Autism and Invention Are Connected
wsj.com
wsj.com
Minor point of clarification: It's noted that many autistic folks struggle with empathy. There are two dimensions to empathy, cognitive and affective. Cognitive is more about perspective taking, or reading the feelings / intentions of others, while affective is the ability to share/understand the emotions of others, and respond appropriately.
Putting aside that the two may overlap, it's often the cognitive aspect that challenges the autistic, leaving them susceptible to being tricked, or unable to pick up on, say, whether or not a person is interested in dating them.
I point this out b/c it's important that this deficiency isn't construed as simply a predisposition to acting like an unfeeling jerk. There are many layers to empathy, as well as the related concept of Theory of Mind.
On the topic of theory of mind and ASD, I think this is quite an interesting read: "Empirical Failures of the Claim That Autistic People Lack a Theory of Mind" – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/
"We conclude that the claim that autistic people lack a theory of mind is empirically questionable and societally harmful"
Some understand but do not care, whereas some care but do not understand. It dovetails really well with creativity but it can introduce many challenges in life.
I say to myself I can "understand it", but if I can't feel it, I didn't really understand anything.
I strongly relate with this as a child. As I grew older my friends would often come to me for emotional advice, which I explain as having found an understanding of the patterns behind emotions. I still have no clue how my own emotions work, but I share that with everyone.
My guess is that when theorizing about another Autistic person mind, which is similar to their own, they might actually do quite well because they have their own mind to use as a base to work from, just like Neurotypical people have their own mind to use as a base when theorizing about another Neurotypical persons mind.
Similarly, I'd say your average neurotypical person would have difficulties theorizing about whats going on inside an Autistic persons mind.
If I'm right, then the difference in Theory of Mind in my view would be more of a difference than an fundamental impairment.
If they know something, they just assume I do too.
I feel like the curse of knowledge mostly applies when experts talk to non-experts. Not including trivially required context when talking to co-experts seems like something else to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
Edit: Sorry for the dupe. Vizzier posted this a minute or three before I did.
I think it feeds strongly into imposter syndrome too. It's easy to devalue your own contributions when you suspect anyone else could make them.
There has been an increasing amount of study on it, and research supports your guesses.
Yes, that perfectly matches my experiences.
I have far too much affective empathy, but struggle with cognitive empathy and often unintentionally make enemies because I am too clumsy with my words and social interactions, and can't properly gauge social roles (such as when a person looks up to me and would be hurt to hear any criticism from me.)
It stings me when people repeat that I have no empathy at all, and I wish this was better understood by others. Thank you for pointing it out so eloquently.
(Only speaking for myself here, not others! All of us are very different.)
(edit: removed the phrase "your unintentional enemies" from my sentence above)
When reflecting on myself, I think I have problems with both cognitive and affective empathy. From my perspective it's hard to differ between those because I think a lot of what makes the "reactibility of a person" is intertwined and feels like a really complicated maze that needs exploration to find a potential solution.
The problem is though, that when you try to explore "this maze" in a situation; usually people get very upset for me behaving not in an appropriate manner. So I guess that it's very hard to figure out when these exploration parts are appropriate; and when they are not.
> leaving them susceptible to being tricked, or unable to pick up on, say, whether or not a person is interested in dating them.
A lot of times in life people tend to exploit your character; and even when you realize it's just friendship or a distanciated acquaintance relationship the hard part is still saying no when people ask for your help. Oh so often you help them; and when you need their help once for a little thing like helping you to move something around - years later - they're suddenly not your friends anymore.
I often think that what keeps my sanity intact is "keeping a score" subconsciously... how often I helped or made space for somebody; and how often they did. While this is the jerk part to other people; it's a necessity for me to not get exploited by others again.
Where did you find this information? I might be self-analysing wrongly, so it'd be helpful to know how one might reach the opposite conclusion.
(Many people already have a story about how the other person feels, and either ignore the signs or try to find an explanation within the story. For example, I assume that the person is angry... but the person smiles at me... what a hypocrite!! Instead of considering that maybe I was wrong about the person being angry.)
