You must log in or # to comment.
I blame mcdonalds chicken nuggets.
That’s about as valid as any of the other claims.
I have to say that modem society seems to be tailored to neurotypicals, but somehow breeds neurodivergents.
From how many people I know who are neurodivergent, I’m not sure if I’m suffering a sampling bias, or whether there’s just a lot of neurodivergents.
I’m ADHD, my brother is too. Two of my long term friends are on the spectrum. I can definitely go on. I know I don’t generally keep neurotypical friends as well as I maybe should, but it seems like there’s a lot more of us than they would like to believe.
I’m fairly convinced that most people are just walking around undiagnosed, blaming themselves for being “weird” or “awkward” or “shy” when they’re just wired differently.
Im more interested if its always been this way. Have this many people always had adhd before it was recognized? Or is it something in modern society causing it.
I dont know how to get an answer to that question.
The chart of left-handed people historically may help with some insights into that.
Ive seen that before, and sure, its possible its like that with adhd but not at all certain i think. Otherwise that argument could be made for anything, that we just couldnt measure that thing before but it always was like that.
Correlate the data of current diagnoses against the historical data of asylum inmates. That should answer the question of if it has always been there, just undiagnosed. At least for the more extreme cases.
Yeah that could be helpful.
I’m not sure there will ever be that level of acceptance
I would say that there’s been a lot of ADHD people throughout history, I find that many types of ADHD, and even ASD people, are quite good in crisis situations. Where things are uncertain and improvisation goes a long way.
I know there’s also more than a few that have symptoms too severe to be helpful in those situations too.
I digress. In any situation where you see someone who is otherwise normal/unremarkable/a low achiever, who stepped up in a crisis and took care of things, I would strongly suspect that they have some form of neurodivergent trait. I’m sure that’s not entirely universal, and there are many exceptions.
I find a lot of the overthinking we tend to do, and analysis of human behaviour (for the purposes of masking), is extremely helpful in crisis situations, where you have to manage several things at once and get things done as rapidly as possible to fix whatever is happening.
And again, by no means an I saying a neurotypical couldn’t do that and even excel at it, I’ve just found that my neurodivergent friends are more prepared, more innovative in the moment, and more focused on something when the pressure is on.
Given this, I would expect that neurodivergent people do very well in highly dynamic environments. So any kind of hunting/gathering/laboring that isn’t entirely sterilized down to white office walls and cubicles where you have to do the same repetitive tasks over and over and over again, is something that our brains are good at.
And if you understand ADHD, you know that’s the case. The more interesting things happening (for our brain) the more easily it is for us to find the motivation to get going with a thing. The more rapidly we can get to our dopamine from completing a task, the better. A crisis combines these things in a compatible way. There’s some urgency so, no time to stop and ponder, we need to move. The thing that needs doing is unlikely to be typical, so it’s interesting because it’s different. And it needs to be solved as quickly as we can, so we get near instant gratification when it is finished.
Since instances of that are less because of the sterilized nature of modern society, I think has two main effects. First, neurodivergents have more difficult finding jobs that are interesting consistently enough that we do well at them, and there’s such an infrequency of crisis because of modern technology and the redundancies, reliability and durability that more modern things have, generally speaking, makes most days quite boring for a neurodivergent mind.
So IMO, is become very obvious that anyone who is ADHD is going to struggle with how boring and sterilized modern living is, vs how things were before we could rely on everything as much as we do in the modern era.
You know, I’ve seen arguments that we’ve just gotten better at testing, and that clearly our environment is causing autism…
But I haven’t seen the argument that the world has gotten better at connecting people with autism. Like, maybe dating apps, online message boards, and video games help people who don’t connect socially… connect socially. So what was previously a detriment to pass your DNA now has a crutch to help it happen.
The increase in diagnosis has happened in less than one generation. Genetic drift from altered reproductive behavior would take multiple generations. The speed of the diagnosis shift rules out social changes to mate selection and childbearing rates.
And that’s why their next step is to make sure a couple like this will be as illegal tomorrow as abortion is today.
Edit: As with everything dear President does, Tylenol is 99% a distraction. RELEASE THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN-BARR FILES!
The 1% is making pregnancy just that bit more unreasonable because fuck women.
Yeah I’m literally not having kids because of this administration. I love my partner dearly and in theory the idea of having kids sounds nice, but in this country, fuck that
I need to be able to dip to France if necessary.
Pretty sure world government is on the long term agenda, so it doesnt matter where you try to escape to. Cant leave the planet.
I believe a big war would be pushing things in that direction afterwards.
Dear God, not everything is an epstein distraction. Can your brain process more than 1 thing?
that’s why their next step is to make sure a couple like this will be as illegal tomorrow as abortion is today.
No… nonono. You’re talking 100% out of your ass. Im sorry, but im not going to explain.
<.< You don’t think Trump and his ilk will try eugenics! Because?
So your parents all used Tylenol. Whatever.
Are you saying my mom and dad are gay?
Not necessarily, but if your parents couldn’t have any children, chances are you won’t either.
Yes. Your father, a man with one ear pierced (the gay one), went to the gay mom store and asked to meet the owner.
Meet the owner or meat the owner?
Yes
Gayness is a spectrum. I’m like 99% straight, but if Ryan Reynolds was offering… That would be hard to pass up.
Based on what my moms have told me about being gay and in the closet before the 90s this is more common than you would think.
Fun topic because being gay and having autistism both have potential genetic components but neither can be explained by genes alone.
