slatestarcodex autism
The Tower vs Foundation model is probably an oversimplification of something like this. Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. And thus a little more involvement from the microglia in utero or during early childhood might lead to a more efficient neural configuration and a higher IQ, especially if the involvement is more concentrated in the brain regions with more of an evolutionarily enforced margin toward resilience/survival rather than cognitive performance in normal humans. However, I couldnt beat the Sophomore at 130 who was my workout partner in the weight room and only had 5-10 lbs on me in most lifts. Increasingly smart people at the high end, as the smart people tend to meet in college/at work and pair off and have super-smart kids. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. Its also a chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion. People diagnosed with autism are less intelligent than average (~100% confidence, leaving aside definitional complications), 3. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, [1] a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, [2] under the pen name Scott Alexander. I am able to emulate being normal very well at work, but horrible in casual settings. The mothers of red-green colorblind individuals are frequently tetrachromats. Titrated use of alcohol in pregnancy and general precautions regarding healthy eating during pregnancy. I thought we were starting to get clear evidence that genes associated with IQ (through the proxy of years of education completed) were being selected AGAINST in 20th century society, which is intuitive (educated people on average have fewer children, because time during child-bearing years is consumed with schooling). 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. A mutation in the pigment for the red cone allows a person to see two shades of red. Having more diverse cones means that they can differentiate shades of red that other people would see as identical. 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. There is another problem: Giftedness also increases empathy, which in the wrong environment can be a bad thing. For what its worth, I was diagnosed with Aspergers (which has now been folded into autism) at age 12 and as part of the diagnosis they did an IQ test with a processing IQ component and a verbal IQ component, and although the documents I have dont list the actual scores, the result is referred to in the documents as being very high in the verbal component and very low in the processing component. His processing was below average. and they seem just as likely to have unplanned children as less intelligent people with equally bad impulse control. Under the DSM-5, autism is characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction across multiple contexts, as well as restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. with stimulant use (arguably, it also explains a number of non-clinical nerdy traits rather nicely). 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. I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. Sure, most of them. A PhD in particle physics at 15 is incredibly impressive, but a programmer starting out of college at an FAANG who saves a bit will be a millionaire by 30. I know plenty of highly intelligent people who nonetheless have very poor impulse control particularly when it comes to libidinous desires! Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. The Flynn effect seems to be about raising the floor by building proper sewers and water supplies, eradicating parasites, vaccinating everyone against common childhood diseases, making sure nobody starves and also adding nutritional supplements to foods so brain development isnt stunted by deficiency diseases, eliminating heavy metals from the environment of small children, making sure everyone goes to school, etc. and b) people diagnosed with autism using current criteria are quite prevalent in the community and presumably functioning in their communities. I have many fewer data points on low functioning autistic people, who I have mostly met through church. g_i = 1 if the parameter is present, g_i = 0 if not. Also also, Crespi is one of those scientists who constantly has much more interesting theories than anyone else (eg), and this makes me suspicious. 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? Doing some [fundamental] discovery is harder and harder. (This sounds harsh, but I want a child at least as normal as I am). We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. First, doesnt the note say that the bottom graph (for each letter) is the likelihood that a father of x IQ will have a child with the specified outcome? Potential confounder: having a low-functioning autistic child is highly stressful and often unpleasant. r/slatestarcodex on Reddit: oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an Yes. [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions]. Im going to interpret fitting in as being liked.. (*), Its not hard to measure my IQ, except that it generally falls at the top of the scale where the tests dont make effective distinctions. If I personally were one of these hypothetical genius scientists in possession of technology that could reshape the world, I think that the most optimal strategy for me would be to offer this technology to the U.S. in exchange for a large sum of money say, $50 million. Why conflate diagnosed with autism with has autism? However, history doesnt always predict the future. Having charismatic superpowers isnt normal, and I suspect requires being sufficiently unconcerned with opinion sufficiently thing-oriented so as to cease to be normal. For one thing, the same studies that found that relatives of autistic patients had higher IQs find that the autistic patients themselves have much lower ones. I would expect that to be the case based simply on the premises. Her condition presents with some speech and language processing difficulties. It turns out that giftedness can be quite a burden for children and teenagers, as not many of their peers can relate to them and vice versa. There are no other cases of autism diagnosed in the immediate family. My oldest child, a boy, is very high functioning. One way of resolving the autism-intelligence paradox is to say that familial genes for autism increase IQ, but de novo mutations and environmental insults decrease IQ. 2. And that finds that only 15% have intellectual disabilities. (Note that if autism is really one thing [not a complex syndrome], with high and normal functioning individuals, and high vs normal correlates with IQ, then if you only measure the normal autistics, youd get results like the above, due to sampling bias. The lectins in wheat interfere with leptin receptors, making people leptin resistant and therefore obese. We dont have an understanding of how autism exists in the general populace so our data is skewed towards the worst because of where that data comes from. 