For someone on the spectrum, probably the most difficult part is to stop doing what you are doing now, and observe the other person curiously. And make the habit to do this as often as possible. Because this is often more important than finishing the sentence (paragraphs, the entire speech) that you already started. This will be really difficult -- but the encouraging thing is that when you master this skill, you can become better at it than many neurotypicals. Because they are doing it in an instinctive half-assed way, but when you learn to focus, you will focus intensely. (Of course, a neurotypical could learn the same thing, the same way, they just have less motivation to do so, because they assume they are already perfect at it, so most won't bother.) Knowing that you don't know is a good start.
And by the way, neurotypicals also fail at empathy quite often, they just cover it better, and recover from a blunder faster. They kinda do it in a way that is more socially acceptable. For example, they sometimes misinterpret another person in a way that makes the other person go "wtf?", but all onlookers go "wow, that was an awesome example of empathy". While you, if you misinterpret someone, that person goes "wtf?" and everyone else goes "wtf?" too. Maybe the proper way to put it is that neurotypicals are very good at reading the feelings of a crowd, but it is hit-and-miss with reading the feelings of one specific person. On the spectrum, it is hit-and-miss with one person, and almost sure miss with a crowd.
Also, look at the compatibility of their words and actions. If someone says "I am okay", but they keep yelling and hitting things, they are probably not okay. But confronting them about it directly is not helpful. Maybe later, if they calm down, you could ask them "yesterday, when you said you were okay, you also..., so I am confused". Here it depends. Some people will explain. Some will get angry again; in that case, don't try this with the same person again, find someone else to talk to.
For long-term understanding of other people, focus on what they do, instead of what they say. The past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. If someone keeps talking about how they are going to do this or that, but they never do it, just assume they never will. Someone keeps doing something, then says excuses and promises to never do it again, but keeps doing it, just assume that they will keep doing it. The words can provide additional information to actions (e.g. "I hit you because I was angry"), but cannot erase the action (whatever was the reason, it is a fact that the person hit you, and you should not forget that, especially if that happens repeatedly). Words are "maybe", repeated actions are "the real thing". (Repeated words do not become any more reliable. Unless you mean "reliable prediction of what the person will say the next time", of course.)
People are different. Some are liars, some are manipulators, some are confused, some are sincere. Sometimes your problems with understanding a specific person are a result of that specific person being difficult to understand. Don't worry too much about understanding one specific person; pay attention to understanding people in general. It is possible that your understanding of other people will gradually improve, and yet that one person will remain just as mysterious as before. Count that as a success, not as failure.
People are more similar to each other than it may seem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect Most people are insecure, with various degree of denial. (Major exception: psychopaths. Charming people who usually refuse to discuss what is inside them, because there is barely anything beyond emptiness and hunger.)
Like all skills, empathy improves with practice. It would probably be useful if you could find someone to observe you at social situations, and discuss with them the situations afterwards. Probably more than one person, because each person will have their own biases and projections.
Maybe try to read some books or watch videos on Rogerian therapy. Simply said, it is a way to communicate with people in a therapeutical setting without imposing your own ideas of how they feel. (If you don't know how they feel, and you know that you don't know, that should make it even easier.)
This is just a random stream of thought, I hope it is useful, and I definitely have no scientific evidence for any of that. Good luck!
Perhaps the author was thinking about a strong form of Autism that pretty unequivocally makes life difficult?
I'm probably guilty of not viewing this as disabling because I'm treating the term too concretely, as if a disability has to be something "physical" that might require special accommodations. But yeah, I suppose my challenges in understanding the game of love are disabling.
As an aside, I'm really disappointed it's all under the umbrella term of ASD now. People are generally more aware of the differences now but no thanks to that.
0. I like ASD better because aspergers sounds like ass-burgers TBH and once explained it makes people understand immediately that you have various degrees of it.
But I don't care to use the word disabled in describing myself. Being unable to keep my mouth shut in the face of something I don't agree with doesn't qualify as a disability. My sensory issues aren't anything I ask for accommodations for. That I prefer to spend more time away from people than the average bear is not a disability. And in the context of autism, it's hard to use the word disabled and not have people place limitations on what one can/can't do. So, I don't use the word. And just consider myself different.
I recognize that there are people deeply offended by people like me, who are at the higher-functioning end of the spectrum and refuse to consider themselves disabled. (They see us as impostors.) There are also many people who take offense to the term lower/lesser functioning, and resent the use of terms like "severe autism". They consider this language to be demeaning. Autistic twitter is quite the landmine for semantic wars of this sort.
