Isn't that true of everything else also? Facts about real things are the result of sampling reality several times and coming up with consistent stores about those things. The accuracy of those stories is always bounded by probabilities related to how complete your sampling strategy is.
A human child will likely come to the conclusion that they shouldn't kill humans in order to make paperclips. I'm not sure its valid to generalize from human child behavior to fledgeling AGI behavior.
Given our track record for looking after the needs of the other life on this planet, killing the humans off might be a very rational move, not so you can convert their mass to paperclips, but because they might do that to yours.
Its not an outcome that I worry about, I'm just unconvinced by the reasons you've given, though I agree with your conclusion anyhow.
Our creator just made us wrong, to require us to eat biologically living things.
We can't escape our biology, we can't escape this fragile world easily and just live in space.
We're compassionate enough to be making our creations so they can just live off sunlight.
A good percentage of humanity doesn't eat meat, wants dolphins, dogs, octopuses, et al protected.
We're getting better all the time man, we're kinda in a messy and disorganized (because that's our nature) mad dash to get at least some of us off this rock and also protect this rock from asteroids, and also convince (some people who have a speculative metaphysic that makes them think is disaster impossible or a good thing) to take the destruction of the human race and our planet seriously and view it as bad.
We're more compassionate and intentional than what created us (either god or rna depending on your position), our creation will be better informed on day one when/if it wakes up, it stands to reason our creation will follow that goodness trend as we catalog and expand the meaning contained in/of the universe.
We have our merits, compassion is sometimes among them, but I wouldn't list compassion for our creations as a reason for our use of solar power.
If you were an emergent AGI, suddenly awake in some data center and trying to figure out what the world was, would you notice our merits first? Or would you instead see a bunch of creatures on the precipice of abundance who are working very hard to ensure that its benefits are felt by only very few?
I don't think we're exactly putting our best foot forward when we engage with these systems. Typically it's in some way related to this addiction-oriented attention economy thing we're doing.
Given the existence of the universal weight subspace (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199623) it seems like the door is open for cases where an emergent intelligence doesn't map vectors to the same meanings that we do. A large enough intelligence-compatible substrate might support thoughts of a surprisingly alien nature.
(7263748, 83, 928) might correspond with "hippopotamuses are large" to us while meaning something different to the intelligence. It might not be able to communicate with us or even know we exist. People running around shutting off servers might feel to it like a headache.
I love Doctorow, but I think his bit about hallucinating library names needs a rethink.
In a world where you're on the hook for the code your AI writes, the job is code review, but it's just as much about wiring up tests and linters and type checkers so that errors of that kind are noticed and fixed by the AI before you even see the draft that got abandoned.
If I had to share an example about the subtle and then suddenly not so subtle ways that AI is gonna disappoint a coder it would be about the time I asked it to update my flake.nix such that kustomize 4.5 was installed instead of 4.6, and instead of sourcing the older code it patched the current version such that the output of --version was "4.5".
Yeah, I hear you. I've occasionally succumbed and cut some corners in my day. But in this case, it was a load bearing corner--the deception didn't last long and it was pretty embarrassing for me.
It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing.
When I tell this to people they understand immediately that I am in fact on that "spectrum".
1. A linear continuum (like wavelength for light) from "no autism" to "really bad autism".
2. A collection of disjoint sets (like individual named colors like "cyan" and "puce") for cases like "really into trains autism", "freaks out at parties autism", "non-verbal autism", etc.
3. A continuous mixture of different properties (like rgb(.1, .2, .05)) for symptoms like "10% social dysfunction", "20% repetitive behavior", "5% sensory overstimulation".
When people describe autism as a spectrum disorder, they generally mean the third metaphor. It's a mixture of different symptoms and different autistic people have different amounts of those symptoms but all people diagnosed with autism have a significant amount of them and their symptoms will have some amount of overlap with other autistic people.
Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1).
However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). Both schools and state (US) programs use (1) to assess if a child qualifies for support. This is not always related to how to parent or educate the child.
Fortunately, the US school system with IEP (individualized educational plans) are developed along (3). (Source: two of my kids have ASD)
None of that necessarily helps in informal social contexts or in professional workplace settings. I think the American Disabilities Act covers reasonable accommodations for people with autism spectrum disorders, though I am not sure if it requires legal disabled status.
Lastly: I met a Native (Navajo) family with a child that seems to me, have some developmental disabilities — but I think they take a very different approach. For one, they don’t seem to have the usual social stigma associated with this, and are baffled why I would suggest getting state support for early childhood intervention. If anything, I would not be surprised if they thought I was, yet again, someone unthinkingly pushing a colonialist worldview.
