5 ms·

Autism hasn't increased

39 points by paulpauper 10mo ago

renewiltord 10mo ago
[flagged]
OgsyedIE 10mo ago
Skimming this it is a shocker to see the author citing Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of disclaimer. Lasker has repeatedly falsified results, given some feigned apology or redirection and continued the practice of falsifying results.
- gsu2 10mo ago
  Skimming the comments it is a shocker to see people attacking Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of link to more context.
  - cretinoid 10mo ago
    Well said :)
  - b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
    If only we lived in an era of instantly-available information easily accessed through ubiquitous supercomputers that we have in our homes and in our pockets. oh, wait: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    That's fair. He's a prominent figure on Twitter who posts a lot of charts and graphs on different and often benign subjects which get shared around a lot. It's not until you follow him that you realize his core obsession is promoting ideas about race and IQ in broad strokes. For example, singling out ethnic groups as intellectually inferior or more likely to commit crime. He has a history of posting misleading or falsified charts or data if their convenient to his agenda. If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia: > between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
    - afpx 10mo ago
      But, the above poster said he falsified results. Is that true? I had some LLMs search, but they couldn't find anything.
      - tptacek 10mo ago
        I don't know about "falsified results", that's a pretty strong phrasing, but here's an interesting story about research Lasker presented on Twitter, by David Bessis: https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not...
    - qcnguy 10mo ago
      None of you are evidencing your claims that he's unreliable. You just keep repeating it, even after being asked for specifics they other people cannot find. It seems more likely from these posts that Lasker is actually accurate but you can't handle true claims about IQ and race, so have unilaterally decided those must be fake because they undermines a left wing world view. But group differences in IQ are a very strong and well replicated result. There is nothing unreliable about those. Until you bring receipts we have to assume you are engaging in ad hominem for ideological reasons.
      - tptacek 10mo ago
        There's clear evidence just one comment back on the thread that falsifies your argument.
        qcnguy 10mo ago
        You mean your comment with the link to the claim there's no such thing as twin studies?
        tptacek 10mo ago
        That's not what the link says, obviously.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  For those who don’t know, Cremieux is a prolific Twitter poster. He posts a lot of graphs and charts and presents himself as purely objective and data driven, but follow him for a while and you’ll start to see he’s highly politically motivated and will pretend to be completely blind to any data that disagrees with his agenda. He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere. Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context. He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    He's also a main character in white supremacist Twitter, for whatever that's worth. Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      > Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism. I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
      - 10mo ago
- tptacek 10mo ago
  Marginal Revolution is a watering hole for all sorts of oddballs, some of them benign, some of them not so much. Lasker and Sailer are examples of the latter kind. In Lasker's case, you kind of have to be "read in" to know what their deal is, so it's not surprising to see them quoted without any context. That context is probably not relevant to what Tabarrok is talking about anyways.
  - ekianjo 10mo ago
    Marginal Revolution is basically just cherry picking data to fit whatever narrative is convenient.
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      Every public-intellectual economist gets accused of that. I don't take anything they say on faith and I don't regularly read MR because the scene around it is icky, but I also don't reflexively assume they're wrong about everything. Tabarrok and Cowen are not stupid.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
- coldtea 10mo ago
  It's marginalrevolution.com, what does one expect?
- blactuary 10mo ago
  Tyler is all-in with the racists and fascists these days
  - blactuary 10mo ago
    A couple of hit dogs hollering here
jmyeet 10mo ago
The example I often end up pointing to is the "rise" in left handedness [1]. It didn't actually increase. We simply stopped punishing people for it. There have been seismic changes in the understanding of autism (and ADHD) over even the last 10-15 years, let alone 30-40+. Once autism was considered only for people who were largely or totally nonverbal. It was only in the 2010s that the consensus formed that people could have both ADHD and autism. They were previously considered to be exclusive. I've heard many stories from teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism. With a modern understanding, it tends to be pretty easy to spot. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/history_of_lefthandedness_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/his...
- barrenko 10mo ago
  Not to mention smartphones and vertical videos that weaponized parental neglect.
- shermantanktop 10mo ago
  > teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism. Our tolerance for weirdos of all kinds seems to have gone both down and up at the same time. Why can’t they just be people who are a little unusual?
  - coldtea 10mo ago
    >Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism. If it's done systematically and has predictive power, there's nothing wrong with that. How else do you propose we diagnose something that doesn't show up in MRIs and bloodwork? Or we could just as well dismiss any mental issues entirely, and say "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist".
    - 10mo ago
mrjay42 10mo ago
The website is https://marginalrevolution.com/about https://marginalrevolution.com/about Whose founders are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen Tabarrok " In 2012, journalist David Brooks called Tabarrok one of the most influential bloggers on the political right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."[6] " Cowen " Cowen’s work spans economics, philosophy, and cultural commentary. He is known for advocating a pragmatic form of libertarianism that emphasizes strong governance, economic dynamism, and technological progress—an approach he terms state capacity libertarianism.[3] In 2011, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Prospect magazine ranked him among the world’s most influential economists in 2023.[4][5] " Those people and this blog is not at all a scientific institution, editor, publisher. And as mentioned in another comment, the person we're invited to read from Crémieux ("Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data."). " He was a speaker at the 2024 Manifest conference. Eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly was also a speaker.[2] Lasker has spoken out in favor of natalism.[2][14] Early in 2025, Lasker was a speaker at the Natal Conference, which has been criticized for including speakers promoting far-right ideologies such as Raw Egg Nationalist.[2][15] " --- Those people are not scientists, they cosplay knowledge and scientific process and will use data to serve their narratives. Yet another example that the info shared here in HN are vastly influenced by some angry teenagers with some kind of libertarian edgelord imperialist agenda. I mean, I'm assuming that's what they imagine they think between two games of League of Legends or wanking to deepfakes
- tptacek 10mo ago
  I find Lasker repellant and am wary of Tabarrok and even I think you need to dial this back a bit. Tabarrok and Cowen are both research professors of economics at GMU. It's no surprise people pay attention to research they call out.
  - blactuary 10mo ago
    GMU econ and Tyler in particular are not truth-seeking academics anymore
nodesocket 10mo ago
The All-In pod was talking about this on their latest episode. In 2018 Minnesota had $3M in Medicaid Autism claims. In 2023 that number rose to $400M! That’s a 13233% increase in 5 years. Nothing suspicious about that at all. Source: https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI Timestamp @25m : 20s
- jazzyjackson 10mo ago
  Might have something to do with 2019 being the year that insurers were mandated to cover care for autism, but yes also there are fraudsters heading to jail for taking advantage. https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/18/feds-investigating-minnesota-autism-centers-which-have-exploded-in-growth-since-2018/ https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/18/feds-investigating-...
legitster 10mo ago
My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality. I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
- graemep 10mo ago
  There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease. Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences. In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example: > It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and-mental-health-problems/adhd-in-adults#faq-accoridon-collapsed00f5abd-47da-4b0b-a32a-343f0d9ddf13 https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and...
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family. The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
  - gizmo686 10mo ago
    I blame the DSM for this. DSM 5 merged multiple diagnostics into a single "autism spectrum disorder", which means that the average case of autism became more mild overnight. This moved where the boundary for "severe" autism is in people's heads.
joemazerino 10mo ago
Most comments here are bashing the author and reference, not the material. Applied to a left-leaning professor (is: Chomsky) would be an interesting thought experiment.
bikenaga 10mo ago
Original paper: "Trends Over Time in the Prevalence of Autism by Adaptive and Intellectual Functioning Levels" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.70167 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.70167 Abstract: "The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends."