You can function obviously, but not as society expects you to or even in way they can understand. For that reason, you receive the label of "has a disability".
The term "disability" is unfortunately as much a reflection of societal norms as it is genuine medical diagnosis.
As I understand it, the problem with using the expressions "lower / higher functioning" is that it evokes the idea that problems of people with "lower functioning" are a strict superset of problems of people with "higher functioning".
In reality, it's more like there is a set of symptoms, and some people have a larger random selection, and some people have a smaller random selection, so it is possible to be "higher functioning" but fail at X, or be "lower functioning" and fail at everything but X. So the "higher/lower" is more about how much your specific set of symptoms disrupts your life, but it doesn't imply which symptoms are present or absent.
But people who see the "lower / higher functioning" as two sets of symptoms will judge you by presence or absence of one specific symptom.
(Also, with some symptoms, how much they disrupt your life depends on what environment you live in.)
> Autistic twitter is quite the landmine for semantic wars of this sort.
Twitter seems to evoke the worst in people in general. The explanation I wrote here would almost certainly be also considered highly offensive by someone.
I was diagnosed with Asperger's later in life. I received this diagnosis after I already had a successful career, happy marriage, and house full of kids. Not much of a hindrance, right?
On the other hand, my brother suffers a much more severe form of autism. He does hold a profession job in finance. But he otherwise requires a full-time caretaker, tons of medication and understanding, etc. No friends. He's not self-sufficient.
It's a huge spectrum.
In many ways my life has been just fine: steady well-paying employment, wonderful wife and kids, etc. So as with you, being (probably) somewhere on the spectrum isn't correlated with a crappy life.
But...
I've also had some unusual personality traits for my whole life, and I've really beaten myself up regarding them. Once I had a probably Asperger diagnosis, I felt like a tremendous weight was lifted. I no longer felt like I was uniquely messed up in those way. And maybe the subconscious logic is that if I'm part of a cluster of people with these idiosynchronies, maybe there's an underlying physiological cause that's somewhat out of my control, and therefore I'm less morally culpable for my atypical social failures.
As part of my BPD the psychiatrist gave me an ADHD test, 25% of people with BPD also have ADHD.
edit: my source is the CDC(https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html) for IQ and this paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3727194/ for proportion of nonverbal autism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao_Ming
Also disable sound and search for "Kevin Durant injury: A look at the NBA's history with foot injuries"
As well, some of the "tall genes" are associated with connective tissue and other health problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfan_syndrome
I'm average height for the West, but when I'm in Asia, I often hit my head on gates, taxi doorways, etc. I imagine that would also happen for 7 footers in the West.
Being on the spectrum without learning how to work around neurotypicals is the issue, the same way that being 7 foot tall without the physical modifications needed to support that body is also an issue.
I am very much on the spectrum but have developed a large number of coping strategies [0]. Had I been diagnosed and treated as a child I would have never had the ability to become anywhere near as successful and fulfilled as I am today. Instead I would have been drugged into being an office drone and probably been looking at suicide about now.
[0] One of the odder ones that no one neurotypical understands is an algebra of social relations I use to model office politics. It lets me evaluate the social graph analytically several jumps further than any person can keep in their head.
Lactose intolerance in adults is something that the majority of our species lives with. It's only the Indo-European minority that can keep drinking cow's milk after puberty.
So, for example: Eye contact aversion. Prevalent among autistics. But only a disability in cultures that equate it with dishonesty.
