My relatively uninformed opinion would be: what the mutations might be affecting in lower-order terms are some subtle parameters of prior mapping, or something like a lower threshold for whats considered to be sufficient fit for model validity, or what kinds of sensory inputs to give particular significance to. Under https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ Murphy wrote: disorders like huntingtons where its theorized that theres a tradeoff between risk of death and IQ. I am known as a word smith (and its an important part of my career, but Im not in journalism). So the technically autistic community could well be more intelligent on average than the general population, with the people who are actually labeled autistic being a particularly low-functioning subset of that population. And also reproducing younger (banking frozen eggs and/or sperm early for the IVF). The differences between 99% and 99.5% get swamped by other differences between people within that group in traits like energy or perseverance or whatever. Yeah, your reaction is what I was scrolling down here to say, but you beat me to it. A preference (or aptitude for) logical or systems thinking. The line here has an extra close-paragraph symbol, > (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here), which I assume is the one missing from the later section here. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene. There was definitely a sperg-normie dynamic on my last work team, all highly intelligent. I think somewhere in the 90s percentile of IQ is plausibly normal by SSC standards. Naive, narcissistic, completely detached from human interaction. The two may or may not be correlated (Im honestly not sure), but theyre not the same thing. For what its worth, I was diagnosed with Aspergers (which has now been folded into autism) at age 12 and as part of the diagnosis they did an IQ test with a processing IQ component and a verbal IQ component, and although the documents I have dont list the actual scores, the result is referred to in the documents as being very high in the verbal component and very low in the processing component. That would give me more than enough money to give the middle finger to all the ignorant normies in our politically correct society, with plenty left over to hire some bodyguards and build mechanical defense systems to insulate me from any of the outraged pearl-clutching idiots who decided to use physical violence against me when their threat of social sanctioning wasnt enough. I strongly doubt that. This is a common situation, but not with many genes of small effect. Either way, I dont think you can have one without the other above a certain level. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. Thats sounds like a significant amount of epistasis in IQ, so I agree its not that weird that a few people end up very different than youd expect from a purely additive genetics + additive environment model. Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt. Its 100% true. Instead of autism causing low IQ, low IQ (in a mental architecture that typically causes high IQ) would cause autism, and then of course when you look at the relatives of a downwards outlier you will find higher IQ. Naturally, things are getting worse. Maybe even only a small fraction of potential arrangements are just right to produce ever-increasing levels of some capability in the phenotype. Meanwhile, placing people on the spectrum equalizes access to resources, including insurance coverage. The reality is that weight training only increases strength in the motion of the lifts that you do. Probably wrong ideas generated from your writing here: We know that core elements of cognition not only do develop early in life, but *have* to develop in life. Another study showing how autistic people have higher prevalence in inpatient psychiatric units. First, the studies. >The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? Increasingly smart people at the high end, as the smart people tend to meet in college/at work and pair off and have super-smart kids. Her IQ has only been tested once, by a neuropsych, and came in around 90. So it may not just be something like too much of a good thing but the relationship between the seed parameters (genes) and the result (brain architecture/intelligence) is something thats chaotic rather than simple. Could you elaborate? Theres obviously no reason genetic factors would aggregate in a nice linear fashion in that kind of situation. Umm, what? Hood got his M.D. People with average or above average intelligence and autism are much, much less likely to be diagnosed, because one contributing cause of a diagnosis is seeing a psychiatrist, which is much more likely for people who are having trouble in classes. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. You underestimate the potential of a good emulation, I think. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. The brain has hyperparameters, just like an artificial neural network. Additionally, look at the lives of geniuses throughout American history. Question the second. Smart people who can manage things by themselves and mask the effects of their autism from others dont get diagnosed, because among other things they dont want to see a psychiatrist and can figure out how to stop people from forcing them to; they can also know the correct answer to psychiatric interviews and can figure out that the things currently bothering them are less likely to continue if they provide the correct answers. These are the people that make the Turing test invalid, youd think they were the chatbot. But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. Genes are not something where you can say, this is good, more of it will be better. Why is this the case? The mean could easily shift without creating a bunch of geniusesit is probably much easier to raise the IQ of average or above average people, just through some relatively basic improvements and guidance. Non-verbal people requiring institutionalization? and they seem just as likely to have unplanned children as less intelligent people with equally bad impulse control. Your argument also seems tautological to an extent; if youre defining normal as someone who thinks like a normal person, thats basically the equivalent of describing an object as being shaped like itself. Non-autistic geniuses are compatible with the proposed hyperparameter model, unless Im missing something. Do a lot of super smart people play the game? 2015, p. 81). Are there other mental disorders that track with intelligence? Ive heard stories of autistic children sometimes regressing in development around 2 years old, e.g. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. One way of resolving the autism-intelligence paradox is to say that familial genes for autism increase IQ, but de novo mutations and environmental insults decrease IQ. So the only question is whether the size of the effect is enough to fully explain the data or whether, even after adjusting out the degree to which autism is caused by mutations and environment, it still decreases IQ. If the extreme male brain hypothesis is true, then those girls have unusually masculinized brains. I dont know why, but my prior is that the mothers age matters more. It could be that geniuses are less visible with more obscure achievements because they work behind-the-scenes at institutions, whether universities or corporations. -.-). The Tower vs Foundation model seems to treat intelligence as if its an attribute like height or arm length; the modification of some static variable. I cant tell if this is evidence against Crespi or whether since all intellectual abilities are correlated this is just the shadow of their high perceptual intelligence, and if we directly looked at perceptual-to-verbal ratio we would see it was lower than expected. Since the definition of autism (as noted by Scott and discussed elsewhere in the comments) is primarily symptomatic, that means you only get the diagnosis if you display symptomatic behaviors meeting a certain noticeable threshold. Im not an expert on biology or genetics or neuropsychology by any means, but I feel like youre onto something with the tower-and-foundation model. FWIW, Ive only ever heard biological females apply the term genderqueer to themselves. I thought we were starting to get clear evidence that genes associated with IQ (through the proxy of years of education completed) were being selected AGAINST in 20th century society, which is intuitive (educated people on average have fewer children, because time during child-bearing years is consumed with schooling). Suppose the only study on age-related mortality shows that people older than 30 are 1.2x more likely to die in a given year than people younger than 30, but does not give any other information. The Economist More evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria. My oldest child, a boy, is very high functioning. My original post talked about dual axes, functionality and intelligence, with non-functional high intelligence becoming, effectively, a distinct kind of low intelligence. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition Press J to jump to the feed. This study finds lower heritability than the usual estimates (which are around 80% to 90%; the authors are embarrassed by this, and in a later study suggest they might just have been bad at determining who in their sample did or didnt have autism. Because he was as skilled as me, and had real muscles. Interestingly, other/unspecified PDD and atypical autism also have a significantly higher PRS for neuroticism than childhood autism and Aspergers. The difference between high and low functioning autistic children is significant. Some people can correctly identify the pitch of a single note played on the piano. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry ), philosophy, politics, and futurism. I view it as absolutely crucial that bright kids get to socialize with kids like them, and also that someone teaches them how to be a functional person. 1), in which the genetic architecture of ASD seems to be different from one individual to another (Huguet et al. I married an autistic woman. (2) genes that promote autism are being selected for There are a lot more pathways to leveraging raw intelligence to acquire economic status now than there used to be, but very few that get you all the way to the point that youre fully safe from the tribe (since the tribe is now the nation and is thus also much stronger now). Lets say for example that parameter A is the learning rate in the part of the brain that deals with reasoning. We have limited time to dedicate to know these genius, and a big part of it is dedicated to old ones. Aspergers was definitionally distinguished from autism due to a lack of the cognitive deficits associated with that condition, but in 2013, the DSM-5 folded it into autism spectrum disorders, so this could make it difficult to analyse the genes of high function autistics if that was the mistake I believe it was. He taught himself the alphabet before he was 1 year old. I have read before that age of parents increases risk of autism. A simple model might be something like the genes for color vision. Or in the case of plants, their leaf