Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

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Note that this was most likely written by his facilitator, not by him. It was written via a technique called "Rapid Prompting Method", which appears to be a variant of facilitated communication, a method that has been debunked as simply being the facilitator guiding the child, either consciously or subconsciously, to type things that the facilitator is thinking, not that the child is thinking.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication for more information. I also recommend the PBS Frontline documentary "Prisoners of Silence" (transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts..., video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXw8Ksvyt5Y), which does a good job both debunking it, and demonstrating why facilitated communication can be quite harmful; there was a rash of incidents in which facilitators imagined sexual abuse allegations from children, leading to substantial repercussions for innocent parents.

And there is a comment in the source article that claims it was written using RPM, so we know the exploitative RPM. Method was used.

http://faithhopeloveautism.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/world-auti...

And another comment on the blog that they're not focused on getting RPM working without the mother aiding.

Thank you for the explanation. I didn't know about FC.

This should have been made very clear at the beginning of the article.

A lot of people who believe in FC and it's variants believe that there's a big conspiracy to silence the voices of their children. They don't think it's relevant that there was a facilitator who was just "supporting his arm" or "providing contact" or something of the sort. So they are unlikely to do this; they want to promote a notion that the child is producing the text, not the facilitator.

I didn't realise this kind of thing applied to people with enough motion control to hold a cup of coffee as seen in the photo. Surely they can type on an iPad themselves at that point, without the need for an interpreter or go-between?

it is actually not about motion control. It is a fundamental inability to communicate. I don't know much about this specific case, but it is quite possible he could accurately hit arbitrary buttons, but cannot map those actions to a meaning to be communicated.

I'd never heard of this, will be a bit more sceptical in future.

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