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185 points ivewonyoung | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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agentcoops ◴[] No.45409472[source]
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
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cwmoore ◴[] No.45409754[source]
Thank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper.

Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes?

The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities.

Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.

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zdragnar ◴[] No.45409818[source]
Boys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't actually a difference.

However, the "greater male variability hypothesis" in terms of IQ scores is not terribly well supported by studies, and the difference isn't significant enough to account for the 4:1 ratio of autism diagnoses. As such, I imagine there's more at play here.

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1. zeroonetwothree ◴[] No.45410788[source]
My niece has autism and it’s much more subtle than I’ve seen in boys. It was difficult to even get her diagnosed until teen years when the masking became much harder for her because of more complex social dynamics.