slatestarcodex autism

Probably wrong ideas generated from your writing here: We know that core elements of cognition not only do develop early in life, but *have* to develop in life. 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. An analogy: Imagine you have a sound system with a microphone, speakers, and a mixing board. Fall short of that threshold and you have a pile of severely broken processes. But I dont think there is overlap between the genetic factors for high-functioning and low-functioning autism. Im not a great student of philosophy, but I dont think most modern philosophers look at the writings of Plato or Descartes or Kant or Hume and think they were intellectual lightweights. Yes, the biggest gains from any given exercise are to performing that specific exercise, but gaining strength that way still allows you to do other mostly unrelated motions that use the same muscle group that you couldnt have done without those exercises. Its not difficult to guess what someones response would be to many chit-chat topics. German Shepherds, Huskies). My current boss. (2005) reported that 50% of families visited their adult with autism at least weekly and an equal number of adults came weekly to visit at their mother's home. 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. The suggested results for selection against IQ are just in recent industrial time. A simple model might be something like the genes for color vision. 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. The tower of intelligence needs to be built upon some kind of mysterious foundation. More generally, to relate to those people around you who are also bright. However, history doesnt always predict the future. n=1, but it was striking to watch my very smart middle kid go from being a near-outcast in his good Catholic school to a guy with lots of friends at his magnet school. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. 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. In a situation where being outcast from the tribe means that the tribe is going to die instead of the outcast, then the tribe had better learn to put up or shut up. Is it the reverse of that? Every autism case is caused by some combination of these three factors, and the more it is caused by normal genes, the more intelligence is likely to be preserved (~100% confidence), 4. 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. He used to claim that he had an advantage in the ring because his muscle was all-natural, which made him stronger than people who got equally buff from working out. Take any part away, and you lose some intellectual ability. So the genes are a correlation but not a cause of the autism, which is due to factors incidentally related to the high IQ, for example the advanced age of the parents? If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page. I would recommend having girls through IVF if that is legally allowed in your jurisdiction? About impulse control, there are two strategies being selected for here, one featuring low impulse control(the classic idiocracy strategy) and another (the religious socially conservative strategy) featuring high impulse control: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X18300976. Kylounet is drinking a CAMBIER Double Galaxy by Brasserie Cambier at Terroir Alternatif. 9 6 5 4 3 marries 9 2 5 4 3, children high chance of 10+ on first and autistic, children that are not autistic are just barely on the bright side of normal. I get to see what happens to those kids otherwise, they become adults who ace every math exam, but are unable to buy pants. He visually learned letter and number orders before turning 2. Only 3% of autistic people were found to have IQs above 115, even though 15% of the population should be at this level. As far as I can tell, the explosion in diagnoses is primarily driven not by the very low-functioning (everyone could already tell that non-verbal folks had something wrong with them) but by increased diagnosis of medium-to-high-functioning people. I think an important possibility to consider is that some or all of the correlation were observing is simply due to bias in the data were using, rather than any actual relationship between high IQ and autism. also, i just read through the swedish study cited in the post. the classic stereotype.). Either way, I dont think you can have one without the other above a certain level. Also, if we do get to a bold new future of hyper-intelligent unilaterism, would the hyper-intelligent even want to sign up for it? Similarly, you would expect lower rates of male-to-female transgender identity among the population of people on the autism spectrum who came equipped with that Y chromosome. My 3rd child, a girl, is much lower functioning. 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. no IQb + low genetic load : high intelligence, sociable, not so technically inclined Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. You might want to adjust for inflation. Could you elaborate? IQb medium genetic load : high intelligence, autistic highly functional autist or autistic tendencies, strongly tenchnically inclined And it would also explain why there are many extremely intelligent people who dont have autism at all (you can build arbitrarily tall towers if your foundation is strong enough). Over the vast majority of the range of the main volume knob on the mixer (assuming the system is set up reasonably), more will be better. g_i = 1 if the parameter is present, g_i = 0 if not. In other words, if your perceptual intelligence is much higher than your other types of intelligence, you will end up autistic. For one, its multiple different kinds of mental tasks whose scores are then combined to get an IQ score. Some of the genetic diseases of Eastern Eurpoean Jews are correlated with intelligence, IIRC, but I dont think they have mental effects. Some might get lucky and be able to manage the negatives from such unusual prior models away by the effects of other quirks, say having abstract thoughts feel more natural through some particular tweaks making the net their active inference casts wider with higher error tolerance or by lowering the interconnectivity between different oversensitive mental modules that they dont interfere with one another as much or whatnot then you get high-functioning autistic individuals, maybe Newtons one cliched example of that sort of configuration. Theres probably not anyone working in math right now who is any smarter than Gauss was. This seems like circular logic to me. I know plenty of highly intelligent people who nonetheless have very poor impulse control particularly when it comes to libidinous desires! 