Inability to tolerate fluorescent lighting. Those damned things did not exist until what, 60 years ago? How is it a pathology to be averse to them.Kamp-Becker I, Albertowski K, Becker J, Ghahreman M, Langmann A, Mingebach T, Poustka L, Weber L, Schmidt H, Smidt J, Stehr T, Roessner V, Kucharczyk K, Wolff N, Stroth S. Diagnostic accuracy of the ADOS and ADOS-2 in clinical practice. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2018 Sep;27(9):1193-1207. doi: 10.1007/s00787-018-1143-y. Epub 2018 Mar 20. PMID: 29560529:
> There is an obvious symptom overlap between ASD and emotional and anxiety disorders documented by several studies [24, 52–56]. Both disorders involve profound social interaction and communication defcits, problems in emotion recognition, insistence on sameness, infexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns or verbal/non-verbal behaviour. 30% of children with an anxiety disorder (but no known diagnosis of ASD) were above the cutof of the ADI-R in at least one domain [57]. Other disorders are likewise associated with “autistic traits” of profound amount, such as ADHD, conduct disorders, intellectual impairment, and language disorders (see above)
Since none of the traits of ASD is unique to ASD, none of those traits can be said to be "by definition, autism". One only should be diagnosed with ASD if one has enough of a broad enough cross-section of those traits, and those traits cause clinically significant dysfunction. (A person with a broad cross-section of those traits but without clinically significant dysfunction doesn't have ASD, they have BAP, but the boundary between ASD and BAP is unclear and varies from clinician to clinician.)
https://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-diagnosis-criteria-dsm-5
"""Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following, currently or by history...
Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity...
Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction...
Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships... """
I'm also diagnosed with ADHD which is often co-morbid with ASD.
I very much refuse to go along with a looooot of things just for the sake it. Anything steeped in tradition without a whole lot of logic to it gets met with mostly flat rejection. This has steadily increased as I've gotten older.
My mum used to be a special needs teacher and she kind of suspected I might be on the spectrum when I was a teenager. I've met people diagnosed with ASD whom I share a bunch of lived experience in common with. My step brother has a son whose diagnosed with ASD and he sort of indicated I show some signs of it. So, there are hints that maybe I am somewhere possibly the invisible end of the spectrum? Or maybe it's just my personality?
I read through Asperger's The Complete Guide. There are a few puzzle pieces which fit like ding ding ding. But there just aren't enough of them. And I watch things like Love On The Spectrum etc and I have had my share of difficulties perhaps but nowhere near what those people experience.
I've kinda tossed up getting a professional opinion about it multiple times. I just mostly feel like this is me and it's who I enjoy being. Perhaps my 20s were just one big development of coping mechanisms? My social skills just haven't really troubled me until this year. Mostly it's either workmates, long term friends who share my interests, or special interest groups where I have stuff in common with people. This year I had to take my son to a school thing where there were other parents and the only shared context was our children. It was very anxiety inducing and I just felt like I had nothing. My son wanted to stay longer but I panicked and I said we had to go home.
So... At this point I don't really know.
"I am acting like this because of my ASD" vs. "I am acting like this because I'm not very agreeable" I think is valuable self knowledge alone.
I tell my own ASD child, it's such a broad spectrum of otherwise loosely-associated characteristics that whatever diagnostic standards are deployed by professionals almost certainly will be reassessed as erroneous in my child's lifetime, which means all authoritative guidance you can receive now on the subject is 'wrong'. ASD is a bucket of 'different'. Those doing the judging can't even be consistent in expressing how ASDers are 'different'. That is all.
> our ancestors started inventing things 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Erm, and what about the other 200k-230k years of homo sapiens?
Not to mention that Homo erectus invented the handaxe and domesticated fire about 1700k years ago, both of which were a pretty big deal!
https://tauromachy.org/2018/07/18/the-handaxe-the-thundersto...
And that modern humans had some kind of creativity explosion substantially after they were anatomically modern.
They also talk about individual learning as a third mode, which somewhat ironically seems to be what the autism article is talking about... except the conditions for it are genetically based ! (But I guess so is the transition to mostly social learning?)
EDIT : Hmm, and since autism is "anti-social" (and also probably generally anti-survival and anti-reproduction), may it be that it was only once that large, stable, strong social groups were put in place starting with 300-200 kya, that the conditions for "autistic specializations" could emerge starting with 100-45 kya, and this is what in turn turbocharged inventions leading to the "creativity explosion" ? The autism article would make a lot of sense under this light !
Anyway, perhaps we can't cleanly separate nature and nurture, see also recent discoveries somewhat rehabilitating Lamarckian inheritance.
Also, my author in a parallel article says :
https://loukeep.substack.com/p/vagaries
> The first modern human bones are in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, 300 kya. H. rhodiensis - the African variant of heidelbergensis - disappears at around this same time. There are just-about-simultaneously collections found in the Rift Valley, Kenya, that point to incredibly “modern” behavior[1], including pigment production and obsidian distant enough to suggest trade networks. Once, I think, it could be maintained that some kind of “great leap forward” in human behavior took place some 60,000 years ago or so. I don’t particularly understand how one can keep that up now.