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. His auditory channel is very slow and only turns on when you say his name or repeat the question. The hypothesis of the blog post is that two people with autism spectrum traits should have children with associated negative outcomes. There are a lot more pathways to leveraging raw intelligence to acquire economic status now than there used to be, but very few that get you all the way to the point that youre fully safe from the tribe (since the tribe is now the nation and is thus also much stronger now). You could also define normal as simply referring to a lack of explicit mental illnesses or emotional problems. How much do we know about how intelligence develops and what might impact it? Most of these seem to be related to social ability. 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). ABA research, like autism research in general, suffers from an appalling lack of rigor. They would more easily get high IQ amongst Aspies, whom I dont consider Autistic. IQ dropping over recent decades in many developed countries, combined with lower TFR for high-IQ isnt evidence? Shes capable of living without a caretaker, but other than that, the impact on her quality of life seems pretty serious. As the authors put it: Because the ASD diagnosis is defined by just two symptoms from an individuals complete set of symptoms, an ASD-defined sample is widely over-inclusive, capturing many different lifelong conditions that can arise from a complex combination of multiple genetic and environmental factors (Dawson 2016, para. 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. Id guess the funny people can be funny even when their jokes bomb, because they can make their failed jokes into a joke at their own expense? Slate Star Codex Suggestion - The Autism Neurodiversity Debate This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. People with average or above average intelligence and autism are much, much less likely to be diagnosed, because one contributing cause of a diagnosis is seeing a psychiatrist, which is much more likely for people who are having trouble in classes. Yes. Any gene that increases A in a normal human makes that human more intelligent by pushing A closer to 10. And also reproducing younger (banking frozen eggs and/or sperm early for the IVF). Perhaps different people train their brain using different optimization strategies, and when you optimize too well you risk ending up in the autistic basin of configuration space, which does well in the environment a fetus or baby faces. It would explain the association of genes for intelligence with autism (holding foundation strength constant, the taller the tower, the more likely a failure). It would be better to try for more precision/clarification concerning the form of social or linguistic impairment you are concerned about and investigate that. comments sorted by Best Top New Controversial Q&A Add a Comment More posts you may like. Theres one other possible source of systematic bias in the data: living and available parents, especially fathers. The Charman et al study finds a correlation between autism and low IQ, by starting with a sample of autistic people and looking at their IQs. He visually learned letter and number orders before turning 2. This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). GS-14 speaking, and Im not exactly normal either. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone. Ive met a couple AMAB people identifying as genderqueer, but at least an order of magnitude more AFAB ones. This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. In sum, these findings suggest that neurodevelopmental social impairment exists in varied forms with varied etiologies and varied pathophysiologies, but the ASD diagnostic criteria do not identify a valid entity, Link to the entire piece https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. Take these away and you arrive at something that seems like an effortless confidence and freedom. What will be interesting to see if we get weeded out before getting close to the top, and if the breakdown will stay the same. My personal bet would be that different sorts of mutations associated with autism could be slotted into abstract prior-mapping-affecting categories manifesting through tiny quirks of cellular chemistry, and some degree of interplay between them and those that affect general nervous tissue metabolism and anatomy might also be the case. So, part of people's problem is with the origins of ABA. But her personal life is a mess. More, by that point your identity probably includes significant aspects which make the idea of becoming normal and predictable less personally palatable. In other countries including those in developed areas like Western Europe and North America IQ has been on the rise. If missing, intelligence develops a lot less/later/incompletely? Immune systems that greet pathogens with a really forceful response on a hair trigger. I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. The tower of intelligence needs to be built upon some kind of mysterious foundation. Comparing intelligence to running fast understates the issue, it is much more like a complex rules-based game such as football, baseball, etc. I talk more about this in parts 2 and 3 here. By the same rationale, you could say that no one is normal, and everyone is simply running a mental emulation. Its not difficult to guess what someones response would be to many chit-chat topics. . 