8 ms·

Neurodiversity

• astrange 10y ago
  Everyone always wants to prevent cures for autism, but no one ever suggests inventing something that gives people autism. (It was sort of a plot point in a Vernor Vinge novel. And Brave New World?)
  • ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    Aren't those functionally the same thing? It reminds me of a debugging technique I sometimes use, to prove to myself I understand a complex issue I try to make it worse. If I can then I almost certainly understand how to fix it too.
    • nikanj 10y ago
      A reliable repro is 98% of solving the problem.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      GP comment is drawing out an ethical tension, not a technical one.
  • api 10y ago
    Problem is there is autism like (maybe) Einstein or Tesla and then there is autism where the child can't communicate or adapt to any form of human social interaction or contact. The former is neurodiversity, the latter a debilitating disease. These are not the same thing and need different terms.
    • rntz 10y ago
      Is there any evidence that they have different underlying causes or are otherwise fundamentally distinct rather than one simply being an extreme case of the other? (Honest question; I'm not familiar with the literature here.) Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway?
      • mercer 10y ago
        Asperger's used to be classified separately but is now considered part of the autism spectrum. That said, I don't think this was done primarily because of a consensus over there being just one 'fundamental type' of autism. As I understand it, there isn't even a consensus on any theory of what autism fundamentally is. Some theories try to explain the social issues as a lack of Theory Of mind, but these theories don't cover the many other symptoms typical of autism. One more recent theory ('Intense Worlds') does present a 'fundamental' explanation for all/most symptoms, but AFAIK it's not well-accepted or supported by evidence (yet), and the fact that it explains so much is also considered a drawback (too vague / overfitting / whatever the term is). > Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway? I've noticed that there seems to be a movement in treatment approach that focuses on treating individual symptoms without focusing too much on the overarching 'labels'. In my experience it's been a very nice, down to earth approach, and it strikes me as more measurable too. This approach strikes me as particularly useful for autism because there's so much variation between different autists and the particular symptoms they exhibit.
    • wbl 10y ago
      They are the same thing, just as someone with a slight sniffle and someone with a sinus infection can both have a cold, and there are lots of places in between. We've also gotten a lot better at treatment: a significant fraction of children with large language delays end up living independently.
    • kosma 10y ago
      The recent developments of DSM-5 and ICD-11 show the opposite: decades of research failed to show any scientifically valid distinction between functional and non-functional autism. That's why they are being conflated into a single "autism spectrum disorder" category.
      • bbarn 10y ago
        Those books exist as a method for billing insurance. The DSM only recently (1983) stopped considering homosexuality a diagnosis. As a result we're hearing the phrase "somewhere on the spectrum" for any number of behaviors we don't see fitting the norm, and the reality of autism is not this "beautiful mind" scenario for many, but instead a crippling illness like the AP mentions. They are definitely not the same thing to the people who live with them. The article is completely centered around the media image that autism creates geniuses, and that's a dangerous, misleading idea at best. The reality of living with it is usually much more ugly. Children who often become grown adults who can't make connections between cause and effect violently lashing out, throwing feces, biting care givers, screaming, screaming, and more screaming. We should absolutely keep looking for ways to prevent and try to treat/cure it, and not act like everything is fine and great and accept it as diversity, for the sake of those who can't live normally.
        • throwaway876543 10y ago
          As someone who falls in the "Beautiful Mind" end of the spectrum I find it insulting and abhorrent that people would do anything OTHER than cure us if they could. Beneath superficial success and contribution, my life is a nonstop Munchian scream. I find it less insulting when people say everyone on the spectrum should be exterminated, than when people say some of us should be allowed to continue existing because our particular end of the spectrum happens to write pretty code / invent pretty theorems / etc.
          • euyyn 10y ago
            On the other hand, I've met high-functioning autists that feel offended at the idea that people want to cure them. My cousin is on the "very crippled side" of the spectrum, so I'd give anything for a cure. So I guess if the person can understand the concept, it should be their own call.
  • SonOfLilit 10y ago
    I think you're talking about Distress by Greg Egan? Was the book about the announcement of a Theory of Everything on an artificial island?