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. However, once it exceeds a certain threshold, the network starts learning things that dont make any sense, and then when it tries to correct those mistakes it goes too far in the other direction again. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/, https://sci-hub.tw/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881, Arizone State University Autism symptoms reduced nearly 50% two years after fecal transplant, The Economist More evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria, Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf, http://cepuk.org/unrecognised-facts/diagnostic-system-lacks-validity/, https://medicine.uiowa.edu/psychiatry/content/ui-research-suggests-huntingtons-disease-gene-also-vital-human-development-and-intelligence, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749054, https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/8/e029040.full. 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. Autism (especially Asperger's) is basically a vanity diagnosis these days. None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. (For example, a too-big head would kill mother and baby until modern times; now it just means mom gets a C-section.). If thats the case, if the Flynn effect ever slows down or goes into reverse wed be in quite a bit of trouble, and Scandanavia could be the canary in the coalmine for that process. No guarantees in biology, but you can try to find a future partner with no such family history. My experience watching a relative currently diagnosed with severe, non-verbal autism grow up is that his diagnosis is a catch-all for he doesnt seem capable of abstract thought but we have ruled out all the other, better-understood potential causes. No one can offer more than conjecture about the cause of his condition, and no one knows how to treat it (unless you listen to the vaccine-chelation charlatans the way that his father does) so why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? And then theres Jacob Collier, who can detect, and accurately sing, the difference between an A at 440Hz and at 432Hz, and that allows him to do stuff like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZn4x3uOac) where he sings a 10-part harmonisation of In the Bleak Midwinter in which hes gradually shifting the key-centre upwards throughout, and then for the last verse he performs a 4-chord pivot to a key halfway between G and G# on the scale hes in at the time, by taking advantage of slight mis-definition in the equal-tempered approximations to those pivot chords that allows him to quickly shift to an entirely out-of-tune system (if you switched directly, it would just sound like trash) in just four chords without it sounding odd. 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. This has held me back at networking events, but overall, there is some tolerance for being abnormal out of the office. My stats-fu isnt strong enough to know if this actually pencils out, though. He (I presume) seems to be a bad conversationalist, likely through lack of practice. You can squeeze out a little more gain by filtering just the frequencies that feed back, but if you keep going up it wont take long at all before there are too many to filter. When she was three, she had symptoms of autism. I am able to emulate being normal very well at work, but horrible in casual settings. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . Thats high, compared to the general population (below 1%) but 50% is weirdly high. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. Tongue in cheek (Swift Modest Proposal) style interventions given this model are: I dont think 99% would stand out here, but I dont think itd quite be mediocre either. I dont think there was much correlation at all with years of formal education, and the paths their lives and careers took are almost unimaginable now. My wife is autistic. how could they recruit in such a way as to get a representative sample? Plenty of people are both smarter and more charismatic than us. Its a highly abnormal subset of people. Genes which are helpful until you have too many of them, at which point you are screwed. Most are weird in the sense of having uncommon interests (reading history or science books or studying languages for fun, say), but most seem pretty normal in terms of personality and affect and such. I never liked that. Im not suggesting this accounts for the high/low intelligence as the sample size was small. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/race-class-contribute-disparities-autism-diagnoses/. And so humans recently had/still are having a massive selection for genes that require lower thresholds for immune responses, and genes that outsource some of the immune de-escalation responsibilities to gut microbes and parasites, etc in order to get a faster jump have proliferated to the point where a lot of these are normal now; this is the hygiene hypothesis or old friends hypothesis and the best outline of I can offer for it is the book An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velazquez-Manoff. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. I think its possible that some relatively simple model will be found to explain this relationship, but I also think its possible that the mechanics of intelligence are simply complex enough that the explanation is something inaccessible with our current level of understanding. 43 votes, 61 comments. So the technically autistic community could well be more intelligent on average than the general population, with the people who are actually labeled autistic being a particularly low-functioning subset of that population. According to the different mechanism theory, they should have more, but by the collapsing tower theory, they should have fewer. Against autism as "extreme male brain"? : slatestarcodex https://sci-hub.tw/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881. Without the load, the child would have had a high IQ, but with weak fundation (genetic load) no. I didnt understand why you left out the actual finding, which seems to be an important fact to note. Note that billionaires in America are still vulnerable to (using a topical example) wealth taxes, and abroad billionaires in Russia / China must play the cuddle up to Putin / Xi or die / get put in a camp game. Overall scores could continue to rise due to the Flynn effect even as intelligence is being selected against on a genetic level, which is what the evidence is suggesting. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. Higher IQ people have lower infant mortality rates than lower IQ people. A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence. There are ways to reduce the loop gain of the system to increase the maximum gain before feedback, but ultimately they involve careful sound engineering theres no general parameter you can turn down to fix the problem, because the primary parameter you _want_ is the same one that causes the breakdown. As I understand it (Im an interested amateur, not an expert, so dont trust this too far! The DSM-5 change was a mistake in my view because high functioning autism and AS genuinely seem to be quite different in structure, and it seems as though there were some low level political motivations for folding them together (see upthread). Autistic people being diagnosed with intellectual disabilities before theyre able to to talk and not really being undiagnosed when theyve demonstrated higher levels of ability is very much a thing. Combining information from a wide variety of studies, Gaugler et al estimate that about 52% of autism risk is attributable to ordinary familial genes, 3% to rare de novo mutations, 4% to complicated non-additive genetic interaction effects, and 41% unaccounted, which may be non-genetic factors or genetic factors we dont understand and cant measure. 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. Check out the similarities. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. And yes, I know the survey showed that the average SSC reader had an IQ of 138, but Im extremely skeptical of that finding too. What do you guys think of the recent research linking autism to gut bacteria? Most successful businessmen. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. You tell them that the study that tried to address that question suggests that they are between one point one and one point two times as likely; in other words, at least 83-90% of their chance to die in any given year is baseline. Maybe specific areas for different such quirks of processing have some optimal Goldilocks zones for their values, which if all fit might give you some sort of the upper bounds of human intelligence-maybe there are multiple such optimal/viable configurations, however hitting all the targets simultaneously must be relatively rare, and some of the targets might be smallish, others might be essentially fixed without some de novo mutation for likely good evolutionary reasons. 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. He has the making of a superb engineer. She pointed out that there are a couple widely-used kinds of IQ test. I guess in a context-specific sense, normal is being defined as not-autistic? Well, much debate here gets into the distinction between people with high functioning autism and Aspergers, due to a muddling at that end of the scale. These numbers should be taken with very many grains of salt. 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. I think youre exaggerating unilateralism, Hypoborean. (*) to complicate matters, in normal usage, Im autistic, but in many usages I wouldnt be described as having autism. Of course people like that exist. On that and other evidence, its pretty clear the above article isnt talking about autistics like me. ), There is a (high functioning) autistic musician named Henny Kupferstein who spends a lot of time teaching piano to autistic kids. These mutations are often very bad, and are quickly selected out of the gene pool (because the people who have them dont reproduce). Also, it doesnt really look like autistic people are worse at mental rotation. Or if (as really happens) it turns out that smart, ambitious people usually have their kids a decade later than dumb, unambitious people and usually the smart, ambitious people only have enough time in their fertility window for one kid while the dumb ones have time for three. I am a highly educated (PhD) male parent of a son with autism (aged 17 so in high school), who is in a Special Education class, so I fit the phenotype described here. One study found that 69% of autistic people had an IQ below 85 (the average IQ of a high school dropout). As an example of the latter there was a time when I was in math class when wed started learning about simple equations with variables (4n + 2 = 3n + 5 or whatever) but we hadnt yet learned about adding things to both sides (I think we were just supposed to guess and check). Non-genetic factors. Beware Simpsons Paradox. why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? when we did a comprehensive neuropsych his IQ came back above average (range 115-125ish depending on how you weight scales) which seems about right. This is just the cystic fibrosis thing again, isnt it? Why would you doubt it if you dont have the data? I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. There are huge practical and financial incentives within our system to diagnose all of these sets of kids with some kind of medicalized disorder, regardless of whether any underlying physical mechanism is understood or present (and sometimes it is, but many different developmental issues can lead you down each of these roads). But there is a critical point in the system, the feedback point, after which more isnt just too much of a good thing the behavior of the system changes qualitatively and the whole thing breaks down. (When your edit window expires before you submit the edit, it just discards your text and you have to retype it? Both moderate to high IQ. Im pretty sure that at some point the emulation efficiency hits diminishing returns- that its not emulations all the way up, in other words. 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. Still, the IQ-boosting alleles produce autism instead of a more classical low IQ that genetic load alone would have had. Its not like theyll answer anybody. 