(my son was a Caesarian delivery) but that was because his head (=brain?) https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/race-class-contribute-disparities-autism-diagnoses/. Increased parental age correlates with autism risk, AIUI. If its just intelligence is good up to some point, then you get autism, how do you explain intelligence sometimes going way past that point without autism? If so, wed expect a much higher rate of female-to-male transgender identity among people on the autism spectrum who, ah, lack that Y chromosome. There are maybe as many as 1000 of them in the Western world, and none of them would want to ever hang out with us because they are smart enough to know that their time would be better spent managing their billion-dollar corporations and/or governments. This makes a very strong auditory learner. For example, the experience of people who are blind at birth and then are given sight as an adult vs. those who lost vision as a child and then have their sight restored as an adult. Thats exactly what we observe here. The best-studied are probably obstetric complications, eg a baby gets stuck in the birth canal and cant breathe for a long time. There was a Conversations With Tyler podcast with Michelle Dawson (link here including transcript) where this was discussed. There is no reason to think that e.g. 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. 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. Drink your Brawndo! The fact that nobody has noticed and studied an effect in a subgroup is evidence that the subgroup does not have a large effect. The optimal value is at 10.0 (for example). Ive looked into this topic myself, not professionally or anything-just as an interested lay researcher with a science/statistics background- and had a less well-articulated formulation of the tower vs. foundation model in mind for awhile, too. Why do you think they arent sperging out about sportsball? I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. That, combined with intentional software creation can lead to more or less high functioning autists. And this is a productive comment because? So it may not just be something like too much of a good thing but the relationship between the seed parameters (genes) and the result (brain architecture/intelligence) is something thats chaotic rather than simple. I recall it because the lowest functioning children all had loser fathers. Based on those two correlations, I would be very surprised if it didnt add up to a correlation between predisposition for autism and children later in life. Each of us have different stories to share. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. 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. 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. Genes are not something where you can say, this is good, more of it will be better. My oldest child, a boy, is very high functioning. Yes, of course. -.-). This is just the cystic fibrosis thing again, isnt it? I dont think this paragraph fits the note in the image. At least part of the story is that there are at least three different causes of autism. Of course, since intelligence and social aptitude seem to have a slight positive correlation, the real number might be closer to 150,000 or 200,000. I actually find it rather consistent with the idea that our brain chemistry is tuned to work with a given level of hormones/neurotransmitters produced by our gut bacteria as per Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that our data suggests that the contribution of common variants may be more prominent in high-functioning ASD cases such as Aspergers syndrome. (*), 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. I recognised my son was different at about 15 months old. Agreed. Hes amazing! My office mate is a big sports fan who cares a lot about his yard and house and is a fairly partisan Democratand whos also a mathematician who plays folk music and speaks several languages. One just needs to consider a model where a brain is a complicated object whose organization and function depends on changes in the genetic blueprint in non-monotonic ways, and it is likely that all combinations (attainable via sexual reproduction) of genes that are beneficial alone or in some particular arrangements are not even more beneficial together; some of the potential arrangements are bound to be non-optimal or even catastrophic. Its a small sample (156) and its 10-14 year olds, not adults. But in general there will always be a hereditary component to personality characteristics that is probably linked to genes and one will be able to find correlations, but that is a long long way from understanding etiology or validating a single diagnostic label for a broad phenotype. A lot of the super smart people I know also seem super interesting either being very funny, uniquely talented, or engaging. So, part of people's problem is with the origins of ABA. 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). He visually learned letter and number orders before turning 2. Judith Harris discusses this in one of her books. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent. 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. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. 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. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. No background in finance required. If the curve stayed exactly the same and there was a correlation between IQ > arb. The results from the large trial seem consistent with there being a yet-undifferentiated subtype of autism that responds moderately to significantly. 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. But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. Intelligence may be very much the same way. Go up a level and you can mash a bunch of sequential notes on a piano with one left out of the middle and they can tell you the highest note, lowest note, and the one you left out. There was definitely a sperg-normie dynamic on my last work team, all highly intelligent. Coming up with elaborate speculations as to why a unitary autism would be characterized by wildly divergent and contradictory symptoms (like being very bright and perceptive and being completely non-verbal and unable to learn) just leads you further down the rabbit hole. in particle physics at age 15, millionaire at age 30 type of stuff. and they seem just as likely to have unplanned children as less intelligent people with equally bad impulse control. In primary school, for a while we used to have daily spelling tests, where we had to spell ten words. Epistemic status: not too bad, certainly good enough to have my old head of department, a grand old neurogeneticist interested in this if still maintaining healthy scientific skepticism. ABA research, like autism research in general, suffers from an appalling lack of rigor. 