39 points by paulpauper 10mo ago

[flagged]

Skimming this it is a shocker to see the author citing Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of disclaimer. Lasker has repeatedly falsified results, given some feigned apology or redirection and continued the practice of falsifying results.

gsu2 10mo ago
Skimming the comments it is a shocker to see people attacking Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of link to more context.
- cretinoid 10mo ago
  Well said :)
- b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
  If only we lived in an era of instantly-available information easily accessed through ubiquitous supercomputers that we have in our homes and in our pockets. oh, wait: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  That's fair. He's a prominent figure on Twitter who posts a lot of charts and graphs on different and often benign subjects which get shared around a lot. It's not until you follow him that you realize his core obsession is promoting ideas about race and IQ in broad strokes. For example, singling out ethnic groups as intellectually inferior or more likely to commit crime. He has a history of posting misleading or falsified charts or data if their convenient to his agenda. If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia: > between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
  - afpx 10mo ago
    But, the above poster said he falsified results. Is that true? I had some LLMs search, but they couldn't find anything.
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      I don't know about "falsified results", that's a pretty strong phrasing, but here's an interesting story about research Lasker presented on Twitter, by David Bessis: https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not...
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    None of you are evidencing your claims that he's unreliable. You just keep repeating it, even after being asked for specifics they other people cannot find. It seems more likely from these posts that Lasker is actually accurate but you can't handle true claims about IQ and race, so have unilaterally decided those must be fake because they undermines a left wing world view. But group differences in IQ are a very strong and well replicated result. There is nothing unreliable about those. Until you bring receipts we have to assume you are engaging in ad hominem for ideological reasons.
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      There's clear evidence just one comment back on the thread that falsifies your argument.
      - qcnguy 10mo ago
        You mean your comment with the link to the claim there's no such thing as twin studies?
        tptacek 10mo ago
        That's not what the link says, obviously.
Aurornis 10mo ago
For those who don’t know, Cremieux is a prolific Twitter poster. He posts a lot of graphs and charts and presents himself as purely objective and data driven, but follow him for a while and you’ll start to see he’s highly politically motivated and will pretend to be completely blind to any data that disagrees with his agenda. He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere. Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context. He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
- tptacek 10mo ago
  He's also a main character in white supremacist Twitter, for whatever that's worth. Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    > Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism. I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
    - 10mo ago
tptacek 10mo ago
Marginal Revolution is a watering hole for all sorts of oddballs, some of them benign, some of them not so much. Lasker and Sailer are examples of the latter kind. In Lasker's case, you kind of have to be "read in" to know what their deal is, so it's not surprising to see them quoted without any context. That context is probably not relevant to what Tabarrok is talking about anyways.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  Marginal Revolution is basically just cherry picking data to fit whatever narrative is convenient.
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    Every public-intellectual economist gets accused of that. I don't take anything they say on faith and I don't regularly read MR because the scene around it is icky, but I also don't reflexively assume they're wrong about everything. Tabarrok and Cowen are not stupid.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
coldtea 10mo ago
It's marginalrevolution.com, what does one expect?
blactuary 10mo ago
Tyler is all-in with the racists and fascists these days
- blactuary 10mo ago
  A couple of hit dogs hollering here