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. The taller the tower, the stronger the foundation has to be. It doesnt really present much evidence for this other than that autistic people seem to have high perceptual intelligence. Indeed, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans all have higher levels of overall learning disabilities than whites do. If your definition of weirdness includes beliefs and interests, then almost by definition anyone whose underlying cognition is unusually effective or ineffective will be weird. Thus, I cant think of anyone whos very intelligent and not weird ceases to be meaningful. I am convinced there are a lot more genius now, but : The latter are the Feynman types: Goofballs with a myriad of weird interests (Feynman was into playing the Bongo drums and the short lifed Soviet Republic Tannu Tuva, among other things). Indeed, higher survival rates over time might also explain why were seeing a real increase in the number of autistic children over time more of them are living long enough to be diagnosed with autism in the first place. I have read before that age of parents increases risk of autism. I had a professor once whose research thesis was basically this applied to language. If we take the Ronemus and Gardner studies seriously, the answer seems to be yes. I would hypothesize based on this that autistic people usually have parents who are very good at exactly those areas that they have trouble in. but heres the thing, I cant come back from the store with six bags of graham crackers and confidently say alright, were gonna make a BUNCH of smores now. To really make a lot, we need all marshmallows, chocolate, AND graham crackersand adding a bunch of one factor does absolutely nothing, and may in fact hinder the whole operationsimilarly, its fallacious to suggest that because some factors dial up, they must all be good things that should be dialed up without limitthat crackling fire is a necessary component, but it doesnt need to go any higherif it does, if we have a big ole bonfire for example, the whole process actually gets harder. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. Is it possible to measure autism on some scale, rather than as a binary category? Given that many drugs both medical and recreational appear to affect similarly subtle parameters broadly through relatively simple molecules, theres no reason to assume they cant be much more specifically fine-tuned through genetics. 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. 10.0 is the optimal learning rate, and 9.5 is good, then 10.5 is typically also good. The reality is that weight training only increases strength in the motion of the lifts that you do. 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. Slate Star Codex Assortative Mating And Autism Posted on January 28, 2020 by Scott Alexander Introduction Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. ), in the general population, you will see a very strong correlation between the IQ score someone gets on the two different kind of IQ test, but among autistics, the correlation is much weaker. While autism (or at least diagnosed autism) is rarer in girls, its very much not unheard of. When I was a music major in college it was the research interest of one of my professors and he put the students with perfect pitch through a couple of tests like this in class. I would say half of the up and coming civil leaders have hints of being abnormal. The threshold is probably different for women and men. Low IQ people are more likely to end up dead or in jail, and are less likely to be in stable nuclear families. Or in the case of plants, their leaf structures are generated by a fractal pattern, and even small changes in the parameters of that fractal cause large changes in the ultimate pattern in a way that is chaotic and difficult to predict. Graph B is the same thing, but with people have have autism with intellectual disability. Her IQ has only been tested once, by a neuropsych, and came in around 90. It would be an excellent skill for a teacher. comments sorted by Best Top New Controversial Q&A Add a Comment More posts you may like. For example, they may dislike the father for not doing enough when the kid is self-harming from overstimulation. What do SSC readers think? 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. [1] I assume most such genes do something way more complicated and hard to measure, but head circumference makes a nice example trait. A lot of people are using social aptitude as a proxy because thats at least something measureable (at least in concept, if not in practice). I have a possible explanation for the observed distribution of intelligence in autistic people. Question the second. Yes their interests and opinions are often eccentric, but they are self-aware of this and do not have problems navigating everyday interactions. A couple of property developers Ive worked with. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. (1) Genes associated with autism arent associated with IQ > (which are around 80% to 90%; the authors are embarrassed by this, and in a later study suggest they might just have been bad at determining who in their sample did or didnt have autism. Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. Or maybe not, because the researchers just act like they are cognitively distinct subtypes anyway, so it might not make much difference in practice. The hypothesis of the blog post is that two people with autism spectrum traits should have children with associated negative outcomes. Kindof like we could genetically engineer all people to be tetrachromats. The existence of a well-defined subset of low IQ people whose relatives have higher-than-predicted IQs is a surprising finding that cuts through the measurement difficulties and suggests that this is a real phenomenon. 80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Honestly, your genius doesnt sound very good at digging into people. If the genetic risk factors for high-functioning and low-functioning autism have a lot of overlap, as Scott suggests, then that strongly implies a connection in etiology. It could be one of the categorization problems Scott was talking about in Against Against Autism Cures. If youre not low-functioning but dont have strong enough autistic traits to be clearly a high-functioning autistic, you dont have autism youre just a little weird? It seems that a process like this could conceptually produce an artificial bimodal distribution, even if the traits arent bimodally distributed. People diagnosed with autism are less intelligent than average (~100% confidence, leaving aside definitional complications), 3. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for AUCHAN RETAIL INTERNATIONAL of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE.

What Denomination Is Summit Church, Articles S