5 ms·

That would be "on a spectrum," not "on the spectrum." Wavelengths are all on a spectrum. Any particular wavelength may or may not be on the visible light spect

by smeej 6y ago

That would be "on a spectrum," not "on the spectrum." Wavelengths are all on a spectrum. Any particular wavelength may or may not be on the visible light spectrum, for example. "The autism spectrum" does not and has never meant a whole spectrum of all people, some of whom are just "autistic enough" to be considered "on the spectrum." The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all.

lcuff 6y ago
I mostly agree with you, but as somebody who is not on the autism spectrum 99% of the time, I still have had moments where I'm incredibly socially awkward, as most folks have had. Add this kind of temporal factor, and the spectrum spreads to cover us all, though there are still useful questions to ask: Is this person awkward enough so much of the time that he/she wouldn't make a good <x>. (Teacher/therapist/salesman/politician). The complexity re-emerges, we all have a spectrum of personality characteristics that includes autistic characteristics.
- smeej 6y ago
  Having some traits that resemble autism isn't the same as having an atypical brain. Autism doesn't just mean, "Damn this person is really awkward." If you look into the screening tools, you'll realize many of the questions are actually about sensory processing, not just human interaction. If there were a spectrum of human awkwardness, sure, everybody could be on it somewhere, but that's not what the autism spectrum is.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    Having some traits that resemble autism isn't the same as having an atypical brain. But even assuming that's true (which I don't think is actually known) how would you distinguish them? There isn't yet a genetic test or an antibody test or anything like that to distinguish autistic from non-autistic people, right? So it's based on judging the symptoms; and given there's a wide spectrum of symptoms, the categorisation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary.
    - zepto 6y ago
      I think that the results of the study in question suggest that you can distinguish a real systematic difference even from the stochastic data.
      - skissane 6y ago
        In practice, reliably distinguishing ASD from non-ASD is problematic. [0] is a PhD thesis which (in its first part) examines three specialist ASD diagnostic clinics in the US, with a >30% percentage point difference in diagnosis rates. It argues that the best explanation for that observed difference is differences in clinical culture between the clinics; and, that despite this substantial variation in diagnosis rates, the clinics took an unusually rigorous approach to diagnosis, suggesting that in a broader set of clinics (most of whom would approach diagnosis with less rigour) the variation is likely to be even higher. Although we have diagnostic instruments, such as the ADOS-2 (which along with the ADI-R is considered the "gold standard"), they have problems. One problem is that the standards for using these instruments clinically are a lot weaker than the standards for research use. [1] is a study which attempts to measure the accuracy of ADOS(-2) coding by clinicians, by comparing it to the consensus coding of experienced researchers – it found a high variability in the accuracy of the clinical codings – some clinicians were quite close to the research standard, others were a fair way off. [0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29560529/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29560529/
        zepto 6y ago
        “In practice, reliably distinguishing ASD from non-ASD is problematic.“ Agreed, but it’s not clear why that is relevant. Whether it is hard to diagnose or not doesn’t tell us whether the condition is discrete or distortion on a spectrum.
        skissane 6y ago
