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A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- mikert89 1y agoPretty clear theres a tradeoff between social intelligence and other forms of intelligence
- userbinator 1y agoOr "there's a fine line between genius and insanity".
- ok_dad 1y agoIt’s kind of rude to equate autism with “insanity”, but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way.
- cwmoore 1y agoBit more than rude, historically.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoHe equated being insane with being a genius. Nowhere did he mention autism. I'm diagnosed as autistic and I am therefore more qualified than you to classify what is rude and what isn't rude to autistic people. I think misrepresenting what he actually said is what is rude, not what he in actuality said.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>Nowhere did he mention autism. It's implied by being in a discussion about autism.
- JanNash 1y agoDisclaimer: I also read it as rude at first glance. Question: Can you classify what is rude or not for autistic people in general or is it more likely that you might perceive something as not rude which other autistic people might perceive as rude?
- ok_dad 1y agoThanks, I am also autistic, so I guess we're evenly matched for this battle to the death :) Also, I wouldn't presume to speak for all autistic people, though I am one. Sometimes people can take the same sentence to mean different things. Please don't assume malice from others where it could be a difference of understanding. I am not mad or anything, I know how it is to misunderstand things.
- kruffalon 1y agoI just noticed (and got a chuckle out of) something: To me it looks like you first "assumed malice", got called out and now don't want to be assumed malignant yourself. Thanks for the chuckle! But in seriousness: would you mind describing how you interpret your own participation in this thread? I'm fascinated by this behaviour, but I suspect it's as "easy" as you not being able to interpret the original comment in more than one way. (Just as I'm doing too, or at least we both seem to act like it anyway)
- ok_dad 1y agoI said > but I understand you probably didn’t mean it that way. Which I assumed the person I was talking to originally would see, read, and understand to mean that their comment was rude but I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way. Instead, a bunch of others jumped in to interpret it a different way. I don’t see how I supposedly have assumed malice when I literally said that the OP probably wasn’t being malicious in a slightly different way!
- kruffalon 1y agoYou are correct, I'm not sure how I missed the second part of your original comment, my apologies! (I thought I could edit my first comment, but I can't, so this comment will have to do.)
- ok_dad 1y agoNo worries at all, I hate textual communication for the specific reason that it's hard to express true emotions through it.
- ACCount37 1y agoIs there now? High functioning autism exists, but autism in general doesn't seem to give any advantage to general intelligence. And the low end of functioning in autism is really, really low.
- ok_dad 1y agoThe spectrum doesn’t work that way, it’s more like a grab bag of traits than a “low to high” thing. High functioning is often just a way to dismiss the needs for certain autistic individuals who can mask very well.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoAnd for girls in particular, who go mostly undiagnosed because they tend to present very differently to boys.
- PaulHoule 1y agoI'd say otherwise. My wife has a student in her riding academy who is a severely autistic adult who is not independent and gets intensive support from her mom and aides that she hires who turn over rapidly because of the difficulty of the job. She has several seizures on some days. One beautiful day when they were tacking up the horse she thought it was a great day to take a walk (it was!) and took off down the driveway and they pressed me into service looking for her. She wandered onto the neighbor's property and when they asked her what was up she took one of them by the arm and started walking back to our place, she then let go of their arm and grabbed onto mine and I brought her back to everyone's relief.
- al_borland 1y agoYou know what they say, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.”
- tedk-42 1y agoYep it's like they're grouping all kinds of mental disabilities as autism
- dyauspitr 1y agoEinstein seemed to have absolutely no problems with his social life. Newton on the other hand lived and died alone, possibly a virgin.
- cultofmetatron 1y agoFeynman was also very charismatic
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoDitto for John von Neumann
- mrits 1y agoIt seems like there are a lot more gay guys than asexuals out there though.
- hollerith 1y agoIn Western Europe in the 1600s, being a virgin didn't make you a loser in most people's eyes like it does now. Newton had long friendships with other leading intellectual figures (Edmund Halley, John Locke, mathematician David Gregory).
- dyauspitr 1y agoNever being married did however.
