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It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any

It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing. When I tell this to people they understand immediately that I am in fact on that "spectrum".

4ndr3vv 11mo ago
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing Oh but they do. the "spectrum" is by how socially acceptable someone's autism is.
- rusk 11mo ago
  > how socially acceptable someone I intuitively understand this but has it been clinically defined?
  - mikestorrent 11mo ago
    Has social acceptability in any context ever been defined, beyond say, rules of etiquette? It's a free market and everyone is arguably entitled to test to see what it will bear.
  - lazide 11mo ago
    The entire nature of the field of psychology and mental health treatment is relative to pain and dysfunction. If people fit in well and didn’t have issues (either internal pain/suffering or society interaction pain/suffering), they are not applicable to the field.
    - prepend 11mo ago
      This is key and what makes something a disorder. Everyone experiences some obsession or compulsion. But only some experience it to the degree of a disorder. Just like everyone has some “autistic” tendencies. But it is only a disorder in some.
  - JohnMakin 11mo ago
    ASD is defined by the level of support the individual needs. It says nothing about “fitting in” or by pain or anything else like that
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      having friends is a level of support though
  - sundarurfriend 11mo ago
    I suspect part of your parent comment's point is that this is an implicit bias in the way the spectrum is defined and thought of, so it wouldn't be clinically defined in those terms explicitly. In other words, the "spectrum" doesn't exist to capture the variation in the autistic person's own experience - if it did, it would look very different. It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you, and the spectrum measures how much of a problem you are and how weird you are seen by their measure; which does map onto a continuous line in the same way. That does capture something useful, but only a small part of what autism actually comprises, and is much less useful at capturing the autistic person's own experience of it, and makes it a less useful tool to them than people might assume.
    - michaelt 11mo ago
      It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life. Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum. Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested. How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.
      - sundarurfriend 11mo ago
        > Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested. We don't ask just that, and the diagnosis doesn't hinge on those - in fact those account for only 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) of the 11 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder. The others are about the person's own experience with alcohol, the difficulties and psychological problems caused by it to the person themself. And that's for alcohol use, an external behaviour-based problem with a specific narrow scope. Autism is a much wider construct with much more varied impact and experiences, and yet in practice people are placed somewhere on the spectrum based mainly on external interactions and troubles. Historically this came about because people who were "low-functioning" caused more difficulties to others, whereas "high-functioning" folk didn't - even though they might have comparable amounts of difficulties and psychological anguish internally and in need of similar help too. This simplistic view is changing slowly within the field and with some therapists recognizing it better for what it is, but it's still not nearly as widely recognized as it needs to be.
  - toast0 11mo ago
    DSM-V [1] describes criteria / symptoms in two groups (caps from document, sorry): > A. PERSISTENT DEFICITS IN SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION ACROSS CONTEXTS, NOT ACCOUNTED FOR BY GENERAL DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS > B. RESTRICTED, REPETITIVE PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR, INTERESTS, OR ACTIVITIES For criteria A, severity is more or less measured by how much social impairment is observed --- that's a measure of social acceptability in some fashion. For criteria B, the severity criteria is about "interference with functioning in contexts" as well as observed distress of the patient. Interference with functioning can be related to the patient resisting the desired function, but it can also be because the patient is socially excluded due to their behavior. Although, I should point out clinical criteria in general and the DSM in specific are a formalization of arbitrary judgements that describe observable characteristics grouped into a diagnostic category; this can be useful, but it's not really an understanding of the underlying condition(s), it's a handbook of things to look for when a patient comes asking for help and what things to try to help them. If someone has the same underlying conditions but manages to pass as socially acceptable, they may not come in for help, and that's fine too. When multiple underlying conditions result in similar observable criteria, the DSM gets pretty confused; there's not much in the way of attaching traces and getting debug logs for mental processes though, especially out in the world, so this is the best society has, I guess. [1] https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(ASD.Guidelines)Feb2013.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(...
    - kube-system 11mo ago
      "Society's acceptance of a person who has a condition", and "a condition that inhibits social interactions" are two entirely different things.
      - notarobot123 11mo ago
        If I persistently ask awkward questions, that might "inhibit social interactions". If my community was tolerant and even accepting of this behavior it might not inhibit social interactions quite as much. They are different things for some behaviors but extremely closely related for others.
bonsai_spool 11mo ago