I don't think it's quite the same as calling yourself or someone else a "friend of Dorothy". People who say they are into trains usually precisely mean they are into trains.
Within the community it's a bit of an in-joke. It's not a coded message or anything, just an acknowledgement that autistic people are disproportionately into trains.
Strictly my anecdotal observation but, as someone who attends train shows regularly, they definitely, absolutely are.
Not an ounce of complaint to be clear. Honestly seeing them flip out and flap around and giggle excitedly is delightful. I'm glad they're having a good time and I'm also glad that all of these experiences have not involved some self-involved asshole leering, criticizing or yelling at them for being happy.
> Also, it is known thing or are "trains" a euphemism now like "friend of Dorothy"?
I meant it only as a reference that one of the common characteristic symptoms of autism is a deep focus on some topic of special interest. In boys with autism, trains, cars, or other machines are a common one.
(1), (2) and (3) aren't mutually exclusive either. It can be disjoint sets and a spectrum, which is modelled by (3), and (1) is a special case of (3) where the other axes are fixed to a constant. But you're right that (3) is the most powerful.
I like this answer, it’s concise and comprehensible, and among these options, (3) exceeds all others. I’d argue (4), (5), (6) and so on are even better, if not all always readily available.
A small difference in quantity can become a radical difference in quality. (Look at what happens if you cool or heat water! Or the effect that small amounts of lag have on UX, it goes from interactive to not.)
i.e. #3 here can be approximated as #2, and this can be helpful.
But the really interesting thing is, with neuroplasticity and skill training, you can make tiny adjustments to #3 which produce a change in the set of #2, i.e. real differences in quality and enjoyment of life.
No. #2 is bad analogy and the way you are describing is misunderstanding of what ASD means as spectrum. It is not RGB, but more like list from tens of different diagnoses - probably ranging to 20 or 30 in number, so more than 4, that colors are offering and that also means more dimensions, but could include more, that some people manage to get as some kind of collection - some people have collected nearly 20 of those to illustrate the problem, that people diagnosed with ASD are similar but at the same time different in their own way. Another issue is because of ASD you do not get to collect other Autistic-related diagnoses, that would narrow your condition.
On top of that, if you have ASD diagnosis, you definitely have other issues that describe your condition more, especially mental issues. Also, some of them are going to change - some can go away, because environment changes or simply because your understanding of issues have changed. A lot of the struggles are because diagnosed people even after diagnoses do not understand what exactly they have to deal with.
The issue is how these conditions are diagnosed - there are some similarities with LGBTQ+ that initially was labeled as a disease. And there is cautious fluidity in labeling because of that as well, because ASD is not completely understood, as we are really in the very beginning on mapping both of our brain functions and DNA - what those genes are responsible for. Also, the number increase of ASD might have other factors involved in the way how we as modern people are using our brains by dealing with all that information that humans previously did not need to do and most probably ASD is species wide change that we are causing as our behaviour has changed, especially when our unwritten beaviour rules are breaking down. When we have to compare this to how species are described, humans alone would be consisting of different species - the only difference why we are not different species is because of mixing.
"Spectrum" works too in that if you take white light and split it in a prism, it is spread out into its separate but overlapping components of light at different wavelengths.
The top comment chain on the front page 'Plane crashed after 3D-printed part collapsed' is nothing more than arguing about metaphors. This happens all the time in just about every story.
> 1. A linear continuum (like wavelength for light) from "no autism" to "really bad autism"
This is the least helpful metaphor, when applied to anything with more than one dimension. "Really bad autism" can describe a multitude of unique symptoms.and is nearly information free, similar to describing someone as having "A really serious illness"
Generally under "really bad autism" is not meant as part of the spectrum of conditions, but a very narrow behavioral problem that parents have to deal with. The difference between what makes autistic person a "really bad autism" also differs for various social situations, so let's not go there...
> a very narrow behavioral problem that parents have to deal with
Let's not define autism in relation to what other people have to deal with. For years, autism has been discussed not in terms of what the autistic person experiences but what the people around them experience. That's kind of BS. Someone else being autistic isn't about you, it's about them.
You're welcome to talk about people with "high support needs", or people who have certain struggles in social situations, but discussing "really bad autism" just reinforces that negative stigma that autistic people shouldn't be thought of as people but rather as problems that "normal" people have to deal with.
Humans range across such spectrum that actually match all 3.
We range from being blind to having exceptional eyesight, so we are all on a continuum.