Based on twin studies, it’s likely they’ll both display either have the trait or neither will but it is no 100% which indicates there is something else at play.
No, I said that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Da fuck yu gonn do, bitch?
Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence
A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating. These findings help to provide an evolutionary basis to understanding autism risk as underlain in part by dysregulation of intelligence, a core human-specific adaptation.
I’m not fond of the “Republicans just want to make Americans dumber, because dumb people are <whatever it is that people think correlate with being Republican>”.
But there’s a special irony in Conservatives fixating on autism as a public health crisis, given that it is literally boiling down to “too many smart people are fucking”, a thing their eugenics-loving elites think we need more of.
The end goal of these policies will have to be - intentionally or otherwise - to dumb down the average American. I guess malnutrition, early childhood disease, and mass management of toxic waste could achieve these ends.
So, uh… yay?
“Too many poor smart people are fucking, and that means the populace is harder to control” is what eugenics boils down to.
Non-conformity is a threat.
These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence
I call that a real life bit overflow
I can attest, autism runs on my mother’s side of the family. I have two uncles who are low functioning.
One’s practically a child mentally with an obsessive recall for music charts over the years, and absolute statistical knowledge of the NY Giants history. He’s brilliant, with essentially encyclopedic knowledge within his extremely narrow interests, but can barely take care of himself otherwise. The other is a somewhat independent and capable of dealing with life, but… just inept and weird, and not smart at all.
I’m also mildly autistic (Asperger’s, on the old system I guess) and smart. Not a genius, but fine. It’s been pretty easy for me to pick up on complex concepts and tasks in life, so long as it’s not too math heavy. I’m working in IT automation/cloud/etc. and generally doing well in life. A little socially awkward and introverted, but happily married and successful overall, more so than average in my age/peer group.
I’ve worked for some time with developmentally disabled young adults, children, and teenagers, generally people under 20, with debilitating autism.
To me, there’s a stark contrast between that stereotypical autism and what the term has turned into today. It almost feels as though any kind of personality quirk now qualifies as autism.
Yes, people behave in accordance with their physiology—we speak through our mouths, see through our eyes, hear through our ears, and so on. Despite these shared functions, there are natural differences among humans. But we cannot just start categorizing every behavior deemed “inappropriate” as autism. There needs to be a sharper line between what is traditionally considered autism and what are simply personality traits or quirks.
At this point, the labeling is becoming preposterous. I even know people in my own life who call themselves autistic simply because they are unsuccessful. That feels like a slippery slope to me.
We went down the slope once people started using it as the next euphemism for “retarded”.
At the same time, to my knowledge autism (and ADHD for that matter) aren’t well enough understood that we can say for certain “all these things we consider autism are caused by the same thing”, it feels more like a grouping of symptoms and as usual you get the diagnosis it if it significantly interferes with your daily functioning.
I can tell you that it very much did (and still sometimes does, though it really helps that most of my peers now think similarly) interferes with my life that people seemingly expect me to know magic to understand what they mean, and inversely their magic that works on everyone else malfunctions on me and gives them completely wrong ideas.
But I am also entirely capable of living life on my own, and fundamentally it does make sense that there needs to be some distinction between someone that needs constant assistance vs someone that is mostly fine if people show some basic attention to not sensorily overload them/can mitigate the issues largely on their own as long as no one prohibits it.
The thing is, it is very much a spectrum and outside of the clear “incapable of surviving on their own in society” and “does fine but people think they’re weird” there’s a ton of “does generally fine but if multiple people start talking at them at once they might shutdown”, “is caused distress by a few basic tasks but can deal with it, it’s just a stress factor” and “needs some active assistance, but is mostly independent” and people (rightfully so) neither want to be told “well your problems aren’t real because you seem fine from the outside” nor “you’re too disabled to live a normal life” when it isn’t abundantly clear that that’s the case. And trying to distinguish between the extremes will necessarily lead to that for a lot of people.
Autism may well be the next step in human evolution and it might not be in humanities best interest to try to “find a cure” and apply it, except for finding a way to compensate the side effects of low functioning autism.
although most issues with autism is dealing with neurotypicals.
9/10 major issues I have in life are indeed caused by having to deal with neurotypicals.
My wife is crazy about drugs and wouldn’t take them or even drink outside a handful of times. I’ve been with her. When she got pregnant, she would just take the pain and never take anything because she was so nervous about all of it. Guess what, 1 of our 2 kids has autism and is clearly not due to any drugs…
Clearly she was talking fistfuls of Tylenol while she was pregnant, behind your back. /s
“Because my husband and I are both mentally ill, obviously thats why our child is mentally ill, not because of “TyLoNaL”, idiot”
… seriously? I can’t even… wow…
Imagine calling autism a mental illness in this day and age.
Wait… im sorry… mental developmental disability… not splitting hairs or anything…
It is a neurological difference.
Lead … its global world wide lead poisoning
It’s in the air, on the ground, on your shirt, in your food, in your car, in your office, in your house, in your sheets, in the water, everywhere … not enough to poison or kill you but in enough amounts to severely affect your life from the moment you are born to the time you die.
So, we would expect ASD diagnosis to be dropping, because while lead is a lot more prevalent than say the 1920s, it’s significantly less prevalent than the 1970s as shown by blood toxicity trends.
… oh look, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Could it be that you’re wrong? Cause last I checked the most likely predictor of ASD is if your relatives have it, implying a strong genetic component, and not lead exposure (in-vitro or otherwise).
