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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> They were amongst the most ... witty people

We have to be careful about praising the disabled like this, because we risk being condescending. This is an age-old phenomenon – in Ulysses (published already a century ago), James Joyce has his protagonist muse on the fact that people are so quick to praise a blind person for his jokes not because the person is actually funny, but simply because people’s expectations towards the disabled are so low.

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I think he was talking about Down Syndrome folks, and I can tell you that DS folks are the most friendliest folks in the crowd. I'll even go ahead and say that they are more charismatic than most software engineers.

My younger brother has Down's, yet he tends to be way more friendly with not only strangers but my relatives too, compared to myself.

This weirdly reminded me of how Michael Bluth fails to realize his girlfriend Rita has a learning disability because of her aristocratic sounding British accent in the show Arrested Development.

He spoke of personal experience of people he knew; and you're lecturing about proper language.

"We shouldn't praise because we risk condescending" ... whuf. and people call me crazy.

Is it wrong to say they look alike? There are just times where there is such commonality in a group due to genetic abnormalities and other factors that descriptions are more a fact than a stereotype.

Wrong? No. But definitely pointless and insensitive. Common genetic factors causing similar phenotypes isn't a novel, or even interesting, thought.

Is it pointless and insensitive for a scientific manual to indicate that all individuals with a certain genetic disorder look incredibly similar across races and genders?

My point is that there is a difference between stereotyping races/cultures/disabled and indicating highly correlated attributes in individuals with specific genetic/chromisonal abnormalities.

They don't look incredibly similar. They have common features that are not seen in the vast majority of others, which tricks your brain into not looking at their other features. It's the same as thinking Han Chinese people or Irish people look incredibly similar.

Is it bad for a textbook to point out how hypoxia kills brain cells during drowning? No. Is it tasteful to bring up at a funeral for someone who drowned? Also no.

If it's in a useful and tasteful context, discuss away. Otherwise, just don't be a chode.

I would think that's more of a cognitive thing where if you don't normally spend time around people with Down's syndrome, the particular physical features that characterize Down's syndrome really stand out in a way that makes you perceive them as looking less distinctive as individuals. But once you get used to it, it becomes apparent that they look as different from one another as anyone else does.

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