Asocial people on other side are not social, but they don't do any anti-social things - because that would mean that they have to socialize and that is opposite to being asocial.
Autistic people are not anti-survivalists, as by definition they have hightened fight-flight response, so they want to survive, however they have to really depend on society(humans by definition are social animals) to provide them survivable environment, so they could invent. Hardly any invention can happen, if there is no fertile ground, as being among morons requires different goals and skills to survive and adapt - with creativity.
Autistic people also are no anti-reproduction either - modern society is in general against reproduction, as there is overpopulation on this planet.
There are no problems to reproduce, if female is autistic, as she has much higher chances to find a partner and produce autistic offsprings, but it is more complicated for autistic males to find a partner and without a partner there is no reproduction even if males are pro-reproduction.
> There are no problems to reproduce, if female is autistic, as she has much higher chances to find a partner and produce autistic offsprings
Not only she has to birth children, in the absence of a strong (extra-)familial community she also has to be able to care well for them. Don't you think that autism, especially if in strong form, might make this a problem?
I pay much more than $10 for only WSJ subscription. Sounds like I'm getting the shaft.
If we do not pay for news, news has to be financed through online advertising which is basically selling personal data for profit. Without paying revenue local news sites cannot afford to hire journalist. If there is not local journalist, there will not be controls, checks and writings on what elected officials do. Local news papers feed national news feed with articles and national news.
So its essential for our democracy that we are willing to pay for news services which pays journalists.
What you need is a well-funded, and non-profit public news media. It's not without its faults, but it certainly shines where private news media consistently fails to.
Agreed.
> which is basically selling personal data for profit
Not necessarily. Mostly untargeted display ads don't. They could profit from personal data as much as TV or newspaper ads. They also yield a lot worse; my point is that it's possible to run ads that don't actually use personal data.
My bigger concern with ad-funded journalism is it encourages stories and headlines that get clicks, not stories that are important. Journalism isn't supposed to be entertainment.
Some people play the social games more than others and if you're not interested in playing along, you're labelled as the 'other'. Then all of the negative stuff builds from there and it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Positive generalizations are harmful too, like it being a super power or you're going to be a wealthy inventor.
Autism would be just one factor among many for all of these things.
Edit: yeah, that’s the conclusion of the analysis. I wonder if there is still more to be found there (ie if it is still closer to 1:1).
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522
And I kind of have the impression that the situation here actually got worse during the last decades?
I mean it's not only career choices where such gender differences manifest, we also see it in the choices that young children make. The burden of proof is on the camp that proposes that it's entirely sociological since the extant empirical evidence, along multiple independent lines, contradicts it.
For instance, women have to be just the right level of assertive. Too little, and you're not respected nor listened to, you're passed for promotions... Too much, and you're viewed as aggressive.
You have all those articles about women leaving tech - they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.
However, this is not evidence of a uniquely bad problem in tech which can explain why tech has a gender disparity (which occurs primarily because women are self-selecting out of it before college) and other areas do not. Tech workers are far less blokey and much more aware/introspective of the issues than finance workers for example, actually the contrast is rather extreme speaking as someone who's worked in both industries, but it has less women proportionately than in finance which is contra to what your hypothesis would predict.
We also have to contend with the fact that women are underrepresented in tech (again due mostly to less women entering technical fields in college, even though they can easily do so if they wanted) across every developed country. Are we to say that chauvinism is such an extensive problem in tech across every single country, and that it's consistently more of a problem than in Law, Finance and almost every other field, and that we can't find a single exception to this in Scandinavia or one miscellaneous country?
I find that dubious and think a genetic explanation (i.e. genetics influencing group means in interests/passions) is a far better fit to the available data, especially since such differences show up at a very young age, across cultures, before significant socialization. Not to mention that these results fit with fairly mainstream science (evolutionary psychology).
This is not an attempt at a value judgement, prescription, or to diminish the very real issues that women face in the workplace (including the tech workplace). I'm just trying to get a descriptive answer to the question "what's the biggest factor behind tech having so few women?".
