But such an explanation is premature. Because theres a correlation between IQ and race, overdiagnosing the children of a higher IQ group with autism (or underdiagnosing the children of a lower IQ group with autism) results in a correlation between IQ and autism which is actually just caused by racial bias in diagnosis rates. Potential confounder: having a low-functioning autistic child is highly stressful and often unpleasant. no IQb + hgl: very low IQ, non-autistic mental disorders. The genes and developmental stuff is one part, an enriching environment in childhood is another, and the physical requirements (adequate nutrition and good health and few toxins present during critical parts of brain development in childhood, continued good health in adulthood). AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like. Broadly, intelligence might be, say: pattern recognition, ability to readjust priors, visual imagination, factual recall, procedural memory etc. If thats the case, if the Flynn effect ever slows down or goes into reverse wed be in quite a bit of trouble, and Scandanavia could be the canary in the coalmine for that process. Suppose also that these autism spectrum traits are associated with negative outcomes such as mental retardation, social nonfunction, etc. Maybe even only a small fraction of potential arrangements are just right to produce ever-increasing levels of some capability in the phenotype. While autism (or at least diagnosed autism) is rarer in girls, its very much not unheard of. And so humans recently had/still are having a massive selection for genes that require lower thresholds for immune responses, and genes that outsource some of the immune de-escalation responsibilities to gut microbes and parasites, etc in order to get a faster jump have proliferated to the point where a lot of these are normal now; this is the hygiene hypothesis or old friends hypothesis and the best outline of I can offer for it is the book An Epidemic of Absence by Moises Velazquez-Manoff. 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. Theres a question if you want to go really far out, outside the modern human range, and you might get unforeseen side effects. List 1 Avoids eye contact Doesn't smile Doesn't reach out to be picked up Rejects your efforts to calm, soothe, and connect Doesn't seem to notice or care when you leave them alone Cries inconsolably Doesn't coo or make sounds Even when adults with autism live outside the family, their families especially their mothers have extensive contact and involvement in their care. And in a sport like wrestling, which is heavily reliant on locks, holds, and pins, having those weak points could easily allow someone to overpower you. My stats-fu isnt strong enough to know if this actually pencils out, though. . The two may or may not be correlated (Im honestly not sure), but theyre not the same thing. For purposes of a discussion of this, I think its best if we restrict ourselves to unusual behaviors. Energy/perseverance/drive and other harder to measure factors. > (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. Autistic people have weird developmental trajectories. But that wouldnt be the way to bet, IMO. And rich people, on average, receive better medical care particularly rich white people. There are ways to reduce the loop gain of the system to increase the maximum gain before feedback, but ultimately they involve careful sound engineering theres no general parameter you can turn down to fix the problem, because the primary parameter you _want_ is the same one that causes the breakdown. Theres no reason to assume that every intelligence-enhancing trait necessarily increases weirdness. And so, wed expect that not every person blessed with a strong combination of intelligence-enhancing traits is going to have an excess of weirdness that they have to brute-force emulate their way around. Highly intelligent people are likely to have different interests, read and talk about different things, than average peopledoes that make them not normal? So for example, bench is largely worthless if youre not pushing people away from you. Second, my 3rd daughters birth was challenging. (When your edit window expires before you submit the edit, it just discards your text and you have to retype it? Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. For this reason, they dont tend to hang out with normal people much. One other observation that may interest people. A 120 year old comes into my office and asks what her risk of death next year is. For example, they may dislike the father for not doing enough when the kid is self-harming from overstimulation. If its just intelligence is good up to some point, then you get autism, how do you explain intelligence sometimes going way past that point without autism? Ive met a couple AMAB people identifying as genderqueer, but at least an order of magnitude more AFAB ones. I mean, doesnt that just mean there are lots of hyper-parameters and you can push one set outside the optimal range without maxing out everything? (For example, a too-big head would kill mother and baby until modern times; now it just means mom gets a C-section.). While their children are clearly at higher risk for autistic traits, I think they want to know whether they have higher risk for the most severe forms of the syndrome, including intellectual disability and poor functioning. It doesnt really present much evidence for this other than that autistic people seem to have high perceptual intelligence. James Comeys twitter and book are exactly what Id expect from a career civil service person. