54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. Theres a question if you want to go really far out, outside the modern human range, and you might get unforeseen side effects. do people predisposed to have autistic kids tend to have them later? 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. If anything, theres a slight positive correlation between the two. There could be something similar going on with autism. Think about it this way: When most other people behave incomprehensible for you because they dont see the same emotional nuances and act on their impulses, it is hard to learn social customs, even though you theoretically have the potential to be very skilled socially. 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. Couldnt this all be the result of several essentailly different things being lumped together under the label autism spectrum? 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. The additive proportion for height is likely higher. This is very very crude model that does not take into account how DNA and sexual reproduction works: it is middle of the night and that stuff is not my strong suit; however, I like this description and with my limited understanding, it may even carry some resemblance to reality: I will bet a considerable sum of money that a model where one simply assumes that Q = f(g_1, g_n) = a_1 g_1 + + a_n g_n for unknown constants a_i does not describe how these parameters affect intelligence (get all g_i that are positively correlated with IQ, combine them, and you get a super-enlightened being!). The military is where the fun toys are all at! Im not especially neurologically atypical, but enough that Im not confident I might not pass down some potentially deleterious genes. Ive heard stories of autistic children sometimes regressing in development around 2 years old, e.g. I know plenty of highly intelligent people who nonetheless have very poor impulse control particularly when it comes to libidinous desires! Why do people keep thinking charisma is normality, out or curiosity? But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. Judith Harris discusses this in one of her books. 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. Perhaps something similar but more extreme is true of autism: maybe autistic people are more highly represented at both ends of the IQ distribution. I cant tell if this is evidence against Crespi or whether since all intellectual abilities are correlated this is just the shadow of their high perceptual intelligence, and if we directly looked at perceptual-to-verbal ratio we would see it was lower than expected. HIGHLY surprising? Even if intelligence where a little lower we would have a lot more genius given the increase in population. Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. I would expect a challenge, in testing the intelligence of Autistics. 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. Or rather, that the concept of Asperger autism is more related to giftedness, and not to autism. Pollution, infection, and trauma might also be in this basket. The tower model looks close to my personal model, which has absolutely no experimental testing besides how the two of us feel about itbut generally I call it the Smore model. Im not sure how normal she is, but an acquaintance through RenFaire is head of some Army Corps of Engineers office in the Bay Area, and shes one of the very few people I consider noticeably more intelligent than me. Im pretty sure that at some point the emulation efficiency hits diminishing returns- that its not emulations all the way up, in other words. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. 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. And autistic people have more health issues than non-autistic people do. Two months later, the child started recovering. If the IQ/autism risk genes are being selected for, we should be seeing more top-level geniuses each generation (Im very skeptical of this) and more autistic children (this half checks out). Some of this effect is because autism is caused both by normal genes and by de novo mutations and environmental insults, and the de novo mutations and environmental insults definitely decrease intelligence. 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. Gender dysphoria. Non-genetic factors. . Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt. If this is good, then by definition, more at the margin will be better. Parents of kids with autism fought for decades to get various benefits and supports, and in comes parents of kids with high-functioning autism, scooping up the same benefits. She has absolute pitch, an attribute that is quite rare in the general population, but she says an amazingly high proportion of her autistic students have it to some degree, even when they didnt know it. focus on the denotations of words, not the emotional or social connotations. Question the second. Four things that make one delicious combination. According to the most recent findings on the subject, its not many developed countries, its only Scandinavia. E.g. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. There are almost no exceptions. For reasons that dont entirely make sense to me, if instead we look at the likelihood of the father to be a certain intelligence (bottom graph, where dark line surrounded by gray confidence cloud is autistic peoples fathers, and dotted line is neurotypical peoples fathers) it becomes more obvious that more intelligent people are actually a little more likely to have autistic children (though less intelligent people are also more likely. And of course theres always survivor bias. To the best of my knowledge, the whole Idiocracy concept (humans are selecting against intelligence because smart people have fewer children) is basically nothing more than a just-so story made up by concerned pseudo-intellectuals. Two of these are diagnosed as autistic, though with very different forms. Ive certainly known highly intelligent people who did not seem to be crazy or disfunctional in any obvious way. And also reproducing younger (banking frozen eggs and/or sperm early for the IVF). If you get the volume knob too close to the feedback point, the sound will start to behave strangely it will ring weirdly in a way its never done before. Its a highly abnormal subset of people. What will really make someone come off as intelligent within that group is going to be something like 99% IQ plus 99% along that other stuff. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for AUCHAN RETAIL INTERNATIONAL of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE. 