The only positive thing said about autism in that entire gigantic write-up is "Special interests may be a source of pleasure and motivation and provide avenues for education and employment later in life"
Why would doctors treat autism as being anything but negative with no positive when Autism is literally defined in that way? Of course, people since Leo Kanner and Hans Aspergers noted Autistics having extraordinary abilities, and people are vaguely aware of this, but doctors hold autistics in worse contempt than the general population mostly because you can't bill insurance to treat a "difference" or get a study grant to research a "difference". So the system they're in forces them to treat autistics as contemptible and even in need of curing. Besides that, psychiatry is after all the study of mental illness and disorders, not of mental differences, so there's a bias just from training.
Legal, UN definition, trying to cure a mental disorder is not eugenics. It is logically the same idea as eugenics though, the UN just didn't outlaw this idea since the mentally disordered were considered sufficiently inferior. Autistics can also be banned from sperm banks.
There's nothing to be done really as a mere not neurotypical internet dweller. The inertia of the status quo is like a train and many people benefit from it. The only real choice you have is to call yourself something like "Not neurotypical" instead of "Autistic".
I don’t think that’s necessarily true even if we only consider those with high-functioning autism (and the average is significantly lower if we include everyone).
Some people with autism have a very high IQ, just like some people who don’t have it.
Yes because the diagnostic label is over broad to the point of meaninglessness and people have their own independently valid reasons for wanting autism to be interpreted as either a mild or severe disability because the diagnostic label is over broad to the point of meaninglessness.
Autism and "severe autism" in particular need to be addressed using totally different words.
I think this is precisely why for-profit healthcare is wild. If it weren’t for ideology we could get behind socialised care and cut out all of the nonsense.
Mostly anecdotal, my school psychologist back in the day sure believed it, and this would vary from place to place. She was a champion of "You give children the diagnosis that gives them the services they need". Autism being the one which gave children the services they needed, and she often expressed frustration at not being able to get such a diagnosis.
In general Aspergers basically meant no verbal delays, where Autism meant verbal delay. Autism was also around longer as a diagnosis. In general, I think theres a reason they changed the name of Aspergers to Autism and not the other way around.
Interesting that the diagnosis of autism apparently wasn't available to her. Do you know what she would have been referring to by the autism diagnosis being able to get children the services they needed, that the "asperger's" diagnosis would not?
It can be helpful to get a diagnosis of autism for kids in public school. Kids end up needing additional one on one time and resources are limited. Those with the biggest problems are the first to be approved for these resources, and a formal diagnosis makes it easier to get that approval.
I've stopped identifying as autistic despite having a dx because I was tired of the way it got me treated worse by the general public who presume I'm far more incompetent than I actually am and medical practitioners who do the same. Last time I sought help for a totally unrelated issue they asked if I had any prior dx and I was foolishly honest so I was subsequently referred to a day program for unemployed people with severe mental health issues. I'm full time employed so I couldn't even attend. This is the outcome of treating "autistics" as a monolith.
After the DSM-IV they decided to consolidate 3 different autism spectrum diagnosis's into one. They said this was scientific, but IMHO, this was done so everybody with Aspergers or PDD-NOS to be eligible for the higher funding levels those categorised as "Autistic" got. Which has done nothing but take away funding from severely disabled people while causing more mildly impaired people to receive inappropriate and condescending treatment, I am fucking eligible for a full time day program where a social worker will be paid to chaperone me because I'm just so fucking needy that's just what needs to be done. This change was great for the psychiatrists through, who simply received more money as a result of making this diagnostic change, nice conflict of interest there.
As a society, we decided having certain labels of disability entitled you to special legal rights and certain financial benefits. Where I live any autism diagnosis, no matter how severe or mild, gets you a flat amount of money, whereas other diagnosis's even if the condition is more severe than autism get nothing. What do you think parents, who can shop around from a variety of private psychiatrists, looking to access therapy for their child that autistic kids also get do? So you might get a kid with ADHD or Anxiety or some speech disorder, and not getting an autism DX, but getting treated like a moderately impaired autistic.
I honestly loathe, absolutely loathe the status quo of autism diagnosis and treatment and am happy for any change to be made that splits the diagnosis up because it creates at least a hope of "Severe autism" receiving higher funding levels than the rest, and "autism light" starting to get similar funding levels to other disabilities so there isn't a perverse incentive. I have not made an online comment on any website in 1 month but this inspired me.
This may be spicy, but I wonder if autism has a higher rate of occurrence in upper middle class homes which is why it has got so much more attention and funding than more serious illnesses as you say.
It seems to me that we’ve always had many people both on the spectrum and with ADHD, but our modern society has such stiff norms that the people who are the most involved with society sees these otherwise often fairly benign variations as diseases to be medicated away.
Schools herd children through something so rigid that a lot of people are told they’re problematic, lazy, stupid, or insufficient in one of millions of ways. And then that continues into adulthood with work and, in a context familiar to many around this site, frameworks for how work should be done. People talk about estimates, and working in bursts or worrying about something your professionalism tells you is important but your boss tells you to ignore become a problem to fix. Finding a level in the hierarchy and a pace that works well for you and being content there is lacking ambition and being lazy.
