7 ms·

But the big statistic is that autism in all of its forms is around four times more common in males than females. In other words the genetic components have a bi

• chillacy 9y ago
  Took me a few seconds too, but I didn't think to rationalize it as "though it took me a few seconds", I thought "wow gee I got it in only a few seconds".
  • Mz 9y ago
    Assuming you are male, that may be the real sex difference: Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything, they apologize for not being "good enough" even when they perform as well as the guys and then if they are excellent, no one believes them. (I think this is literally true, but it is intended as sort of humorous observation so maybe imagine there is a winky here and interpret that to mean "look, this is an injoke of sorts!")
    • Grustaf 9y ago
      "Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything" I don't think anyone at all is claiming that. At most people are claiming that girls are better at verbal and emotional skills, while boys are better at visio-spatial things.
      • projektir 9y ago
        When the explanation for women being paid less / having less power overall is that men have superior bodies for tasks (from athletes to programmers), it does seem to come off that way. It's little help that women have better verbal and emotional skills if they do not appear to be valued in our society.
        • aianus 9y ago
          The highest paying jobs are managerial not technical. If anything emotional skills are much more valued in our society.
          • projektir 9y ago
            Yet high-paid managerial and control jobs are dominated by men.
            • kamaal 9y ago
              This is because emotions and empathy are a small part of management. Bulk of it is politics. And politics is a ultra-competitive space which it own demands.
        • Grustaf 9y ago
          You should take care to separate these two very different questions. You should also not forget that there are values other than monetary. I'm sure most people "value" their midwives or nannies infinitely higher than their plumbers or even bankers.
          • Mz 9y ago
            Yes, that is why nannies and so many other Pink Collar Ghetto jobs are paid so poorly: Because we value these people so much.
            • Grustaf 9y ago
    • chillacy 9y ago
      Well that's sort of the idea of stereotype threat, in that it can warp your perceptions of not just other people, but also yourself, and that the self-doubt will cause you to do worse or drop out in the long run. I recall we had a comment exchange awhile ago about optimism/pessimism in the parable of The Two Travelers and the Farmer. In this case both the parent commenter and I may have had the exact same score in terms of seconds to an answer, but we both perceived the significance very differently. I also shared the idea that "it's easier to change ourselves than it is to change the world". I think this might be an example of where that could be applied. (Of course easy for me to say, I haven't lived my life with subtle social cues that told me not to be good at math or spatial reasoning, but there are other areas in life where I get to apply the same lessons).
      • Mz 9y ago
        I have spent a lot of years working on changing myself. My default preference is to focus first on what I have the most immediate control over. A) I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world. B) For things like sexism (racism, etc), there comes a point past which the world needs to change if your life is to have any hope of actually improving.
        • chillacy 9y ago
          > I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world. What if the inverse was true and changing the world was easy, and changing yourself was hard? If somehow you managed to change the world and not change yourself, then the world will be entirely fine, but you yourself will still suffer from the same perceptions as before (this is entirely possible, I've seen many a white male strongly believe that the world is prejudiced against them, and I recall some stats showing an increasing number who believe similarly in polling). In that case, the world is relatively good to them, but the mind creates its own interpretation of reality. Unless you believe people are un-changable, and changing the world means raising the next generation right and forgetting ours. Anyways, I'm not advocating to forget about activism, just saying I recommend looking inwards first before helping others. Like on airplane safety directions. And that's not a comment directed at you specifically, just a general observation to those looking outwards before looking in (it sound like you've done your share of introspection).
    • weberc2 9y ago
      I don't know where or in what decade this has been true, but in the United States for all of my life, media, every level of the education system, corporations, and governments do everything they can to communicate that women are as good as men at anything and better at many things, and that any disparity is necessarily caused by discrimination.
  • corford 9y ago
    Sorry to go slightly OT here but just for my own sake... can someone tell me where the bottom figure appears in the top figure? Tried quickly googling for it but can't find this test anywhere other than on the OP blog. No matter how long I stare at it, all I see is a flat yellow rectangle in the centre - it's driving me nuts! Edit: scrub that! Finally figured it out by deduction i.e. move bottom figure up so front face aligns with central yellow square on top figure. Guess I was expecting something a bit more fun with a "magic eye" style ah ha! moment :D
    • chillacy 9y ago
      Aye, it didn't appear instantly for me, but I broke the problem down like this: I decomposed the bottom figure into it's shapes, and the square stood out the most to me (it's composed of a square and 2 quadrilaterals). Then I looked for a square in the top figure, which happens to be in the middle.