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. The top level of any domains is so hard that most people cant judge anything about it. Keep in mind, my sample size is small. 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. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for SYNPSH of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE. 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. As long as I kept useful inventions flowing out of my lab, I think hed pay me well and insulate me from social criticism. But quickly selected out of the gene pool doesnt help the individual person who got one of them, who tends to end up severely disabled. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. Given the numerous different genetic correlates to autism, if one wants to preserve the diagnostic validity of autism by finding a single etiology, one might hypothesize that all of these genes affect a narrow set of brain circuitry in a similar way, but as discussed in the Waterhouse paper people have tried to do this and (per her lit review) failed to do so. My vague recollection on this is a large portion of population variance in IQ is additive (like 30 or 40%? Awareness of it? 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. 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. This might sound mean, and Im very sorry if this offends anyone, but just seeing what my family has gone through, I would definitely find having a severely disabled child worse than not having one and would likely be unhappy with a child any more than slightly aspie. (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. In the graph of relatives, are autists typically on the border or inside of high-IQ regions? In sum, the heterogeneity of risk factors, brain impairments, and non-diagnostic symptoms in an ASD-defined sample blocks valid scientific inference. 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. 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. Im going to interpret fitting in as being liked.. 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. completely unfalsifiable, and 2.) Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. Low-functioning autism has all kinds of genetic linkages to all kinds of different genetic syndromes that cause brain damage, damage that often extends beyond autistic symptoms. And also reproducing younger (banking frozen eggs and/or sperm early for the IVF). the non-verbal. Id say so. (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). I dont know. For that matter, some amazing ingenuity went into ancient engineeringenough so that I think we still dont know exactly how the Incas built Machu Pichu or the Egyptians built the pyramids. 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 always used to get one word wrong on purpose because I preferred the silver stars. This would be consistent with the idea that more aggressive screening (which is likely to be most aggressive at schools full of white kids because those schools have better resources for such things on average) would cause this effect size to shrink considerably if not vanish. 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. Slate Star Codex For, Then Against, High-Saturated-Fat Diets Posted on March 10, 2020 by Scott Alexander I. 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. * Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it. The military is where the fun toys are all at! I have 5 children. 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? Hence the need to go along with pointless social rituals. Fall short of that threshold and you have a pile of severely broken processes. This is a common situation, but not with many genes of small effect. Preoccupation with whats normal and whether you are normal is a sign of mediocrity in my experience (though its not terminal). This is true in a sense, but also alters what we mean by normal. Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. 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. The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. 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. The selection findings are across historical time, not recent industrial time, and theyve found that IQ is being selected for as well. Humans have been selectively breeding themselves since the dawn of civilization, even if we werent consciously aware of it; reproductively speaking, the traits that are selected for in an organized society are bound to differ than those that wouldve been selected for in the wild. Well, in my case it was a single person who did both. Sights and sounds are processed in the brain area that first receives it without sending it further to attach meaning. So they went to one doctor, and the doctor removed gluten and dairy from her diet. Kraus et al. 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. Any gene that increases A in a normal human makes that human more intelligent by pushing A closer to 10. And rich people, on average, receive better medical care particularly rich white people. 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). 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. This study finds lower heritability than the usual estimates (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. My understanding is that gender dysphoria is associated with certain structures or traits of the brain- transwomen tend to have certain identifiable feminized brain structures, and transmen to have masculinized brain structures. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Is it the reverse of that? However, history doesnt always predict the future. I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. They would more easily get high IQ amongst Aspies, whom I dont consider Autistic. 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. No guarantees in biology, but you can try to find a future partner with no such family history. If smart people are predisposed to have autistic kids (which Scott seems very confident of), another trait of smart people is that they tend to get more education than average. (2) genes that promote autism are being selected for (2) Genes associated with autism arent being selected for It stands to reason that f can be very intractable, and resolving that function is the difficult question where there is science to be done. The two may or may not be correlated (Im honestly not sure), but theyre not the same thing. Suppose the only study on age-related mortality shows that people older than 30 are 1.2x more likely to die in a given year than people younger than 30, but does not give any other information. Id say his IQ is similar to or higher than mine (around 135.). One solution is to view your family rather than your schoolmates as your peer group. Dunno, but you dont need to know the exact structure of the genotype to phenotype map to check whether the assumption is empirically correct. Beware Simpsons Paradox. Either way, I dont think you can have one without the other above a certain level. Could you elaborate? 