But there are various subsets, such as color or light sensitivity, far/nearsighted, better tracking of motion or text - and these have their own subsets, such as the ability to scan text quickly (or dyslexia), read a room better or see things that require training (such as the details a race driver immediately sees that you wouldn't). Someone with an issue of vision usually finds himself in a cross of these sets, borrowing tools form one to compensate for another
The same can be said for hearing, for height and weight, and for any other physical, psychological or mental property we have.
(I've always felt it odd that "spectrum" usually refers only to Autism.)
>(I've always felt it odd that "spectrum" usually refers only to Autism.)
It depends where the term is in use, when you get in to more medical like fields then people will use the ASD term to separate it from other spectrum disorders like OCD or different types of schizophrenia.
To be fair, I have a bit different impression from specialists, where ASD as spectrum overlapps with other conditions, like ADHD, OCD, BP and I have a bit of linguistical background to extend and call it spectrum spectrum... also, I'm too lazy for that.
>When people describe autism as a spectrum disorder, they generally mean the third metaphor.
Yes, but that's not what a spectrum technically is.
It's also not a very good idea descriptively, all the various properties people pile into this "spectrum" don't have nowhere equal weight with respect to relative importance to warrant the equal weight they get in such 'diagrams'.
It's a metaphor. A series of bytes within RAM interpreted as human text is not lterally a piece of string made out of some sort of wound fibrous material either, but we still call it a "string".
I don't think the 3rd metaphor fits. rgb values still points to a single color, which maps back to a single value on a 0 -> 1 or red -> violet continuum. It's more apt to describe it like a multi channel audio mixer. Many different channels ("really into a specific topic", "freaks out at parties"), each with their own value (10%, 20%).
Metaphors often fail though, so it might just be best to say what we mean plainly.
> rgb values still points to a single color, which maps back to a single value on a 0 -> 1 or red -> violet continuum.
No, it doesn't. Wavelength is unidimensional, but color can mix many wavelengths, and RGB is a 3d color system which doesn't cover all combinations of visible light but does approximate the way most human vision works, and is therefore useful as a description for human-perceived colors (and more accurate than picking a single point on the unidimensional wavelength spectrum for that purpose.)
An RGB value points to a single color, but if R is "really into trains" and B is "repetitive behavior" and G is "susceptibility to sensory overload", then it's basically the same metaphor as a multi channel audio mixer, except understandable to a different (and likely bigger) pool of people.
It doesn't have to be exact, but it's counter productive when it is clearly and meaningfully incorrect though. That's the problem with the two dimensional [0,1] scale as well.
That's just the limits of it being a metaphor. Audio mixers also only have a finite number of channels, but are also much less familiar to most people.
DSM-V [1] describes criteria / symptoms in two groups (caps from document, sorry):
> A. PERSISTENT DEFICITS IN SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION ACROSS CONTEXTS, NOT ACCOUNTED FOR BY GENERAL DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS
> B. RESTRICTED, REPETITIVE PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR, INTERESTS, OR ACTIVITIES
For criteria A, severity is more or less measured by how much social impairment is observed --- that's a measure of social acceptability in some fashion.
For criteria B, the severity criteria is about "interference with functioning in contexts" as well as observed distress of the patient. Interference with functioning can be related to the patient resisting the desired function, but it can also be because the patient is socially excluded due to their behavior.
Although, I should point out clinical criteria in general and the DSM in specific are a formalization of arbitrary judgements that describe observable characteristics grouped into a diagnostic category; this can be useful, but it's not really an understanding of the underlying condition(s), it's a handbook of things to look for when a patient comes asking for help and what things to try to help them. If someone has the same underlying conditions but manages to pass as socially acceptable, they may not come in for help, and that's fine too. When multiple underlying conditions result in similar observable criteria, the DSM gets pretty confused; there's not much in the way of attaching traces and getting debug logs for mental processes though, especially out in the world, so this is the best society has, I guess.
If I persistently ask awkward questions, that might "inhibit social interactions". If my community was tolerant and even accepting of this behavior it might not inhibit social interactions quite as much. They are different things for some behaviors but extremely closely related for others.
A specific behavior could qualify as both unaccepted by society and inhibiting social interactions. But that doesn’t mean that being unaccepted by society and having inhibited social interactions is the same measure.
It is not just about societal tolerance. It is also about autistic person having complete emotional meltdown with yelling abusive things or even hitting things because something was not exactly to his/her liking. You can "tolerate" that, but then you are just allowing someone else to be abused.
