4 ms·

That's just human beings acting like human beings. Every orthodoxy behaves the same way up to a point because this is how primate power hierarchies behave. The

• skissane 5y ago
  > The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly. I don't know. I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's 2013 book Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity. Waterhouse argues that there has never been any good scientific evidence to support the existence of autism or ASD, that what evidence has accumulated undermines rather than supports the theory that it exists, and that it is past time that researchers abandoned the concept and moved on to something else. (At the end of her book, she tentatively proposes replacing the concept of autism/ASD with "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment".) But I very much get the impression that few want to take her argument seriously, not due to the quality of her arguments, but because people have so much invested into the concept of autism/ASD – there is a whole community of people who identify with the concept as a diagnosis for themselves and their family members, there are many professionals who have built their entire career on the concept, entire institutions, billions of dollars of funding (both for research and for support services), and Waterhouse's ideas are just too threatening to all of that for many people to seriously consider them. The social, cultural, political and economic/financial factors supporting the theory are more important than the question of its scientific truth. (To be clear, Waterhouse doesn't deny that the symptoms of autism/ASD, in their immense variety, actually exist. She has spent much of her career working with children who suffer from these symptoms, and she knows how disabling they can be for individuals and their families. But she argues that autism/ASD is a scientific dead-end in terms of actually finding effective treatments for these symptoms, that abandoning the concept is necessary to move the research forward to discovering their real causes, which will hopefully lead in turn to effective treatments for them.)
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    But researchers and clinicians don't believe that ASD is a single disorder. No professional assumes that clinical classification implies only a single underlying etiology, and a cluster of phenotypes for clinical distress is precisely what a classification is for.
    • skissane 5y ago
      In Waterhouse's book, she isn't simply assuming that "ASD is a single disorder". (Although she does argue that if you study the history of ASD research, a lot of it has been based on that assumption, and that even in recent years people still get funding for research projects which effectively presume that.) One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
  • clairity 5y ago
    my working hypothesis on spectrums of all sorts is that we inevitably misrepresent the extremes as separate phenomena (because, strong esteem boost for the “discoverer”), rather than the ends of a continuous distribution, and that causes us to misunderstand all sorts of as-yet-unexplained phenomena as problems. severe autism certainly looks like something different, but we’ve let the label, and the stigmatization that inevitably follows, to trickle down the distribution until it butts unnaturally right up against “normal” (asperger’s, in this example), creating cognitive dissonances we can’t reconcile. you also see this with adhd, introversion/extroversion, and all sorts of psychosocial categorizations.
    • skissane 5y ago
      > severe autism certainly looks like something different Some authors [0] have criticised that idea though. Severe ASD very often (but not always) co-occurs with intellectual disability, but intellectual disability with and without ASD don't actually look that different from each other, and we really have to ask how useful it is to distinguish ASD from non-ASD in cases of intellectual disability. Added to that, in many jurisdictions people with an ASD diagnosis get better services, so there is continuing pressure to reclassify people from ID without ASD to ID with ASD, not justified on any scientific grounds, but simply because they'll get better supports with the ASD label than without it. That has driven a lot of diagnostic substitution from pure ID to ID+ASD, and lends support to the argument that the whole thing is more about society and culture than actual science [0] see for example Graham Collins, "Does a Diagnosis of ASD Help Us to Help a Person with Intellectual Disabilities?" in Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, Sami Timimi (editors). Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. pp. 204–220