As an AI researcher, this actually seems pretty intuitive for me. Obviously it cannot be 100%, but I have not yet encountered one that isnt a narcissist or what the internet calls an autist. 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). I wonder what the genetics for this would look like. 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. Interestingly, other/unspecified PDD and atypical autism also have a significantly higher PRS for neuroticism than childhood autism and Aspergers. Also also, Crespi is one of those scientists who constantly has much more interesting theories than anyone else (eg), and this makes me suspicious. too many CAG repeats and the area destabilizes and you get runaway anticipation that wipes out later generations of your family. (Is that still seen as credible? It would be an excellent skill for a teacher. There are maybe as many as 1000 of them in the Western world, and none of them would want to ever hang out with us because they are smart enough to know that their time would be better spent managing their billion-dollar corporations and/or governments. I didnt understand why you left out the actual finding, which seems to be an important fact to note. The Charman et al study finds a correlation between autism and low IQ, by starting with a sample of autistic people and looking at their IQs. 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 Flynn effect seems to be about raising the floor by building proper sewers and water supplies, eradicating parasites, vaccinating everyone against common childhood diseases, making sure nobody starves and also adding nutritional supplements to foods so brain development isnt stunted by deficiency diseases, eliminating heavy metals from the environment of small children, making sure everyone goes to school, etc. No guarantees in biology, but you can try to find a future partner with no such family history. Ive known people who were very mathematically and/or technically inclined who had poor social skills. Autism, rationality and intelligence. Ive heard stories of autistic children sometimes regressing in development around 2 years old, e.g. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, [1] a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, [2] under the pen name Scott Alexander. 1. Struggling to describe this. Crespi suggests that autism is marked by an imbalance between P (as the tower) and V + R (as the foundation). Even if the definition is good, people who function poorly are more likely to seek out (or be coerced into) psychiatric treatment, and so are more likely to be identified. I think its possible that some relatively simple model will be found to explain this relationship, but I also think its possible that the mechanics of intelligence are simply complex enough that the explanation is something inaccessible with our current level of understanding. Would you mind clarifying what you mean by narcissist? I mean, if you go with The Last Psychiatrists standards we are basically all narcissists and to some extent the claim Comey is a narcissist loses meaning.
Assortative Mating And Autism | Slate Star Codex I think this is connected to gifted people tend to be good at finding creative solutions to things rather than the most obvious ones, which in the case of weird walking or talking styles can look like autistic behavior. I spent a lot of time reading about giftedness (having a IQ > 130) in the last few months, specifically educating gifted kids and teenagers, and I found out quite some things about how giftedness can interact with social ability: 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. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. Have children earlier, maybe? Evidence suggest otherwise. In a few cases, the parent gets the de novo mutation, but for whatever reason doesnt develop autism, and then passes it onto their child, who does develop autism. More, you have probably already settled into an existence that minimizes their importance to you by the time you have enough information to piece together the importance of predictability. My 3rd child, a girl, is much lower functioning. Sure, most of them. I would expect a challenge, in testing the intelligence of Autistics. Why do you think they arent sperging out about sportsball? Some of the stuff she says about this seem a bit woo-woo, but interesting anyway. Pollution, infection, and trauma might also be in this basket. 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. 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. And we know that theres differential infant mortality rates. Sample: literally the whole of scotland. Fall short of that threshold and you have a pile of severely broken processes. Or the dad may have left or tuned out because he couldnt handle the situation (but could have handled a socially inept kid who wont shut up about WWI airplane models). 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. The military is where the fun toys are all at! Superficially, this seems more plausible to me than the tower vs. foundation model, especially since its type of phenomenon we already observe for better-understood things the brain does, e.g. They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. However being homozygous for this new mutation would lead to a person being red-green colorblind. Genes which are helpful until you have too many of them, at which point you are screwed. ), in the general population, you will see a very strong correlation between the IQ score someone gets on the two different kind of IQ test, but among autistics, the correlation is much weaker. 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). More, by that point your identity probably includes significant aspects which make the idea of becoming normal and predictable less personally palatable. This could also tie back in to socioeconomic status better off parents may be more likely to have kids diagnosed as having autism instead of some other less acceptable mental disability, which could also potentially explain the racial disparities. 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. If autism is a result of piling up too many high-IQ alleles, then youd expect to see far more of it in the children of scientists, lawyers, engineers, doctors, mathematicians, etc., than in the children of janitors, file clerks, policemen, nurses, etc. I wonder what human spoken language would be like if that kind of ability were universal. Other possible explanation(s): Some kind of anxiety about doing things wrong, combined with worrying about whether one is supposed to be able to do a thing yet. For one thing, the same studies that found that relatives of autistic patients had higher IQs find that the autistic patients themselves have much lower ones. There are huge practical and financial incentives within our system to diagnose all of these sets of kids with some kind of medicalized disorder, regardless of whether any underlying physical mechanism is understood or present (and sometimes it is, but many different developmental issues can lead you down each of these roads). With more aggressive screening for such things, we would see a much smaller diagnosis gap. All this is a purely hypothetical thought-experiment, of course. I work with with a lot of very smart people, and have throughout my career.