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. Perhaps the mechanisms for high IQ autism and low IQ autism are different. Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. Indeed, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans all have higher levels of overall learning disabilities than whites do. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. I hesitate to make anything out of this, but whenever theres a study that links pre-natal stress to autism, my ears perk up a little. I married an autistic woman. Some of the stuff she says about this seem a bit woo-woo, but interesting anyway. But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. For example: As the learning rate increases, a network becomes able to learn new information more quickly. First, IQ tests dont do a great job of measuring autistic people. Evidence suggest otherwise. 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). Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. What is the point of arbitrary social rituals? Strongly agree. Why on Earth people take a decomposition of intelligence quotient such as the v-p-r, while itself fairly reasonable sounding but also very broad, and take seriously attempts to shoehorn that as the biological mechanism behind a very handwavy metaphor-like explanation such as tower and foundation?It is blatantly obvious that v-p-r is a very crude model that should not make sense. Shes capable of living without a caretaker, but other than that, the impact on her quality of life seems pretty serious. One study found that 69% of autistic people had an IQ below 85 (the average IQ of a high school dropout). Genes which are helpful until you have too many of them, at which point you are screwed. While autism (and Asperger) has a lot of symptoms, there is one thing I noticed early on: people on the spectrum tend to take words very literally. What if autism does two things: it has a tendency to break enough normal processes to make someone rather nonfunctional, and it also has tendencies to increase perceptual ability and intelligence. And of course theres always survivor bias. >They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. 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. 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.) 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. One other observation that may interest people. 1), in which the genetic architecture of ASD seems to be different from one individual to another (Huguet et al. Thats assuming that we do have a missing group of geniusesIm not sure how we track these things, or who you are counting as a genius. Ill share some info that might or might be helpful, since its just an anecdote. 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. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. Interestingly, other/unspecified PDD and atypical autism also have a significantly higher PRS for neuroticism than childhood autism and Aspergers. the classic stereotype.). Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers. 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. These are the people that make the Turing test invalid, youd think they were the chatbot. The avoidance of eye contact. What led me to ask this is stories of people who were deaf from birth whod get cochlear implants as adults. Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry ), philosophy, politics, and futurism. Too much difference from wild type synaptic pruning and youve got pathology in addition to the possible, but not certain, optimization. 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. The tower of intelligence needs to be built upon some kind of mysterious foundation. Theyre often chatting about the latest sportsball game or what their kids are doing or their vacation plansconversations that wouldnt seem unusual anywhere in the US. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. I dont know what to make of this: Underconnectivity in autistic brains account for sensory integration differences and gifts. All this is a purely hypothetical thought-experiment, of course. Any chance its just a matter of recessive genes? There are so many ways to be weird and out of touch with the people around you, related to very different sets of issues and characteristics. What is going on? If anything, theres a slight positive correlation between the two. The only reason social rituals are important is because other people say that theyre important, and historically it was important for high-intelligence people to be able to get along with low intelligence people or they would be outcast from the tribe and die. 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. 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. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). We both spent a lifetime getting scolded because we were obviously too smart for the dumb stuff we kept doing (grades and the like). One possibility would be something like a tower-vs-foundation model. I was thinking of Sickle Cell Anemia, where if you get the gene from one parent you are immune to malaria, while if you get from both, your blood cant carry enough oxygen. 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). I remember seeing that article 10 years ago and Ive never followed up, so replication not guaranteed. But the ability to notice patterns in the world, analyze phenomena and their causes/effects, understand highly complex and abstract concepts, and make connections between things all seem to be correlated with higher levels of social awareness and persuasive ability. E.g. Gender dysphoria. Their career progress might have stalled due to stress and sleep deprivation. My parents were optometrists. 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. In this model, theres a ceiling to your intellectual ability thats set by each of those components. The mean could easily shift without creating a bunch of geniusesit is probably much easier to raise the IQ of average or above average people, just through some relatively basic improvements and guidance.
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