The benefits of autism, what is autism ?

You are.

Dutch ? Been dropped on your head or something ?

There is a wide spectrum of what they now want to call asperger's or autism spectrum diseases. The various specific types are all scientifically outlined but f*ck all that.

There are many functioning people with mild Asperger's.

The problem seems to be a lack off true communication. The affected feels outside, no matter where he is. Some simply lack empathy and such, others, especially when young are more of a nuisance, and apparently they want to be.

Years ago, there was a claim that a smack works. Seriously, no injury or anything but smacking in the face. Maybe like on StarTrek when Spock needs to be awoken from his Vulcan healing trance.

That is not meant to hurt. They used to slap a baby's ass to make him breath. However news of this was suppressed because they considered it barbaric. I just happen to know people.

Now what they call autism or Asperger's spectrum, they got one that is f****ng ridiculous. People who keep clearing their throat. That should not even be classified.

There have been reports suggesting that it is even related to Turet's syndrome. However what I read about it was quite speculative

With all descriptions it seems like being on PCP. a very tang and dangerous drug, but a real blast.. You could cut your arm off with a chainsaw and think nothing of it.

But sometimes you are just calm and you might stand around thinking "There is something going on here I don't know, and I don't care".

That is strictly my opinion based on what i have read, seen and heard. The grain of salt is in the mailbox.

I'm austic, according to my wife who is an expert on the subject.

I don't feel "left out" because it doesn't matter to me. I kind of feel sorry for people who are distressed by lack of social contact now.

I feel like it's an asset. I'm not strongly influenced by caring about social pressures, so break rules and invent things. I think that extreme sociability is the actual handicap. It leads to wars and things.

Mo works with severely austic kids, the types who flop around on the floor and scream. That's different.

Feynman wrote a book, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

Sadly, the cover shows him smoking a cigarette.

<snipped>

My wife (who is an expert on most subjects) says, "All men are autistic, engineers especially so."

She's joking, probably, but she has a point.

She does. Engineers, at least good ones, are thing-people, not people-people. Sensitivity to social pressure distorts clear thinking.

The classic 3-line experiment shows that social pressure distorts what most people *see*.

Some women like engineers, and they are a good sort of women.

Yes! Is anybody here Rh negative?

Not me. Boring O+.

Does it matter?

Yeah, that sounds like a real bast all right.

A lot of wives probably think their husbands are at least partly autistic. I should get a male 'expert on the subject' for a more impartial opinion if it worries you.

There was a trend in the 50s among the intellectual classes; men of letters and so forth, to be photographed with a cigarette in order to look more sophisticated and worldly. Some folk were able to carry the look off more convincingly than others, however.

tinny.com/wrbv6sac

The best. ;-)

Absolutely. They mark my paper A+ every time I donate!

(As it happens, tomorrow morning will be my 71st donation.)

Absolutely. They mark my paper A+ every time I donate!

(As it happens, tomorrow morning will be my 71st donation.)

Autism is related to intelligence.. genetically. As we've selected for smart people we get more autism too.

George H.

You probably need to read

Intellectual features seem to be influenced by thousand of genes, none of which have much effect on the feature you are looking at, and all of which have other effects.

The Slate Star codex seems to be citing studies which are unlikely to be all that well done.

One potential confound for "autism is related to intelligence" is that if you weren't intelligent, nobody would have noticed that you were autistic. More important, autism - like intelligence - is continuously distributed, and any write-up that is couched in terms of autistic and non-autistic people is not going to be any more realistic than one that was couched in terms of intelligent versus stupid people as if that was also a bimodal distribution.

I think that people going to college puts smart males and females together, and the result is more autism. In 1900, only a few percent of people went to college, and those schools were separated by sex. Most people met their mate close to home in those days, which reduced extreme braniacs meeting and mating.

I thought that she was a speech therapist.

But nothing much patentable.

How, precisely?

That isn't a particularly persuasive document. There are lots of genes - tens of thousands - which have some influence on intelligence (but not very much) - and since "autism" also covers a broad spectrum of behavior that's probably true of autism too, and it wouldn't be surprising if some of the same genes were involved (but acting via different routes).

Looking for slightly advantageous genes with the data we've got can only work if the advantages add linearly. If two gene variant acting in combination can be more potent than either on its own (non-linear intereaction) teasing out the intereactions would take a lot more data than we have got.

The proposition that the same gene variations that are correlated with higher intelligence are also correlated with more florid autism is extremely dubious.

Not really - hardly any females went to college - which was the real separation. Most tertiary institutions wouldn't accept female students, and quite a few of the very few that did did accept only women.

In1900 you had to come from rich family to be able to go to college, so colleges were less selective about intelligence than they are today. Extreme brainiacs were thinner on the ground.

If this hypothesis was worth thinking about, assortive mating should already have produced many more intelligent people whose parents were both college graduates. I'm one - my parents were both graduates of the University of Adelaide in the 1930s - but there aren't enough of us for anybody to have bothered to quantify the advantage (if it exists - and it probably doesn't, as different people are intelligent in different ways for different reasons).

If it doesn't work for intelligence it's even less likely to work for autism.

Good thinking, John. I reckon you're on to something there...

Cursitor Doom endorses John Larkin's "thinking" - John Larkin does seem to be the same kind of gullible twit as Cursitor Doom, so it isn't altogether surprising that they both like the same kind of vaguely plausible nonsense.

My wife works with a lot of austitic kids and says she can see the signs in the behavior of their parents.

One of my daughters is a PhD scientist who married a PhD scientist and has a semi-austic kid, a sweet weird math genius. My other daughter is a jock who, thankfully, married a people-person big dumb jock. They got married on a golf course.