- hollerith 1y agoThere are essentially no married virgins, i.e., essentially all the virgins are unmarried, so it seems inconsistent to consider the unmarried as losers but not the virgins.
- lelanthran 1y ago> There are essentially no married virgins, Which is something I point out to JWs rude enough to interrupt my Sunday breakfast. Which of the following scenarios present as most likely: 1. A married couple, living together as a married couple, had never had sex, or 2. They had sex
- shermantanktop 1y agoIMO ideas which make the believer feel better about themselves, particularly about their weaknesses, should be viewed with skepticism. Maybe those bright people with poor social intelligence are more likely to be labeled as very intelligent by others…which would be the kind of thing a social species would do.
- jibal 1y agoThat's not "pretty clear" at all--and you've provided no argument. As a lifetime member and former officer of Mensa, I know many people with both very high IQ and very high EQ.
- DrewADesign 1y agoThe smartest person I’ve ever met— like, well-cited research for all 3 PhDs and still does a lot of it, a few moderately popular books, yet also teaches very popular classes at a world-class university— is extremely socially adept.
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- jongjong 1y agoThis makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits. If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
- krackers 1y agoIf you believe in the intelligence -> compression thing, then the hard limit would be the komologorov complexity.
- eru 1y agoYou could imagine that an ever more intelligent person could solve your IQ test pattern puzzle quicker and quicker, or could solve bigger and bigger puzzles of this kind.
- jongjong 1y agoAlong these lines, I do think that most human problems don't require that much intelligence to solve. There are patterns which are counter-productive and best left unidentified if your goal is to create economic value. My PoV is that conversations around intelligence should be had alongside conversations about goals.
- eru 1y ago> My PoV is that conversations around intelligence should be had alongside conversations about goals. Well, one definition of intelligence is something along the lines of 'better able to achieve your goals (holding resources available constant)'.
- HPsquared 1y ago
- pizzafeelsright 1y agoIs there a blood test for autism?
- nickthegreek 1y agono.
- marklar423 1y agoThere are certain genetic markers you can test for, but not all forms of autism appear in the tests we have today. Then there's things like the folate blocking antibody (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4783401/) which you can do a blood test for, but again not all people with autism have the antibody.
- nerdsniper 1y agoWhy do you ask?
- thorncorona 1y ago> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation. I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
- metadat 1y agoIt is a long paper, so not immediately obvious. > The study links evolutionary neuroscience with neurodevelopmental disease, suggesting that the unusually high incidence of autism in humans might be a byproduct of selection shaping our brains. > It suggests that key neuron types in the human brain are subject to particularly strong evolutionary pressures, especially in their regulatory landscapes. > If valid, it opens a new lens through which to think about neurodiversity: certain vulnerabilities might be inextricable from the very changes that made human cognition distinctive
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoThe idea is that the same evolutionary process that rapidly selected human brains for intelligence also selected for autism as a side effect. Perhaps because the genes are proximally linked or it’s just the way brains work or some other random reason. It is NOT saying that for specific individuals intelligence is correlated with autism. That is actually not the case.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mavsman 1y ago[flagged]
- margalabargala 1y agoThe article is about how the fundamental nature of intelligence has certain weaknesses that will manifest. For example, a species sufficiently intelligent to discover acetaminophen is doomed to also create the sort of idiocy that is the current US administration.
- treetalker 1y ago[flagged]
- isjamesalive 1y agoI'm assuming the cure for paracetamol-related autism is equal parts bleach, ivermectin paste and hot sauce.
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't post trollish comments like this on HN. It's not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. Please make an effort to heed the guidelines, particularly these ones: Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- agentcoops 1y agoThere's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
- cwmoore 1y agoThank you for the clarification. Can't read the paper. Who was it that was quoted often a decade ago that described the intellectual variance difference between the sexes? The research concluded that women are smarter (just kidding) that men have much greater variance while women are generally closer to the mean and one another in abilities. Since differences between the sexes exist, I would also expect differences among the sexes to cluster for evolutionarily relevant reasons.
