Autism hasn't increased
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences.
In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example:
> It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments:
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and...
It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family.
The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
The people I know in the medical field are becoming frustrated by how often parents bring their children in requesting an autism diagnosis when their child doesn't even begin to meet the current DSM definitions of autism. The social media version of autism has become its own separate entity.
This has caused a second-order effect where the severe ends of the autism spectrum are getting erased from public perception. It's really sad to encounter parents who think their child is autistic (diagnosed or not) who run into children who are severely autistic, as often they'll reflexively try to draw dividing lines between the severely autistic child and their own. It's sadly common to see these parents try to insist that "something else is wrong" with the severely autistic child because it's entirely different than what they've come to view as autism through their TikTok and Facebook groups.
If you were diagnosed with one thing but decide to tell people you're diagnosed with something else, that difference doesn't appear to come from the DSM.
I'm sure the powers that be had a reason to combine them; and I am no where near qualified to have an opinion on if it was good idea or not. But expanding the definition of autism to include milder forms was 100% a choice that was made.
The fact that the public perception subsequently shifted to view autism as less severely disease seems to me to likely be causally related.
I have an in law that has severe autism issues that had a career and children. They never advanced in jobs, couldn't hold friendships, got neglected at work and kinda abused, got bad assignments. They were a lawyer for a long time, so the law itself was useful to them and their autism, but clients were hard. Their marriage was clearly strained the entire time before their spouse passed. It's been years and they still can't grieve or process the loss, likely due to the autism. Their children don't have these autistic issues, afaict, and those relationships are strained now that the grandkids are here and the children have leaned more about the issues of the grandparent.
Still, made a successful career of it, saved well enough into 401ks, and is now a millionaire.
In those days, their autism was just a quirk, one most people didn't like. And if they had help and strategies when younger, they would have been more successful and had a much better life.
There have been seismic changes in the understanding of autism (and ADHD) over even the last 10-15 years, let alone 30-40+. Once autism was considered only for people who were largely or totally nonverbal. It was only in the 2010s that the consensus formed that people could have both ADHD and autism. They were previously considered to be exclusive.
I've heard many stories from teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism. With a modern understanding, it tends to be pretty easy to spot.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/his...
Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism.
Our tolerance for weirdos of all kinds seems to have gone both down and up at the same time. Why can’t they just be people who are a little unusual?
If it's done systematically and has predictive power, there's nothing wrong with that.
How else do you propose we diagnose something that doesn't show up in MRIs and bloodwork?
Or we could just as well dismiss any mental issues entirely, and say "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist".
If I am at a party and I tell my friends “that weird person I just met is pretty autistic,” I am not diagnosing them, I am just saying something speculative behind their back.
That's fine, because professionals don't diagnose people officially based on "casual interactions" either, nor they do that at parties.
They have systematic scripts to go through and structured interactions. That's because diagnosing is official business and must have a higher standard plus tests and paperwork to cover your ass.
Ignoring that, whether a professional or not, if you know what to look for, it's pretty easy to tell if someone is autistic by talking to them at a social context, with way better than chance accuracy (meaning aspie autistic - for asd 2 or 3 it's way more self-evident than that even).
How do you measure the accuracy of your guess?
If you have guessed correctly from before the reveal for many different individuals, you can pat yourself on the back.
For those that don't reveal or might not even have a diagnosis or be aware they could be, a pile up of additional (unrelated to the initial impression) diagnostically consistent behaviors and mannerisms as you get to know them over time is also a good enough confirmation for use outside of a clinical setting.
In general, even the average non-trained or unfamiliar with the specific traits neurotypical person is good at this identification even subconsciously, they just don't know what exactly they're identifying (so pit it as "weird", "offputting" etc):
(...) across three studies, we find that first impressions of individuals with ASD made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction. These patterns are remarkably robust, occur within seconds, do not change with increased exposure, and persist across both child and adult age groups
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28145411/
Even photographs will do it:
"… a static image was sufficient for generating negative first impressions of those with ASD. (...) In contrast, first impressions of TD [typically developing] controls improved with the addition of a visual information, suggesting that unlike the ASD group, visual cues helped rather than hurt the impressions they made on observers."
Because the diagnostic process is reduced to that? Or because the layman's conception of what "sounds systematic or predictive" is the correct one?