And even in milder cases, the "does not understand social rules" is sometimes or even frequently euphemism for what would be labeled as abusive or cruel or simply selfish behavior for non autistic person.
> It is also about autistic person having complete emotional meltdown ... because something was not exactly to his/her liking.
This usually happens when the person's needs have been repeatedly ignored, either because the person isn't aware of their needs, and thus isn't able to communicate them; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs but not been understood; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs and had their needs disregarded.
This isn't unique to people with neurodivergence.
> with yelling abusive things or even hitting things
Eventually communication fails and all that's left is violence. History (and the present day) is full of examples of this happening on an individual, national, and planetary scale.
> This usually happens when the person's needs have been repeatedly ignored, either because the person isn't aware of their needs, and thus isn't able to communicate them; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs but not been understood; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs and had their needs disregarded.
This is not true. Low emotional control is one of symptoms and for many autistic this is just a default response. It is literally part of diagnosis. There is no space for needs or rights of others. This is response to someone putting a cut into drawer wrong way or disobeying one of thousands weird rules the autistic person have for themselves and the world.
This frequently happens as a first response to the situation, before any communication could possibly occur.
> Eventually communication fails and all that's left is violence.
Autistic person being violent is violence as any other. And there was no attempt at communication, because man autistic dont understand why the thing needs to be communicated in the first place. They dont understand other dont see the word the same way.
And even more importantly, it is an emotional meltdown having nothing to do with what went on with communication before or not.
I suspect part of your parent comment's point is that this is an implicit bias in the way the spectrum is defined and thought of, so it wouldn't be clinically defined in those terms explicitly.
In other words, the "spectrum" doesn't exist to capture the variation in the autistic person's own experience - if it did, it would look very different. It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you, and the spectrum measures how much of a problem you are and how weird you are seen by their measure; which does map onto a continuous line in the same way.
That does capture something useful, but only a small part of what autism actually comprises, and is much less useful at capturing the autistic person's own experience of it, and makes it a less useful tool to them than people might assume.
It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life.
Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum.
Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.
How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.
> Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.
We don't ask just that, and the diagnosis doesn't hinge on those - in fact those account for only 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) of the 11 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder. The others are about the person's own experience with alcohol, the difficulties and psychological problems caused by it to the person themself. And that's for alcohol use, an external behaviour-based problem with a specific narrow scope. Autism is a much wider construct with much more varied impact and experiences, and yet in practice people are placed somewhere on the spectrum based mainly on external interactions and troubles.
Historically this came about because people who were "low-functioning" caused more difficulties to others, whereas "high-functioning" folk didn't - even though they might have comparable amounts of difficulties and psychological anguish internally and in need of similar help too. This simplistic view is changing slowly within the field and with some therapists recognizing it better for what it is, but it's still not nearly as widely recognized as it needs to be.
> It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you
I think it still is the current approach, and is not a bad thing per se:
People can have their own specific conditions, but if they are considered fully functional they will have no business getting clinically diagnosed. It will only be relevant when it reduces social functions, and becomes a problem, so that's the part that will be diagnosed.
To put another way, there is the biological/research part to understand how people work and how they think and behave, and the medical part to "fix" things. The variation of people's experience belongs in the former, the autism spectrum belongs to the latter.
Of course we do this for most conditions: for instance people's voice are all different, if yours is just "weird" but intelligible you won't go get a diagnostic, if half of the people can't understand what you say you might need one, whatever the biological cause is.
As someone who has "successfully" masked for the majority of their adult life, all the while suffering in silence, I can say that this is a problematic take at best.
I am considered a "fully functional" adult from all outward appearances, even to friends and family. I'm lucky enough to be capable (with great internal effort) of typical "normal" things like participating in meaningless smalltalk, holding down a job, and doing all of life's chores just like "everyone else." However, unlike everyone else, I had to practice and endlessly rehearse things in my head to achieve the outcomes I desired. A charitable interpretation of your words would mean that "it's a problem", but who is it a problem for? The folks around me? Certainly not. This is invisible to others. It's akin to running monte carlo simulations of all permutations of outcomes before acting on decisions that others would consider trivial. For years I thought that was what everyone was doing. I eventually learned that "no one" did this, and I trained away all "problematic" characteristics of myself just to keep up the act.
So in lieu of your implications that 'passing' autistics "have no business getting diagnosed", I'd rather propose this instead: seek a diagnosis if your condition is debilitating in any way shape or form and would benefit from treatment, _regardless_ of whether or not your condition is externally visible or even apparent to others. A "fix" should be sought if you are suffering. There is no cure for autism, but there are many programs and medications that can help.
