Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 214 posts

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#131

Post by spongebobstoes »

scottlamb wrote: post #120
OJFord wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: it is characteristically autistic to have episode names memorised like that, and it sort of is 'blurting out a series of words' if you don't know that's what it is; a more 'normal' answer might be more like a description of the episode or 'the one called [...]'. I think perhaps you can see that in Sam's assistance, he doesn't know the episode names, possibly he knows or expects that is an episode na…

I think you're right in that when the reporter asked "What's your favorite episode?", the more autistic brother interpreted it literally as "What's the name of your favorite episode?" where other people typically re-interpret the question as "Could you describe your favorite episode in a few sentences?" But the autistic version seems perfectly valid, and shouldn't a reporter recognize a direct answer to his question…

> why blame the autistic person for the reporter's poor communication?

this specific sort of difficulty communicating is a daily reality for many autistic folks

I believe that communication can often be fixed by either party, but is usually fixed by neither

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#132

Post by Der_Einzige »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #124
nickpeterson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being a young teenager (25 years ago now, yikes) playing counter strike and StarCraft all the time and being pretty good at both. I started playing with others who were in really good leagues (back then it was called cal-i for cs, not sure what exists now), and I realized the level of dedication and time necessary to compete at that level and I basically gave it up. Once you start thinking, “becoming bette…

Those sorts of guys have ruined all the games I grew up with. I can’t just casually play anymore. It doesn’t exist. Every lobby left is a sweatfest from people who have been playing the game nonstop since it came out 10-20 years ago sometimes. You have to swing vine from vine to whatever crap game is currently popular to get a chance at pwning noobs again.

There's an easy fix for this one!

AI literally made game hacks undetectable. It's never been easier to cheat on videogames in a way that poses literally zero risk of getting banned.

Here's an example of a tool that has made my "The Finals" experience about 10000% better: https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy

I'm having fun with my buddies, leasiurly talking on discord while yet another diamond sweat-lord who tries to gank me gets destroyed.

Also related, but botting on games like runescape has made my desire to play MMORPG's go way up too. Now I too can play the fun end game content without wasting my damn life on it.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#133

Post by cma »

brightball wrote: post #128
cma wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't we see much lower rates in Christian Scientists?

Why would that correlate?

> Christian Scientists avoid almost all medical treatment, relying instead on Christian Science prayer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_prac...

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#134

Post by novia »

drooby wrote: post #4

This seems to bolster the theory that autism is modulated by the gut-brain axis. Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. And GABA actually does cross the BBB but in small amounts. Perhaps at such an early age, dysregulation in GABA produced in the gut has significant effects on brain health - over stimulation, learning memory issues, etc.

The gut microbiota shouldn't be affected by antibiotics delivered via IV.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#135

Post by cjbgkagh »

jjallen wrote: post #130
drooby wrote: post #4

This seems to bolster the theory that autism is modulated by the gut-brain axis. Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. And GABA actually does cross the BBB but in small amounts. Perhaps at such an early age, dysregulation in GABA produced in the gut has significant effects on brain health - over stimulation, learning memory issues, etc.

Isn't autism much older than antibiotics? I mean it couldn't be - I haven't actually researched it but I'm pretty sure autism is older than antibiotics.

Severity can be modulated by the environment, it’s not that autism didn’t exist it but we can say for sure that antibiotics didn’t make anyone worse before it was invented.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#136

Post by m0llusk »

jjallen wrote: post #130
drooby wrote: post #4

This seems to bolster the theory that autism is modulated by the gut-brain axis. Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. And GABA actually does cross the BBB but in small amounts. Perhaps at such an early age, dysregulation in GABA produced in the gut has significant effects on brain health - over stimulation, learning memory issues, etc.

Isn't autism much older than antibiotics? I mean it couldn't be - I haven't actually researched it but I'm pretty sure autism is older than antibiotics.

