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254 points perihelions | 26 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source | bottom
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47282847 ◴[] No.43810954[source]
It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here. What is it that makes autism so dangerous? To me it looks like part of an almost spiritual war against empathy/compassion by traumatized individuals trying to fight their own Jungian Shadow.
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1. rayiner ◴[] No.43816351[source]
Fixing diseases and abnormalities in humans is empathy and compassion.
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2. throw16180339 ◴[] No.43816529[source]
Are you referring to the Trump government's treatment of trans people?

RFK views autistics as undesirables, so it's absurd to believe that he'll be any nicer to us.

> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”

What makes more sense is that he's collecting our personal information for imprisonment and execution.

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3. rayiner ◴[] No.43816638[source]
> RFK views autistics as undesirables

>> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”

This is true of people with severe autism. I know someone whose autism is severe enough she'll probably never be able to live independently. Doesn't everyone view that medical condition--the condition, not the person--as undesirable? Doesn't everyone view being healthy as better than being unhealthy?

I have ADHD. I'd rather not have ADHD. I take a pill every day to control it. My kid has it too. He'll have to take a pill every day for the rest of his life. I'd love to avoid that outcome. Avoiding disease is a good thing!

replies(1): >>43816792 #
4. throw16180339 ◴[] No.43816792{3}[source]
If he had made the same statement about Bangladeshi-Americans and was collecting their personal information, how would you feel about it?
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5. rayiner ◴[] No.43816829{4}[source]
Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.

But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.

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6. throw16180339 ◴[] No.43817110{5}[source]
> Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.

I was trying to give you a sense of why I interpret his comments as a threat. He's described all of us as if we're a burden when I've been supporting myself for decades.

Some autistics would want a cure, but others feel that their perspective is equally as valid as neurotypicals. They don't see themselves as sick and in need of a cure.

> But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.

My main impairments are face blindness and a severe difficulty with reading facial expressions - I'm in the bottom 5% of the population. I would happily take a cure for either of these if it was offered. If it's a more general personality change, then I'm not interested. I'm comfortable with who I am.

There isn't an opt-out for me and there's a long history of eugenics in this country, that's why I'm concerned about this.

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7. rayiner ◴[] No.43817217{6}[source]
And I'm saying you shouldn't compare people of different ethnicities to people with medical conditions. I'm normal where I'm from. My skin color is an adaptation to the tropical climate I'm from. It's not a medical condition that's maladaptive to normal functioning, or something that ideally we could cure.

Your use of the term "eugenics" is nonsensically broad. Society should seek to cure diseases and maladaptive medical conditions. That's not "eugenics."

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8. MattGrommes ◴[] No.43817406[source]
The problem is not fixing diseases. The problem is what is defined as a disease or abnormality. The problem is people who are clearly choosing abnormalities based on politics, power grabs, and anti-science rhetoric.
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9. rayiner ◴[] No.43817477{8}[source]
Reducing the incidence of undesirable or maladaptive medical conditions is a good thing. That's why we have vaccines, for example. That's why we perform second trimester screening, for example.
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10. rayiner ◴[] No.43817685[source]
Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality. Science and medicine are telling us that the rates of these diseases are growing dramatically, for decades now.

RFK isn’t the one who made autism concern happen. My three year old’s teacher asked us to get him tested with the county for autism. It’s a very common thing parents are dealing with these days. I’d argue that what you’re saying is exactly backward. The medical community has defined a lot of normal behavior as autism.

Now, I agree RFK’s views on what’s causing autism are anti-scientific, and I doubt he’ll be able to figure out what’s causing it. But RFK has a platform because the medical community has diagnosed all these kids as autistic but doesn’t have an explanation for what’s causing it. So looks like RFK fill the void.

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11. ActorNightly ◴[] No.43818125{3}[source]
>Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality.

Not really. DSM is not really scientific, its more statistical.

You could make arguments that autism is actually evolutionary, as people who are on the spectrum in certain ways are often better in select areas than neuro typical people.

12. ModernMech ◴[] No.43818128{9}[source]
> undesirable or maladaptive medical conditions

This is why autistic people are wary of efforts to "cure" autism -- because the people leading the charge always use dehumanizing language to frame their cause. It becomes a moral imperative. "We have to cleanse humanity of this scourge! We have to save the children!"

And what do we have to do to accomplish this goal? The solutions are always the same: register us all in a database, send us to a camp or a farm for "curing", and prevent us from reproducing through forced sterilization and/or euthanasia.

Unless and until autistic people are in charge, then all such efforts to "cure" autism and "find the cause" should be treated with extreme skepticism.