    • teraflop 10y ago
      Pretty sure OP was referring to A Deepness in the Sky.
      • SonOfLilit 10y ago
        I'm very surprised that two authors that are commonly confused with each other would make a secondary plot point about the same subject that is very weakly related to their main interests.
      • astrange 10y ago
        Yes, but I didn't want to spoil it.
  • rntz 10y ago
    This isn't as inconsistent as it seems. People would probably also be equally uncomfortable with both the idea of "editing" an embryo's genome to make it light-skinned, and the inverse idea of editing it to make it dark-skinned.
    • yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Why are people uncomfortable with this? While it's not important enough for genetic engineering on it's own, I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
      • up_so_floating 10y ago
        Your body evolved skin to suit an environment other than a Thai beach. I would not consider that genetic inferiority.
        • jessriedel 10y ago
          Pale skin is thought to have evolved as a rapid (last ~5k years) and crude adaptation to avoid vitamin D deficiency shortly after farming was developed and allowed non-animal-based diets at the very high latitudes of northern Europe. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved... It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution are no longer necessary because modern diets easily give adequate vitamin D.
          • Tycho 10y ago
            So you're saying pale skin is a "hacked together" solution but modern vitamin supplements are not?
            • jessriedel 10y ago
  • nabla9 10y ago
    An illustrated transcript of a talk presented at the First Biennial Conference on Induc ed Humanoid Subspecies Peter Watts, Ph.D. FizerPharm Evoconsumables http://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm http://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
  • gcr 10y ago
    Ted Chiang wrote a short story, "The Evolution of Human Science", about that idea. If I recall, the main premise was that new parents could choose to give their children a neurodevelopmental drug that would cause vastly increased intellectual prowess at the cost of gradually losing their connection to human society to the point of indecipherability. I think it was a bit heavy-handed. But maybe I'm not remembering the story correctly.
• scalio 10y ago
  The author has a point. As long as we don't understand how we're built and functioning, modifying our code is a bad idea. Learning by doing is only applicable when the thing in question is expendable, which is definitely not the case with the human genome.
  • internaut 10y ago
    Surely we have devised experiments for which the use of the human genome is indeed expendable? e.g. tissue cultures.
• Pica_soO 10y ago
  The actual question is- what is or was neuro-diversity useful for? Its a uncomfortable question, because the answers may insult conservative and progressive comfort zones. The publicly condemned sadistic murderer, might be a perfectly adapted model-citizen for a society that wents savage every second generation. The schizoid paranoid might be have been a model citizen in society ravaged by disease and bubonic plague, forming hate-filled sub-communitys, who would purge outsiders and self-quarantine. The sexual-deviant might have been a model citizen in a society that had no real justice system, by being forced to uphold basic social contracts. Autism would be a attempt of evolution to develop reliable automation and mass production in a medieval society in need of it. All of this of course has to be "triggered" somehow, so there would be a feedback loop of mothers in the making, that create with the society they perceive, the counter measure of tomorrow. Have strife and stress? Next generation will have more psychopaths that see your genetic lottery ticket through that. Have a disease like the anti-baby-pill? Lots of paranoid schizophrenic that want humanity to retreat into gated community. Of course non of this is written in stone, it is always how nature turned out by supply and demand. What we make of this, is completely open to debate, but it has to be made upon a foundation of well researched knowledge, not upon a wishing well.
  • sethrin 10y ago
    There is no need to assume a reason for genetic variance or a particular genetic expression. The idea that evolution is directed, that each change is somehow purposeful has been fairly conclusively disproven: genetic drift has been observed nearly universally. As speculative fiction your ideas are somewhat interesting. I don't know if you've ever tried your hand at a short story, but it could be a good premise.
  • internaut 10y ago
    As I see it, neurodiversity is more useful if the environment suddenly changes. In a stable environmental niche most forms of neurodiversity are probably a drawback. For instance (reflecting on your examples) it should be obvious to us that the word 'crime' meant something much narrower several thousand (or hundred) years ago.
• robg 10y ago
  I live with mental "illness". With respect to the brain, the diversity is our story. The types and subtypes are challenges on how to live, past and beyond the diagnosis.
• WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Like it or not Autistic people will be weeded out of society through fetal genetic testing or other interventions. It will be a net loss for humanity, but I don't think there's anyway to stop it. It's a paradox in that it's nearly impossible to appreciate the value of neurodiversity until you build a close relationship with such a person. My cousin Tony with Downs's would have most likely been aborted decades ago if a test were available. What no one knew is that he would become so kind, good natured, and socialable it would bring incredible joy and love to literally hundreds of family members and friends. There won't be too many like him from now on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/22/downs-syndrome-people-risk-extinction-at-the-hands-of-science-fe http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/22/downs-syndrome-pe... The paradox is that most families with Autistic or Down's children would tell you their lives have been greatly enriched. To outsiders it sounds like parents are in denial and blinded to their child's predicament. But it's not denial or sympathy, the value is beautiful, but invisible until you experience it.
  • throwaway87293 10y ago
    On the other hand I have heard more than once people who do sometimes very secretly confess they wish their cousin/brother/etc with Down's had been aborted. They always talk about all the love and joy and positive things too. But at the end of the day, they say, they think they would have preferred it the other way. But this is not pretty, and it's not something people like to talk about. So if you just take what people say in public, you maybe don't get accurate representation. Maybe the people I know are not good representation of the population, though!
    • AReallyGoodName 10y ago
      In the case of extremely severe disabilities i think we can all completely understand that attitude. Those who don't understand or think it's weird have probably never had to care for someone with such a severe disability (i try my best to help out relatives who have a disabled child but i struggle to do it for more than a few hours at a time).
    • WhitneyLand 10y ago
• cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  I once used the term "neurodiversity" in a meeting with the vice principal and a resource teacher in the context of the behaviour of one of my children. The knife-eyes and suspicious looks were amazing. Lots of _talk_ in the school system about acceptance and anti-bullying, but I think our society has never been so intolerant of the diversity it claims to covet. (We switched schools and things are much better now.)
  • walshemj 10y ago
    was that recently? I thought "neurodiversity" was the preferred term for conditions like dyslexia dyspraxia and so on
• musesum 10y ago
  TL;DR CRISPR will lead to fewer people on autism/spectrum? A friend mentioned his son is a bit "Aspy" - he said it with a bit of pride in his voice. Both father and son are brilliant coders. Meanwhile, there's Modafinil. Originally intended as a treatment for narcolepsy, others use it to improve concentration. I wonder if neuro-configurability will lead to less or more diversity?
  • scalio 10y ago
    Less, because the choices you would be offered would be limited compared to the messy free-for-all that is natural evolution.
• scandox 10y ago
  I think we will start to limit our capability for diversity soon. Population control, anti-aging and direct genetic control will limit the opportunities for change. A case of our short term culture conflicting with our long term biology. It's a pity because we will be less likely to ever become something we can't already imagine.
  • zer0gravity 10y ago
    >>It's a pity because we will be less likely to ever become something we can't already imagine. The desire of mankind to control everything is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
  • cb18 10y ago
    The idea that we will soon control everything seems akin to other inaccurate prognostications. The combinatoric explosion of interactions between new "control technologies" alone will introduce many new, unforeseen variables. The world will still be uncontrollable in new unforeseen ways.
• sugarfactory 10y ago
  Even though my intuition tells me that I should support neurodiversity my reasoning keeps failing to justify it without introducing "diversity is unconditionally good" as an axiom. I find it difficult to add it to the list of axioms I support because it seems like hypocrasy to endorse diversity considering the history of humans. Almost every human has the ability to learn and speak language, which is unique to mankind. (What media often reports as an animal language is not a language in that it doesn't have recursion -- the ability to handle it is, Chomsky and his supporters believe, unique to humans) But shortly after language was born, in the very first stage of evolution of language, there must have been significant percentage of people who could not learn language. Where did they go? The answer is: they went extinct, failing to reproduce. And that's why we all can learn and speak language. The ancestors of us are those who could speak it. By making it difficult to reproduce for those who couldn't speak language, through the process of natural selection, we managed to build society where almost all of the members can speak it. Having autism in this era is analogous to being non-verbal in the early stage of humans. With that said, endorsing diversity seems to be denial of evolution to me, denial of how we have come this far. It is by putting selection pressure on those who cannot adapt to society. And the sad reality is, you cannot stop it from happening. Autistic people will go extinct, even without the gene-editing technology, just like non-verbal people went extinct.
