Both my wife and I lean toward the academic. I went to MIT, and we have an ASD son. This research is fascinating. And I think the Time article on it (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2089358,00....) is a good starting place. A while back the "Einstein Syndrome" book did a light treatment on this topic but for speech delays. Ultimately, I think the whole concept of an autism spectrum is helpful and harmful, because severe kiddos are so different from high-functioning (e.g. nerds) ones.
Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
#22Sometime in the future it will become clear that one of the causes of autism is traumatic experiences during labor and within the first few weeks of life. And the reason why boys are 4 times more likely than girls to be autistic is because of the trauma caused by circumcision. I can't point at any scientific studies. This is purely speculation based on years of research and observation on my end. I don't have autisti…
Yeah, so, ideas someone just makes up one day, which directly contradict all existing scientific observations, tend not to become clear in a few years.
Re: Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
#23Don't miss the end (pp. 41-43), where he calculates that the net economic benefit of mating between "systematizers" as very positive, modeling the resulting higher wages compared with the cost of autism (as 3-SD systematizing behavior) and Asperger's syndrome (as a 2.5-sigma trait). In this model, net economic result is still very positive, even if the lifetime economic cost for a case of autism is $5 million, and th…
I thought the net calculation was a little lame.
There's an interesting literature on the relationships between IQ and economics on both individual and national levels (I've compiled some links in http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_201... ), but one of the key factors making it difficult is that while it's easy to observe correlations between IQ measured at some point and later income, it's not easy to figure out the additional wealth created!
Much of IQ's economic benefits seem to be related to zero-sum or positional games (only a few thousand students can be let into Harvard each year). However, an additional marginal case of autism is not zero-sum where one case of autism saves you $5m on, I dunno, Alzheimer's somewhere. It just makes everyone $5m worse off.
So, it's possible that most of that 'net benefit' is only the 'net benefit' as considered for the specific person, and a net loss on a society-wide scale (because while that person may be internalizing the benefit of hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're not externalizing any of the cost by paying for that extra autistic kid a few houses over, whose treatment is going to be subsidized to some degree by other people as well).
Calculating the society-wide gains and losses is much harder, and it seems he didn't even try.
Re: Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, isn't this an example of a genetic diversity increase?
I will freely admit that most of what I attempted to read beyond the first few pages was over my head (and certainly my attention span), but the gist of my interpretation would be that humans are increasingly mating with sameness in mind, or as I will henceforth (egotastically--not a typo) call "self-identifying physiopsychological compatibility".
No, he constructs his model specifically to leave the underlying genetics the same in a static population, as a simplification.
Re: Childhood Autism and Assortative Mating
#25Sometime in the future it will become clear that one of the causes of autism is traumatic experiences during labor and within the first few weeks of life. And the reason why boys are 4 times more likely than girls to be autistic is because of the trauma caused by circumcision. I can't point at any scientific studies. This is purely speculation based on years of research and observation on my end. I don't have autisti…
Circumcision is barbaric but very old. Why didn't it have this effect until a few decades ago?