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A person can have autistic traits without being autistic. The diagnosis is how the symptoms affect the person as a whole, and if “Symptoms cause clinically sign
by snotrockets 3y ago
A person can have autistic traits without being autistic. The diagnosis is how the symptoms affect the person as a whole, and if “Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning” (which is why it's so hard to diagnose adults, because many undiagnosed autistics learned to mask their difficulties).
That's why you don't diagnose based on rumors or historical records. It's unscientific and unethical. And as Glenn Elliott is quoted in the link you shared: “One can imagine geniuses who are socially inept and yet not remotely autistic, impatience with the intellectual slowness of others, narcissism and passion for one’s mission in life might combine to make such an individuals isolative and difficult.”
Baron-Cohen himself is very much proponent of Asperger abelist view of autism: an ouccrance of some super-intelligent boys with social deficiencies. That definition isn't much accepted nowdays, when we know autism doesn't necessarily cohabitates with better cofnitive abilities, or being AMAB.
- xhevahir 3y agoI'll bite. Why is it unethical? As for its being unscientific, I'm also curious as to what standards of evidence people think are appropriate to biographical and literary-historical matters.
- snotrockets 3y agoI'll bite back: no informed consent. It's the most basic requirement from every research on human subjects.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoIf I speculate that Donald Trump is a narcissist based on publicly available information, would that be unethical? If not, how is it different?
- snotrockets 3y ago(I'm assuming) you are not a professional and this isn't a professional opinion. Me calling someone "dumb", maybe offensive, probably impolite, but as I'm not qualified to asses intelligence, carries little weight. A professional whose job is to asses mental capacity calling someone "dumb": just as offensive, but also unethical.
- xhevahir 3y agoSo, to take another example, if I were to say that Jonathan Swift appears to have suffered from depression, that would be a breach of ethics as you understand it?
- akiselev 3y agoYes though professionals agree to a medical code of ethics, whereas you probably didn’t. See discussions of the Goldwater rule [1] in psychiatry for more in depth explanations because it’s hard to explain without going into the very dark history of medical research and treatment. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule
- snotrockets 3y agoYou as a rando on the internet? Not, because your opinion doesn't carry much weight, if at all. You in a professional capacity? Of course.
- xhevahir 3y agoYou still haven't answered my question as to whether this medical code of conduct applies to a writer working in the fields of history or literary criticism (such as the scholar whose paper I mentioned above); nor the question of whether "scientific" is a quality one can reasonably expect of work in these disciplines.
- snotrockets 3y agoBaron-Cohen is a clinical psychologist.