I guess when a society is sick, its members are diagnosed.
Autism on the other hand is a modern condition, but I don't think there's really much dispute there's SOMETHING there because you see things like savants who are just inexplicable.
However, the rate at which we're diagnosing people today is totally unprecedented. The DSM and ICD-11 are also more like medical dictionaries than rigorously scientific reflections of underlying biological reality. They describe what Autism and ADHD are, but the categorisation is largely based on convention, clinical convenience, and a desire to fit a certain nosology rather than actual science. I've been looking into the alternative frameworks like RDOC and HITOP.
Anyways we're diagnosing people a lot more often nowadays, increasing the patient population, but still acting like research done on a much smaller patient population still holes up. Adaptive Behaviour Analysis therapy for instance is still insured in the United States based on research from the 90s when the average autistic child was very different than an average 2024 autistic child (not to say there hasn't been more research since than), and generally I see money and entrenched laws and bureaucratic guidelines and incentives as creating a sort of system which has no evidence of helping anybody which coincidentally results in a lot more money changing hands and more people getting government money.
Anyways I think the current system we have where we pretend that it's useful to say that Elon Musk and some guy who smashes his head into the wall until it bleeds to self-stimulate have the same disability strains credulity.
Throwaway, speaking from personal experience. I will note up front that none of what follows should be read as advocating a value judgement (I have certainly failed to conceal my own biases, regardless).
Lower middle and working class families lack the knowledge and financial resources necessary to obtain diagnoses, if they should feel it worthwhile. In working class families especially, autism and ADHD traits are either vilified as gross character defects or minimized as typical immaturity, with some variation with respect to gender role. In any case, diagnosis is less likely. In middle class families, where expectations of social function and independence are different, the same behaviors are treated very differently.
In Norway (with a completely different system of public health funding), children of immigrants have several times higher chance of being diagnosed as autistic. Results were "adjusted for parents' education and income". I have no idea how to interpret this. (Hopefully diagnoses didn't involve testing immigrant children on their command of the Norwegian language.)
Agreed. One must be rather careful when determining the Cybertruck's "direct rivals".
It's got a lot of properties of a "truck", yet it is difficult to imagine utilizing it, especially given the price, in many of the environments for which trucks were originally designed.
It's an SUV and I think most people know that and if not a ton of people buy $70k+ pick up trucks when they really only need a normal SUV or car anyway, so it's not like the market was full of rational behaviour and clearly defined work vs consumer marketing by the vendors.
I drive a Ford Lightning and it’s exactly like my previous F-150 except faster and cheaper to operate. Oh and it was cheaper out of the door than its gas sibling at the same trim level. 10/10 - would buy a vehicle from an experienced manufacturer again.
I’ve downright gotten philosophical about it. The way my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories.
The way I see it, if some people get personal satisfaction and a good reputation from being the stars, and their stardom leads to them helping people, I shrug. If you’re in a desperate situation you use the resources you have in front of you, and even say whatever it takes for them to help you more. I just don’t trust their motivations as people who “help the disadvantaged” can have INSANE saviour complexes and hurt those around them so they can heal them. Because they don’t actually care about you - they care about saving and being seen saving.
You’re perceptive to have caught on to the game so quickly. It took me years.
On the other hand there is almost always a somewhat selfish motivation behind any extensive action. I would rather prefer someone being seen helping the poor rather than being paid to do the same.
Besides, in some regard the helpers might also be in need, even though not in a material sense.
> my and other people’s suffering is used as a prop in other people’s stories
I'm gathering material for a possible book (or series of blog posts) on the role of stories in people's identities and sense of meaning in their lives, and I'd be interested in hearing more about your perspective on this if you fancy talking about it? fromhn at demersal dot net
When I look at the commonality between all the successful consumer electronics, it's really about how easily they fit into people's lives. The AirPods and Apple Watch were two of the most recent smash hits because they are an improvement on what existed before
For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.
With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.
I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.
Have you tried the quest 3? A lot of your concerns, I feel, go away with pass thru. Like you say, mixed or augmented reality is going to be society altering.
I was walking through my house, navigating doorways, stairs, and changes in lighting, with my son's headset while I had the equivalent of a 30in monitor playing Netflix following me around. I sat on the couch and pinned the "tv" to the wall, enlarged it to be a 80in tv.
What truly is missing is a shared environment between multiple headsets in the same location. Movie night where the whole wall is a shared experience, and it can be synced with grandma who is three states over; even better, we can look over and see grandma in AR and she sees us. Distributed family night! Some ergonomics to work out. That, and seeing faces.
I have tried the quest 3 and it’s like looking through a distorted version of the world through a low resolution camera with Vaseline slopped on top.
It’s impressive technology but it’s far from seamless. There’s less colours, less resolution, worse depth perception, more latency, and worse nightvision than your actual eyes. The quest makes your head quite a bit larger and you’re more likely to hang your head into something. It is very far from seamless.
They have a long way to go. Audio pass through still isn’t good enough for me to trust it never mind video pass through.