- zdragnar 1y agoBoys are diagnosed with autism 4 times more than girls by age 8. There's a certain amount of supposition that this is due in part or largely down to "boys being boys" type handwaving, though my two nephews are on the spectrum and neurodivergent behavior in them presented as distinctly different from simply being energetic (one being almost nonverbal). Though it's possible, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't actually a difference. However, the "greater male variability hypothesis" in terms of IQ scores is not terribly well supported by studies, and the difference isn't significant enough to account for the 4:1 ratio of autism diagnoses. As such, I imagine there's more at play here.
- cwmoore 1y agoPersonal experiences play important roles. As for the hypothesis, if not represented in studies, it is certainly reflected in penitentiaries.
- mrkstu 1y agoMy father’s (extended) side of the family seems to have once a generation severe autistic case and many of us less severely on the spectrum. Doesn’t seem to exist on my mother’s side with any regularity with similar cohort sizes. Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
- FigurativeVoid 1y agoOn which side?
- ErigmolCt 1y agoIf your father's side carries some of those sensitizing variants, it could explain both the cluster of traits and the generational occurrence of more severe ASD cases. That actually fits eerily well with the picture this paper is painting
- petermcneeley 1y agoWhat if it is more like Vegeta's super saiyan 2. A false super saiyan 2 form. Just like the real SS2 maintains both power and agility the real Übermensch will attain new levels of IQ while maintaining if not advancing a strong EQ. https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Insanity 1y agolol that’s an interesting comparison. Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself.
- greesil 1y ago’round these parts it's not atypical. Merely a categorization. Goddamn auties are so stubborn though, my way or the highway all the way. Okay bub, go explore and ignore the team priorities. Curse yer down votes, tell me rigidity isn't a manifestation of the condition.
- Muromec 1y agoYou are unfortunately totally right
- throwup238 1y ago> Another angle is that our categorization of what is atypical is the actual problem, and not the symptom itself. I wouldn't call it a problem so much as a fundamental aspect to human psychology as a clinical science. A lot of mental disorders are only really diagnosable by the impact the disorder has on the individual's life because of the fundamental limitations on external observers so at some point we have to draw a line or create a spectrum of what is considered "typical".
- mort96 1y ago
- PaulHoule 1y agoGordon Claridge thought the same about schizotypy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
- monkeycantype 1y agoas I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people
- throw81239821 1y agoReminds me of the armchair medical theory about autism being a disorder of brain density/dimensionality: https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/ https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...
- dboreham 1y agoI've wondered if it's something akin to an LLM with the wrong temperature or a GPU that's overclocked. If human intelligence is right at the evolutionary bleeding edge you'd expect some proportion of outcomes like that just due to randomness of various kinds.
- nikau 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409361 and marked it off topic.
- karmakaze 1y agoI'd thought that by living indoors and in otherwise controlled environments that there's not really much evolutionary pressure in any particular direction. Higher intelligence isn't a specific requirement to have (many) children live healthy lives.
- brian-armstrong 1y agoThis is obviously untrue, isn't it? A great many person has died maidenless, as it were.
- Muromec 1y agoNobody offerred them toyota accord either. Really unfortunate
- chongli 1y agoYou don't have to die to be selected out of the gene pool, you just need to fail to reproduce. If intelligence contributes to wealth and wealth contributes to reproductive success, then there will be evolutionary pressure favouring intelligence (and any other genes that "come along for the ride" with it).
- svnt 1y agoIt also weeds you out if you reproduce but your children choose not to (and/or don’t get chosen), which adds an interesting dimension.