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). Theres a lot of work left to do to sort out what being autistic actually means. also, i just read through the swedish study cited in the post. These deficits are present in early childhood, typically before age three, and lead to clinically significant functional impairment. 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. Broadly, intelligence might be, say: pattern recognition, ability to readjust priors, visual imagination, factual recall, procedural memory etc. (Always Sunny parodied this phenomenon with Mac, who only works out his glamour muscles.). Now there is a very strong effect towards their fathers being less intelligent than usual. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. It is very, very smart, but nobody dares reproduce naturally anymore, not because the equipment doesnt work, but because genetic engineering means everyone pushed every single one of these levers to the setting marked beyond this point, there be dragons, and at least half their kids would die or come out completely non-functional if they tried it. However, history doesnt always predict the future. Possible metaphor: overclocking your computer a bit makes it better (faster), but push it too far and you start getting weird random crashes and end up getting less work done overall. Its because we selectively bred dogs to have these traits at a much faster rate than evolution could naturally develop them. As a result, we could have similar imbalances. That would give me more than enough money to give the middle finger to all the ignorant normies in our politically correct society, with plenty left over to hire some bodyguards and build mechanical defense systems to insulate me from any of the outraged pearl-clutching idiots who decided to use physical violence against me when their threat of social sanctioning wasnt enough. 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. n=1 description of autism and speculation on etiology. I suspect that this is the case. This probably calls for some elaboration. Why do you think they arent sperging out about sportsball? Getting more education is strongly correlated with later childbearing / siring. Wow! How much effort do people, particularly young people, put into being normal that is, into fitting in? corticalchauvinism. One possible explanation is simply that autistic children born to poor parents/less intelligent parents/disadvantaged minorities are simply more likely to die in infancy/early childhood and thus never be diagnosed as being autistic to begin with. Youre starting with the premise intelligence is incompatible with normality and then reflexively dismissing all evidence to the contrary with theyre not really normal, theyre just pretending. Which is 1.) Meanwhile, placing people on the spectrum equalizes access to resources, including insurance coverage. Do a lot of super smart people play the game? I dont know their actual IQs, but Im very confident a lot of people in my bubble are nice, funny, enjoyable, sports-watching people with 99% intelligence. Why on Earth one would assume that the effect of genes that contribute to IQ should be linearly additive and increasing to ad infinitum. He initially appeared to learn the names of items when we attached labels with printed words on them around our house. Say you are a bright nerdy tech-aligned person who is attracted to other bright nerdy tech-aligned people; you have a medium preference for eventually having kids but you really dont want an autistic child. I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. First, these two children were the only children where my wife was working while she was pregnant. 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. Seriously, what sort of advice do you expect? Perhaps it will help if I ask a question. 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. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. 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. I would recommend having girls through IVF if that is legally allowed in your jurisdiction? I think youd need to ask them about their internal experiences, but Id guess a lot of the people you find unusually functional arent putting a lot of effort into fitting in. the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry in the UK on the lack of validity of diagnostic categories in psychiatry http://cepuk.org/unrecognised-facts/diagnostic-system-lacks-validity/). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. . 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. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene. I strongly doubt that. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). As an AI researcher, this actually seems pretty intuitive for me. (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. Every year, we get like 4 or 5 students who are just ready for hardcore abstract mathematics from the get go, and since a few years my university allows them to take masters level lectures as early as they want. 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. FWIW, I know a few bona-fide genius-level people; on the order of Ph.D. the non-verbal. 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. Avoidance of social situations. Bottle. If you mean extraverted, no small number. Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. (Apologies for a machine metaphor that is certainly misleading, but better than anything else than I can think of.). 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. 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. And how come its so inconsistent, and many people have naturally high intelligence but arent autistic at all? I think this was also true for some genes supposedly predisposing to ADHD and Schizophrenia. This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). 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. This has held me back at networking events, but overall, there is some tolerance for being abnormal out of the office. Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Its not like theyll answer anybody. Causation not detected through a randomized controlled trial. Slate Star Codex, which sprung up in 2013, helped her develop a "calibrated trust" in the medical system. If missing, intelligence develops a lot less/later/incompletely? The result is a total mess. Doing some [fundamental] discovery is harder and harder. 