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing. Hmm, what are these 'colors' in your framing? I don't think anyone feels that ASD comprises totally distinct, 'disjoint' descriptions. It's true that there are multiple parameters along which one may vary, but that's true of any human syndromic disease, and probably true for any human disease, in general. Here's a popular press article that talks about a very recent framing of autism that uses clinical and genetic data: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/09/new-study-reveals-subclasses-of-autism-by-linking-traits-to-genetics/ https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/09/new-study-reveal...
Hard_Space 11mo ago
It seems a poor analogy, since it's impossible not to be on the spectrum somewhere, even if it's #000000.
- Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
  This is a misconception I see pop up frequently online. In terms of the color spectrum, there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. And while there are colors outside of what humans can see, we generally use it not to refer to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but only to the subset that makes up light visible to human eyes. Likewise, when we talk about the "autism spectrum," we're not including every exhibition of traits associated with autism. You can have some traits associated with autism without being "on the spectrum." Also, perhaps as importantly, "spectrum" isn't a term that generally applies only to color, or even electromagnetism.
  - Hard_Space 11mo ago
    I would argue that for the average person, therefore, 'spectrum' is an unfortunate choice of analogy, since most people believe that it encompasses every possible color. One should not need specialist knowledge to discuss an issue of this kind in common terms.
    - Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
      The idea that the word "spectrum" doesn't automatically imply "color" is hardly specialist knowledge, though. "There's a spectrum between..." is not an uncommon way to describe something where there's a range of possible things.
  - __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
    > there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it. Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.
sfpotter 11mo ago
Fun fact: some spectra are discrete, not continuous! And some have both parts. Depends on the operator...
- delichon 11mo ago
  Autism researchers talks in terms of "graded membership" in "fuzzy clusters" within trait space.
jckahn 11mo ago
This is the most delightfully autistic response to the article.
raverbashing 11mo ago
The current shitshow was the result of several misshaps and naive thinking - Group together "rainman" type people (and people with even harder limitations) with "not overly social/minor social impairments" - The current overmedicalization and diagnostication of everyday life wanting to label every minor difference between people - Current "education was too hard, let's build accommodations" which is good but not when you can get any diagnosis by shopping for it
- dr-detroit 11mo ago
  [dead]
- 453yuh46 11mo ago
  It is because how system works. You might be upset about label, but this is least worry for me but even people with great ability to perform as part of work team and no ability to form relationships need that help to get back into workforce and figure out what is actually going on with them.
maxbond 11mo ago
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors"... I get what you mean but I feel compelled to point out that colors are on a spectrum. A partition can be a quantized spectrum.
- rusk 11mo ago
  GP’s concern is that the quantisation scale is not representative of linear severity. It’s more like classification of disjoint characteristics tagged with colour
  - maxbond 11mo ago
    I won't offer an opinion of my own but I don't disagree with that take.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
dooglius 11mo ago
I think the former is what they are trying to imply?
renewiltord 11mo ago
Actually, the original word has nothing to do with continuity. That's a later adoption of it from Latin to English. So to be precise, you don't need continuity. It's just a re-adoption of the same word form the original Latin. But many without autism don't have that need for precision so they get confused by mixing up later word use in different contexts like you did there.
- rusk 11mo ago
  The present day meaning describes a continuum. The term could indeed be defined in the anachronistic terms you describe so it is anachronistic, which is a reasonable complaint when something enters common usage. We see terms redefined all the time thusly UPDATE I have exceeded my grace with HN spam controls The confusion arises from the direct import of a medical Latin term which means what it means in Latin, into the modern colloquial- this is important information
  - renewiltord 11mo ago
    Well, if one is being pedantic about a loanword one must admit the possibility of the word being loaned twice with different meanings. If one doesn't want to be pedantic, all manner of things are admissible, of course.
kube-system 11mo ago
And yet, colors themselves are arbitrarily chosen partitions of a spectrum.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Not exactly - there are very clear areas where everyone agrees the dividing line exists when you look a full spectrum map. Even most colorblind will agree with the areas in general (there are lots of specific color blind types but most will agree what area of the map is which colors even if you don't put any scale indications on the map)
  - QuercusMax 11mo ago
    Within a particular culture that may be true, but for example the Japanese concept of blue/green is decidedly different from most Western concepts which consider blue and green separate colors.
    - bluGill 11mo ago
      Even then though we agree on the zones.
      - kube-system 11mo ago
        Until my wife and I are picking out home decor. Then all of a sudden nobody can agree on what color something is.
  - watwut 11mo ago
    I argued over a color names with a guy who later admitted he is color blind. So, no, we don't agree on zones. I mean, it was rather clear he is off. Basically, he has seen different color.
  - blueflow 11mo ago
    The dividing lines are the purest form of social construction. "arbitrary" for some people and "everyone agrees" for others.
