U.S. autism data project sparks uproar over ethics, privacy and intent

One thing this will do is disincentivize high functioning autists from identifying themselves as autists, which is a very good thing IMO. Just look at this channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAutisticSoc/videos. There is a lot of survivor-ship bias on this channel towards high functioning autists who can talk in front of a camera.

Just to give an idea to those not familiar with the difference between high functioning and low functioning autism, high functioning autists face problems like not being able to communicate properly some of the time, and low functioning autists face problems like not even being able to tell their caretaker which part of their body is in pain, or which kid in the group punched them.

Edit: The National Autistic Society is UK based but the situation is not that different in other countries.

"Actually, it's good they're registering every autistic persons in the country in a national database, under a president who is overtly eugenicist [1]."

No it's not. At minimum this is a horrible invasion of privacy, that I can't believe anyone on HN would defend. At worst this is straight Nazi shit, preparing the ground for extermination.

[1] https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...

> I can't believe anyone on HN would defend.

On this site, you can hold pretty much any opinion you like as long as you coach it in the most neutral-sounding "Modest Proposal"-esqe language you can.

To expand on what you said - you can post some grotesque things here as long as you don't provoke flagging or offending the ~90th percentile into down-voting your comment in the first 24 hours, and language plays a big part in this, such as hiding bigotry behind big words and playing into confirmation bias. Low-level down-voting can be countered if you can get <1% of HNers, who may be fellow-travelers in the fringe ideology to vociferously agree & up-vote your comment.

I think this is a side-effect of HNs voting rules, what counts as "adding to the conversation", and the limited window for voting down comments and unlimited time to vote up.