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A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

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Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#151

Post by danaris »

idiotsecant wrote: post #63
zdragnar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't act…

I think boys just present symptoms that are more obvious. Girls with autism are very often much better at masking than boys are.Young girls also tend to fixate on more 'socially acceptable' topics that make that fixation less obvious

Girls are much more likely to be socialized to mask before the parents or children have a clue that's what's happening.

Boys are much more likely to be allowed to "express themselves," act out, etc.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#152

Post by somenameforme »

makeitdouble wrote: post #129
somenameforme wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. As are intelligence, education, secularity, and so on. IQ is a decent proxy for intelligence. What many people don't know is that it's not a raw score, but relative. The mean of a population is always set to 100 and a standard deviation is generally 15 points. So an IQ of 115 means you performed better than 84% of people, one positive standard deviati…

> The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. Yes and no, it's a lot more nuanced. There can be higher fertility and the very low high and very high end of wealth, but it's also not consistent nor a solid link. This article looked at as an well illustrated one to me: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

Their graph is setting off red flags for me. A decent sized sample of data over any sort of remotely normal distribution doesn't look like that where you're seeing a 3% change on the x axis drive a 30% shift on the y, and then back again. Here [1] are some of the data that they probably used. Table 7 in particular.

Here is the percent of women in each income bracket who gave birth in the past year by ascending income per household member (their choice of data, not mine - I would prefer completed fertility):

7.96 7.51 6.39 5.14 4.47 3.78 3.18

Here is the percent by total household income in ascending order of income:

6.27 5.23 5.64 5.88 5.26 5.30 5.26 4.98 4.64 4.75

In both cases there is a practically linear, and sharp, inverse correlation between income and fertility. I have no idea how they derived their graph as that data does not seem to be directly provided, but there's no combination of the lines in their graphs that would yield these data as an average, so I suspect they made a mistake.

I would not dispute that there is a U curved shape to fertility, but it's misleading as the tail end is in extremely high incomes. And in any case, their graphs look more like some sort of messed up sine waves, which is obviously just wrong!

[1] - https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/fertility/women...

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EDIT: Actually I have a hypothesis. The census tables give an extremely useless datum that's very easy to misinterpret. The column is simply labeled "percent". It waxes and wanes all over the place, very much like their graph does. But it's the percent of all births that came from a given income group. But that is completely meaningless, because what matters is the data I gave (and had to manually calculate - by adding a new column) which is the percent of each group that is having children. Otherwise you're graphing some bastardization of population size at each percentile (a bell curve) multiplied by a pseudo-randomizing linear decreasing factor (fertility). So you get a graph that looks weird and makes no sense.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#153

Post by mfru »

djohnston wrote: post #127
mfru wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to add that autism does not automatically limit these. I am diagnosed ASD and ADD with high IQ and altruism, empathy and collaboration are core principles of mine - because they are optimizing efficiency and quality of life on a societal level thus affecting the individual as well. You could argue that I am an exception but all ASD / ADD friends of mine also tend to at least view empathy and collaboration…

I know someone autistic who also describes herself this way and was banished from multiple teams for being politically machevialian while also being incompetent - so YMMV

Yeah, on an individual level there will be a lot of variance including people misinterpreting their own principles / beliefs (leading to the situation you described).

Therapy helps a lot with that + how to communicate them.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#154

Post by dns_snek »

PaulHoule wrote: post #61
tedk-42 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep it's like they're grouping all kinds of mental disabilities as autism

It is the so-called "autists" who do that. It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful. Look at the case of Kanye West https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sick-people-are-sick There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study... If it wasn't something people were flocking to like neurotypicals that is now a valuable part…

> It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.

It hasn't "become" anything and it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, take Kanye's behavior up with him.

> There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases

> Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...

A few things to unpack:

1. autism isn't a disease, it's a disorder (or a difference from average)

2. they identified 4 *subtypes* of ASD, not distinct disorders

3. these subtypes have nothing in common with the conditions that were removed from the DSM-5

4. these are serious issues that have always had profound effects on people's lives, the only difference is that they used to suffer alone, in silence. Increased awareness doesn't make it a "fad" and your snotty, dismissive attitude towards them doesn't belong here or anywhere else

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#155

Post by jwatte »

mort96 wrote: post #119
Insanity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol that’s an interesting comparison. Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself.

IMO the issue is that we use the term "autism" for two wildly different things. We use it for perfectly functional people who are more sensitive than usual to crowds and noise and prefers a somewhat different style of communication than most people. And we use it for completely non-functional people who can't communicate at all and don't understand what's being communicated to them and throw violent temper tantrums a…

We had it, it was called "Aspie," but somehow that wasn't good enough.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#156

Post by dekhn »

cwmoore wrote: post #50
agentcoops wrote: post #19

There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both tho…

Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper. Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes? The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities. Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences a…

Larry Summers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-...

He clarified his intent: https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005...

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#157

Post by kridsdale1 »

jagaerglad wrote: post #123
mort96 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the issue is that we use the term "autism" for two wildly different things. We use it for perfectly functional people who are more sensitive than usual to crowds and noise and prefers a somewhat different style of communication than most people. And we use it for completely non-functional people who can't communicate at all and don't understand what's being communicated to them and throw violent temper tantrums a…

the "level 1, 2 or 3 autism" has started to gain colloquial traction recently

Isn’t that straight out of the DSM 5?

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#158

Post by ok_dad »

kruffalon wrote: post #132
ok_dad wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said > but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way. Which I assumed the person I was talking to originally would see, read, and understand to mean that their comment was rude but I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way. Instead, a bunch of others jumped in to interpret it a different way. I don’t see how I supposedly have assumed malice when I literally said that the OP probably wasn’t being malicious in a…

You are correct, I'm not sure how I missed the second part of your original comment, my apologies! (I thought I could edit my first comment, but I can't, so this comment will have to do.)

No worries at all, I hate textual communication for the specific reason that it's hard to express true emotions through it.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#159

Post by estimator7292 »

hyghjiyhu wrote: post #145
nkozyra wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic I find this part to be a really strong highlight of our change in perception of autism and what it means to be "autistic" or "on the spectrum." Perhaps due to the broadening of the spectrum or just an odd association with success and spectrum attributes, we now strongly associate intelligence with spectrum…

I still think it's odd how aspergers disappeared as a label. Made more sense than a spectrum with both really smart people and really stupid ones.

This is a direct result of a push from within the autistic community to stop using eugenicist labels and notions of "more" or "less" autistic. The community is really sensitive to eugenics because of all of the people trying to do eugenics against them and treating them as subhuman.

Autism isn't a scalar. One is not more or less autistic than another. It's a multidimensional vector space where each individual has unique needs and disabilities throughout that space.

We also don't really talk about the IQ angle because, again, eugenics and elitism. It is a fact that some or many autistic people are incredibly intelligent, but it is exclusively allistic people who get hung up on this point. For autistic people, it's just the way things are and we have to make do, just like with everything else in life.

Turns out when a lot of people want to murder, sterilize, experiment on, or genetically engineer you, you get pretty sensitive about other people using actual, factual, literal Nazi eugenicist ideas to describe you.

That's why everyone should be using the terms that autistic people choose for themselves. So that you're not continuing to promote, again, actual Nazi war crimes as a way to distinguish "good" autism from "bad". That's why we've purged Asperger's as a diagnostic label.

Re: A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

#160

Post by [deleted] »

dns_snek wrote: post #150
hyghjiyhu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's odd how aspergers disappeared as a label. Made more sense than a spectrum with both really smart people and really stupid ones.

Why? We don't have 2 different terms for "blindness" (or any other condition for that matter), one for people who are intelligent and another for those who aren't. Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator who drew an imaginary line between "less autistic" children, whom he believed could still be valuable to society, and "more autistic" children who were considered to be a threat to their racial purity - so he murdered…

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