spongebobstoes 11mo ago
spectrum is a good word because of spectroscopy, where for example a single beam of light is broken down into constituent parts in this ASD model, a single person is like a light source, ASD traits are like frequencies, and ASD itself is like the EM spectrum this is useful because our best understanding of ASD today is multidimensional as you say, it is not supposed to be used as like "the spectrum" is a line from "normal" to "autistic" unfortunately most people aren't familiar with spectroscopy, but I think it's a good metaphor do you have a suggestion for a better word than spectrum, that could convey the same rich metaphor but be less easily misunderstood?
- jermaustin1 11mo ago
  That metaphor actually fits well with how it is interpreted in my head. Even the "visual" of a spectroscope's graph, just turned 90º in my mind.
- 453yuh46 11mo ago
  Your metaphor explains it a lot more than the definiton of one single color among spectrum. like some are proposing.
munificent 11mo ago
Here are three separate metaphors: 1. A linear continuum (like wavelength for light) from "no autism" to "really bad autism". 2. A collection of disjoint sets (like individual named colors like "cyan" and "puce") for cases like "really into trains autism", "freaks out at parties autism", "non-verbal autism", etc. 3. A continuous mixture of different properties (like rgb(.1, .2, .05)) for symptoms like "10% social dysfunction", "20% repetitive behavior", "5% sensory overstimulation". When people describe autism as a spectrum disorder, they generally mean the third metaphor. It's a mixture of different symptoms and different autistic people have different amounts of those symptoms but all people diagnosed with autism have a significant amount of them and their symptoms will have some amount of overlap with other autistic people.
- hosh 11mo ago
  Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1). However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). Both schools and state (US) programs use (1) to assess if a child qualifies for support. This is not always related to how to parent or educate the child. Fortunately, the US school system with IEP (individualized educational plans) are developed along (3). (Source: two of my kids have ASD) None of that necessarily helps in informal social contexts or in professional workplace settings. I think the American Disabilities Act covers reasonable accommodations for people with autism spectrum disorders, though I am not sure if it requires legal disabled status. Lastly: I met a Native (Navajo) family with a child that seems to me, have some developmental disabilities — but I think they take a very different approach. For one, they don’t seem to have the usual social stigma associated with this, and are baffled why I would suggest getting state support for early childhood intervention. If anything, I would not be surprised if they thought I was, yet again, someone unthinkingly pushing a colonialist worldview.
  - Pet_Ant 11mo ago
    > Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1). However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). My first thought was is (1) more of a projection of (3) from multiple dimensions to one, or more like the magnitude. Also, it is known thing or are "trains" a euphemism now like "friend of Dorothy"?
cardanome 11mo ago
The more correct way is to think about it as a prisms. It is multi dimensional. Also it is for autistic people. It grinds my gears when people say "everyone is on the spectrum", no, just no. Again it is only for autistic people and you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird. And no, just because someone is verbal and seems to be very articulate does not mean the person has low support needs or vice versa.
- QuercusMax 11mo ago
  I guess it depends on whether you consider RGB(0,0,0) to be on the same spectrum as RGB(100,0, 100) or RGB(100, 150, 100). RGB(10,10,10) may be awfully dark but it's definitely not black. On the spectrum doesn't necessarily mean you have clinically relevant difficulties.
  - cardanome 11mo ago
    The more helpful way to think about is that the neurotypical brain is like RGB(63.32, 12.3, 73.02) but with thousands or maybe millions of variables. If certain values are significantly lower or bigger it might cause you trouble. Having Autism is one cluster of values you can have. So is having ADHD. So is having Trauma. And many more things. And you can and often have multiple things at once and their symptoms overlap.
- d1sxeyes 11mo ago
  I find this take quite challenging, although I know it is one shared by a lot of autistic people. I understand that if a person has no support needs, they cannot be diagnosed with autism. But that person may still be neurodivergent, and therefore to me it seems to follow that you have folks who are autistic with high support needs, and folks who are autistic with low support needs. Then, you have neurodivergent folks with no support needs. But this seems to me like a difference in degree, rather than category, and which would mean that the “spectrum” analogy works quite well. With a clear understanding that I am not trying to minimise the struggles autistic people face, a sincere desire to learn, and an open mind, would you mind trying to help me understand?
brightball 11mo ago
Numerous people don’t realize this or that there’s not some simple consistent blood test to say “yep, he’s got autism.” Moreover, people have no idea how difficult this makes it to properly test anything related to it because control groups are so difficult. It’s why any type of study that claims something does or does not, definitively “cause autism” is highly unlikely. You can identify potential contributors, but that’s about as good as it gets. People in absolutes about this stuff can’t be taken seriously.
MichaelDickens 11mo ago
Isn't this a retcon? As I understand, autism was considered by many to be a spectrum in the literal sense, and the "colors" thing came later.
tshaddox 11mo ago
> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. Wasn't Newton making the point that we normally perceive and treat colors as qualitatively different, but that they're in fact caused by a single underlying mechanism that can take on any of a continuous range of quantities? Thus using the term "spectrum disorder" would be making precisely the same point, to describe a set of apparently qualitatively different disorders that are in fact caused by some underlying mechanism with a range of quantities? (To be clear, I don't know if any so-called spectrum disorders actually meet this criterion, and it's probably more complicated than that, but it seems to be the reason the term was chosen.)
yunnpp 11mo ago
Why are you "on the spectrum" for pointing out the correct use of the term? As far as I can tell, everybody else is on some spectrum of "idiot".
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  There's a whole genre of viral social media posts that amount to lumping anyone who appears to have cared quite a bit about something that's not obviously exciting (to most other people) into the autism spectrum. Especially historical figures. "This guy made tons of detailed beetle drawings and cataloged them in books! See, there have always been autistic folks, because he definitely was!" Like I mean maybe, but also he was a bored rich aristocrat before TV was invented, and sometimes there are no parties going on or everyone's hiding in their country estates because of a cholera outbreak or whatever, and "making shitloads of drawings and organizing them" was like 50% of scientific work at the time. So. Maybe he just had a lot of time to kill. Going by randos posting online, "liking things" and "knowing stuff" and "caring about things" are all autistic traits when present in any but the tiniest of degrees. It's ridiculous.
- bluerooibos 11mo ago
  It's getting a tad out of hand. A friend "jokes" that I'm on the spectrum fairly often any time I speak with any sort of passion on topics in interested in or care about. I feel social media has conditioned people to think of you're anything other than bland and "normal" in your personality and have any degree of uniqueness about you then you're on the spectrum.
  - pixl97 11mo ago
    >then you're on the spectrum. Sorties paradox. Everybody is on the spectrum, it's only called out when it's noticeable.
    - __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
      It was only after being corrected a few times for saying things like: > well, were all on the spectrum, that's how spectra work: they're encompassing. that I began to suspect that we weren't actually on the same page about spectra.
ryandvm 11mo ago
It should just be called the "well actually spectrum".
IAmBroom 11mo ago
> "...they mean..." It's always some anonymous "they". Those bad people. You know; not reasonable folk like you and me. "Them".
humanfromearth9 11mo ago
Isn't a spectrum limited to a single dimension? If yes, that doesn't sound like Autism disorders (Asperger's, ADHD, verbal, non-verbal, violence, exacerbated sensitivity, social abilities...). They all suggest that there are multiple more or less independent/orthogonal. dimensions. And everyone scores differently on the combination of these dimensions. Which puts us on different coordinates in a vector space. Is this still a partition?
- pixl97 11mo ago
  >Isn't a spectrum limited to a single dimension? Typically no in the english language usage.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  I do think the word spectrum is most usefully applied to something that can vary only in a single dimension. The partition I'm talking about is a set of sets of behaviors. I think the vector space you're talking about is a set of people (each person being a vector on the basis of the sets of behaviors). So I think we're on the same page, just referring to different parts of the construction. I.e. everybody is somewhere on the verbal/nonverbal spectrum, and somewhere else on the sensitive/tolerant stimulus spectrum and so on for each dimension.
narrator 11mo ago
What you are witnessing is the process of "mystification" where it requires an "expert" annointed by some organization to interpret arbitrary criteria to make a politically or economically important determination that can't really be challenged on any objective basis. Since you are not an "expert", you are not permitted to do your own research and therefore by rule are incapable of being able to access the special mystified knowledge that only the "expert" has access to.
- pixl97 11mo ago
  That, or it keeps non-expert snake oil sales people from 'flat making shit up'.
  - narrator 11mo ago
    If no outsider can't explain why the expert is right and the non-expert is wrong, besides saying they're not an expert, then it certainly has the appearance of being a mystical power of the expert. After all, mysticism requires only faith in the mystic prophet to be true.
plorg 11mo ago
Perhaps this is just a different mental model thing, but in a spectrum each of those colors would be, maybe, a frequency of light or maybe even a range of frequencies measured at different intensities. Autism might be thought of as a band in the larger spectrum (think of the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums as subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum), and any one person might emit a different spectrum, like a combination of these different colors. An autistic person, specifically, would exhibit higher intensities in that named spectrum, and conversely the spectrum is identified as a part of the larger spectrum of human experience where people often show similar combinations of colors. It's always going to be a metaphor, but that's the way that I best understand it.
Terr_ 11mo ago
What about "constellation"? 1. We've seen them long before we could really investigate them. 2. We've already grouped them up based on seeing them in a similar direction. 3. ... But it might turn out they are actually very far away from one-another, or have important differences we weren't able to see before.
- __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
  It definitely acknowledges our biases better than "spectrum", although I think they want varying degrees of each component, and we don't usually take a little of this star and a little more of that one. I might've recommended "palette" if asked before spectrum got traction. Or maybe we don't need a better word at all, maybe we should try grouping the characteristics differently such that they're no longer all together under the same heading. (I'm not qualified to say, just a hunch).