Pretty sure what is being asserted is that gut bacteria may influence brain function and antibiotics can have influence on gut bacteria. Those are both complex systems, so there could be many other factors as well as wide variations.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#137

Post by kelipso »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #124
nickpeterson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being a young teenager (25 years ago now, yikes) playing counter strike and StarCraft all the time and being pretty good at both. I started playing with others who were in really good leagues (back then it was called cal-i for cs, not sure what exists now), and I realized the level of dedication and time necessary to compete at that level and I basically gave it up. Once you start thinking, “becoming bette…

Those sorts of guys have ruined all the games I grew up with. I can’t just casually play anymore. It doesn’t exist. Every lobby left is a sweatfest from people who have been playing the game nonstop since it came out 10-20 years ago sometimes. You have to swing vine from vine to whatever crap game is currently popular to get a chance at pwning noobs again.

Chess is super old but reason it's fun is because of the rating system that matches equal-ish players against each other. I'm guessing these games don't have that, I thought Starcraft had something like that but it's been a while since I played it.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#138

Post by kelipso »

ycombinete wrote: post #118
nickpeterson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being a young teenager (25 years ago now, yikes) playing counter strike and StarCraft all the time and being pretty good at both. I started playing with others who were in really good leagues (back then it was called cal-i for cs, not sure what exists now), and I realized the level of dedication and time necessary to compete at that level and I basically gave it up. Once you start thinking, “becoming bette…

I had the exact same experience, when I went to a chess club for the first time. I realised that to keep pace with those guys I’d have to spend more time than I was willing to on getting better. Especially with MMR based systems. No matter how good you get your win/loss ratio will end up around 50%. So you have to ask yourself why you need to keep getting better. To me It’s really about finding a level of “good” that…

I play chess at a nearby place and they just split people into self selected newbie/intermediate/advanced groups. There is just no limit to how much time you can spend training in chess is the thing, applied to most games really. I used to be more into it during the pandemic but now I just play casually without practicing everyday, which is fun enough for me.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#139

Post by yterdy »

notahacker wrote: post #115
yterdy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the explicit query was, "What's your favorite episode?". It's frustrating to be accused of disordered thinking on your part when the actual issue is disordered expectations from the other party. What they actually should have asked was, "What happened during your favorite episode?", which might have produced the response given by the sibling. It's not like neurotypical people don't also experience this frustr…

The query explicitly didn't include "Despite asking you about your preferences, I have no interest in why you prefer it so please refrain from commenting on that. Please don't waffle or ask me anything back, simply provide me with the title, and I will have all the information I need", so I don't think it's "disordered expectations" to assume that message wasn't conveyed by the question... Neurotypical communication…

No, I do think this is still an example of disordered expectations. What you're pointing out doesn't strike that notion as valid; it expands it from "an expectation of a response to an entirely different question, " to, "an expectation that you will pretend to be and behave as a neurotypical person to suit my comfort even though I know that you're not."

Which is probably worse.

As the other reply mentioned, there is an empathy (double empathy) problem, but the answer is not for one party to have to assume responsibility for the other's comfort entirely by having to guess all of their unspoken emotional desires for the conversation. "The query explicitly didn't include [...]" is kind of a ridiculous thing to expect someone to respect or even predict.

Also, I don't mean to pick apart your comment, but:

>Neurotypical communication 101 is that a casual conversation question about your favourite things is probably a cue for you to be enthusiastic and effusive about things you care about rather than a prompt for you provide names only

I don't know that this is true. If anything, doing this seems to get on their nerves.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#140

Post by yterdy »

roywiggins wrote: post #122
yterdy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the explicit query was, "What's your favorite episode?". It's frustrating to be accused of disordered thinking on your part when the actual issue is disordered expectations from the other party. What they actually should have asked was, "What happened during your favorite episode?", which might have produced the response given by the sibling. It's not like neurotypical people don't also experience this frustr…

> the actual issue is disordered expectations from the other party. There is something called "double empathy problem", referring to the idea that there is a mutual difficulty communicating across neurotypes. Neurotypical people struggle to understand autistic people because of a sort of "language barrier" even without a deficit in neurodivergent communication skills per se. After all, if neurotypical people are univ…

Here is me encountering the pitfalls of speculation as a layman: the phenomenon I stumbled upon is already well-documented.

Thank you for the link and explanation.

Post reply on HN