Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

Empirical makes more sense when you contrast empiricism with rationalism. It's a split between things you observe and things you think. If you're doing chemistry calculations, that's not empirical but it is quantitative. If you're pouring stuff into beakers and writing down what you see, it is empirical and quantitative.

The book Neurotribes presents a very in-depth picture of the history of autism and the research and theories for the past century.

This is not saying that autism is not real, that it is not a thing to understand, or something that should not be researched. It is only saying that the idea that autism is On The Rise in a terrifying way, that it is something to be feared, is misguided.

As this article says, and as the book Neurotribes explores in depth, autism used to have much more strict criteria for diagnosis. Connor, the leading researcher of autism for much of the 20th century, was convinced autism should only cover the most severe cases, and he did not like the spectrum idea. As time went on and it was realized that many more persons may have some aspect of autism even if it isn't extremely severe led to the DSM making the criteria much looser. The authors of the DSM particularly noted that this may make it seem like the prevalence was increasing when in fact it was simply more widely diagnosed.

The reason for caution of using the term "autism epidemic" is that it spooked many parents into thinking there was a horrible plague afoot, and that it needed to be cured.

My current understanding of it in myself and wider society is that it has always been around, that those on the spectrum hold an important place in society, and that rather than finding a cure (if this is an epidemic) is more important than understanding autism and advocating for services to help those who have autistic children.

This absolutely does not seek to discredit the indeed heroic efforts many parents have gone to to support their children, in fact by being more precise about what is happening the hope is that autistics like myself can have even better outcomes.

I imagine that one could spend a long time learning the fundamentals before getting to a stage where the proficiency escalates quickly i.e. where the steepness occurs. But the long time getting there is what the term "steep learning curve" is about. Like the opposite of taking a long run at jumping off a cliff. I'm sure that this is easier to show with a graph.