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . I recall it because the lowest functioning children all had loser fathers. (This sounds harsh, but I want a child at least as normal as I am). Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. On the first level its obviously because of the genetic abnormalities they have, but its not like we could look at those gene differences and predict that those features would develop in that way. [1] I assume most such genes do something way more complicated and hard to measure, but head circumference makes a nice example trait. She hoped to use this theory to explore why some autistics show delayed language acquisition. The note in the second image mentions adjusting for maternal and paternal age (among other things), and it doesnt look like the adjustment makes an important difference. The talented ones dont seem to put extra effort into being impressive for others sake. . There are almost no exceptions. EDIT: It draws on the VPR model of intelligence, where g (general intelligence) is divided into three subtraits, v (verbal intelligence), p (perceptual intelligence), and r (mental rotation ability) despite the very specific names each of these represents ability at broad categories of cognitive tasks. I imagine the effort you put into fitting in goes down as you get older. Revenge can be fun just ask Taylor Swift! Autism, rationality and intelligence. Her condition presents with some speech and language processing difficulties. Ive looked into this topic myself, not professionally or anything-just as an interested lay researcher with a science/statistics background- and had a less well-articulated formulation of the tower vs. foundation model in mind for awhile, too. Im not a great student of philosophy, but I dont think most modern philosophers look at the writings of Plato or Descartes or Kant or Hume and think they were intellectual lightweights. There are so many ways to be weird and out of touch with the people around you, related to very different sets of issues and characteristics. But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. Of the autistics I personally know (through common support groups), the Aspergers all have a parent who is an engineer or computer scientist of some sort. None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. 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. They would more easily get high IQ amongst Aspies, whom I dont consider Autistic. Theres a new paper out on how the frequency of variants that affect educational achievement (which also affect IQ) have been changing over time in Iceland. This is more or less a requirement if the system is to be robust and quickly adaptable to environmental variation. For another (Ravens), its a bunch of iterations of the same basic task (a kind of visual puzzle with one piece missing), described here. The tower model looks close to my personal model, which has absolutely no experimental testing besides how the two of us feel about itbut generally I call it the Smore model. A lot of dog breeds, particularly those that are very small (like Teacup Yorkies), very large (like Great Danes), or otherwise very different from the default canine somatoform (like Pugs), tend to suffer from health problems at a vastly higher rate than mutts or more natural breeds (e.g. 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. What do you guys think of the recent research linking autism to gut bacteria? This would also explain why theres a larger gap in autism diagnoses between rich and poor blacks and Hispanics than rich and poor whites more affluent blacks and Hispanics have access to the same resources as affluent whites do, while poor ones have worse resources than poor whites. ASD has no reliable early predictor, no unitary developmental course, no unitary life outcome, no unitary recurrence risk, no unitary pattern of BAP features, and no standard homogeneous subgroups. The normies were not spergs running emulations, theyd have the same confused look whenever we sperged-out about something that we had when they talked about sportsball. Thats exactly what we observe here. And so those are genes that show up as giving you a bump in your IQ in populations genetic studies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ I have not read the other comments, so maybe someone already pointed this out, but I wish to file a complaint. We have another child who shows no autistic traits. Lilian Grebert is drinking a CAMBIER Black IPA by Brasserie Cambier at Untappd at Home. If it is, that could explain some of these results. This can lead to bullying and social isolation, which in the long term can cause depression and the failure to learn social customs. I was under the impression, that IQ was culturally biased, as DNA Markers would be. A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence. 