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. Yes indeed. Social rituals are incredibly important though, humans are social animals. I dont know what to make of this: Underconnectivity in autistic brains account for sensory integration differences and gifts. A lot of dog breeds, particularly those that are very small (like Teacup Yorkies), very large (like Great Danes), or otherwise very different from the default canine somatoform (like Pugs), tend to suffer from health problems at a vastly higher rate than mutts or more natural breeds (e.g. Because they survived due to wearing helmets, and we were only measuring *surviving* soldiers, helmets appeared to increase the number of head injuries, rather than decrease their severity. This makes it difficult to analyse high functioning autistics separate from those who would have previously been distinguished as having Aspergers. But its frankly unclear who it is talking about. The best-studied are probably obstetric complications, eg a baby gets stuck in the birth canal and cant breathe for a long time. The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. One possibility would be something like a tower-vs-foundation model. No background in finance required. Now that Aspergers syndrome has been removed from the DSM, in favour of something understood by lay people as autism, Ive become autistic, along with a fair number of other geeks, nerds, etc. children who previously had normal or even remarkable verbal abilities for their age suddenly losing words. Maintaining or constructing rigorous social boundaries would be the only thing that would protect a human with IQ300 from a human with IQ400 (or a seed AI). Honestly, your genius doesnt sound very good at digging into people. Autism As A Disorder Of High Intelligence, A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence, https://hennyk.com/autism-and-perfect-pitch/, https://hennyk.com/book-perfect-pitch-in-the-key-of-autism/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZn4x3uOac, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd54l8gfi7M, distinction between people with high functioning autism and Aspergers. Agree with your post, and especially with this part. Scott mentions selection bias, with people diagnosed as autistic being more likely to be the low-functioning ones, but then he seems fairly dismissive of its importance. Broadly, intelligence might be, say: pattern recognition, ability to readjust priors, visual imagination, factual recall, procedural memory etc. But even adjusting for these factors, the autism low intelligence correlation seems too strong to dismiss. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? So the only question is whether the size of the effect is enough to fully explain the data or whether, even after adjusting out the degree to which autism is caused by mutations and environment, it still decreases IQ. (I.e. Question the first. Hes amazing! The avoidance of eye contact. Also, if anything, it would be self-control thats being selected against by modern reproductive behaviors, not intelligence. They get offended more if you question them than normal lawyers do, they have the 4chan-y social awkwardness that those communities jokingly call autism, etc. Figuring out the causes of neurotypicality in intelligent people would go a long way, but its hard even to measure how neurotypical a given smart person is. Or the dad may have left or tuned out because he couldnt handle the situation (but could have handled a socially inept kid who wont shut up about WWI airplane models). A bit of motivation before asking a question: my boss has a daughter. 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. Could there be some sort of input(s)/connection(s) in early development which is responsible for the development or unfolding of intelligence like that? According to the most recent findings on the subject, its not many developed countries, its only Scandinavia. This makes a very strong auditory learner. There is no reason to think that e.g. 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. Couldnt this all be the result of several essentailly different things being lumped together under the label autism spectrum? 10.0 is the optimal learning rate, and 9.5 is good, then 10.5 is typically also good. The suggested results for selection against IQ are just in recent industrial time. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. Yes, I was thinking something very similar: Broadly speaking, its pretty clear that intelligence differeces come from differences in brain structure or organization, macroscopic and/or microscopic. In Iceland., https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.full. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. Big muscles can also reduce range of motion. 43 votes, 61 comments. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. threshold and massive achievement, massive achievement should have exploded in recent decades. Maybe the pattern is something like this (calling rare IQ/autism boosting alleles IQb): Of course people like that exist. Normality is just too vague to be quantifiable. In particular, the excess of alleles associated with higher intelligence and educational attainment was only observed in the higher functioning categories (particularly Aspergers syndrome and individuals without comorbid intellectual disability) and not in the other/unspecified PDD and intellectual disability categories. paternal IQ/ autism seems pretty much decorrelated, which is strange given the 100% confidence that autism genes are IQ boosting. Autism prevalence increase, Deisseroth's "Projections", systems Brilliant, productive people dont spend time either wishing to be normal, wishing to be different, or obsessing how they are different from normal. Theyre simply too busy getting things done for a triviality that reduces to dumb averages to matter to them. 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). Get the latest business insights from Dun & Bradstreet. Social relationships are not difficult and people who cannot navigate them are displaying a serious deficit. But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. HIGHLY surprising? 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. 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. Smart people who can manage things by themselves and mask the effects of their autism from others dont get diagnosed, because among other things they dont want to see a psychiatrist and can figure out how to stop people from forcing them to; they can also know the correct answer to psychiatric interviews and can figure out that the things currently bothering them are less likely to continue if they provide the correct answers. (:D Sorry, couldnt resist the quip; please carry on.). 