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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

ASD diagnoses have skyrocketed in the past few decades (years?) with no clear cause. I'm just old enough to remember a childhood without cell phones - we didn't have a computer in my house until middle school but we were lower income than most of my friends - and people are definitely inside more and outside less than they were when I was 8 or 9 years old.

It seems like a plausible theory.

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When left handedness was seen as a disorder and students who used their left hand were beaten, rates of this disorder were a few percent. When the idea of left handedness became mainstream, rates skyrocketed and we know the base rate is about 10%.

Homosexuality was considered a disorder in the DSM until 1974. Self-reported rates of homosexuality have skyrocketed since then. Most likely explanation is that the true base rate has not changed, just society's measurement of it.

Children with ASD in prior generations were labeled as delinquent, troublemakers, retarded, or were abandoned by their parents and communities.

You think. Let's be clear about what's a hypothesis vs. a confirmed fact.

I wrote a response that argues against your hypothesis, and then I realized ... "do I really know what I'm saying? Or are these my preconceptions and biases?"

> and we know the base rate is about 10%.

Sinister.

I think it would be cool to be left-handed in a country where the language is written from right to left.

> Sinister.

A dexterous response, to be sure. ;)

I find it interesting that the rates of a whole bunch of these uncommon-but-still-prevalent differences seem to cluster around 10%. I can't help wondering if it stems from prehistoric humans living in small group of 20-30, so each band would have on average 2-4 of each, giving the group a wider range of capabilities than they would otherwise have.

Something influenced by 2 double recessive genes will occur ~1/8 of the time in a population where the recessive gene is common.

I've always understood the increase in diagnoses to be more about increased awareness than about a change in human behavior.

E.g. it looks like autism wasn't defined as a spectrum in the DSM until either 1994 or 2000: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/evolution-autism-diagnosis....

Lots of other things have changed, including, people are having kids older (known correlate), the DSM definition changed, and the general awareness has radically increased.

It doesn't seem plausible to me, based on my anecdotal experience with an ASD child who played in the woods all the time.

When I was younger autism wasn't called autism - it was blamed on mothers who worked, "refrigerator mums". Doesn't change the fact that I'm autistic though.

Correlation, as the saying goes, does not prove causation.

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