It's also clear to anyone who pays attention that there is a genetic link with autism and it doesn't take much to see it.
More deeply, you rcomment reads as a typical neurotypical response (or possibly internalized ableism from someone who isn't diagnozed but probably should be). There is a real safety issue here because autistic people can spot the neurotypical vs neurodivergent difference pretty darn quickly and have come to realize that neurotypical people are a real threat, particularly in the job market.
And if you still don't think neurodivergent people can spot neurotypical people, what about the reaction autistic people get from allistic people? Allistic people tend to instinctively dislike, distrust or even bully autistic people from the moment they meet them. They create conditions where autistic people have a harder time in the workplace, are less likely to get promoted and more likely to be fired or forced to quit.
And you still think it isn't obvious?
The point of TFA is that the mild/borderline diagnosis rate has exploded. So apparently those professionally tasked with diagnosis now see autism where they used to not see it. But now we have self-styled autism spotters out there labeling people definitively based on tweets.
Even in your response you said my response was neurotypical, OR undiagnosed atypical. You don’t see the irony?
I don't think I've ever seen someone diagnosed with autism who turned around and said "it's not a big deal". It always, always, always has a profound impact on understanding the trauma and difficulties they've suffered their entire lives.
These are people who once wore labels like "being a nerd" or simply "being introverted" when their brains were wired in such a way as to be at a severe disadvantage in an allistic world. There were answers to why they had few friends in school, were likely bullied, had difficulties getting and keeping jobs and had problems maintaining social relationships. These are people who sought out (or were forced into) jobs where social connections didn't matter (as much). These are people who were told their team in the office was "like a family" but were somehow always excluded and were told they were being difficult for asking qualifying questions on tasks or simply pointing out how something was doomed to failure.
What autistic people learn is that allistic people are dangerous and needy because they demand conformance to unwritten rules, who will talk about rules while ignoring them when convenient, who will talk about consistency while having none of it and will talk about morality while discarding it in a heartbeat.
It is the most allistic trait ever to simply dismiss all this as "overdiagnosis".
Lasker has repeatedly falsified results, given some feigned apology or redirection and continued the practice of falsifying results.
oh, wait: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker
If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia:
> between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not...
It seems more likely from these posts that Lasker is actually accurate but you can't handle true claims about IQ and race, so have unilaterally decided those must be fake because they undermines a left wing world view. But group differences in IQ are a very strong and well replicated result. There is nothing unreliable about those. Until you bring receipts we have to assume you are engaging in ad hominem for ideological reasons.
He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere.
Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context.
He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
Lasker won't make you wait long before bringing the racist stuff out!
With this person, his core area of pseudo-research has been the race/IQ generalizations. He has a long history of eugenics content and his Reddit posts engage in Nazi stuff.
He jumps into popular topics like autism statistics to ride those trends on Twitter and expand his reach. Once you follow him, you realize it’s a steady drip of the lightly disguised eugenics stuff that has been his core focus for a long time.
And if someone is a prolific poster of them, there's always an agenda.
Abstract: "The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends."
Source: https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI Timestamp @25m : 20s
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/18/feds-investigating-...
Whose founders are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen
Tabarrok " In 2012, journalist David Brooks called Tabarrok one of the most influential bloggers on the political right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."[6] "
Cowen " Cowen’s work spans economics, philosophy, and cultural commentary. He is known for advocating a pragmatic form of libertarianism that emphasizes strong governance, economic dynamism, and technological progress—an approach he terms state capacity libertarianism.[3] In 2011, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Prospect magazine ranked him among the world’s most influential economists in 2023.[4][5] "
Those people and this blog is not at all a scientific institution, editor, publisher.
And as mentioned in another comment, the person we're invited to read from Crémieux ("Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data."). " He was a speaker at the 2024 Manifest conference. Eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly was also a speaker.[2] Lasker has spoken out in favor of natalism.[2][14] Early in 2025, Lasker was a speaker at the Natal Conference, which has been criticized for including speakers promoting far-right ideologies such as Raw Egg Nationalist.[2][15] "
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Those people are not scientists, they cosplay knowledge and scientific process and will use data to serve their narratives.
Yet another example that the info shared here in HN are vastly influenced by some angry teenagers with some kind of libertarian edgelord imperialist agenda. I mean, I'm assuming that's what they imagine they think between two games of League of Legends or wanking to deepfakes