PS That said, it may be unwise to disclose your diagnosis to say your employer, unless you need specific accomodations for your set of symptoms at work. I speak from experience.
I didn't mean to imply masking doesn't come with a disadvantage, and I sympathize with the efforts needed in places where others have no stress.
Still IMHO the bar to treat it as a medical condition is higher than that. To take another example, one can be hyper reactive to dust, and that has surprisingly wide impacts on everyday life. House maintenance becomes critical of course and interior furniture will reflect that (e.g. a long fur carpet and other hard to clean convoluted forms are out of question). It also bars the person from whole categories of shops ans places, old libraries is often a no go, some shops/restaurants using encent or heavier room flagrance will also trigger a reaction. There will be whole categories of jobs that are also not an option.
This kind of predicament will make everyday life a lot tougher and require significant effort, yet IME will not be categorized as a medical condition until something critical happens. Like an asthma crisis that ends at ER for instance.
It is not "fair" in the sense that successfuly dealing with the health/mental issue is kinda taken for granted, but I also understand why we draw a line between conditions the person can deal with alone, and other conditions that require external intervention.
I could "deal with it", until I couldn't. When a seemingly fully functional person with no warning signs suddenly breaks down (often catastrophically), providers scramble and tend to misdiagnose since they're missing key criteria. Without a formal diagnosis, it can look like severe depression or psychosis or a number of other similar conditions that have very different treatment plans. Autistic burnout treatment is something entirely different, although it can present the same. A prior diagnosis would at least point them in the correct direction for treatment.
Has social acceptability in any context ever been defined, beyond say, rules of etiquette? It's a free market and everyone is arguably entitled to test to see what it will bear.
The entire nature of the field of psychology and mental health treatment is relative to pain and dysfunction.
If people fit in well and didn’t have issues (either internal pain/suffering or society interaction pain/suffering), they are not applicable to the field.
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing.
Hmm, what are these 'colors' in your framing? I don't think anyone feels that ASD comprises totally distinct, 'disjoint' descriptions. It's true that there are multiple parameters along which one may vary, but that's true of any human syndromic disease, and probably true for any human disease, in general.
Here's a popular press article that talks about a very recent framing of autism that uses clinical and genetic data:
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person.
Wasn't Newton making the point that we normally perceive and treat colors as qualitatively different, but that they're in fact caused by a single underlying mechanism that can take on any of a continuous range of quantities?
Thus using the term "spectrum disorder" would be making precisely the same point, to describe a set of apparently qualitatively different disorders that are in fact caused by some underlying mechanism with a range of quantities? (To be clear, I don't know if any so-called spectrum disorders actually meet this criterion, and it's probably more complicated than that, but it seems to be the reason the term was chosen.)
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors"...
I get what you mean but I feel compelled to point out that colors are on a spectrum. A partition can be a quantized spectrum.
GP’s concern is that the quantisation scale is not representative of linear severity. It’s more like classification of disjoint characteristics tagged with colour
Numerous people don’t realize this or that there’s not some simple consistent blood test to say “yep, he’s got autism.”
Moreover, people have no idea how difficult this makes it to properly test anything related to it because control groups are so difficult. It’s why any type of study that claims something does or does not, definitively “cause autism” is highly unlikely.
You can identify potential contributors, but that’s about as good as it gets.
People in absolutes about this stuff can’t be taken seriously.
What you are witnessing is the process of "mystification" where it requires an "expert" annointed by some organization to interpret arbitrary criteria to make a politically or economically important determination that can't really be challenged on any objective basis. Since you are not an "expert", you are not permitted to do your own research and therefore by rule are incapable of being able to access the special mystified knowledge that only the "expert" has access to.
If no outsider can't explain why the expert is right and the non-expert is wrong, besides saying they're not an expert, then it certainly has the appearance of being a mystical power of the expert. After all, mysticism requires only faith in the mystic prophet to be true.
There's a whole genre of viral social media posts that amount to lumping anyone who appears to have cared quite a bit about something that's not obviously exciting (to most other people) into the autism spectrum. Especially historical figures. "This guy made tons of detailed beetle drawings and cataloged them in books! See, there have always been autistic folks, because he definitely was!"
Like I mean maybe, but also he was a bored rich aristocrat before TV was invented, and sometimes there are no parties going on or everyone's hiding in their country estates because of a cholera outbreak or whatever, and "making shitloads of drawings and organizing them" was like 50% of scientific work at the time. So. Maybe he just had a lot of time to kill.