psychiatry | Slate Star Codex Based on those two correlations, I would be very surprised if it didnt add up to a correlation between predisposition for autism and children later in life. 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. Hood got his M.D. Intelligence is clearly not a neat and predictable thing, at least beyond certain broad generalizations or thresholds. Regarding Narcissim, the first website I pulled up had these as the first 3 symptoms: * Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance But even adjusting for these factors, the autism low intelligence correlation seems too strong to dismiss. What is the SES variation of autism? You could also define normal as simply referring to a lack of explicit mental illnesses or emotional problems. The optimal value is at 10.0 (for example). g_i = 1 if the parameter is present, g_i = 0 if not. There could be something similar going on with autism. 3. My problem with this kind of model is that some people are geniuses but dont have autism. I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. Isnt autism a bit more sensitive to increased parental age than many other mental disorders? Why conflate diagnosed with autism with has autism? I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. 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. It is very, very smart, but nobody dares reproduce naturally anymore, not because the equipment doesnt work, but because genetic engineering means everyone pushed every single one of these levers to the setting marked beyond this point, there be dragons, and at least half their kids would die or come out completely non-functional if they tried it. Guys autism is not a thing. Take these away and you arrive at something that seems like an effortless confidence and freedom. Both moderate to high IQ. Broadly, intelligence might be, say: pattern recognition, ability to readjust priors, visual imagination, factual recall, procedural memory etc. Probably not the most important feature of this research but its a thunderous argument against modern day IQ-obsessed cryptoeugenicists. I think somewhere in the 90s percentile of IQ is plausibly normal by SSC standards. This confuses me a little. If relatives of autists are smarter, then that sounds to me like a regression towards the mean. If you get a high intelligence person who is smart enough to create a game-changing technology for example, militarized AI or super-forecasting technology then they dont need to get along with low-intelligence people: instead, low-intelligence people need to get along with them. Most of my coworkers (except for the youngest ones) are married, and many have children. Increased parental age correlates with autism risk, AIUI. It is where his bread is buttered professionally, but I wish he would think more deeply about it. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. Gender dysphoria. The high end should stay the same, in much the way that the high end of human lifespan is only a little longer now than in 1800its just that a lot more people make it to 90 or 100 with modern medical care. Having charismatic superpowers isnt normal, and I suspect requires being sufficiently unconcerned with opinion sufficiently thing-oriented so as to cease to be normal. This would be a more useful post if it addressed this change in terminology. The additive proportion for height is likely higher. In primary school, for a while we used to have daily spelling tests, where we had to spell ten words. There is another problem: Giftedness also increases empathy, which in the wrong environment can be a bad thing. But many do it for positive outcomes versus negative pressure, which is how I interpreted your question. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. [3] I would hypothesize based on this that autistic people usually have parents who are very good at exactly those areas that they have trouble in. Because they lacked the development of the auditory processing, it was very draining for them because it mostly came across as a large amount of noise. I am not saying they have the full disorder (and no its not a partisan snipe, except to the extent that being very skeptical of the US bureaucratic class is partisan). Maybe even only a small fraction of potential arrangements are just right to produce ever-increasing levels of some capability in the phenotype. (That said, it becomes an incredibly strong correlation if youre taking mentally disabled people into account, as people with IQs below 70 tend to have extremely poor social skills.). Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt. (*), Its not hard to measure my IQ, except that it generally falls at the top of the scale where the tests dont make effective distinctions. This seemed to balance out by late middle-school/early high-school. No ICU or anything that severe, but still something that differentiates her from the other children. 