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. The difference between high and low functioning autistic children is significant. Normality is just too vague to be quantifiable. Higher IQ people have lower infant mortality rates than lower IQ people. Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. I married an autistic woman. 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. Another, potentially related, possibility is that we are disproportionately likely to diagnose white kids with autism rather than other forms of mental disability. This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. 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. a sort of arrangement where if you pick up to four of them you get enhanced intelligence, five or six and you get high-functioning intelligent autism, and seven or more and your brain crashes on boot-up and the autism stops you from functioning. I dont think you can model the autism-IQ correlation using a simple additive genetic model. Etc. Her claim was that autistics often did *way* better on Ravens than on the multiple subtest kind of IQ test. And her failure to understand social cues lets her be taken advantage of by lower-quality men, who have sexually abused her on multiple occasions. 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? And intelligence, being a function of the brain itself rather than directly of the genes that generate it, would in this analogy depend more directly on something more like the shape of the plants leaves than the internal fractal parameters that generate it. If the curve stayed exactly the same and there was a correlation between IQ > arb. The Tower vs Foundation model is probably an oversimplification of something like this. I favour the Maxander description of the genetic defect in autism, too much brain development can be bad. It is known that gifted kids can be misdiagnosed as autism, ADHD or both, but many psychologist never bother doing IQ tests, or do them, but then ignore the results. As for genetics, well, my IQ is ~135, and my wifes is right there with me (~125). Thank you for introducing me to him. Terrifyingly competent and motivated, shockingly good with people, and with few visible mental issues. Because they lacked the development of the auditory processing, it was very draining for them because it mostly came across as a large amount of noise. Graph B is the same thing, but with people have have autism with intellectual disability. And at least a few of them were probably just lying outright. Yes. High-functioning autism looks more like the same polygenetic soup one finds with other complex personality characteristics like intelligence or Big Five character traits. Indeed, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans all have higher levels of overall learning disabilities than whites do. If it is, that could explain some of these results. Quite a few trans women seem to be extremely masculine in their interests. Some good story make much more in our appreciation of who is a genius than anything else. 1. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. Social relationships are not difficult and people who cannot navigate them are displaying a serious deficit. FWIW, Ive only ever heard biological females apply the term genderqueer to themselves. children who previously had normal or even remarkable verbal abilities for their age suddenly losing words. One other effect of this change in labelling, is that studies of autistics before and after the renaming cant be combined into any kind of meta-study, unless they are both much more detailed in their description of the grouyp they are measuring, and happen to target the same people. This article explores piano lessons for non-verbal and autistic students as a means for creating new and necessary pathways for abstract logic inherent in higher education. Auditory learning is therefore the only accessible means for learning prior to the bridging of other brain functions. Big muscles can also reduce range of motion. Sights and sounds are processed in the brain area that first receives it without sending it further to attach meaning. with stimulant use (arguably, it also explains a number of non-clinical nerdy traits rather nicely). This can best be understood through a tower-versus-foundation model where higher intelligence that outstrips the ability of some mysterious foundation to support it will result in autism (25% confidence), 6. 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. (Is that still seen as credible? A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence. I have always considered him more naturally gifted than me. 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. But its frankly unclear who it is talking about. Draft. I dont have time to go through all the links this morning but wanted to add some more studies. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. Guys autism is not a thing. And rich people, on average, receive better medical care particularly rich white people. It doesnt really present much evidence for this other than that autistic people seem to have high perceptual intelligence. autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high. r/slatestarcodex Did recent AI . They find that even autistic people without de novo mutations have lower-than-average IQ. These things are incredibly synergistic in some people, allowing them to do exceptional things, we notice thisso we start to associate them with one anotherbut the presence of one means absolutely nothing about the presence of any others in general, and you need to scale up all or at least many of them to get any good returnsworse, some factors may not need to go any higher, otherwise theyll just be a hindrance. Being a deadbeat or loser, or being perceived as same, may be a result, not a cause, of the specifically low-functioning types. Its similar with hearing. At times she has been productively employed in a technological field. 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. What do you guys think of the recent research linking autism to gut bacteria? If we got 10/10, wed get a gold star, and, if 9/10, a silver star. 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. 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. I was getting my disorders mixed up, yes, but this is the one I was thinking of. 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. I then play out both parts of the conversation from memory as their mouth gapes open.). These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. Gifted children dont always have gifted families, though.