structures are generated by a fractal pattern, and even small changes in the parameters of that fractal cause large changes in the ultimate pattern in a way that is chaotic and difficult to predict. Plausibly, a certain amount of narrowness and rigidity of focus will improve cognitive performance, whereas too much will cause impairment by making it too hard to get the big picture, switch attention and deal with competing stimuli etc. I feel like unless your definition of normal includes non-highly intelligent this is just so far from true. Avoidance of social situations. The change is even starker at the extremes. Thats high, compared to the general population (below 1%) but 50% is weirdly high. The optimal value is at 10.0 (for example). The top level of any domains is so hard that most people cant judge anything about it. my kid who is on the spectrum is 12 and ok functioning (doing well in middle school) i cant imagine what would get us into the therapist office to do an IQ test. Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. The fact that nobody has noticed and studied an effect in a subgroup is evidence that the subgroup does not have a large effect. For example, they are not extremely aggressive, but tend to be gentle individuals. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). Scott mentions selection bias, with people diagnosed as autistic being more likely to be the low-functioning ones, but then he seems fairly dismissive of its importance. Gender dysphoria. The hypothesis of the blog post is that two people with autism spectrum traits should have children with associated negative outcomes. Guys autism is not a thing. Coming up with elaborate speculations as to why a unitary autism would be characterized by wildly divergent and contradictory symptoms (like being very bright and perceptive and being completely non-verbal and unable to learn) just leads you further down the rabbit hole. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. Ive only found one paper that takes this model completely seriously and begins speculating on the nature of the foundation. Is it possible to measure autism on some scale, rather than as a binary category? . Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. Slate Star Codex Assortative Mating And Autism Posted on January 28, 2020 by Scott Alexander Introduction Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. Epistemic status: wild speculation backed up only by anecdotal evidence and theory. linear or quadratic around the average and possibly tapers off sub-linearly on the tails. If you keep stacking up genes that in isolation would improve your running speed, but that involve trade-offs or may have adverse interactions with each other by both modifying the same chemical pathway or something Eventually you have too many and things collapse. Thats exactly what we observe here. You tell them that the study that tried to address that question suggests that they are between one point one and one point two times as likely; in other words, at least 83-90% of their chance to die in any given year is baseline. The same principle can be applied to genetic traits. Six months later, the child was cured. While autism (and Asperger) has a lot of symptoms, there is one thing I noticed early on: people on the spectrum tend to take words very literally. Knowing how much of the genetic variance in intelligence (say IQ for an easy measure) is additive is probably good enough to figure out how off the purely linear assumption is. Ill share some info that might or might be helpful, since its just an anecdote. Immune systems that greet pathogens with a really forceful response on a hair trigger. And her failure to understand social cues lets her be taken advantage of by lower-quality men, who have sexually abused her on multiple occasions. His processing was below average. Kylounet is drinking a CAMBIER Double Galaxy by Brasserie Cambier at Terroir Alternatif. But the basic eugenics of moving intelligence higher at the margin through differential fertility, or the soon-to-be possible embryo selection for intelligence, this is not an argument against that. I then play out both parts of the conversation from memory as their mouth gapes open.). You don't have to be a diagnosed autist to be like that. For this reason, they dont tend to hang out with normal people much. why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? For that matter, some amazing ingenuity went into ancient engineeringenough so that I think we still dont know exactly how the Incas built Machu Pichu or the Egyptians built the pyramids. Now there is a very strong effect towards their fathers being less intelligent than usual. I really like this change. Autism As A Disorder Of High Intelligence, A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence, https://hennyk.com/autism-and-perfect-pitch/, https://hennyk.com/book-perfect-pitch-in-the-key-of-autism/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZn4x3uOac, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd54l8gfi7M, distinction between people with high functioning autism and Aspergers. If you have too many, your legs are bizarrely long twigs that you totter around on like a newborn giraffe, and youve just gone to far so you wont be a great runner. I would expect a challenge, in testing the intelligence of Autistics. The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. Second, even if the test itself is good, autistic people may be bad at test-taking for other reasons for example, they dont understand the directions, or theyre anxious about the social interaction required to answer an examiners quetsions. Indeed, higher survival rates over time might also explain why were seeing a real increase in the number of autistic children over time more of them are living long enough to be diagnosed with autism in the first place. In this model, theres a ceiling to your intellectual ability thats set by each of those components. 