8 ms·

Autism is not one thing. For some, intellectual disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it shares the same causes. For others, ID plays no part. e

Autism is not one thing. For some, intellectual disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it shares the same causes. For others, ID plays no part. even at the subdiagnostic level.

LoganDark 2y ago
> For some, intellectual disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it shares the same causes. I would imagine some expressions of autism are automatically called intellectual disability just because it's not understood well enough for people to effectively teach for it. Of course people will think you're intellectually disabled if you learn so significantly differently that most of the education that works well for most other people does not work nearly as well for you. That doesn't necessarily make you intellectually disabled though, it just makes you bad at doing the same thing as everyone else. Which, to be fair, is already the source of practically all of the social consequences of neurodivergence. My particular flavor of autism seems to make me a decent programmer (I hope so, anyway). While regular education also does not entirely work for me, I did self-learning that allowed me to still keep up in school, and I can still somewhat benefit from resources made for non-autistics, just not always as much as one is "supposed" to. I personally benefit the most from explanations of how something is implemented rather than directions to achieve certain arbitrary goals, because if I know how something is implemented, I will be able to achieve any goal with it. Nowadays, I can usually manage to figure out how something is implemented based on directions, so I can still usually learn from directions, it's just much slower / less efficient for me. I'd imagine forms of autism that are automatically called intellectually disability might not be able to "work backwards" like this, even if they are perfectly capable of autistic logic and reasoning, just because they haven't yet developed the skill needed to extract value from directions. I sincerely hope that further research in this field will finally reveal how to effectively help these people rather than just calling them disabled in the context of a neurotypical education.

Autism is not one thing. For some, intellectual disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it shares the same causes. For others, ID plays no part. even at the subdiagnostic level.

LoganDark 2y ago

> For some, intellectual disability (ID) is not separate from their autism .. it shares the same causes. I would imagine some expressions of autism are automatically called intellectual disability just because it's not understood well enough for people to effectively teach for it. Of course people will think you're intellectually disabled if you learn so significantly differently that most of the education that works well for most other people does not work nearly as well for you. That doesn't necessarily make you intellectually disabled though, it just makes you bad at doing the same thing as everyone else. Which, to be fair, is already the source of practically all of the social consequences of neurodivergence. My particular flavor of autism seems to make me a decent programmer (I hope so, anyway). While regular education also does not entirely work for me, I did self-learning that allowed me to still keep up in school, and I can still somewhat benefit from resources made for non-autistics, just not always as much as one is "supposed" to. I personally benefit the most from explanations of how something is implemented rather than directions to achieve certain arbitrary goals, because if I know how something is implemented, I will be able to achieve any goal with it. Nowadays, I can usually manage to figure out how something is implemented based on directions, so I can still usually learn from directions, it's just much slower / less efficient for me. I'd imagine forms of autism that are automatically called intellectually disability might not be able to "work backwards" like this, even if they are perfectly capable of autistic logic and reasoning, just because they haven't yet developed the skill needed to extract value from directions. I sincerely hope that further research in this field will finally reveal how to effectively help these people rather than just calling them disabled in the context of a neurotypical education.