        Well, if we view the "spectrum" as including broad autism phenotype (BAP), and note that that the boundary between ASD and BAP can be very difficult to reliably determine, that seems to me to support the "distortion on a spectrum" viewpoint. By contrast, if BAP didn't exist, or if there was a highly reliable test to distinguish it from ASD, that would not support that viewpoint. So the reliability of distinguishing BAP from ASD does actually seem to me to be relevant to the issue. I think the answer to "whether the condition is discrete or distortion on a spectrum" is likely to be "both". I think the most severe cases – such as non-verbal classic Kannerian autism with intellectual impairment – are likely discrete conditions (albeit not a single discrete condition, more likely several). By contrast, the lower severity cases are likely to just be the extreme end of the normal variation of traits in the general population. I think, one of the many mistakes made by the authors of the DSM-5, was creating a single diagnosis encompassing everything from the most severe to the mildest cases, when it seems likely that rather different things are going on at those two extremes. There's a bunch of research that supports that view, see for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3451-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3451-...
  - skissane 6y ago
    > If you look into the screening tools, you'll realize many of the questions are actually about sensory processing, not just human interaction. A person doesn't have to have abnormal "sensory processing" to have ASD, even though a lot of people have convinced themselves that's what ASD is all about. Abnormal sensory responses is DSM-5 criteria B(4). You need at least two of B(1)-(4) to be diagnosed with ASD, so a person can meet the diagnostic criteria without abnormal sensory responses, if they have at least two of criteria B(1)-B(3) (along with criteria A,C,D,E).
skissane 6y ago
> The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. What about the broad autism phenotype (BAP)? BAP is very common in close relatives of people diagnosed with ASD. And there is no clearcut boundary between ASD and BAP – the boundary varies from clinician to clinician. (On that topic, see [0] which argues that a >30 percentage point difference in ASD diagnosis rates between two specialist clinics is best explained by differences in the culture of the clinicians.) If ASD is 1-2% of the population, BAP could be several times that. [0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070
iainmerrick 6y ago
The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. Well, that's the bit I'm questioning, although I'm definitely no expert. This Astral Codex Ten post would seem to back me up, although on re-reading it's more ambiguous: Autism is such an annoying thing to have on this list – just when everyone finally agreed there was an “autism spectrum” and no clear difference between neurotypical-people-with-some-autistic-traits and high-functioning-autistics, along comes this meta-analysis to say nope, it’s a taxon, neurotypicals and autistics are two clear objectively separate categories. I did hunt down the studies here and they actually seemed pretty good. But none of these results are strong enough to be more than suggestive, so I am going to keep believing in an autism spectrum until more research comes in. I don't know enough to rate the research here. But it does seem to me a bit strange to work so hard on communicating to laypeople that there isn't just a single condition called "autism", it's a whole spectrum with degrees of severity, but at the same time to still insist that only a small discrete set of people "have autism" and the rest of us are completely free and easy. As other commenters have noted, all the symptoms of low-level autism (social awkwardness, sensitivity to overstimulus, difficulty in communication, etc) are things that almost everybody experiences now and then. So it seems much more helpful to me to think of autistic symptoms as things that everybody has to a greater or lesser degree; so the autistic spectrum has room for everybody.
- zepto 6y ago
  Another possibility is that these kinds ‘symptoms’ are second order effects which everyone exhibits to some degree, but that autism itself is not. For example - here are some possible causes of a person exhibiting social awkwardness: 1. Slow/Deep processing of language 2. Distraction by other stimuli such as bright lights, visual noise. 3. Introversion 4. Lack of experience in the particular social setting. 5. Religious structures agains certain prevailing social behaviors. 6. A headache caused by forgetting to hydrate adequately during exercise. 7. A pressing need to empty one’s bladder. 1 & 2 are often associated with Autism, but 4 could result from 1 & 2 making social situations unrewarding. 6 & 7 could just be rare flukes or they could happen frequently due to ADHD. The point I’m getting at is that Autism (or ADHD) can be conditions with varying degrees of severity and that can be orthogonal to the fact that the symptoms present in a spectrum across the entire population, because each ‘symptom’ has many causes and is fundamentally stochastic.