> they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.
I see these as anecdotes. They're interesting and worthy of attention, but it's not good data that compares how many women and how many men are leaving tech when compared to other industries.
-
I would really like to see a survey of 18 year old women who are enrolling into college, and straight up ask them why they didn't choose tech. My money is on them saying they have no interest, and not that they read some article about tech-unique chauvinism. I will await such results keenly.
I'm not denying a genetic factor either, because I can't disprove it.
What I'm arguing against is this "tabula rasa" at age 18. Women grow up with less female role models in STEM. A Barbie doll used to say "math is hard", which speaks volumes to how prevalent this message is. Sure, 18yo haven't seen the workplace yet, but they've seen how women are treated, how higher the bar is for them, how more criticism they get when they take a risk and fail, how often they'd be the only woman in the room... Going into STEM for a boy is being safe in a group of similar peers, going into STEM for a girl is harder, because all your life, you have to prove you're good despite being a girl, and because it's lonely.
My personal view is that both genetics and society matter here. I don't have a problem with genetics, but I do have one with society.
There is a 3-to-1 ratio in diagnostic prevalence. From the article you linked: "There appears to be a diagnostic gender bias, meaning that girls who meet criteria for ASD are at disproportionate risk of not receiving a clinical diagnosis."
There are multiple theories for this difference: genetics, environment, ...; but also gender bias in diagnosis. eg. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/14/thousands-of...
There's a bigger payout at the right tail of the distribution for male genes. Male genes can sometimes have 1000 offspring. Female genes generally can't. Male genes are generally more likely to have 0 offspring. So male genes have less to lose and more to gain by taking risks, behavioral and biological risks. See also male variance hypothesis.
This varies by species and the pattern is likely stronger in more polygynous species and weaker in more monogamous species. See also sexual dimorphism. Human males take more behavioral risks on average and have higher mortality rates throughout life (not only from behavior).
I warn you though, this is a controversial subject because of some of its possible implications.
Also I should disclose that I'm not an expert, just a layperson interested in this and some related topics.
This is a really sad state of science we are living through.
I can imagine some of the implications people could come up with, but I'm curious which ones come to mind for you.
+ I wonder if people with these 'differences' really at the end of the day just have 'different viewpoints'.
If 'everyone' were autistic a person that we might consider to be 'normal' ... would literally be an 'empath' - someone with uncanny magical powers to read emotions. That person would probably seem 'innovative' for having such a worldview.
Yes it is a spectrum and yes you can be "high functioning" and have "milder symptoms" but it is way more than that.
Autism has a wide range of clinical subtypes and there are extremely debilitating ones.
At its worst, you have kids who are non-verbal and can't communicate. If they don't get therapy they can be become aggressive and violent as they get older. A screaming hitting 5 year old is far different than a screaming hitting 15 year old.
Spinning in circles, flapping, repetition, sensory issues, the requirement of definite routines. It's a whole different world and exhausting.
You can identify signs of autism as early as 18 months. At age 2 or 3 it can be reliably diagnosed. I've personally seen autistic non-verable young kids go through intensive therapy and develop into kids who can attend kindergarten or 1st grade.
What is really sad is that for the kids that don't get early intervention and where schools and states are not able to identify these kids. These kids end up with behavioral IEPs, might get kicked out of school and have no friends. Not that the kids necessarily want to play with other kids.
Also the UK is seriously behind in autism therapy services and while it is good to focus on positive traits that might be associated with autism it is not helpful to those who really need the help. And in many cases you need a lot of help. But if you invest when the kids are young you can really make a difference.
In the US, Obamacare really opened up services in the US and even then its hit or miss. For example, federal employees have no early intervention/autism coverage. And before that you had to go to specific states or school districts or be really rich to get any type of help. Even then it takes 6 months to get your kid in somewhere and the wait lists are huge as demand is so high.
Kids with autism basically need 1:1 therapy 8 hours a day with positive reinforcement either ABA, AVB etc... I am a fan of center based programs but you do need to find a good program.
https://www.autismspeaks.org/signs-autism
Also I am not sure what Baron-Cohen is suggesting here but saying that there is a "scientific rationale" behind the kid flipping the light on and off or staring at the fireplace or a ceiling fan wondering how it is just nonsense. I mean maybe its true but did the kid tell you that? The kid is presumably not able to ask someone as to why the light turns on when he flicks the switch or if told, integrate the response. I think it is more consistent with the need for stimulation. Also his comment on a savant with autism is really not helpful. Savant syndrome is probably co-morbid with autism, development delay, and intellectual disability... but to say that's an autistic trait is just irresponsible.