4ndr3vv 11mo ago

> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing Oh but they do. the "spectrum" is by how socially acceptable someone's autism is.

rusk 11mo ago
> how socially acceptable someone I intuitively understand this but has it been clinically defined?
- mikestorrent 11mo ago
  Has social acceptability in any context ever been defined, beyond say, rules of etiquette? It's a free market and everyone is arguably entitled to test to see what it will bear.
- lazide 11mo ago
  The entire nature of the field of psychology and mental health treatment is relative to pain and dysfunction. If people fit in well and didn’t have issues (either internal pain/suffering or society interaction pain/suffering), they are not applicable to the field.
  - prepend 11mo ago
    This is key and what makes something a disorder. Everyone experiences some obsession or compulsion. But only some experience it to the degree of a disorder. Just like everyone has some “autistic” tendencies. But it is only a disorder in some.
- JohnMakin 11mo ago
  ASD is defined by the level of support the individual needs. It says nothing about “fitting in” or by pain or anything else like that
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    having friends is a level of support though
- sundarurfriend 11mo ago
  I suspect part of your parent comment's point is that this is an implicit bias in the way the spectrum is defined and thought of, so it wouldn't be clinically defined in those terms explicitly. In other words, the "spectrum" doesn't exist to capture the variation in the autistic person's own experience - if it did, it would look very different. It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you, and the spectrum measures how much of a problem you are and how weird you are seen by their measure; which does map onto a continuous line in the same way. That does capture something useful, but only a small part of what autism actually comprises, and is much less useful at capturing the autistic person's own experience of it, and makes it a less useful tool to them than people might assume.
  - michaelt 11mo ago
    It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life. Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum. Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested. How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.
    - sundarurfriend 11mo ago
      > Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested. We don't ask just that, and the diagnosis doesn't hinge on those - in fact those account for only 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) of the 11 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder. The others are about the person's own experience with alcohol, the difficulties and psychological problems caused by it to the person themself. And that's for alcohol use, an external behaviour-based problem with a specific narrow scope. Autism is a much wider construct with much more varied impact and experiences, and yet in practice people are placed somewhere on the spectrum based mainly on external interactions and troubles. Historically this came about because people who were "low-functioning" caused more difficulties to others, whereas "high-functioning" folk didn't - even though they might have comparable amounts of difficulties and psychological anguish internally and in need of similar help too. This simplistic view is changing slowly within the field and with some therapists recognizing it better for what it is, but it's still not nearly as widely recognized as it needs to be.
- toast0 11mo ago
  DSM-V [1] describes criteria / symptoms in two groups (caps from document, sorry): > A. PERSISTENT DEFICITS IN SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION ACROSS CONTEXTS, NOT ACCOUNTED FOR BY GENERAL DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS > B. RESTRICTED, REPETITIVE PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR, INTERESTS, OR ACTIVITIES For criteria A, severity is more or less measured by how much social impairment is observed --- that's a measure of social acceptability in some fashion. For criteria B, the severity criteria is about "interference with functioning in contexts" as well as observed distress of the patient. Interference with functioning can be related to the patient resisting the desired function, but it can also be because the patient is socially excluded due to their behavior. Although, I should point out clinical criteria in general and the DSM in specific are a formalization of arbitrary judgements that describe observable characteristics grouped into a diagnostic category; this can be useful, but it's not really an understanding of the underlying condition(s), it's a handbook of things to look for when a patient comes asking for help and what things to try to help them. If someone has the same underlying conditions but manages to pass as socially acceptable, they may not come in for help, and that's fine too. When multiple underlying conditions result in similar observable criteria, the DSM gets pretty confused; there's not much in the way of attaching traces and getting debug logs for mental processes though, especially out in the world, so this is the best society has, I guess. [1] https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(ASD.Guidelines)Feb2013.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(...
  - kube-system 11mo ago
    "Society's acceptance of a person who has a condition", and "a condition that inhibits social interactions" are two entirely different things.
    - notarobot123 11mo ago
      If I persistently ask awkward questions, that might "inhibit social interactions". If my community was tolerant and even accepting of this behavior it might not inhibit social interactions quite as much. They are different things for some behaviors but extremely closely related for others.

bonsai_spool 11mo ago

> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing. Hmm, what are these 'colors' in your framing? I don't think anyone feels that ASD comprises totally distinct, 'disjoint' descriptions. It's true that there are multiple parameters along which one may vary, but that's true of any human syndromic disease, and probably true for any human disease, in general. Here's a popular press article that talks about a very recent framing of autism that uses clinical and genetic data: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/09/new-study-reveals-subclasses-of-autism-by-linking-traits-to-genetics/ https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/09/new-study-reveal...

Hard_Space 11mo ago

It seems a poor analogy, since it's impossible not to be on the spectrum somewhere, even if it's #000000.

Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
This is a misconception I see pop up frequently online. In terms of the color spectrum, there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. And while there are colors outside of what humans can see, we generally use it not to refer to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but only to the subset that makes up light visible to human eyes. Likewise, when we talk about the "autism spectrum," we're not including every exhibition of traits associated with autism. You can have some traits associated with autism without being "on the spectrum." Also, perhaps as importantly, "spectrum" isn't a term that generally applies only to color, or even electromagnetism.
- Hard_Space 11mo ago
  I would argue that for the average person, therefore, 'spectrum' is an unfortunate choice of analogy, since most people believe that it encompasses every possible color. One should not need specialist knowledge to discuss an issue of this kind in common terms.
  - Matticus_Rex 11mo ago
    The idea that the word "spectrum" doesn't automatically imply "color" is hardly specialist knowledge, though. "There's a spectrum between..." is not an uncommon way to describe something where there's a range of possible things.
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  > there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it. Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.

sfpotter 11mo ago

Fun fact: some spectra are discrete, not continuous! And some have both parts. Depends on the operator...

delichon 11mo ago
Autism researchers talks in terms of "graded membership" in "fuzzy clusters" within trait space.

jckahn 11mo ago

This is the most delightfully autistic response to the article.

raverbashing 11mo ago

The current shitshow was the result of several misshaps and naive thinking - Group together "rainman" type people (and people with even harder limitations) with "not overly social/minor social impairments" - The current overmedicalization and diagnostication of everyday life wanting to label every minor difference between people - Current "education was too hard, let's build accommodations" which is good but not when you can get any diagnosis by shopping for it

dr-detroit 11mo ago
[dead]
453yuh46 11mo ago
It is because how system works. You might be upset about label, but this is least worry for me but even people with great ability to perform as part of work team and no ability to form relationships need that help to get back into workforce and figure out what is actually going on with them.

maxbond 11mo ago

> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors"... I get what you mean but I feel compelled to point out that colors are on a spectrum. A partition can be a quantized spectrum.

rusk 11mo ago
GP’s concern is that the quantisation scale is not representative of linear severity. It’s more like classification of disjoint characteristics tagged with colour
- maxbond 11mo ago
  I won't offer an opinion of my own but I don't disagree with that take.
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dooglius 11mo ago

I think the former is what they are trying to imply?

renewiltord 11mo ago

Actually, the original word has nothing to do with continuity. That's a later adoption of it from Latin to English. So to be precise, you don't need continuity. It's just a re-adoption of the same word form the original Latin. But many without autism don't have that need for precision so they get confused by mixing up later word use in different contexts like you did there.

rusk 11mo ago
The present day meaning describes a continuum. The term could indeed be defined in the anachronistic terms you describe so it is anachronistic, which is a reasonable complaint when something enters common usage. We see terms redefined all the time thusly UPDATE I have exceeded my grace with HN spam controls The confusion arises from the direct import of a medical Latin term which means what it means in Latin, into the modern colloquial- this is important information
- renewiltord 11mo ago
  Well, if one is being pedantic about a loanword one must admit the possibility of the word being loaned twice with different meanings. If one doesn't want to be pedantic, all manner of things are admissible, of course.

kube-system 11mo ago

And yet, colors themselves are arbitrarily chosen partitions of a spectrum.

bluGill 11mo ago
Not exactly - there are very clear areas where everyone agrees the dividing line exists when you look a full spectrum map. Even most colorblind will agree with the areas in general (there are lots of specific color blind types but most will agree what area of the map is which colors even if you don't put any scale indications on the map)
- QuercusMax 11mo ago
  Within a particular culture that may be true, but for example the Japanese concept of blue/green is decidedly different from most Western concepts which consider blue and green separate colors.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    Even then though we agree on the zones.
    - kube-system 11mo ago
      Until my wife and I are picking out home decor. Then all of a sudden nobody can agree on what color something is.
- watwut 11mo ago
  I argued over a color names with a guy who later admitted he is color blind. So, no, we don't agree on zones. I mean, it was rather clear he is off. Basically, he has seen different color.
- blueflow 11mo ago
  The dividing lines are the purest form of social construction. "arbitrary" for some people and "everyone agrees" for others.

spongebobstoes 11mo ago

spectrum is a good word because of spectroscopy, where for example a single beam of light is broken down into constituent parts in this ASD model, a single person is like a light source, ASD traits are like frequencies, and ASD itself is like the EM spectrum this is useful because our best understanding of ASD today is multidimensional as you say, it is not supposed to be used as like "the spectrum" is a line from "normal" to "autistic" unfortunately most people aren't familiar with spectroscopy, but I think it's a good metaphor do you have a suggestion for a better word than spectrum, that could convey the same rich metaphor but be less easily misunderstood?