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. The hypothesis of the blog post is that two people with autism spectrum traits should have children with associated negative outcomes. Non-genetic factors. My original post talked about dual axes, functionality and intelligence, with non-functional high intelligence becoming, effectively, a distinct kind of low intelligence. children who previously had normal or even remarkable verbal abilities for their age suddenly losing words. If so, then the top-level geniuses may well have something else going on upstairs to enhance their intelligence, some other difference from the norms, that isnt part of the complex of IQ/autism risk genes. At least part of the story is that there are at least three different causes of autism. 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. 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. Intelligence may be very much the same way. As far as I can tell, the explosion in diagnoses is primarily driven not by the very low-functioning (everyone could already tell that non-verbal folks had something wrong with them) but by increased diagnosis of medium-to-high-functioning people. 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. 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. Also, IQ over 70 should be IQ under 70, and people have have autism should be people who have autism. MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Tongue in cheek (Swift Modest Proposal) style interventions given this model are: Today, he weighs about 195. (Which isnt the same as saying its bimodal; the distribution still peaks in the middle, but its wider and flatter.). Sights and sounds are processed in the brain area that first receives it without sending it further to attach meaning. If the genetic risk factors for high-functioning and low-functioning autism have a lot of overlap, as Scott suggests, then that strongly implies a connection in etiology. I havent been keeping up.) But its frankly unclear who it is talking about. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. Wheat has been genetically modified recently in ways that make it much worse for you. 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. One other observation that may interest people. Kylounet is drinking a CAMBIER Double Galaxy by Brasserie Cambier at Terroir Alternatif. What is the point of arbitrary social rituals? (Or did, 20+ years ago when I last took an IQ test.) The Waterhouse study I linked above (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf) argues that even before the autism-aspergers lumping made things worse, ASD samples within single studies (let alone meta-analyses) were not useful for scientific inference because the autism diagnosis lumps together so many wildly disparate developmental and social issues. Increasing numbers of autistic kids at the high end, as some of the smart kids get too many overlapping IQ-enhancing genes that mess up something important. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know 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. This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. when we did a comprehensive neuropsych his IQ came back above average (range 115-125ish depending on how you weight scales) which seems about right. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams. Slate Star Codex (SSC) was a blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry ), philosophy, politics, and futurism. 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. The genes that increase risk of autism are disproportionately also genes that increase intelligence, and vice versa (~100% confidence), 2. 2015, p. 81). Hrm.
Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions]. Avoidance of social situations. (PDF link) This was the link from Wikipedia; Im not sure where else to look for the paper. I remember seeing that article 10 years ago and Ive never followed up, so replication not guaranteed. But for me the key point is that high-intelligence fathers show a trend (albeit not significant in this study) to be more likely than average to have children with autism and intellectual disability. 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. The Tower vs Foundation model is probably an oversimplification of something like this. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. My vague mental model is that there are a bunch of different parameters that have to be within a certain range to get good performance from your brain. Research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. Keep in mind, my sample size is small. If you get the volume knob too close to the feedback point, the sound will start to behave strangely it will ring weirdly in a way its never done before. Maybe youre thinking of sickle cell anemia? It stands to reason that f can be very intractable, and resolving that function is the difficult question where there is science to be done.