Learning openings beyond a very basic level is not going to help the club player very much and it’s generally a good way for them to waste their time, at least from an improving your ELO perspective.
Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
The other problem with learning opening theory against novices is you will learn 30 moves a side of Ruy Lopez opening theory and your opponent won’t get 10 moves without leaving theory rendering your study moot.
There’s far more emphasis on memorizing openings at the grandmaster level because people are playing a tight enough game elsewhere for that slight advantage to really matter, and because of all the pre-game preperation where teams of grandmasters and chess engines will come up with novel moves to throw an opponent off balance while the star player memorizes the lines. To the point of grandmasters like Bobby Fischer complain it ruined the game and inventing variants like chess960. All super grandmasters have outlier memorization abilities.
Generally club players just need to rote memorize not too deeply and understand the broad sweeping ideas and key moves of the openings (when white does that, counter them with this). That should allow them to come up with reasonable moves on the fly which might be the best or third best moves. Memorizing fewer openings at first is probably better. At the more casual level memory is much less important.
> Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
While this is true if you know openings, many openings have a trap or two that make up a very tricky line that puts you 3-5 points ahead. Knowing the traps and how to punish them is a huge material advantage in some games. So while knowing your opening well is "worth" only a quarter pawn in a typical game, it is worth a several-percent increase in win rate from knowing these lines.
Openings like the Jobava London system have 10-20 different trap lines like this, and if you want to play them, you must know the lines.
It is very common for players with your mindset to plateau around 1400-1600, at which point it's time to sit down and start memorizing openings and endgames. Just being good at searching the game tree gets you to that point, but now you need to know the times when the game tree collapses 30 moves later.
There was a guy Michael De La Maza who literally just drilled tactics and broke 2000 USCF and then quit chess, and if you look at his games yes he really really did not understand openings. So 1400-1600 is well before when you’re going to plateau without knowing openings.
1400 yes learning a trap line can improve your results, so if you subscribe to the Eric Rosen school of opening theory you can benefit from openings. I’ve just never thought it’s worth learning much about conventional openings until about 1600.
> When all is said and done, I can’t recommend Rapid Chess Improvement (a book that, in my view, offers a philosophically bankrupt vision of what chess is). It smacks of "the blind leading the blind.” But, as I said earlier, his book might prove useful for some.
Also, a rating improvement from a 1300 start after a long spell of no rated games often means a lot of skill improvement in that gap, and then a corresponding adjustment in rating. Perhaps the guy was a bridge or Magic: the Gathering player and already had a decent intuition for games and needed to transfer that to chess. Disregarding that drilling 1000 tactical problems sounds a lot like a memorization plan to me, he also clearly knows the e4 opening given the game analysis quoted in Silman's review.
> Like many adults, he assumed that he needed to augment his natural skills and intelligence by compiling chess knowledge: he studied openings, endgames, and other "chess knowledge" information. Despite all that accumulation of knowledge, he was getting nowhere.
Huh... did someone study some openings and endgames? His tactical game was likely the weakest part of his game so he remedied that error and got rapid improvement. Not in spite of failing to study openings and endgames, but because he did study them, just out of order.
Sure he didn't know the quarter-pawn-advantage grandmaster lines (which you don't need to know as a 1600), but he knew the traps and how to avoid them.
Rote memorization is absolutely a mainstay of learning both openings
and endgames.
It’s usually a part of tactics training as well although not as purely, the polgar sisters for instance were drilled on the same chess positions day in day out in a spaced repetition system. This is going away a bit because chess puzzle databases have so many unique positions that there’s less need for repetition.
Regarding openings, there's a trade-off between chess training and chess results. Rote memorization can improve your results (if you already have good skills), but it won't improve your skills.
Learning endgames is not about blindly memorizing moves in specific positions. You learn tricks that can be used in a large number of positions. Even the seemingly very specific positions can be mirrored left-right (not to mention black-white).
https://www.reddit.com/r/aspergirls/comments/th9hku/dsm5tr_n...
The only positive thing said about autism in that entire gigantic write-up is "Special interests may be a source of pleasure and motivation and provide avenues for education and employment later in life"
Why would doctors treat autism as being anything but negative with no positive when Autism is literally defined in that way? Of course, people since Leo Kanner and Hans Aspergers noted Autistics having extraordinary abilities, and people are vaguely aware of this, but doctors hold autistics in worse contempt than the general population mostly because you can't bill insurance to treat a "difference" or get a study grant to research a "difference". So the system they're in forces them to treat autistics as contemptible and even in need of curing. Besides that, psychiatry is after all the study of mental illness and disorders, not of mental differences, so there's a bias just from training.
Legal, UN definition, trying to cure a mental disorder is not eugenics. It is logically the same idea as eugenics though, the UN just didn't outlaw this idea since the mentally disordered were considered sufficiently inferior. Autistics can also be banned from sperm banks.
There's nothing to be done really as a mere not neurotypical internet dweller. The inertia of the status quo is like a train and many people benefit from it. The only real choice you have is to call yourself something like "Not neurotypical" instead of "Autistic".