His book is basically a generalization based on autistic traits focused on systematizing and pattern matching and guess what the major confounding variable is ... we are all humans. Humans are pattern matchers + more. We also all respond to stimulus/response. And even animals are pattern matchers.
And yes, you can make kids stop performing some specific behaviors using ABA, so they will count it as big success. It does not make them less autist, only more terrified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Cont...
> applied behavior analysis ... used aversives such as electric shocks to modify undesirable behavior in their initial use in the 1970s, as well as slapping and shouting ... aversives have continued to be used in some ABA programs. In comments made in 2014 to the FDA, a clinician who previously worked at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center claimed that "all textbooks used for thorough training of applied behavior analysts include an overview of the principles of punishment, including the use of electrical stimulation." In 2020, the FDA banned the use of electrical stimulation devices used for self-injurious or aggressive behavior and asserted that "Evidence indicates a number of significant psychological and physical risks are associated with the use of these devices, including worsening of underlying symptoms, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, burns and tissue damage."
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Educational_Ce...
This is not true. Modern ABA has no punishment as negative feedback component. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. If you find that a facility engages in said techniques they should be reported.
Modern ABA is good at finding things that are extremely unpleasant to autists, but seem okay to normies, and use those as a punishment. Perfectly legal. (And even this improvement only came after the alternatives were made illegal.)
I am curious what would be your example of ABA without punishment. Could you perhaps send me a link to a video? Maybe we make different conclusions from watching the same thing.
There is extremely scant evidence to support this claim, and conversely, an enormous amount of evidence to disprove it.
The first part is questionable in its very premise. Mental disabilities as an adaptation? By what metric do you measure this? And having huge upsides? There aren't many upsides to someone being born severely mentally retarded. There aren't really even many upsides to severe autism.
For every "House, M.D." you're thinking of, there's another totally non-functional person who requires an enormous amount of caretaking.
My God, this is so well said. Thank you for this comment.
I could not agree with you more.
This was really not my intent. Would you care letting me know where I implicitly said that so I cannot make the same error in the future?
So one explanation is that natural selection has found a balance that yields benefits for the group.
Obviously autism != intelligence, but I'd wager a fair amount of people are thought to be "on the spectrum" when really they just have an incredibly high IQ compared to their peers.
Obviously not coming at this from a medical background.
For the longest time people viewed high IQ (as much as it is an actual distinct thing) as a pure blessing. But more and more is coming out saying like everything else high IQ is a trade off and by increasing IQ you decrease other factors so it would not be at all surprising if major issues are strongly correlated with high IQ.
That said I believe autism specifically occurs up and down the range of IQs and there are generally more people with autism on the low end of the spectrum (it could be equally likely that this is because of the diagnosis bias from the above).
Pretty much all diagnosis criteria include some form of "and these things cause some sort of problems in the patient's life". Even if it doesn't, if someone's school/life/career is going OK, they don't seek out a mental health diagnosis. And IQ is one thing that is positively correlated with all sorts of desirable life outcomes.
Like, one notable anecdotal example of this is Bill Gross, the "Bond King". He found out that he was on the spectrum when he was in his seventies. Basically a psych was talking about Asperger's at a dinner, Bill was like "that sounds like me", and his wife was like "of course, dear".
This way anybody proving how ridiculous these conditions are is wrong by default.
it's also not lost on those "professionals" that if you can diagnose enough kids with various unfalsifiable "medical conditions", you're set for life with a steady supply of paying customers in the form of easy-street "patients" you can "treat" without ever having to provide any "cure"
and anybody who questions the validity of a science not based on logical reasoning is obviously autistic themselves and thus doesn't count - real people have this emotional intelligence that you simply cannot understand, silly; you're just thinking too logically and thus you're wrong and if you don't shut up and obey we might have to put you in an asylum (for your own good, of course!) because we're so caring and understanding that I'm almost fainting just from thinking about just how good of a person I am