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. I also need alternative means to handle a wide variety of learning and perceptual tasks. I am not particularly confident in the theory either in its parts or in whole. Each genes benefit is based on underlying assumptions about how the body works, and if you change enough of those assumptions, the entire edifice becomes a failure. IQb + high genetic load: autism with lowish IQ, always diagnosed as autist Its talked through in detail here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd54l8gfi7M). The genes that increase risk of autism are disproportionately also genes that increase intelligence, and vice versa (~100% confidence), 2. In other countries including those in developed areas like Western Europe and North America IQ has been on the rise. This is consistent with the existence of people in the past who seem to be about as bright as humans get. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. Flynn effect vs genetic selection. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? This is a common situation, but not with many genes of small effect. In Graph A, we see that if a child has autism (but not intellectual disability), their likelihood of having a father with any particular IQ (orange line) is almost the same as the likelihood of a neurotypical child having a father of that IQ (dotted line). 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. I am one of those people who has to run emulators to appear socially normal. However, I wouldnt be surprised if a statistically high proportion of people here are autistic or have autistic family members. Low-functioning autism has all kinds of genetic linkages to all kinds of different genetic syndromes that cause brain damage, damage that often extends beyond autistic symptoms. Thats high, compared to the general population (below 1%) but 50% is weirdly high. This confuses me a little. First, the studies. We dont let people who are neither smart nor charismatic hang out with us, and people who are both smart and charismatic dont want to hang out with us. Blacks have an infant mortality rate more than twice as high as whites do. Most cases of autism involve all three of these factors; that is, your overall autisticness is a combination of your familial genes, mutations, and environmental risk factors. People running an emulation of normal are usually not staggeringly intelligent. But as mentioned before, autistic people themselves on average have lower intelligence. It would not surprise me if a lot of non-neurotypical children were doing similar things, and that it poses genuine problems for studies like those discussed above. The brain has hyperparameters, just like an artificial neural network. Plus being allied to Putin would allow me to strike back at the assholes in the U.S. who treated me unfairly because they were offended by my pragmatic philosophy and refusal to play along with their ignorant social customs, so that would be a nice little side bonus. The physical kinematics of the human body dictate some ideal limb proportions for the 500-meter dash (say), and thats a target your genetic makeup can miss in either direction. And the extreme male brain hypothesis in that light might just be an artifact of a statistical consequence of GMV in that set of traits, as it could be less reproductively costly to have a less stable architecture for those types of parameters in males due to higher reproductive payoff of hitting one of those optimal configurations in terms of number of offspring, as well as lower individual investment. When she was three, she had symptoms of autism. Its hard to pin down why this is the case, but I think it is related to the things above, but also to the fact that gifted people tend to be bad at copying other people instinctively. ABA research, like autism research in general, suffers from an appalling lack of rigor. paternal IQ/ autism seems pretty much decorrelated, which is strange given the 100% confidence that autism genes are IQ boosting. Interestingly, other/unspecified PDD and atypical autism also have a significantly higher PRS for neuroticism than childhood autism and Aspergers. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). Its much easier to please one person than an entire society, and unlike our judgmental mouth-breathers in the States, Putin at least seems like a pretty pragmatic and reasonable guy. 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). ), but the non-additive portion is of roughly comparable size. Im not suggesting this accounts for the high/low intelligence as the sample size was small. Sample: literally the whole of scotland. Autism-risk genes may just be plumping up the middle tiers, those who are noticeably intelligent but not staggering one-in-a-million test cases. High IQ, excellent at math, maybe a little socially awkward but not too bad (we live in a reasonably large town, so there are lots of like-minded kids he can socialize with.) Theres a range for this parameter, selection in the past has left most of the population too low, but if you push the parameter up too high things will break. Think about it this way: When most other people behave incomprehensible for you because they dont see the same emotional nuances and act on their impulses, it is hard to learn social customs, even though you theoretically have the potential to be very skilled socially. Id say so. People at the higher end of the corporate ladder that Ive met were very intelligent and also seemed generally normal, though of course they had much higher-than-normal ambition, stamina, and interest in their business. Agreed. This is very very crude model that does not take into account