80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. no IQb + mgl: normal Perhaps this is an obvious point with an obvious answer, but wouldnt female prevalence of diagnosed autism be expected to be markedly lower? This pattern is not uncommon (my son followed this trajectory), and is partly responsible for the even less uncommon belief that vaccines cause autism, because the regression coincides with vaccination. Most of my coworkers (except for the youngest ones) are married, and many have children. Autistic people being diagnosed with intellectual disabilities before theyre able to to talk and not really being undiagnosed when theyve demonstrated higher levels of ability is very much a thing. But its frankly unclear who it is talking about. Maybe this is old news to most people, so I wont belabor that point any more, but what about the link between high IQ and a different immune function? 10.0 is the optimal learning rate, and 9.5 is good, then 10.5 is typically also good. I guess in a context-specific sense, normal is being defined as not-autistic? This friend had been working for many years with Leroy Hood. If the g factor and IQ gains from the Flynn Effect are negatively correlated, then does that mean that IQ tests are gradually being more and more poorly designed over time? (So I dont understand why confidence goes down so much for point 5 in the conclusion of the original post, from 80 to 25 percent.). Above a certain level of gain, the system _wants_ to break down. Its not because simply being small or being large or having a flat face are inherently unhealthy traits; there are other species that are much smaller than Yorkies, much larger than Great Danes, and have flatter faces than Pugs, without suffering any problems as a result. Further (indirect) confirmation of the autism-IQ link comes from evolutionary investigations. Because they survived due to wearing helmets, and we were only measuring *surviving* soldiers, helmets appeared to increase the number of head injuries, rather than decrease their severity. Id figured out myself how to do that, but tried to hide that I knew how because I thought I wasnt supposed to know yet. What will be interesting to see if we get weeded out before getting close to the top, and if the breakdown will stay the same. This seems like circular logic to me. Very simple and wrong toy model: One solution is to view your family rather than your schoolmates as your peer group. But the ability to notice patterns in the world, analyze phenomena and their causes/effects, understand highly complex and abstract concepts, and make connections between things all seem to be correlated with higher levels of social awareness and persuasive ability. My personal bet would be that different sorts of mutations associated with autism could be slotted into abstract prior-mapping-affecting categories manifesting through tiny quirks of cellular chemistry, and some degree of interplay between them and those that affect general nervous tissue metabolism and anatomy might also be the case. Yes indeed. I would say half of the up and coming civil leaders have hints of being abnormal. Kraus et al. Two of these are diagnosed as autistic, though with very different forms. Poor people have a higher infant mortality rate than rich people do. She has absolute pitch, an attribute that is quite rare in the general population, but she says an amazingly high proportion of her autistic students have it to some degree, even when they didnt know it. Question the first. Perhaps something similar but more extreme is true of autism: maybe autistic people are more highly represented at both ends of the IQ distribution. Perhaps different people train their brain using different optimization strategies, and when you optimize too well you risk ending up in the autistic basin of configuration space, which does well in the environment a fetus or baby faces. Score: Also, the Gardner paper has analyzed autistic patients fathers by subtype of intelligence, and there is a nonsignificant but pretty suggestive tendency for them to have higher-than-normal verbal intelligence; certainly no signs of high verbal intelligence preventing autism. In general, the less a dog resembles a wolf, the more likely it is to have musculo-skeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems. This always seemed nonsensical to me, because muscle is muscle; if two people are equally large, it shouldnt matter whether they were born that way or got that way through exercise. We cant do much about the genetic or random developmental stuff, but we can make sure most of the things that have stunted peoples intelligence over time go away. This is Crespi 2016, Autism As A Disorder Of High Intelligence. My wife is autistic. People running an emulation of normal are usually not staggeringly intelligent. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. Engineer/scientist social mixers with barbers/hairdressers and fashion merchandisers Agreed. Wheat has been genetically modified recently in ways that make it much worse for you. Regarding Narcissim, the first website I pulled up had these as the first 3 symptoms: * Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance It turns out that giftedness can be quite a burden for children and teenagers, as not many of their peers can relate to them and vice versa. There is also some link to male sex, I do believe that there are higher levels of males with low intelligence autism. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that our data suggests that the contribution of common variants may be more prominent in high-functioning ASD cases such as Aspergers syndrome. Epistemic status: not too bad, certainly good enough to have my old head of department, a grand old neurogeneticist interested in this if still maintaining healthy scientific skepticism. Higher IQ people have lower infant mortality rates than lower IQ people. Yes, I was thinking something very similar: Broadly speaking, its pretty clear that intelligence differeces come from differences in brain structure or organization, macroscopic and/or microscopic. Im not especially neurologically atypical, but enough that Im not confident I might not pass down some potentially deleterious genes. We often joke that my son learned English as a second language, it appeared that his primary language acquisition pathway just wasnt there. This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. In other countries including those in developed areas like Western Europe and North America IQ has been on the rise. I have many fewer data points on low functioning autistic people, who I have mostly met through church. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. Genes encode changes to these hyperparameters. Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. Some of this effect is because autism is caused both by normal genes and by de novo mutations and environmental insults, and the de novo mutations and environmental insults definitely decrease intelligence. Yes, the biggest gains from any given exercise are to performing that specific exercise, but gaining strength that way still allows you to do other mostly unrelated motions that use the same muscle group that you couldnt have done without those exercises. This meant that theyd routinely turn them off. Social rituals are incredibly important though, humans are social animals. IQb medium genetic load : high intelligence, autistic highly functional autist or autistic tendencies, strongly tenchnically inclined As a result, they have unbalanced physiologies; their bone and cartilage may not be strong enough to support their frames, their hearts may be too large or too small for their bodies, their nasal passages may be truncated because their snouts are shorter than the rest of their genetic blueprint expects. Physically, people with autism might have certain brain structures or modes of neural connection that are associated with high intelligence, but without the surrounding neurological infrastructure necessary to support those structures/functions like the poor Great Dane whose heart is too small and bones are too weak for his frame. If you are an expert in X, and the popular understanding of X is X, you will end up having the exact same conversation about X every time. Trump = President Camacho, the contemporary media is just as idiotic as the media in that movie, etc. If smart people are predisposed to have autistic kids (which Scott seems very confident of), another trait of smart people is that they tend to get more education than average. Why do people keep thinking charisma is normality, out or curiosity? Why would you doubt it if you dont have the data? This should be surprising; why would too many intelligence-promoting variants cause a syndrome marked by low intelligence? If were gonna sit down and make Smores, we need marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and a crackling fire. Evidence suggests the null hypothesis. My experience watching a relative currently diagnosed with severe, non-verbal autism grow up is that his diagnosis is a catch-all for he doesnt seem capable of abstract thought but we have ruled out all the other, better-understood potential causes. No one can offer more than conjecture about the cause of his condition, and no one knows how to treat it (unless you listen to the vaccine-chelation charlatans the way that his father does) so why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? In particular, this aligns well with the observation that de novo variants are more frequently observed in ASD cases with intellectual disability compared to cases without comorbid intellectual disability, that IQ correlates positively with family history of psychiatric disorders92 and that severe intellectual disability (encompassing many syndromes that confer high risk to ASD) show far less heritability than is observed for mild intellectual disability93, intelligence in general94 and ASDs. Anecdote is not data, which overwhelmingly show a negative correlation between IQ and fertility. They also have higher rates of having children with multiple partners. Energy/perseverance/drive and other harder to measure factors. But there is a critical point in the system, the feedback point, after which more isnt just too much of a good thing the behavior of the system changes qualitatively and the whole thing breaks down. Her condition presents with some speech and language processing difficulties. But by intelligence mean the ability of a complex system (a brain) to operate effectively; so being smart is much more similar to being able to run really fast or having a good immune system.. Or if (as really happens) it turns out that smart, ambitious people usually have their kids a decade later than dumb, unambitious people and usually the smart, ambitious people only have enough time in their fertility window for one kid while the dumb ones have time for three.
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