jmyeet 10mo ago

The example I often end up pointing to is the "rise" in left handedness [1]. It didn't actually increase. We simply stopped punishing people for it. There have been seismic changes in the understanding of autism (and ADHD) over even the last 10-15 years, let alone 30-40+. Once autism was considered only for people who were largely or totally nonverbal. It was only in the 2010s that the consensus formed that people could have both ADHD and autism. They were previously considered to be exclusive. I've heard many stories from teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism. With a modern understanding, it tends to be pretty easy to spot. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/history_of_lefthandedness_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/his...

barrenko 10mo ago
Not to mention smartphones and vertical videos that weaponized parental neglect.
shermantanktop 10mo ago
> teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism. Our tolerance for weirdos of all kinds seems to have gone both down and up at the same time. Why can’t they just be people who are a little unusual?
- coldtea 10mo ago
  >Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism. If it's done systematically and has predictive power, there's nothing wrong with that. How else do you propose we diagnose something that doesn't show up in MRIs and bloodwork? Or we could just as well dismiss any mental issues entirely, and say "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist".
  - 10mo ago

mrjay42 10mo ago

The website is https://marginalrevolution.com/about https://marginalrevolution.com/about Whose founders are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen Tabarrok " In 2012, journalist David Brooks called Tabarrok one of the most influential bloggers on the political right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."[6] " Cowen " Cowen’s work spans economics, philosophy, and cultural commentary. He is known for advocating a pragmatic form of libertarianism that emphasizes strong governance, economic dynamism, and technological progress—an approach he terms state capacity libertarianism.[3] In 2011, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Prospect magazine ranked him among the world’s most influential economists in 2023.[4][5] " Those people and this blog is not at all a scientific institution, editor, publisher. And as mentioned in another comment, the person we're invited to read from Crémieux ("Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data."). " He was a speaker at the 2024 Manifest conference. Eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly was also a speaker.[2] Lasker has spoken out in favor of natalism.[2][14] Early in 2025, Lasker was a speaker at the Natal Conference, which has been criticized for including speakers promoting far-right ideologies such as Raw Egg Nationalist.[2][15] " --- Those people are not scientists, they cosplay knowledge and scientific process and will use data to serve their narratives. Yet another example that the info shared here in HN are vastly influenced by some angry teenagers with some kind of libertarian edgelord imperialist agenda. I mean, I'm assuming that's what they imagine they think between two games of League of Legends or wanking to deepfakes

tptacek 10mo ago
I find Lasker repellant and am wary of Tabarrok and even I think you need to dial this back a bit. Tabarrok and Cowen are both research professors of economics at GMU. It's no surprise people pay attention to research they call out.
- blactuary 10mo ago
  GMU econ and Tyler in particular are not truth-seeking academics anymore

nodesocket 10mo ago

The All-In pod was talking about this on their latest episode. In 2018 Minnesota had $3M in Medicaid Autism claims. In 2023 that number rose to $400M! That’s a 13233% increase in 5 years. Nothing suspicious about that at all. Source: https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI Timestamp @25m : 20s

jazzyjackson 10mo ago
Might have something to do with 2019 being the year that insurers were mandated to cover care for autism, but yes also there are fraudsters heading to jail for taking advantage. https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/18/feds-investigating-minnesota-autism-centers-which-have-exploded-in-growth-since-2018/ https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/18/feds-investigating-...

legitster 10mo ago

My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality. I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.

graemep 10mo ago
There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease. Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences. In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example: > It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and-mental-health-problems/adhd-in-adults#faq-accoridon-collapsed00f5abd-47da-4b0b-a32a-343f0d9ddf13 https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and...
Aurornis 10mo ago
> My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family. The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
- gizmo686 10mo ago
  I blame the DSM for this. DSM 5 merged multiple diagnostics into a single "autism spectrum disorder", which means that the average case of autism became more mild overnight. This moved where the boundary for "severe" autism is in people's heads.

joemazerino 10mo ago

Most comments here are bashing the author and reference, not the material. Applied to a left-leaning professor (is: Chomsky) would be an interesting thought experiment.

bikenaga 10mo ago

Original paper: "Trends Over Time in the Prevalence of Autism by Adaptive and Intellectual Functioning Levels" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.70167 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.70167 Abstract: "The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends."