slatestarcodex autism

Im reminded of the Simon Baron-Cohen theory about autism being like an extreme male brain in some sense. It would not surprise me if a lot of non-neurotypical children were doing similar things, and that it poses genuine problems for studies like those discussed above. Second, even if the test itself is good, autistic people may be bad at test-taking for other reasons for example, they dont understand the directions, or theyre anxious about the social interaction required to answer an examiners quetsions. If the mums with low functioning autistic children, the ones I spoke to described the fathers as losers or deadbeats. Its hard to pin down why this is the case, but I think it is related to the things above, but also to the fact that gifted people tend to be bad at copying other people instinctively. For all his skepticism in some areas, Scott is remarkably accepting of the overall conceptual framework of psychiatric and psychological diagnosis despite its glaring philosophical flaws, which have been pointed out by many (see e.g. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . Perhaps the mechanisms for high IQ autism and low IQ autism are different. The Western world (taken to mean Europe and the Anglosphere) comprises roughly 1/6th of the global population, which means there should be about 125,000 Westerners who are both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. Knowing how much of the genetic variance in intelligence (say IQ for an easy measure) is additive is probably good enough to figure out how off the purely linear assumption is. Score: Lets say for example that parameter A is the learning rate in the part of the brain that deals with reasoning. This one comes from Gardner et al (2019), which measures the cognitive ability of the fathers of autistic people and disaggregates those with and without intellectual disability. So, part of people's problem is with the origins of ABA. I feel like unless your definition of normal includes non-highly intelligent this is just so far from true. I really like this change. I notice a lot of people confuse normality with charisma. One other observation that may interest people. If so, then the top-level geniuses may well have something else going on upstairs to enhance their intelligence, some other difference from the norms, that isnt part of the complex of IQ/autism risk genes. (2) genes that promote autism are being selected for Second, my 3rd daughters birth was challenging. This can coexist with a loss in the number of people with the highest potential intelligenceif were building sewers and safe water supplies at the same time were convincing our smartest 5% of people to take a vow of celibacy, well get that pattern. g_i = 1 if the parameter is present, g_i = 0 if not. This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). Either way, I dont think you can have one without the other above a certain level. For example, girls were much less likely to receive an Aspergers diagnosis than boys, and girls were more likely to be diagnosed at an older agea disparity that points to bias. Why on Earth one would assume that the effect of genes that contribute to IQ should be linearly additive and increasing to ad infinitum. In primary school, for a while we used to have daily spelling tests, where we had to spell ten words. 2016, p. 118), and there are many individually varied connections between brain and behavior (Kennedy et al. Maybe this is a tower collapse event. Agreed. Even when you get it high enough, to the point of being too much of a good thing, if its a rock show some people are still going to want it higher. Spoiler alert: ASD in adults was estimated to be 1%. Beware Simpsons Paradox. So in that sense, maybe its just a phrasing problem. Polimanti and Gelemter (2017) find that autism risk genes arent just sticking around. The military is where the fun toys are all at! We had children at around 30. Is it kind of like a bimodal distribution, i.e. The population mean for many of those parameters is off from the optimal value for thinking, perhaps because theres some tradeoff encoded there that doesnt matter as much now as in the past. (And maybe theres some kind of subtype of autism > size of correlation thing happening, too. Autistic people have weird developmental trajectories. Given the problems measuring IQ in autistic people (spiky profiles, huge differences between ravens vs. weschler) its also possible that intellectual disabilities are overreported at 15%. All this leads me to believe that people who are gifted and whos weirdness is more obvious are often misdiagnosed as having Asperger autism. In some sense, all autism has such-and-such characteristics studies are studying the way people like to define autism, and tell us nothing about any underlying disease process. I think this is connected to gifted people tend to be good at finding creative solutions to things rather than the most obvious ones, which in the case of weird walking or talking styles can look like autistic behavior. (I have predicted conversations, but only because the other person forgot we already had it. For this reason, they dont tend to hang out with normal people much. We cant do much about the genetic or random developmental stuff, but we can make sure most of the things that have stunted peoples intelligence over time go away. with stimulant use (arguably, it also explains a number of non-clinical nerdy traits rather nicely). And in a sport like wrestling, which is heavily reliant on locks, holds, and pins, having those weak points could easily allow someone to overpower you. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881. Observing matters in my local school, I think that child psychiatry is best understood as a means of managing problems that arise in childrens socialization to the school environment, and clusters of diagnoses align with a big three of socialization difficulties: weird dont fit in kids are diagnosed as autistic, restless cant sit still or stop acting up kids are diagnosed as ADD, violent/fighting/tantrum kids are diagnosed with oppositional disorders. Other possible explanation(s): Some kind of anxiety about doing things wrong, combined with worrying about whether one is supposed to be able to do a thing yet. Your argument also seems tautological to an extent; if youre defining normal as someone who thinks like a normal person, thats basically the equivalent of describing an object as being shaped like itself. You don't have to be a diagnosed autist to be like that. 43 votes, 61 comments. So you end up with a system where every gene that increases hyperparameter A makes the individual smarter, except that the individual becomes mentally ill if the hyperparameter exceeds a certain threshold. A 120 year old comes into my office and asks what her risk of death next year is. This gene developed in Africa, and can be seen as a fundamental reason for the transatlantic slave trade. The Tower vs Foundation model is probably an oversimplification of something like this. >The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. unsurprisingly, ID is inversely correlated with IQ; ADHD also shows a strong inverse correlation with IQ. At the individual level things are generally way more complex than these symptom-based diagnoses and the key is to ask *why* the kid isnt mixing well socially, gets into fights / lashes out, or cant sit still rather than reify it as a brain dysfunction. This always seemed nonsensical to me, because muscle is muscle; if two people are equally large, it shouldnt matter whether they were born that way or got that way through exercise. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. This could also tie back in to socioeconomic status better off parents may be more likely to have kids diagnosed as having autism instead of some other less acceptable mental disability, which could also potentially explain the racial disparities. Fortunately, at home, I can act how I want, which recharges me significantly. They may also have eccentric opinions or interests but theyre more likely to pursue them obsessively or compulsively without good reason, and they have trouble with self-awareness and awareness of others. Still, the IQ-boosting alleles produce autism instead of a more classical low IQ that genetic load alone would have had. These different enrichment profiles observed provide evidence for a heterogeneous and qualitatively different genetic architecture between sub-types of ASD, which should inform future studies aiming at identifying etiologies and disease mechanisms in ASD. Being 1.5 standard deviations less socially adept than the average girl might make you weird, but not problematic, while being 1.5 standard deviations less socially adept than the average boy might make you a classroom / societal problem. When people came to our defense, it was generally with an idea I didnt like too much: that maybe there were different types of intelligence and if we sucked at [x] we must surely be good at [y]like life was an RPG character generator or something. B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more. linear or quadratic around the average and possibly tapers off sub-linearly on the tails. (remember that no intellectual disability just means IQ over 70, and so many of these not-intellectually-disabled people may still have low intelligence I wish the paper had quantified this). One of psychiatry's many embarrassments is how many of our drugs get discovered by accident. children who previously had normal or even remarkable verbal abilities for their age suddenly losing words. Interestingly, this one addresses the P>V, and V>P subtypes and suggests: children with ASD did not show the commonly understood characteristic profile on the WISC either in terms of PIQ-VIQ discrepancy or in terms of peak skills on particular WISC subtests. I recognised my son was different at about 15 months old. This is not the whole story, and even cases of autism that are caused entirely or mostly by normal genetics are associated with unusually low IQ (80% confidence), 5. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page. Theres a range for this parameter, selection in the past has left most of the population too low, but if you push the parameter up too high things will break. That there is some knob which, as you turn it up, it increases intelligence, until you get it too high and then it blows up due to some fact about the dynamics of the system that we dont understand yet. This is more or less a requirement if the system is to be robust and quickly adaptable to environmental variation. And autistic people have more health issues than non-autistic people do. The autism epidemic may have been caused by assortative mating (people with subclinical autism marrying other people with subclinical autism producing children who are autistic) The sort of people that would do polygenic scoring for IQ are exactly the sort of people whose children might already be at risk for autism (high systemisers) The Tower vs Foundation model seems to treat intelligence as if its an attribute like height or arm length; the modification of some static variable. Big muscles can also reduce range of motion. Lots of bright nerdy tech-aligned people dont. It could be that geniuses are less visible with more obscure achievements because they work behind-the-scenes at institutions, whether universities or corporations. Well, I think its certainly a reasonable possibility, which in my experience appears to be true, that beyond a certain point, intelligence either directly causes weirdness or is reliant upon it as a foundation. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. This is just the cystic fibrosis thing again, isnt it? Only 3% of autistic people were found to have IQs above 115, even though 15% of the population should be at this level. Maybe I just dont understand what you mean by normal. If I suggest autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high, would that make sense to you? AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. Disguised in that almost is a very slight tendency for fathers to be unusually intelligent, plus a (statistically insignificant) tendency for them to be unusually unintelligent. Id cheerfully get in bed with the military-industrial complex -in fact, Id probably be rock-hard the whole time. For each parameters, there are many alleles in different locations that can bump the parameters a certain directionmake the babys head[1] a little bigger, for example. The ICD-11, which was adopted this year and will be implemented globally by 2022, instead calls it autism spectrum disorder without disorder of intellectual development and with mild or no impairment of functional language. Proponents of the change hope to reduce stereotypes. Without the load, the child would have had a high IQ, but with weak fundation (genetic load) no. Intelligence and social aptitude dont seem to be positively correlated, at least not very strongly, but theyre definitely not negatively correlated. @Cliff Indeed. These questions interest me because I know a lot of people who are bright nerdy programmers married to other bright nerdy programmers, and sometimes they ask me if their children are at higher risk for autism. That figure seems very low to me, though it depends what exactly you define as incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. If we take incredibly to be synonymous with top percentile, there would be 75 million people in the world who are incredibly intelligent. I had a professor once whose research thesis was basically this applied to language. High IQ, excellent at math, maybe a little socially awkward but not too bad (we live in a reasonably large town, so there are lots of like-minded kids he can socialize with.) I used to live in the DC area and still work with the civil service in my current job. Its possible some degree of politics was involved in this decision: The World Health Organization also is eliminating Asperger syndrome from its International Classification of Diseases. And at least a few of them were probably just lying outright. Sample: literally the whole of scotland. The physical kinematics of the human body dictate some ideal limb proportions for the 500-meter dash (say), and thats a target your genetic makeup can miss in either direction. I would recommend having girls through IVF if that is legally allowed in your jurisdiction? (Although, arent gene-behavior connections in general pretty suspect, as per your previous post?) People at the higher end of the corporate ladder that Ive met were very intelligent and also seemed generally normal, though of course they had much higher-than-normal ambition, stamina, and interest in their business. As an AI researcher, this actually seems pretty intuitive for me. Well, there is a point, but it takes a long time to grasp it, at which point you are significantly behind people who went along with them without questioning them. If you have too many, your legs are bizarrely long twigs that you totter around on like a newborn giraffe, and youve just gone to far so you wont be a great runner. His processing was below average. While their exact numbers are doubtful, I think the overall finding that common familial genes are much more important than rare de novo mutations survives and is important. Under https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ Murphy wrote: disorders like huntingtons where its theorized that theres a tradeoff between risk of death and IQ. They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. Yeah, your reaction is what I was scrolling down here to say, but you beat me to it. Wheat something something something autism and schizophrenia. While their children are clearly at higher risk for autistic traits, I think they want to know whether they have higher risk for the most severe forms of the syndrome, including intellectual disability and poor functioning. Potential confounder: having a low-functioning autistic child is highly stressful and often unpleasant. We have another child who shows no autistic traits. But they can only screen for de novo mutations they know about, and it could be that they just missed some. There are 5 hyperparameters, the optimal value for all is 9, and 10+ in any causes autism, and each hyperparameter is driven by many genes and different people have different mixes of genes. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. The taller the tower, the stronger the foundation has to be. High-functioning autism looks more like the same polygenetic soup one finds with other complex personality characteristics like intelligence or Big Five character traits. With that said, Im not an expert and there is a vast literature rummaging around for genetic correlates to autism, so Im mostly going by the linked paper above. If the g factor and IQ gains from the Flynn Effect are negatively correlated, then does that mean that IQ tests are gradually being more and more poorly designed over time? Because he was as skilled as me, and had real muscles. But many do it for positive outcomes versus negative pressure, which is how I interpreted your question. I dont have time to go through all the links this morning but wanted to add some more studies. Is it possible to measure autism on some scale, rather than as a binary category? i.e. (3) Genes that promote autism and IQ are being selected for DESPITE other genes that promote IQ being selected AGAINST, so we would expect to see the representation of autism in (the dwindling fraction of) high-IQ families explode in the coming decades. But for me the key point is that high-intelligence fathers show a trend (albeit not significant in this study) to be more likely than average to have children with autism and intellectual disability. How much of this could be IQ tests failing to effectively measure g in autistic individuals? This confuses me a little. Thats probably how he got to that level. Since autism is a polygenic disorder, it suggests a Gaussian model, with traits for autistic thinking normally distributed in the population, but at the tail end of the curve the hyper-systematizers cluster, and beyond a certain threshold of expression lie the autists. At least part of the story is that there are at least three different causes of autism. There was definitely a sperg-normie dynamic on my last work team, all highly intelligent. 6. While our latest study shows that autistic people, on average, have a shift towards a masculinised profile of scores on empathy and systemising tests, they are not extreme males in terms of other typical sex differences. * Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it. There could be something similar going on with autism. High IQs appear to be selected for, as does ASD; while the the survival advantage of the first is obvious, the second is a really high cost to pay from a fitness standpoint, and Im skeptical that the IQ on its own would be worth it as a survival advantage. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. In Graph A, we see that if a child has autism (but not intellectual disability), their likelihood of having a father with any particular IQ (orange line) is almost the same as the likelihood of a neurotypical child having a father of that IQ (dotted line). I think youre exaggerating unilateralism, Hypoborean. Strongly agree. A lot of the super smart people I know also seem super interesting either being very funny, uniquely talented, or engaging. This is reminiscent, and logically inverted, from the much greater role of spontaneous mutations in these latter categories, particularly in genes known to have an even larger impact in cohorts ascertained for intellectual disability/developmental delay91. I am getting a vision of the future. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. Superficially, this seems more plausible to me than the tower vs. foundation model, especially since its type of phenomenon we already observe for better-understood things the brain does, e.g. Assuming that intelligence is neither positively nor negatively correlated with social skills, that means 1% of those 75 million people would also be in the top percentile for social aptitude, for a total of 750,000 people. (Which isnt the same as saying its bimodal; the distribution still peaks in the middle, but its wider and flatter.). Improvements in health care thus cause an increase in the number of autistic children born to more affluent families, but whats actually happening is that were just seeing more of them *survive*. My vague mental model is that there are a bunch of different parameters that have to be within a certain range to get good performance from your brain. ASD has no reliable early predictor, no unitary developmental course, no unitary life outcome, no unitary recurrence risk, no unitary pattern of BAP features, and no standard homogeneous subgroups. We both spent a lifetime getting scolded because we were obviously too smart for the dumb stuff we kept doing (grades and the like). The results from the large trial seem consistent with there being a yet-undifferentiated subtype of autism that responds moderately to significantly. could equally be applied to people who arent especially intelligent. According to the different mechanism theory, they should have more, but by the collapsing tower theory, they should have fewer. These deficits are present in early childhood, typically before age three, and lead to clinically significant functional impairment. I view it as absolutely crucial that bright kids get to socialize with kids like them, and also that someone teaches them how to be a functional person. My vague recollection on this is a large portion of population variance in IQ is additive (like 30 or 40%? Autism, rationality and intelligence. My absurdly layman impression of the austistic spectrum suggested that autists might make less use of a heuristic that produces one of those needed side-effects, so the simplest testable prediction springing to mind was that ghost experiences would be absent somewhere in the autistic population. There are almost no exceptions. Heck, maybe there are two different underlying conditions here that have similar enough symptoms that we categorize them together (per Scotts observation in his The Body Keeps the Score review that we tend to categorize psychiatric disorders heavily by effect, because the cause is so murky).

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