jermaustin1 11mo ago
That metaphor actually fits well with how it is interpreted in my head. Even the "visual" of a spectroscope's graph, just turned 90º in my mind.
453yuh46 11mo ago
Your metaphor explains it a lot more than the definiton of one single color among spectrum. like some are proposing.

munificent 11mo ago

Here are three separate metaphors: 1. A linear continuum (like wavelength for light) from "no autism" to "really bad autism". 2. A collection of disjoint sets (like individual named colors like "cyan" and "puce") for cases like "really into trains autism", "freaks out at parties autism", "non-verbal autism", etc. 3. A continuous mixture of different properties (like rgb(.1, .2, .05)) for symptoms like "10% social dysfunction", "20% repetitive behavior", "5% sensory overstimulation". When people describe autism as a spectrum disorder, they generally mean the third metaphor. It's a mixture of different symptoms and different autistic people have different amounts of those symptoms but all people diagnosed with autism have a significant amount of them and their symptoms will have some amount of overlap with other autistic people.

hosh 11mo ago
Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1). However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). Both schools and state (US) programs use (1) to assess if a child qualifies for support. This is not always related to how to parent or educate the child. Fortunately, the US school system with IEP (individualized educational plans) are developed along (3). (Source: two of my kids have ASD) None of that necessarily helps in informal social contexts or in professional workplace settings. I think the American Disabilities Act covers reasonable accommodations for people with autism spectrum disorders, though I am not sure if it requires legal disabled status. Lastly: I met a Native (Navajo) family with a child that seems to me, have some developmental disabilities — but I think they take a very different approach. For one, they don’t seem to have the usual social stigma associated with this, and are baffled why I would suggest getting state support for early childhood intervention. If anything, I would not be surprised if they thought I was, yet again, someone unthinkingly pushing a colonialist worldview.
- Pet_Ant 11mo ago
  > Number (3) has better explanatory powers than (1). However, for the purpose of assessing social and family impact, it is rendered to (1). My first thought was is (1) more of a projection of (3) from multiple dimensions to one, or more like the magnitude. Also, it is known thing or are "trains" a euphemism now like "friend of Dorothy"?

cardanome 11mo ago

The more correct way is to think about it as a prisms. It is multi dimensional. Also it is for autistic people. It grinds my gears when people say "everyone is on the spectrum", no, just no. Again it is only for autistic people and you need to have support needs to be diagnosed with autism. You don't get a diagnosis for being quirky and a little weird. And no, just because someone is verbal and seems to be very articulate does not mean the person has low support needs or vice versa.

QuercusMax 11mo ago
I guess it depends on whether you consider RGB(0,0,0) to be on the same spectrum as RGB(100,0, 100) or RGB(100, 150, 100). RGB(10,10,10) may be awfully dark but it's definitely not black. On the spectrum doesn't necessarily mean you have clinically relevant difficulties.
- cardanome 11mo ago
  The more helpful way to think about is that the neurotypical brain is like RGB(63.32, 12.3, 73.02) but with thousands or maybe millions of variables. If certain values are significantly lower or bigger it might cause you trouble. Having Autism is one cluster of values you can have. So is having ADHD. So is having Trauma. And many more things. And you can and often have multiple things at once and their symptoms overlap.
d1sxeyes 11mo ago
I find this take quite challenging, although I know it is one shared by a lot of autistic people. I understand that if a person has no support needs, they cannot be diagnosed with autism. But that person may still be neurodivergent, and therefore to me it seems to follow that you have folks who are autistic with high support needs, and folks who are autistic with low support needs. Then, you have neurodivergent folks with no support needs. But this seems to me like a difference in degree, rather than category, and which would mean that the “spectrum” analogy works quite well. With a clear understanding that I am not trying to minimise the struggles autistic people face, a sincere desire to learn, and an open mind, would you mind trying to help me understand?

brightball 11mo ago

Numerous people don’t realize this or that there’s not some simple consistent blood test to say “yep, he’s got autism.” Moreover, people have no idea how difficult this makes it to properly test anything related to it because control groups are so difficult. It’s why any type of study that claims something does or does not, definitively “cause autism” is highly unlikely. You can identify potential contributors, but that’s about as good as it gets. People in absolutes about this stuff can’t be taken seriously.

