millions of other people instantiate, with a few superficial differences you probably confuse for a unique and indescribable soul, and it's easy for the right person to put you in a box and label you (and manipulate the hell out of you if they want, eg, advertising and marketing). Asperger's and HFA present distinctly. You actually can make pretty valid diagnosis of something so characteristic even posthumously. We shouldn't avoid interpreting history this way because it destroys peoples pathetic illusion's that they are special and impossible to pin down.

This is the kind of thing where understanding it at the surface will be deceiving, but understanding deeply will be illuminating. The way most people understand this is wrong, but understanding Asperger's as it relates to human culture will enhance most people's understanding of the world deeply.