  • drdeca 10y ago
    Why would an is of evolution be considered to imply that ought? The association of evolution with "unalloyed good" seems like a mistake to me, and this mistake seems potentially connected to Hegelianism.
  • scalio 10y ago
    Why do autistic people have to go extinct? Can't we support them in this wealthy day and age? Couldn't great cognitive tools lie beneath autism and other supposed illnesses? In my experience, "normal" people are the most boring because they can't think in (what they would consider) contorted ways. There's a whole spectrum of people, one end which defines large parts of society, the plain average. On the other end are people whose minds are so distorted relative to the norm that it's impossible for them to function in our society. I would put the blame for that on society not being diverse or open enough. It seems to me that evolution works because of diversity: an organism diversifies through mutations to the point where one type gets an advantage over the others and survives. Think of it this way: If you limit yourself to what you already know, you'll be turning in circles, constantly reaching the same conclusions for the same problems. Let some outside knowledge/factors mess things up and you'll be able to move on.
• duckingtest 10y ago
  I don't think it's possible to edit autism out until it's actually understood on a mechanical level. It's likely that's what's now called 'autism' in reality are several completely different things with vaguely similar symptoms. Once it's understood, I don't think it's going to disappear: positive forms of it (ie. milder Asperger's) are going to become a niche option for parents, along with high iq edits of course. The 'little Einstein' option on a menu.
  • throwaway876543 10y ago
    Hi, I have milder asperger's, and I've been highly successful by most objective measures (great job in finance, make more money than both my parents combined, trophy wife, etc.) If I could go back and start over without the disease, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant sacrificing all that success and being a fry-cook all my life.
    • duckingtest 10y ago
      How can you know? The only way to really compare two lives would be to live them both.
      • throwaway876543 10y ago
        I'm completely fucking isolated. Like, a million miles away. Someone at work invites me to a party. I go, I have fun. I never get invited again. New person gets hired, pattern repeats. Reliable as a clock. My wife? I picked her up using techniques from the seduction community, which I studied like a science and practiced for over a year. I did that because I was tired of being a virgin, now I hate this relationship and feel powerless to escape it. BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal. At work I feel like the mythical Cassandra, cursed to see the future but no-one will believe you. (I'm a programmer, of course.) I wish I could just treat it like a job that doesn't matter, and that it wouldn't physically pain me when some idiot can't even follow in-house variable-naming conventions, etc. Sure, I guess I can't be 100% certain that fry-cooks aren't in their own screaming hell, just like I can't be 100% sure I'm not living in Plato's cave. But I think that's pretty fucking academic compared to the above things which I can be sure of.
• nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  I believe they're right about neurodiversity overall but that doesn't make a case for preventing gene editing so these people can better function in our society. If you think about it, surely out of the counless gene variations possible in sexual reproduction some of them will most definitely be bad and even fatal. In fact this happens all the time. The fact is that society is naturally tuned toward the average case and straying far in either direction usually causes a bad quality of life. Humans have a tendency to mark everything as good or bad. Beautiful or ugly, smart or stupid. In reality everything is on a statistical distribution and for most traits you want to be in the middle. We shouldn't be breeding humans to live 20 years or 200, as a social species it's largely better to just correct the large outliers, even if it means losing our "geniuses"
• wuhwgiuhguh 10y ago
  It can be a-la-cart. We'll find ways to make it possible to edit our genomes so that we can have: * dark skin when we want it (for practical reasons or style) * stripey zebra skin (just for this week, it's a novelty) * genetic tattoos (program your skin to make tattoos of your design) * cuttlefish skin, glowing jellyfish skin (for parties) * change eye/hair color to match our clothes when going out * change mental processing style for exams, getting jobs, learning languages (this week I'm autistic)