MichaelDickens 11mo ago

Isn't this a retcon? As I understand, autism was considered by many to be a spectrum in the literal sense, and the "colors" thing came later.

tshaddox 11mo ago

> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. Wasn't Newton making the point that we normally perceive and treat colors as qualitatively different, but that they're in fact caused by a single underlying mechanism that can take on any of a continuous range of quantities? Thus using the term "spectrum disorder" would be making precisely the same point, to describe a set of apparently qualitatively different disorders that are in fact caused by some underlying mechanism with a range of quantities? (To be clear, I don't know if any so-called spectrum disorders actually meet this criterion, and it's probably more complicated than that, but it seems to be the reason the term was chosen.)

yunnpp 11mo ago

Why are you "on the spectrum" for pointing out the correct use of the term? As far as I can tell, everybody else is on some spectrum of "idiot".

phantasmish 11mo ago
There's a whole genre of viral social media posts that amount to lumping anyone who appears to have cared quite a bit about something that's not obviously exciting (to most other people) into the autism spectrum. Especially historical figures. "This guy made tons of detailed beetle drawings and cataloged them in books! See, there have always been autistic folks, because he definitely was!" Like I mean maybe, but also he was a bored rich aristocrat before TV was invented, and sometimes there are no parties going on or everyone's hiding in their country estates because of a cholera outbreak or whatever, and "making shitloads of drawings and organizing them" was like 50% of scientific work at the time. So. Maybe he just had a lot of time to kill. Going by randos posting online, "liking things" and "knowing stuff" and "caring about things" are all autistic traits when present in any but the tiniest of degrees. It's ridiculous.
bluerooibos 11mo ago
It's getting a tad out of hand. A friend "jokes" that I'm on the spectrum fairly often any time I speak with any sort of passion on topics in interested in or care about. I feel social media has conditioned people to think of you're anything other than bland and "normal" in your personality and have any degree of uniqueness about you then you're on the spectrum.
- pixl97 11mo ago
  >then you're on the spectrum. Sorties paradox. Everybody is on the spectrum, it's only called out when it's noticeable.
  - __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
    It was only after being corrected a few times for saying things like: > well, were all on the spectrum, that's how spectra work: they're encompassing. that I began to suspect that we weren't actually on the same page about spectra.

ryandvm 11mo ago

It should just be called the "well actually spectrum".

IAmBroom 11mo ago

> "...they mean..." It's always some anonymous "they". Those bad people. You know; not reasonable folk like you and me. "Them".

humanfromearth9 11mo ago

Isn't a spectrum limited to a single dimension? If yes, that doesn't sound like Autism disorders (Asperger's, ADHD, verbal, non-verbal, violence, exacerbated sensitivity, social abilities...). They all suggest that there are multiple more or less independent/orthogonal. dimensions. And everyone scores differently on the combination of these dimensions. Which puts us on different coordinates in a vector space. Is this still a partition?

pixl97 11mo ago
>Isn't a spectrum limited to a single dimension? Typically no in the english language usage.
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__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
I do think the word spectrum is most usefully applied to something that can vary only in a single dimension. The partition I'm talking about is a set of sets of behaviors. I think the vector space you're talking about is a set of people (each person being a vector on the basis of the sets of behaviors). So I think we're on the same page, just referring to different parts of the construction. I.e. everybody is somewhere on the verbal/nonverbal spectrum, and somewhere else on the sensitive/tolerant stimulus spectrum and so on for each dimension.

narrator 11mo ago

What you are witnessing is the process of "mystification" where it requires an "expert" annointed by some organization to interpret arbitrary criteria to make a politically or economically important determination that can't really be challenged on any objective basis. Since you are not an "expert", you are not permitted to do your own research and therefore by rule are incapable of being able to access the special mystified knowledge that only the "expert" has access to.

pixl97 11mo ago
That, or it keeps non-expert snake oil sales people from 'flat making shit up'.
- narrator 11mo ago
  If no outsider can't explain why the expert is right and the non-expert is wrong, besides saying they're not an expert, then it certainly has the appearance of being a mystical power of the expert. After all, mysticism requires only faith in the mystic prophet to be true.

plorg 11mo ago

Perhaps this is just a different mental model thing, but in a spectrum each of those colors would be, maybe, a frequency of light or maybe even a range of frequencies measured at different intensities. Autism might be thought of as a band in the larger spectrum (think of the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums as subsets of the electromagnetic spectrum), and any one person might emit a different spectrum, like a combination of these different colors. An autistic person, specifically, would exhibit higher intensities in that named spectrum, and conversely the spectrum is identified as a part of the larger spectrum of human experience where people often show similar combinations of colors. It's always going to be a metaphor, but that's the way that I best understand it.

Terr_ 11mo ago

What about "constellation"? 1. We've seen them long before we could really investigate them. 2. We've already grouped them up based on seeing them in a similar direction. 3. ... But it might turn out they are actually very far away from one-another, or have important differences we weren't able to see before.

__MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
It definitely acknowledges our biases better than "spectrum", although I think they want varying degrees of each component, and we don't usually take a little of this star and a little more of that one. I might've recommended "palette" if asked before spectrum got traction. Or maybe we don't need a better word at all, maybe we should try grouping the characteristics differently such that they're no longer all together under the same heading. (I'm not qualified to say, just a hunch).