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? Moments of it? During a conversation on something or other he told my friend that he knew what my friend was going to say, then ended up saying thats not what Id thought youd say afterward. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Like everyone else, they find autism risk genes are positively correlated with years of schooling completed, college completion, and IQ. Perhaps it will help if I ask a question. And so those are genes that show up as giving you a bump in your IQ in populations genetic studies. Flynn effect vs genetic selection. (Is that still seen as credible? I imagine the effort you put into fitting in goes down as you get older. the genetic load would be due to bad luck in parent mixing (recessive-recessive pairs) and parent age. How much effort do people, particularly young people, put into being normal that is, into fitting in? 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. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. My parents were optometrists. What videogames do you play? : slatestarcodex 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. She has absolute pitch, [] an amazingly high proportion of her autistic students have it to some degree. In a few cases, the parent gets the de novo mutation, but for whatever reason doesnt develop autism, and then passes it onto their child, who does develop autism. I dont know. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. ASD core diagnostic symptoms are not uniquely linked and are only very rarely expressed without nondiagnostic symptoms. My 3rd child, a girl, is much lower functioning. 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. The genes and developmental stuff is one part, an enriching environment in childhood is another, and the physical requirements (adequate nutrition and good health and few toxins present during critical parts of brain development in childhood, continued good health in adulthood). Normal includes insecurities, anxieties, caring what other people think. Id figured out myself how to do that, but tried to hide that I knew how because I thought I wasnt supposed to know yet. I.e. Each genes benefit is based on underlying assumptions about how the body works, and if you change enough of those assumptions, the entire edifice becomes a failure. Perhaps the mechanisms for high IQ autism and low IQ autism are different. Theres a lot of work left to do to sort out what being autistic actually means. Plenty of people are both smarter and more charismatic than us. > (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. For such individuals, perfect pitch is almost always the indicator that highly refined processing is available in these areas of immediate reception of sound. But if you pile on enough of the genes that increase IQ by increasing your head circumference, you will get a kid with such a huge head that his neck wont support it and his heart and lungs cant keep his giant brain in oxygenated blood, and hell die as a baby. Kylounet is drinking a CAMBIER Double Galaxy by Brasserie Cambier at Terroir Alternatif. So one model is that we should see two things happening at once, as a result of the assortative mating by IQ thats been going on for a couple generations now in the US: a. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams. The selection findings are across historical time, not recent industrial time, and theyve found that IQ is being selected for as well. But one of his trainers actually had an explanation: A lot of people who casually work out dont exercise all of their muscles equally, so even if they appear to be as strong as him, there could be some muscles that arent as developed as others. List 1 Avoids eye contact Doesn't smile Doesn't reach out to be picked up Rejects your efforts to calm, soothe, and connect Doesn't seem to notice or care when you leave them alone Cries inconsolably Doesn't coo or make sounds By and large, they find conversations with non-genius people extremely boring, because they can predict exactly what the other person will say long before he says it. This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. If a high quantity of a good thing comes with a risk of problems that reduce the quantity again, then you could understand the ability to keep the problems at bay as foundation of the tower. AUCHAN RETAIL INTERNATIONAL - Dun & Bradstreet I mean, it COULD be that autism somehow exaggerates male brain characteristics in a bunch of different respects, but then doesnt touch the parts of the brain that affect gender identity. I wonder what the genetics for this would look like. My stats-fu isnt strong enough to know if this actually pencils out, though. This is Crespi 2016, Autism As A Disorder Of High Intelligence. Fortunately, at home, I can act how I want, which recharges me significantly. You dont need a tower-and-foundation model to explain how both higher than usual prevalence of intelligence-associated genes in autistic individuals and extremely intelligent non-autistic people. @Cliff Take any part away, and you lose some intellectual ability. psychiatry | Slate Star Codex I notice a lot of people confuse normality with charisma. One other observation that may interest people. My problem with this kind of model is that some people are geniuses but dont have autism. Dunno, but you dont need to know the exact structure of the genotype to phenotype map to check whether the assumption is empirically correct. But if you want to redefine incredible to mean the top 0.1 percent of the population, then yes, Bugmasters guess would be roughly accurate: Thered be approximately 1,250 people who were both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic in the Western world, or maybe 1,500-2,000 if you assume a minor positive correlation between being intelligence and being socially adept. These mutations are often very bad, and are quickly selected out of the gene pool (because the people who have them dont reproduce). Why? For example, they may dislike the father for not doing enough when the kid is self-harming from overstimulation. Fall short of that threshold and you have a pile of severely broken processes. Plus the military is always interested in easy ways to enforce security and they arent too bothered by political correctness, so any automated defense units that I might hypothetically build could also be a profitable side-business for me.Town Of East Greenwich Tax Assessor, Woman Died On Plane Yesterday, Distance Between Junctions On M25, Peter Luger Parking, Articles S