      • corford 9y ago
        Yep, similar here though didn't think to look for the quadrilaterals! Just broke the bottom figure in to it's component shapes/lines and then stared at the top figure to see where the front face and the top two diagonal lines coming off it would fit.
    • peripitea 9y ago
      It doesn't seem like the same size though? Possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but the diagonals appear to be disproportionately shorter in the top image. Even tried measuring the lines on my screen to make sure it wasn't an optical illusion.
• throwaway91111 9y ago
  I wouldn't read too much into individual examples. However, in composite, these little tests do reveal how people think overall.
  • Mz 9y ago
    I often default to taking people literally. Because of that, people who don't like me sometimes suggest I am autistic as a faux polite way of publicly calling me a social retard. Although ASD individuals are prone to being very literal, I have observed two other types of people who tend to do that. The first are people from low context cultures, where you say what you mean and mean what you say. Except for certain aspects of military intelligence and information security, military culture is generally like this. My father and ex husband were both career military. So, I tend towards being blunt and direct. Some people find this refreshing. Others find it abhorrent. The other group of people that I have observed as tending to be very literal and taking people at their word is people with PhDs. Less educated people routinely leap to conclusions that are rooted in personal bias. People with sufficient education tend to consider only the facts in evidence. They aren't stupid and they aren't unaware of the fact that there may be additional facts not currently in evidence. But they are less prone to shitty, prejudiced behaviors that are the lifeblood of sexism, racism, etc. So, I am not at all confident that the way ASD individuals think is a) unique to them or b) evidence of mental defect. I am highly skeptical of the degree to which all sorts of differences get labeled and medicalized and framed as a defect. They used to do this to homosexuals. IIRC, homosexuality is no longer officially listed as a mental disorder (aka form of insanity). So, while I know that a battery of tests can cast light on certain things, I still fail to see why this specific test is seen as indicative of being on the spectrum.
    • throwaway91111 9y ago
      I was under the impression that the primary characteristic is social; that is, you need to have some sort of difficulty in social situations to qualify at all for "autism". I would not imagine that these tests would be the line between "autistic" and "socionormal" (probably not the right term) but between "autism" and some other diagnosis. So perhaps the problem here is either a) I'm missing something with respect to autism diagnosis or b) they shouldn't be portraying this as crucial evidence in public discourse, which is what i think you've been arguing for. Is this a good understanding? I might add i agree; I think certain fields attractive a different way of thinking that overlaps heavily with the autistic spectrum.
• olewhalehunter 9y ago
  The findings are beyond just diagnosis statistics and have been shown to correlate with other biologically male traits, like fetal testosterone. https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2040-2392-1-11 https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2...
• Practicality 9y ago
  "Why on earth is this a test for autism?" I agree. There is a clear gender difference in seeing color [1][2][3][4]. The use of colors here would invalidate the test for autism, at least in the context of gender difference, since it would be testing for how well you see shapes versus colors. 1: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191999 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191999 2: https://www.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-differently.html https://www.livescience.com/22894-men-and-women-see-things-d... 3: https://www.colormatters.com/color-symbolism/gender-differences https://www.colormatters.com/color-symbolism/gender-differen... 4: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-w...
  • throwaway88512 9y ago
    This response is laughable. Your links refer to differences in the perception of slight variations of colours, which (yes) women are more sensitive to. The colours used in the image are distinct, and very few men would have enough trouble discerning them for this to have a substantial effect on the results.
• vertex-four 9y ago
  I've heard that autism can present slightly differently in girls than boys in terms of coping strategies, etc etc, which makes sense due to different external factors. This may lead to the underdiagnosis - it doesn't "look like" autism in boys.
  • Mz 9y ago
    Some studies make it quite clear that parents treat boys and girls different from the get go and even outright interpret identical behaviors differently depending on the gender of the child. Recent HN discussion about that, with citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14875643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14875643
• 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
  Does this account for the fact that women tend to be underdiagnosed? Loads of people go undiagnosed: https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-11-undiagnosed-adults-struggling-autism-shadows.html https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-11-undiagnosed-adults-... I know people in tech have a tendency to try and break things. But I think everyone should give professionals in their respective fields just a little bit of benefit of the doubt. Remember, these studies probably talk about averages and populations NOT individuals. And that test was just 1 example of the problems they give.