13. sizzle ◴[] No.43818598{3}[source]
What were the symptoms your 3 yr old were exhibiting to be asked to screen them? Was the teacher right to say something or are they handing out these diagnoses like candy?
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14. rayiner ◴[] No.43821356{4}[source]
He was a little speech delayed, has somewhat below age level fine motor function, can sight read a lot of words, and has some odd behaviors, like taking to his hand pretending its Toodles from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The county said he was borderline. There is some gaming of the system going on for sure. They said they were ready to diagnose him with something and give him an IEP if he were going to public school where he could get extra services, but since we’re planning to send him to private K-12 they recommended against it.

I’ll be honest, my first thought was that it was white women (everyone in this story besides me) overreacting. In our circle of friends, several of the kids are diagnosed with something on the spectrum. By contrast I don’t know a single person from my immigrant group whose child has a diagnosis. So I was skeptical. But ultimately, I figured that the teachers see dozens of these kids every year and I trust their judgment.

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15. sizzle ◴[] No.43821859{5}[source]
Yeah I have observed the same re: lack of immigrant mental health access/diagnosis, but it seems to be changing in subsequent generations that are more privy to mental health disorders in general. Why not help a child get accommodations they need to thrive in school, there is no shame in that in my opinion. It narrows/evens the playing field for neurodivergent folks who need a little more help to be their best selves in school.
16. Seb-C ◴[] No.43822045{3}[source]
It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.

The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.

Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.

Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".

If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.

This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.

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17. tumsfestival ◴[] No.43822917{7}[source]
Your problem is that you fail to understand that autism isn't a disease, it's a neurodivergence, their brains are just wired slightly differently. Many autists live their whole lives without even suspecting of their conditions, and most of those who are aware of it live absolutely normal lives. The only way we could potentially "cure" autism is if we somehow altered peoples' brains while in the womb, if that's not eugenics I don't know what is.
18. boroboro4 ◴[] No.43825922[source]
Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.

We're moving same direction, mostly by people wishing for a strong arm, and being consumed by hate. And it's definitely not empathy and compassion in play here.

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19. TeaBrain ◴[] No.43826117{4}[source]
>It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.

I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.

>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.

A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.

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20. rayiner ◴[] No.43826177[source]
> Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.

They were wrong. Does that mean that human developmental abnormalities don't exist and we shouldn't be looking for ways to prevent them? Of course not.

I can't believe you're making me defend RFK, but characterizing this as being motivated by "hate" is completely absurd. RFK is a kook, but he's a kook motivated by compassion and empathy. His entire career has been driven by compassion for people affected by environmental poisons. And the people in his camp are crunchy granola parents who can't analyze statistical data, who are grasping at straws trying to find out why their kid has a developmental abnormality that science doesn't have a ready explanation for.

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21. sureglymop ◴[] No.43826709{5}[source]
Please read through this page shared here on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43813441
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22. ◴[] No.43826957{6}[source]
23. ◴[] No.43828653{6}[source]
24. TeaBrain ◴[] No.43828827{6}[source]
From the linked article:

"We can be certain that autism rates have gone up for artefactual reasons—diagnosis, changing awareness and incentives, etc. rather than real increases in the number of people with autism—by exploiting policy changes. For example, above, I mentioned the Massachusetts saw autism reports increase 400% in one year due to a change in school reporting."

This is exactly the issue that I'm getting at, which is shared with the above user's assertion. We cannot be certain of any of this. Especially not because of some handpicked examples by the author. None of this is provable or falsifiable, even if a the handful of disparate examples picked by the author seem compelling. Besides the examples of reporting changes, the author's arguments almost wholly rely on untestable counterfactuals.

Also:

"A single piece of evidence indicates that there is no real epidemic of autism. As remarked in a review in a 2020 Nature Reviews Disease Primers article:

No significant evidence is available supporting that autism is rarer in older people, which provides further evidence against the suggestion that autism is increasing in prevalence over time."

This doesn't provide evidence of anything. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. This is just an argument from ignorance. This is little different from saying that there is no significant evidence that people 500 years ago had lower rates of being diagnosed with a given disease, therefore the rates of people with that disease were likely the same as now.

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25. Seb-C ◴[] No.43829045{7}[source]
If you ask any high-functioning or late-diagnosed autistic person who knows about the topic, you can bet that he will tell you his family (parents and grand-parents included) shows the same signs of autism, but that they do not wish to aknowledge it or be diagnosed. These people will never be included in any proper statistics because they see themselves as "normal" or "just a little different", despite being widely known as "weird".

Previous generations didn't grow up with all the comfort that we have today, such as games, internet and technology, and thus didn't have as many ways to isolate themselves in more comfortable hobbies. Because of this, they could develop stronger masking skills, which helps them a bit more than current generations, but does not fix the problem and made the understanding of it more difficult.

26. tptacek ◴[] No.43849223{3}[source]
He's a kook who claimed that COVID-19 was ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazim. That's not a claim motivated by compassion and empathy.