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dns_snek

> It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.

It hasn't "become" anything and it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, take Kanye's behavior up with him.

> There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases

> Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...

A few things to unpack:

1. autism isn't a disease, it's a disorder (or a difference from average)

2. they identified 4 *subtypes* of ASD, not distinct disorders

3. these subtypes have nothing in common with the conditions that were removed from the DSM-5

4. these are serious issues that have always had profound effects on people's lives, the only difference is that they used to suffer alone, in silence. Increased awareness doesn't make it a "fad" and your snotty, dismissive attitude towards them doesn't belong here or anywhere else

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Whether is is a subtype or a disorder is political, which is true about everything in mental health and developmental disability.

Personally I have been hurt because a condition that I suffer from and that probably about 5% of people suffer from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

This is something I came to understand at the age of 51 where my ability to benefit from that knowledge is limited. I got a psych eval circa 1978 which I'm told was a good quality eval at the time -- they had no idea what I had but knowing what I know now I can attack it with a highlighter and line it up with Meehl's work that was published in 1962 but failed (and still fails) to be translated into practice.

Given that 5-10% of people have this condition, some will be misdiagnosed as "autistic", others will not be diagnosed at all. Kids with my condition will have to wait another 45 years for answers and I blame the "autism" epidemic.

And don't get me started on the other fashionable neurodivergence by which the children of the rich and powerful can get performance enhancing drugs and extra time on the test.

Oops late to the tussle with identarians.

>Andersen suggests that a tradeoff exists in predictive processing, where giving higher weight to prediction errors prevents the detection of false patterns (i.e. apophenia) at the cost of being unable to detect higher level patterns, and giving lower weight to prediction errors allows for the detection of higher level patterns at the cost of occasionally detecting patterns that don't exist, as in delusions and hallucinations that occur in schizotypy.

Personally: I focus on the anhedonia because ime the other schizotypists* (&, less commonly, diagnosed autists) seem to have it, and, as I might have mentioned before, negative affect in combo with some other traits tends to attract bullies/certain sadists/karens/well just friggin identarians and not fellow autists/schizos whatever :)

(*As far as I'm concerned the founding stoics were simply rationalizing their anhedonia, so they needed rich and powerful patrons to take that practice to the masses. Former-day VC and unis, as it were)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418765

That’s the point, if you use the hashtag #actuallyautistic you just proved you’re #notactuallyautistic.

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