how DNA and sexual reproduction works: it is middle of the night and that stuff is not my strong suit; however, I like this description and with my limited understanding, it may even carry some resemblance to reality: I will bet a considerable sum of money that a model where one simply assumes that Q = f(g_1, g_n) = a_1 g_1 + + a_n g_n for unknown constants a_i does not describe how these parameters affect intelligence (get all g_i that are positively correlated with IQ, combine them, and you get a super-enlightened being!). Naive, narcissistic, completely detached from human interaction. Of the 5 relatives, how many are males? I think this was also true for some genes supposedly predisposing to ADHD and Schizophrenia. Ill share some info that might or might be helpful, since its just an anecdote. If your definition of weirdness includes beliefs and interests, then almost by definition anyone whose underlying cognition is unusually effective or ineffective will be weird. Thus, I cant think of anyone whos very intelligent and not weird ceases to be meaningful. One big category would be selection bias due to diagnosis bias. My absurdly layman impression of the austistic spectrum suggested that autists might make less use of a heuristic that produces one of those needed side-effects, so the simplest testable prediction springing to mind was that ghost experiences would be absent somewhere in the autistic population. the non-verbal. Even when you get it high enough, to the point of being too much of a good thing, if its a rock show some people are still going to want it higher. They get offended more if you question them than normal lawyers do, they have the 4chan-y social awkwardness that those communities jokingly call autism, etc. High IQs appear to be selected for, as does ASD; while the the survival advantage of the first is obvious, the second is a really high cost to pay from a fitness standpoint, and Im skeptical that the IQ on its own would be worth it as a survival advantage. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. I used to live in the DC area and still work with the civil service in my current job. We just rarely see them because they dont hang out with us losers. (I.e. Probably not the most important feature of this research but its a thunderous argument against modern day IQ-obsessed cryptoeugenicists. Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. Or it means that subgroup is relatively small and thus has not been studied yet. Other interesting question if the Flynn effect is more important than genetics and our mean IQ is 15 points higher than 100 years ago: where are all the geniuses? So the genes are a correlation but not a cause of the autism, which is due to factors incidentally related to the high IQ, for example the advanced age of the parents? This fits with my observations of my family (parents, siblings, kids) and other science majors in college. Two of these are diagnosed as autistic, though with very different forms. I find it absolutely bizarre that the intelligence of kids who dont fit in is often ignored. Moreover, if your family isnt too bright, you might not even recognize that theres something funny about your latest kid. This would be a more useful post if it addressed this change in terminology. Because he was as skilled as me, and had real muscles. For all his skepticism in some areas, Scott is remarkably accepting of the overall conceptual framework of psychiatric and psychological diagnosis despite its glaring philosophical flaws, which have been pointed out by many (see e.g. The suggested results for selection against IQ are just in recent industrial time. Id cheerfully get in bed with the military-industrial complex -in fact, Id probably be rock-hard the whole time. It could be one of the categorization problems Scott was talking about in Against Against Autism Cures. If youre not low-functioning but dont have strong enough autistic traits to be clearly a high-functioning autistic, you dont have autism youre just a little weird? It seems that a process like this could conceptually produce an artificial bimodal distribution, even if the traits arent bimodally distributed. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. You mentioned height, which I think is a good example too we have studies (possibly not good ones) showing that taller people have better outcomes, get treated nicer, are more attractive but people who get too tall have bad medical problems, shorter life expectancy. It wouldnt surprise me if whats perceived in higher order terms as stereotypically autistic might be a series of misses on such optimal targets, over- or under- shoots, and then you end up in a situation where a child has difficulty working out how to discard pareidolia from their mental model of the world say just because of a specific kind of synapse oversensitive in some particular way, or later they engage in repetitive behavior instead of altering their mental model to accommodate more unpredictable interactions because it appears more efficient to their brain to conserve the model because of the overstated unpredictability of the alternatives, et cetera. 1. But many do it for positive outcomes versus negative pressure, which is how I interpreted your question. Thats assuming that we do have a missing group of geniusesIm not sure how we track these things, or who you are counting as a genius.