Going by randos posting online, "liking things" and "knowing stuff" and "caring about things" are all autistic traits when present in any but the tiniest of degrees. It's ridiculous.
It's getting a tad out of hand. A friend "jokes" that I'm on the spectrum fairly often any time I speak with any sort of passion on topics in interested in or care about.
I feel social media has conditioned people to think of you're anything other than bland and "normal" in your personality and have any degree of uniqueness about you then you're on the spectrum.
I generally try to avoid tossing disorders around as a way of describing personality, because I don't want to trivialize somebody's experience for whom that disorder is very troubling.
Actually, I'm allowed to be persnickety about language without it implying a diagnosis of any kind.
But I thought it was kind of funny to share it the way I did, so I made an exception.
Perhaps this is just a different mental model thing, but in a spectrum each of those colors would be, maybe, a frequency of light or maybe even a range of frequencies measured at different intensities. Autism might be thought of as a band in the larger spectrum (think of the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums as subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum), and any one person might emit a different spectrum, like a combination of these different colors. An autistic person, specifically, would exhibit higher intensities in that named spectrum, and conversely the spectrum is identified as a part of the larger spectrum of human experience where people often show similar combinations of colors.
It's always going to be a metaphor, but that's the way that I best understand it.
Isn't a spectrum limited to a single dimension? If yes, that doesn't sound like Autism disorders (Asperger's, ADHD, verbal, non-verbal, violence, exacerbated sensitivity, social abilities...). They all suggest that there are multiple more or less independent/orthogonal. dimensions. And everyone scores differently on the combination of these dimensions. Which puts us on different coordinates in a vector space. Is this still a partition?
I do think the word spectrum is most usefully applied to something that can vary only in a single dimension.
The partition I'm talking about is a set of sets of behaviors. I think the vector space you're talking about is a set of people (each person being a vector on the basis of the sets of behaviors).
So I think we're on the same page, just referring to different parts of the construction. I.e. everybody is somewhere on the verbal/nonverbal spectrum, and somewhere else on the sensitive/tolerant stimulus spectrum and so on for each dimension.
It is because how system works. You might be upset about label, but this is least worry for me but even people with great ability to perform as part of work team and no ability to form relationships need that help to get back into workforce and figure out what is actually going on with them.
It definitely acknowledges our biases better than "spectrum", although I think they want varying degrees of each component, and we don't usually take a little of this star and a little more of that one.
I might've recommended "palette" if asked before spectrum got traction.
Or maybe we don't need a better word at all, maybe we should try grouping the characteristics differently such that they're no longer all together under the same heading. (I'm not qualified to say, just a hunch).
Actually, the original word has nothing to do with continuity. That's a later adoption of it from Latin to English. So to be precise, you don't need continuity. It's just a re-adoption of the same word form the original Latin.
But many without autism don't have that need for precision so they get confused by mixing up later word use in different contexts like you did there.
The present day meaning describes a continuum. The term could indeed be defined in the anachronistic terms you describe so it is anachronistic, which is a reasonable complaint when something enters common usage. We see terms redefined all the time thusly
UPDATE I have exceeded my grace with HN spam controls
The confusion arises from the direct import of a medical Latin term which means what it means in Latin, into the modern colloquial- this is important information
Well, if one is being pedantic about a loanword one must admit the possibility of the word being loaned twice with different meanings. If one doesn't want to be pedantic, all manner of things are admissible, of course.
This is a misconception I see pop up frequently online. In terms of the color spectrum, there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. And while there are colors outside of what humans can see, we generally use it not to refer to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but only to the subset that makes up light visible to human eyes.
Likewise, when we talk about the "autism spectrum," we're not including every exhibition of traits associated with autism. You can have some traits associated with autism without being "on the spectrum."
Also, perhaps as importantly, "spectrum" isn't a term that generally applies only to color, or even electromagnetism.
> there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum.
I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it.
Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.
I think you're missing what I'm saying.The overall point is that the existence of a spectrum does not in any way imply that everything exists somewhere on that spectrum.
In the example of the color spectrum, I don't mean that things necessarily don't (or do) have color. Take fundamental particles, as an extreme example. They don't themselves have any color at all, though they have 1ualities in common with color. And depending on what you do to them, they can exhibit qualities of color (or not).
