The Battle over Dyslexia

The case study was interesting. Those diagnosed in England get support from local government by covering cost of private school at £20k a year. Looking at the incentives, governments don't want lots of people diagnosed as it costs them. £20k is a huge amount of money in the UK, top universities (Oxbridge) cost around £10k a year. I could see why many would not get the support they need and go undiagnosed.

It's just a simplification, many people experience dyslexia differently, but for some people with dyslexia that may be a good way to describe to someone what they experience. It's not actually a medical diagnosis, though can achieve the qualifications to test for it, it's a learning disability that doesn't have a well understood physilogical mechanism behind it.

For me I was slow to learn to read, and was in remedial classes until halfway through elementary school, but I was eventually able to get it down and am now a very active reader with an average reading pace. Spelling was the issue that never went away for me. When I try to spell a word I can remember the general set of letters it's composed of, but knowing the precise order, or if a word ends in one or two ls, are things I really struggle with. I'm constantly having to look up the same words over and over, It just doesn't stick.

My first job was a short term remote developing contract. My coworkers thought I was foreign for the first few weeks because of my poor spelling in code comments. It's better when I have access to good spelling or grammar checkers, but often times I misspell a word so completely that even the software has no idea what I'm trying to say. I also still mess up you're/your and their/there/they're all the time. In my head words are auditory not visual, so I have to put extra effort into resolving homophones.

I typed "dyslexia" into Google, and on the side bar overview it says "More than 3 million US cases per year"

Edit: I dug a little deeper. It's 5-15% of the population. http://www.ldonline.org/article/10784/

> It is not clear to me what that "condition" would mean in China

If you said so because I'm Chinese and you wonder what I meant, in this specific example, I'm talking about a British person writing English. You know, a good number of people in China also write English all the time. ;)

With regards to Chinese characters, not only do people forget how to write characters sometimes, but also some people do have problems recognizing mis-written characters, e.g. a missing stroke, an extra stroke, etc.

> It is also unclear to me how anyone could have a "condition" in which they struggle to spell if we did not have arbitrary spelling conventions.

I agree, if hypothetically there is only one way to pronounce words, and only one way to spell a syllable, this would be less of a problem, as the person can deduce the correct spelling if memory fails. There are still other factors, like speed and error rate, that the hypothetical language might not solve.

Although, I imagine it would be hard to replace the natural languages in human society at this point.

> I would argue that a "true" medical/psychological condition should not be so dependent on specific cultural practices like spelling rules.

If the actual cause of the condition is triggered by a specific cultural practice, I don't see why the condition cannot be referring to such practice.

It would be similar to how when a condition is caused by occupational practices, its medical description will refer to the occupational practices.

At this point, we don't have a universal definition dyslexia, and I don't think that's because the is cultural specific, but simply that we don't know what's happening. Our recognition of the condition is quite superficial, and even within a single language, a universal and precise definition has not yet been contrived.

I hazard that this is one of those places where everyone is anecdata, and doing the maths (well.. statistics) underpinning this, is going to be the main problem for choosing rational paths out. At 5-15% of the population, its got significant economic consequences. The investment of dollars in education and child psychology, research, teaching, will pay back. So it should be a no-brainer, but people are going to get tied up in knots on the anecdata, instead of the underlying trends.

I also think that like "headache" its a symptom label, not an underlying causative statement. There are many fake cures of headaches, and some which work, some of the time, for some specific causes of headaches. If you label it migraine, it doesn't get any better because again, its a symptom label more than an actual specific thing much of the time.

Dyslexia not having a single root cause won't admit of a single fix.

I don't doubt reading difficulties exist. I'm a bibliophile, and live surrounded by books since childhood, but now read almost exclusively my kindle and my reading behaviours have changed, and not entirely for the better. I skim read since childhood, and re-read books frequently, discovering new meaning missed in the previous skims. This has upsides, (the pleasure of re-reading is enhanced: new things!) and downsides (it infuriates the authors of detailed, dense writing of substance who need me to read it properly and recall it to engage with them in work)

Anecdata!