- somenameforme 1y agoThe reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. As are intelligence, education, secularity, and so on. IQ is a decent proxy for intelligence. What many people don't know is that it's not a raw score, but relative. The mean of a population is always set to 100 and a standard deviation is generally 15 points. So an IQ of 115 means you performed better than 84% of people, one positive standard deviation. It was discovered some time back that the 'raw score' for IQs was increasing over time - meaning the mean kept going higher and higher. This is called the Flynn Effect. [1] People were getting smarter. The section I linked to is about the fact this trend reversed some time around 1990 in the developed world. Wiki uses weaker language 'possible end' but it's been tested and verified repeatedly at this point - we're getting dumber, and quite rapidly. This remains true even after controlling for obvious explanations like immigration. This is yet another reason why fertility is, in my opinion, the issue of the century. The world is going to look so absurdly different, and not in a good way, in 50 years, owing to fertility rates alone. We're very likely living on the tail end of a societal golden age. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
- strathmeyer 1y ago[dead]
- temptemptemp111 1y ago[dead]
- porknubbins 1y agoI have worked very closely with some autistic people and they were very smart in a human dictionary type way- knew a huge amount of facts but hit a wall very hard with higher levels of abstraction. Two things I see as required for cutting edge math or physics are intellectual humility and a lot of intuitive feeling for how to approach problems. Another way to say this would be not missing the forest for the trees.
- ErigmolCt 1y agoIt's kind of wild how the same traits (hyperfocus, detail orientation, pattern sensitivity) can be superpowers in some contexts but limiting in others that require leaps of intuition or comfort with ambiguity
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- porknubbins 1y agoYeah I am slower, clumsier and somewhat worse with memorizing details but still the person that is called in when there is something novel that requires cutting through multiple levels and using judgement. Though I am extremely thankful for my autistic coworkers since we complement each other as a team.
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- never_inline 1y agoIsn't this already quite popular theory? Eg: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8zqoBWBBHD2RjDuS/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8zqoBWBBHD2RjDuS/autism-and...
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- mfru 1y agoI just want to add that autism does not automatically limit these. I am diagnosed ASD and ADD with high IQ and altruism, empathy and collaboration are core principles of mine - because they are optimizing efficiency and quality of life on a societal level thus affecting the individual as well. You could argue that I am an exception but all ASD / ADD friends of mine also tend to at least view empathy and collaboration as important / useful and necessary, more so than many of my neurotypical acquaintances (which tend to be more conservative and focus on their small ingroup / family instead of a more societal / communal perspective).
- djohnston 1y agoI know someone autistic who also describes herself this way and was banished from multiple teams for being politically machevialian while also being incompetent - so YMMV
- mfru 1y agoYeah, on an individual level there will be a lot of variance including people misinterpreting their own principles / beliefs (leading to the situation you described). Therapy helps a lot with that + how to communicate them.
- lll-o-lll 1y agoIs this an intentionally offensive post? > Collaboration is the reason why we are here, along with altruism and empathy. Autism drastically limits all three. Autism does not reduce altruism. What are you trying to suggest by this? Autistic people are often the most altruistic people I know; going well above and beyond to help out (sometimes to a fault). Autism does not reduce empathy. This is a common misconception due to difficulties with reading faces and theory of mind. Empathy is often felt extremely strongly. Autism does not mean unable to collaborate. Here on HN of all places! The software world is full of asd people happily collaborating to do great things. > at the cost of losing core human characteristics like altruism, empathy, and the potential for collaboration. Ahh I get it now. The neurodivergent are not even properly human to you. Perhaps a little eugenics is needed to correct things?
- deafpolygon 1y agoPerhaps we are seeing evolution unfold in real time. The human brain is under constant pressure from modern life: technology, nonstop information, and increasingly complex social systems. Autism may not be a limitation, but the emergence of a cognitive style better suited to these challenges. Some researchers suggest we are at the beginning of a divergence in human cognition. If so, autism could be one of the first signs of a broader shift in how our brains develop.
- loa_in_ 1y agoNotably, technology is computers and networks but also pumps, presses, gears, everything since the wheel.
- ErigmolCt 1y agoIf their hypothesis holds, it sort of reframes autism (and maybe schizophrenia) as evolutionary trade-offs
- incomingpain 1y ago>Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution I have autism, I got a temp ban from one of the big autism subreddits because before I knew autism, I thought autistic people who seem to dominate the IT industry were simply the next evolution, far more logical, dont let emotions cloud your judgement. But I've since understood better that indeed it's a "price" or "cost". Having no friends, no social life, and having random people for no reason at all hate you is quite a shit life to live.