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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

Well the nature of autism being a "spectrum disorder" (per the DSM, the officialest psychology book) inherently means that there will be people who are 1%, 2%, 5%, 50% autistic. So boolean labels/diagnoses don't really apply very well in all cases.

I think that fact doesn't sit well with some people and that's worth exploring. Perhaps wanting bucket people to be "neurotypical" or "neurodivergent" (rather than on a normal distribution) may reflect an underlying desire to have an ingroup or outgrop, for example.

Interestingly Simon Baron-Cohen (Yes, Borat's Brother!) proposed the theory that a ton of intelligent people in professional fields and/or academia called "systemizers" carry a slight predisposition toward autism and mate with each other [1]. I haven't followed up how well his theories have held up in the last 5 years.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen

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"Neurotypical" always rubs me the wrong way, because I feel I've never met this person with a typical mind and I'm not sure they exist. I prefer to think of it as a distribution over a very high dimensional space, where the autism spectrum would be one dimension among many. I saw someone make a comment the other day about the average person having "one ovary and one testicle," which is crude but illustrates the point well.

Maybe not typical, but you must know somebody who doesn't suffer from ADHD levels of distraction or an inability to cope with sensory input from autism. like you said, it's a distribution and it's important to recognize that there exist people that trend towards the typical end of the spectrum and aren't severely afflicted by mental illnesses the way some people are.

given that there are people with one testicle and other people with one ovary, the average is probably less than one for both.

I don't know anyone that doesn't have something going on some of the time. Consider that a multimodal distribution in a high dimensional space doesn't really have a center, or has many centers, depending on how you want to look at it. It seems unlikely to me that the geometry would be simple.

To strip out the math metaphor in case it's unhelpful, there is no single way to be a normal or typical person, there are many ways. At first approximation you could think of them as being different archetypes (that metaphor ultimately suffers the same problem that I'm describing with "neurotypical", but just to illustrate). They aren't better or worse, just different. The problem isn't that someone is one type or another, but that the differences lead to confusion and miscommunication.

> given that there are people with one testicle and other people with one ovary, the average is probably less than one for both.

What do you think would happen if we rounded fractional values, given we're talking about something quantized?

you must know people that have less going in those dimensions than others. a friend that never loses their keys, or a friend that's always on time. they don't have to have utterly uneventful and unremarkable lives to be neurotypical, but some people just have less trouble with things than others. Or, you don't have any one who is neurotypical in your life, which is why you question the word. which is entirely valid as well.

as far as the average: I'm just saying the average person has more like .9 ovaries and .9 testicles.

I don't live in a reality where people have 1.8 gonads, I live in a reality where people an integer >= 0 number of gonads (which may be more or less than the mode of 2), so I feel like we're not quite speaking the same language and aren't quite understanding each other.

How many times do you have to forget your keys to be neurodivergent?

If you lived most of your life always remembering your keys, but when you entered your 40s you started to experience some pretty radical shifts in your personality, and as a result you start forgetting your keys - are you neurodivergent now? Were you always?

Similarly, what if you keep forgetting your keys, and you have a lot more trouble at it than other people, but over time you develop systems and skills that work for you. Did you stop being neurodivergent?

the world I live in has people with two testicles or two ovaries, generally, and not one of each. if you want to make it a math problem and average it out then it's just numbers and the math says it's a non-integer value.

if you experience a large personality shift when you hit 40 that results in you needing medication to function as you were before, yeah, I'd call that neurodivergence. that implies that for that person there was a state before where things were typical for them. schizophrenia is something that often manifests before hitting 30, and that's definitely a neurodivergent condition. before it manifests the person could be considered neurotypical for the most part.

if you're able to get to a place approximating a neurotypical person with a heroic amount of effort, you don't stop being neurodivergent because you've lived that whole past life where you had those struggles to be neurotypical so even in this neurotypical state, you can't forget your past.

It seems trivial, but I do actually think the average thing is the core of our disagreement. I suspect our different interpretations of questions like that are at the root of our different viewpoints. I don't think either of us are going to change or mind here, but I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for sharing.

interesting. thank you too.

>"Neurotypical" always rubs me the wrong way, because I feel I've never met this person with a typical mind and I'm not sure they exist.

The variation of "traits over a very high dimensional space" doesn't really prevent the distinction.