by smeej 6y ago

lcuff 6y ago

I mostly agree with you, but as somebody who is not on the autism spectrum 99% of the time, I still have had moments where I'm incredibly socially awkward, as most folks have had. Add this kind of temporal factor, and the spectrum spreads to cover us all, though there are still useful questions to ask: Is this person awkward enough so much of the time that he/she wouldn't make a good <x>. (Teacher/therapist/salesman/politician). The complexity re-emerges, we all have a spectrum of personality characteristics that includes autistic characteristics.

smeej 6y ago
Having some traits that resemble autism isn't the same as having an atypical brain. Autism doesn't just mean, "Damn this person is really awkward." If you look into the screening tools, you'll realize many of the questions are actually about sensory processing, not just human interaction. If there were a spectrum of human awkwardness, sure, everybody could be on it somewhere, but that's not what the autism spectrum is.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  Having some traits that resemble autism isn't the same as having an atypical brain. But even assuming that's true (which I don't think is actually known) how would you distinguish them? There isn't yet a genetic test or an antibody test or anything like that to distinguish autistic from non-autistic people, right? So it's based on judging the symptoms; and given there's a wide spectrum of symptoms, the categorisation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary.
  - zepto 6y ago
    I think that the results of the study in question suggest that you can distinguish a real systematic difference even from the stochastic data.
    - skissane 6y ago
      In practice, reliably distinguishing ASD from non-ASD is problematic. [0] is a PhD thesis which (in its first part) examines three specialist ASD diagnostic clinics in the US, with a >30% percentage point difference in diagnosis rates. It argues that the best explanation for that observed difference is differences in clinical culture between the clinics; and, that despite this substantial variation in diagnosis rates, the clinics took an unusually rigorous approach to diagnosis, suggesting that in a broader set of clinics (most of whom would approach diagnosis with less rigour) the variation is likely to be even higher. Although we have diagnostic instruments, such as the ADOS-2 (which along with the ADI-R is considered the "gold standard"), they have problems. One problem is that the standards for using these instruments clinically are a lot weaker than the standards for research use. [1] is a study which attempts to measure the accuracy of ADOS(-2) coding by clinicians, by comparing it to the consensus coding of experienced researchers – it found a high variability in the accuracy of the clinical codings – some clinicians were quite close to the research standard, others were a fair way off. [0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29560529/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29560529/
      - zepto 6y ago
        “In practice, reliably distinguishing ASD from non-ASD is problematic.“ Agreed, but it’s not clear why that is relevant. Whether it is hard to diagnose or not doesn’t tell us whether the condition is discrete or distortion on a spectrum.
        skissane 6y ago
        Well, if we view the "spectrum" as including broad autism phenotype (BAP), and note that that the boundary between ASD and BAP can be very difficult to reliably determine, that seems to me to support the "distortion on a spectrum" viewpoint. By contrast, if BAP didn't exist, or if there was a highly reliable test to distinguish it from ASD, that would not support that viewpoint. So the reliability of distinguishing BAP from ASD does actually seem to me to be relevant to the issue. I think the answer to "whether the condition is discrete or distortion on a spectrum" is likely to be "both". I think the most severe cases – such as non-verbal classic Kannerian autism with intellectual impairment – are likely discrete conditions (albeit not a single discrete condition, more likely several). By contrast, the lower severity cases are likely to just be the extreme end of the normal variation of traits in the general population. I think, one of the many mistakes made by the authors of the DSM-5, was creating a single diagnosis encompassing everything from the most severe to the mildest cases, when it seems likely that rather different things are going on at those two extremes. There's a bunch of research that supports that view, see for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3451-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3451-...
- skissane 6y ago
  > If you look into the screening tools, you'll realize many of the questions are actually about sensory processing, not just human interaction. A person doesn't have to have abnormal "sensory processing" to have ASD, even though a lot of people have convinced themselves that's what ASD is all about. Abnormal sensory responses is DSM-5 criteria B(4). You need at least two of B(1)-(4) to be diagnosed with ASD, so a person can meet the diagnostic criteria without abnormal sensory responses, if they have at least two of criteria B(1)-B(3) (along with criteria A,C,D,E).

skissane 6y ago

> The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. What about the broad autism phenotype (BAP)? BAP is very common in close relatives of people diagnosed with ASD. And there is no clearcut boundary between ASD and BAP – the boundary varies from clinician to clinician. (On that topic, see [0] which argues that a >30 percentage point difference in ASD diagnosis rates between two specialist clinics is best explained by differences in the culture of the clinicians.) If ASD is 1-2% of the population, BAP could be several times that. [0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070

iainmerrick 6y ago

The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. Well, that's the bit I'm questioning, although I'm definitely no expert. This Astral Codex Ten post would seem to back me up, although on re-reading it's more ambiguous: Autism is such an annoying thing to have on this list – just when everyone finally agreed there was an “autism spectrum” and no clear difference between neurotypical-people-with-some-autistic-traits and high-functioning-autistics, along comes this meta-analysis to say nope, it’s a taxon, neurotypicals and autistics are two clear objectively separate categories. I did hunt down the studies here and they actually seemed pretty good. But none of these results are strong enough to be more than suggestive, so I am going to keep believing in an autism spectrum until more research comes in. I don't know enough to rate the research here. But it does seem to me a bit strange to work so hard on communicating to laypeople that there isn't just a single condition called "autism", it's a whole spectrum with degrees of severity, but at the same time to still insist that only a small discrete set of people "have autism" and the rest of us are completely free and easy. As other commenters have noted, all the symptoms of low-level autism (social awkwardness, sensitivity to overstimulus, difficulty in communication, etc) are things that almost everybody experiences now and then. So it seems much more helpful to me to think of autistic symptoms as things that everybody has to a greater or lesser degree; so the autistic spectrum has room for everybody.

zepto 6y ago
Another possibility is that these kinds ‘symptoms’ are second order effects which everyone exhibits to some degree, but that autism itself is not. For example - here are some possible causes of a person exhibiting social awkwardness: 1. Slow/Deep processing of language 2. Distraction by other stimuli such as bright lights, visual noise. 3. Introversion 4. Lack of experience in the particular social setting. 5. Religious structures agains certain prevailing social behaviors. 6. A headache caused by forgetting to hydrate adequately during exercise. 7. A pressing need to empty one’s bladder. 1 & 2 are often associated with Autism, but 4 could result from 1 & 2 making social situations unrewarding. 6 & 7 could just be rare flukes or they could happen frequently due to ADHD. The point I’m getting at is that Autism (or ADHD) can be conditions with varying degrees of severity and that can be orthogonal to the fact that the symptoms present in a spectrum across the entire population, because each ‘symptom’ has many causes and is fundamentally stochastic.