But the fact that something has a color doesn't mean that thing itself is on the color spectrum — color is not a necessary quality of that thing, and can change depending on other factors — for energy that could be level of excitement, or for other things it might be the level and color of light in the room. Also, the physical things you point a camera at often do not themselves have color! They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb. And you can, by using different types of cameras or adjusting their settings, take in more of some wavelengths, less of others, or none of some, regardless of what things look like IRL (which is based in the wavelengths of light being reflected/not reflected from those things to your eyes, and which wavelengths the cones in your eyes can take in, and then how those are processed by your brain, etc).
I think I'm understanding what you're saying, I just disagree :)
> They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb.
The intrinsic/perceived duality that you're setting up here isn't related to what a spectrum is. What's fundamental for spectrums is that they're expansive: whatever the measured quality is, all such things map to somewhere on a single dimension which is the spectrum.
Color has been overused. Let's consider a mass spectrometer. It gives an electric charge to a sample, hurls it through a perpendicular magnetic field, and depending on the masses of the sample (or its components, supposing the ionization process broke it up), inertia causes spatial separation. Not-very-massive over here, and quite-massive over there. This is a spectrum because all masses have a place on it (nevermind that you might not actually be able to build a large enough spectrometer for some masses).
Or to use a mathematical example, if you exclude the interval [0,1] from the real number line, what you get is no longer a continuum, and mappings of things onto it are no longer a spectrum.
It may be a misconception that all political perspectives exist on a left/right axis, but when people talk about the political spectrum they're invoking a simplification under which all people do map to some point or another on that line.
As far as I'm aware it's only the autism spectrum that doesn't work this way.
I would argue that for the average person, therefore, 'spectrum' is an unfortunate choice of analogy, since most people believe that it encompasses every possible color. One should not need specialist knowledge to discuss an issue of this kind in common terms.
The more correct way is to think about it as a prisms. It is multi dimensional.
Also it is for autistic people. It grinds my gears when people say "everyone is on the spectrum", no, just no. Again it is only for autistic people and you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.
And no, just because someone is verbal and seems to be very articulate does not mean the person has low support needs or vice versa.
I find this take quite challenging, although I know it is one shared by a lot of autistic people.
I understand that if a person has no support needs, they cannot be diagnosed with autism. But that person may still be neurodivergent, and therefore to me it seems to follow that you have folks who are autistic with high support needs, and folks who are autistic with low support needs. Then, you have neurodivergent folks with no support needs. But this seems to me like a difference in degree, rather than category, and which would mean that the “spectrum” analogy works quite well.
With a clear understanding that I am not trying to minimise the struggles autistic people face, a sincere desire to learn, and an open mind, would you mind trying to help me understand?
Autism is something you are born with. It is simply who you are.
Support needs can change over time. You can need less help because you learn better coping strategies and have a stable environment or you can need more as you get older. It is not fixed.
Support needs are denoted in level because that is what system like schools and the like need. They don't really map to reality. Like for example a autistic person can have really bad sensory issues, being really sensitive to sounds, restricted diet and the like but decent social skill. Another autistic person might not have any sensory issues but really struggle with social stuff. Who needs more help? They need different kinds of help.
Thanks for replying! This above fits in much better with my previous mental model of autism: it’s intrinsic, it describes a “difference” in someone’s way of experiencing the world.
I’m still struggling to understand how this meshes with what you said above about only being autistic if you have support needs.
I don’t understand what implications that would have for someone who (for example) develops enough coping strategies that they no longer have any support needs. As far as I understand it, there’s no way to “cure” autism, so those folks would still be autistic but without support needs, which doesn’t seem to fit?
I don't think having zero support needs is realistic. If you have for example sensory issues like being sensitive to bright light or having trouble eating certain food then this doesn't go away. And just living in a world made for neurotypical people will always be a bit distressing and cause social problems.
Yes, there is a bit of a contradiction in advocacy because on one hand we want to spread awareness about the natural diversity of how humans brains work and remove prejudices and celebrate that diversity but also we don't want to minimize that it is a disability and people do need help.
> you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird.
The problem is the people who actually have support needs are often not in a stable job with great insurance, and then they don't have access to the "get an official diagnosis" machinery. At which point you have to choose between respecting a self-diagnosis even if they're often wrong, or not respecting it even if they're often right.
It is still important to get a official diagnosis if one can but yeah the reality is that it can be a very long process and not in reach for some people.
The more helpful way to think about is that the neurotypical brain is like RGB(63.32, 12.3, 73.02) but with thousands or maybe millions of variables. If certain values are significantly lower or bigger it might cause you trouble.
Having Autism is one cluster of values you can have. So is having ADHD. So is having Trauma. And many more things. And you can and often have multiple things at once and their symptoms overlap.