"A distribution over a very high dimensional space" can still have clustered groups on one side of the high dimentional space vs the other side, based on a set of X traits.

And neurotypicals are clustered away from neurodivergent people of various types, on the relevant traits.

(Plus, of course, traits that are equally variable within both groups are neutral as far as the classification is concerned).

>Well the nature of autism being a "spectrum disorder" (per the DSM, the officialest psychology book) inherently means that there will be people who are 1%, 2%, 5%, 50% autistic.

Not exactly how "spectrum" works. It's about the variation of type and severity, not merely the variation of severity.

And there's no 1% or 50% autistic per the DSM. It's just autistic (or non-autistic), and autistic comes at 3 levels, which is not 33% 66% and 100% autistic, but autistic with low, mid, and high support needs.

If you're diagnosed as autistic you're not 5% autistic or 30% autistic, you're autistic, period. Your support needs just vary (and the 3 levels is a crude, but "good enough", breakdown for policy decision making).

Sure the DSM isn’t capable of assigning a % but that’s just a practical simplification it makes. There are over 100 genes strongly linked to autism and many other correlates. There are obviously people in the world who stim every minute, some every hour, some once a day, some once a week, etc. All of these symptoms fall on a range (be it eye contact). Often with these cases a sibling has a more severe case.

>There are obviously people in the world who stim every minute, some every hour, some once a day, some once a week, etc. All of these symptoms fall on a range (be it eye contact)

Those are just the easiest to spot and measure outward symptoms. Not that relevant for giving some imaginary finegrained "autism score", just to diagnose.

Internal symptoms, the important ones, like sensory issues, social adaptability issues, routine issues, emotional regulation issues, and so on, are not quantifiable like that, and those are the ones that actually matter.

But whether external or internal, the symptoms don't neatly fall on some specific range for a single individual, but vary with age, external conditions, factors like stress, sensory triggers, environment, emotional state, masking, and so on.

There's no "this person stims about X% with some specific interval" measurent" (or whatever other symtom you want). And thus there's non measurable "autism percentage within this 0-100" (whether on a linear scale or in some higher dimentional space).

The website the "Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical" existed back in the 90s. Back in those days, it just meant "not on the autism spectrum". People parodied how other people acted to express pride in themselves and of course mock the weakness of others, so as to prove they are the best.

Autistics have been using "Neurotypical" to describe the out-group for decades and won't stop anytime soon. It serves a social purpose due to social failures elsewhere that cause autistics to be rather stigmatised.

Enticing theory, but doesn’t seem to have held up, even mentioned in that wiki a little. There seems to be lots of criticism of his work. It’s not wholly bad I don’t think, but probably too simplistic.

But I’m just a random.

The "Extreme male brain" theory aged like milk, that autistics have more "male" brains than the rest of the population. Years after that theory we saw extremely high incidence of MtF transgenderism among autistics. Living as a woman doesn't really seem like an extreme male brained thing to do.

Oh yeah! That part of his research, especially, just screamed out of touch with reality.

It aged quite well, it's just the name that didn't age well, because in 2024 you can't say males have more of X trait and women have more Y trait for political reasons.

That certainly plays into the unpopularity of the concept, but even independent of that, this doesn't address the central criticism that autistics seem to be more likely to be MtF transgender.

We know that MtF transgender people that the brains of transgender women resemble the brains of cisgender women, than the rains of cisgender men resemble the brains of cisgender men.[1] Transgender women have extremely androgynous brains, not extreme male brains.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

Generally, if you rephrase the concept as the "Emphasising-Systemising theory of autism" it becomes a lot less implausible. "Extreme maleness" implies being more male across the board to an extreme, and that does not appear to be the case with autistics, they might have a few male-coded traits but they're not extremely male.

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

That study, and others with similar results, do not control for sexual orientation - even though it's already well established that homosexuality correlates with some brain structures being atypical for one's sex.

In the studies that do control for sexual orientation, no such shift towards the opposite sex is found to correlate with gender dysphoria.

Instead, what has been shown are differences in structural and functional connectivity within the default mode network of the brain, which is essential for body perception and self-referential processing. See for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17352-8.

If you think of things from a political lens, "autistics" being an exclusive group makes sense, so as to not dilute support for those autistics.

Simon is Sacha's cousin (according to Wikipedia).

What a thoughtful comment. Thank you for providing a valuable perspective that made me question how I view some things.

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