  • Mz 9y ago
    This post is by some guy who calls himself Donald Clark and I see zero credentials given. I am not "in tech." Posting to HN says nothing about one's profession. At one time, I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. It was an unpaid position, I took it because I was homeschooling my 2xE kids, both of whom are likely somewhere on the spectrum. So, I know something about the issues of people on the spectrum and I know something about testing generally and my interest in this subject is not just some passing fancy because I am bored on a Sunday. Tests are just tools. They sometimes get misused. My question should be taken literally, not inferred to be outright dismissive, as so many people here seem to be doing.
    • throwaway88512 9y ago
      > This post is by some guy who calls himself Donald Clark No, the post is by a person calling himself Jon Reidel[1]. Who knows why he calls himself that, maybe it's his name? > My question should be taken literally, not inferred to be outright dismissive If you don't want to be perceived as dismissive, perhaps you should stop making strange, snide remarks about someone's name. [1] http://www.uvm.edu/ugresearch/?Page=news&storyID=23724&category=uvmresearch http://www.uvm.edu/ugresearch/?Page=news&storyID=23724&categ...
• celticninja 9y ago
  Autism in females shows itself differently to autism in males, it tends to be a lot less obvious because the traits that they display are unlike those displayed by autistic males. Further they tend not to cause academic issues and as such are not picked up by schools. I am no expert but I have a friend who has an autistic daughter and both her and her partner are child psychologists and we had a discussion about it only 2 nights ago, which was the point that I learned that one of their daughters was on the spectrum (she is approx 6 years old) comparing this to another friend of mine who has an autistic son and the signs that he was on the spectrum were apparent even at the age of 2.5 years old.
• belorn 9y ago
  I have heard first hand that there is a general rule among psychologists that its wrong and unethical to diagnose someone with neurodevelopmental disorder when there are no signs of impairments to the individual. So if a person has impairments and visit a psychologist, the psychologist might use several tests to aid and guide them towards the right help (or cross out wrong ones). The image test in the article might be good to do that (I would not know), but without the initial impairments it does nothing to imply if a person has autism or not.
  • projektir 9y ago
    > I have heard first hand that there is a general rule among psychologists that its wrong and unethical to diagnose someone with neurodevelopmental disorder when there are no signs of impairments to the individual. I've always found this a bit funny. I kind of understand why this is done this way, but it does imply that a person with a given disorder could end up diagnosed, or not diagnosed with it, depending on what kind of society/culture they're in, which doesn't sound right. I would argue that things like autism should have a solid diagnosis regardless of how it influences a person's life in a given society. The reality seems to be that we're just very poor at diagnosing these things, so we diagnose by proxy.
    • monktastic1 9y ago
      It doesn't seem crazy that there should be differing diagnoses by culture. Autism falls along a spectrum, and there are obviously varying degrees of anxiety, depression, attention deficit, and many other symptoms of diagnosable disorders. The question of when it crosses the line to "impairment" is pretty arbitrary.
    • belorn 9y ago
      I find it similar to how a doctor diagnose malnutrition. The exact amount of vitamins, minerals, and proteins needed for each individual varies, so you can't be sure within the natural variance when a problem occur by just measuring each level in the blood. So you end up with lists of symptoms that may indicate a problem by malnutrition, but the existence of those symptoms (like fatigue, stress, sexual behavior) are all interpreted by the society/culture you are in. I think the most important part is that people should not end up diagnosed unnecessary. Rather than rigid diagnosis, I rather have solid professional standards that require the psychologist to have a similar education and use techniques that will reduce cultural and social norms as influences.
• aaron695 9y ago
  > I think it is ridiculous this is a test for autism. Sorry but that is a pretty autistic response. It obviously isn't a test for autism. It would be part of a much larger written and possibly verbal test along with one on one medical support. Then holistically a medical practitioner could make a decision. You have a sore toe, it's probably not cancer. But do you have a sore toe might be a good start for toe cancer testing. It's just in the blog to make it fun. >Does this account for the fact that women tend to be underdiagnosed? Yes, this was acknowledged years ago. Like the fact men can get breast cancer was acknowledged years ago. It can still lead to mistakes and people being missed but the figures still remain approximately the same.