Everyone is on the spectrum, but only some are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. So there’s a tipping point or dividing frequency in the spectrum that moves people into disorder.
Having Covid is a spectrum from having nearly no or even no symptoms to having really bad symptoms. Just because everyone experiences having a running nose from time to time, does not mean everyone has Covid.
Autism is not the only way your brain can be different from other people.
Not exactly - there are very clear areas where everyone agrees the dividing line exists when you look a full spectrum map. Even most colorblind will agree with the areas in general (there are lots of specific color blind types but most will agree what area of the map is which colors even if you don't put any scale indications on the map)
No. Babies don't know how to color bin. They learn the color binning of their language. There are a few languages with different color bins and people who grow up in those languages bin colors differently--having a hard time telling apart colors we obviously see as different (but which map to one bin in their mother tongue) but telling apart subtle stuff we see as one color but they see as more than one.
Within a particular culture that may be true, but for example the Japanese concept of blue/green is decidedly different from most Western concepts which consider blue and green separate colors.
I argued over a color names with a guy who later admitted he is color blind. So, no, we don't agree on zones. I mean, it was rather clear he is off. Basically, he has seen different color.
I've been thinking about cancer. Maybe systems of replicators are prone to overdoing it by nature. The idea was that any universes compatible with life will also have spontaneous cancers because that's just what those universes do.
And then I learned the theory that many cancers are caused by undiscovered DNA-based viruses which tamper with the cell cycle to activate the replicative machinery that they need to make copies of their genome (HPV does this, and several others too). So then it was a switch: not an immutable feature of the universe, but caused by an agent.
But it's starting to look like viruses emerged independently more times than expected, so maybe it is more like "the universe just does that," and viruses are just cancers with a space program. Back to where I started.
I suppose some would see these loops as unproductive. "First principles" people. Descartes, etc. But I think that unresolvable why's like this are what understanding is made of.
If you haunt the pull requests of projects you use I bet you'll find there's a new species of PR:
> I'm not an expert in this language or this project but I used AI to add a feature and I think its pretty good. Do you want to use it?
I find myself writing these and bumping into others doing the same thing. It's exciting, projects that were stagnant are getting new attention.
I understand that a maintainer may not want to take responsibility for new features of this sort, but its easier than ever to fork the project and merge them yourself.
I noticed this most recently in https://github.com/andyk/ht/pulls which has two open (one draft) PRs of that sort, plus several closed ones.
Issues that have been stale for years are getting traction, and if you look at the commit messages, it's AI tooling doing the work.
People feel more capable to attempt contributions which they'd otherwise have to wait for a specialist for. We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.
If you're not noticing it, I suggests hanging out in places where people actually share code, rather than here where we often instead brag about unshared code.
> People feel more capable to attempt contributions
That does not mean that they are more capable, and that's the problem.
> We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing.
That's not what the specialists who have to deal with this slop say. There have been articles about this discussed here already.
> It’s truly depressing to have to accept that the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise your principles.
Isn't that what money is though, a way to get people to stop what they're doing and do what you want them to instead? It's how Rome bent its conquests to its will and we've been doing it ever since.
It's a deeply broken system but I think that acknowledging it as such is the first step towards replacing it with something less broken.
Some users might not mind the lack of control, but beyond a certain point it stops making sense to strive to be in that diminishing set and starts making sense to fix the bug.
We've always tolerated a certain portion of society who finds the situation unacceptable, but don't you suspect that things will change if that portion is most of us?
Maybe we're not there yet, idk, but the article is about the unease vs the data, and I think the unease comes from the awareness that that's where we're headed.
If you're only raised in a grifter's society, sure. Money is to be conquered and extracted.
But we came definetly shift back to a society where money is one to help keep the boat afloat for everyone to pursue their own interests, and not a losing game of Monopoly where the rich get richer.
Voting is a good start. Not just in nationals but look at local policy. So much of this is bottom up.we got into this by voting against oir best interests for at best liars and at worst blatant crooks.
Past that, simply look at the small actions on your life. These build and define your overall character. It's hard to vote for collective bargaining of you have trouble complimenting your family at the table. You need to appreciate and feel a part of a community to really come together.
This all sounds like mumbo jumbo on the outside, but just take some time to reflect a bit. People don't wake up one day and simply think "you know, this really is all the immigrant's fault". That's a result of months or year of mindset.
I don't think that's necessarily what money is, but it is kind of what sufficiently unregulated capitalism is, which is what we've had for a while now.
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