snowcat
Schneewittchen
Phogna Bologna@ichbindabomb ah yes, the "sudden explosion of left-handedness"
David 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️NB they/them@bransonturner @ichbindabomb I heard similar things about the increase of gay people coming out in the 2000s.
Pēteris Krišjānis
MikeWas@ichbindabomb So the discovery of exoplanets causes autism, or the rise in austism has led to the discovery of more exoplanets?
@mikewas you never know
Andreas K@ichbindabomb
Despite what my wife says, my theory is that the problem is that even basic statistics and probability theory (basically what every high school graduate should know) confuses a surprising big majority of the population. Or perhaps they have only problems applying it to reality.
@isotopp
Despite what my wife says, my theory is that the problem is that even basic statistics and probability theory (basically what every high school graduate should know) confuses a surprising big majority of the population. Or perhaps they have only problems applying it to reality.
@isotopp
EndlessMason@yacc143
I bet if the lines on the graph broke each time the math/definition/diagnostic criteria changed there'd be less confusion.
dsm4 autism: red
dsm5 autism: yellow
"What's causing this?!" Umm, the dsm5 aka the slow grind of human knowledge
Just like there's more adhd now because we literally didn't call it that before... it was ADD or hyperwhatever or "just being a spacy kid, man" or "could do better if they just applied themselves".
Even a vertical rule on the graphs for each revision of the book would provide some clue, but knowning which version the study used would be nice
@EndlessMason @ichbindabomb @isotopp Ok, small disclosure, I work for a company (as I don't speak for them, let it be unnamed) that deals with scientific data and texts. As such we've been using e.g. machine learning, etc. for classification purposes. One of the interesting insights of our head data scientist in the early days was that especially in the area of mental health US/UK/AU the practices were totally divergent. So I'm totally confident in numbers being absolutely comparable.
@yacc143
> practices were totally divergent.
> So I'm totally confident in numbers being absolutely comparable.
How's that work? The total percentage of the population its the same but the division of categories differs?
@EndlessMason @ichbindabomb @isotopp I have no idea, that was over a decade ago, and my focus and knowledge about that stuff back then wasn't as intense as say 5 years ago.
But as a guess, validating the classification systems (our first "complete" classification system was an AU one, and hence we had pre-classified training data from AU, while surprise, the first paying and important customers were from the US/UK).
So even if the internal QA did not flag it, the first alpha tests with friendly customers and their data would have raised red flags about dramatic misclassification.
@yacc143
The classification of papers? Or of humans?
@EndlessMason
Of texts as such. But obviously if your definition of diagnosis X does not match my definition of diagnosis X, than we will qualify patients differently.
Because of we use your definition of X, then suddenly my bibliography on topic X is only classified as X at 10% hit rate, than obviously the classifier dies not think that my bibliography is about X at all. Not your X at least.
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Hah! "could do better if they just applied themselves"...
My equivalent in middle school was "Keith is bright, but bone idle". Nope; I just didn't understand the point of tests.
@bytebro @EndlessMason @ichbindabomb @isotopp What shall I say, I was notorious for having a "2" (a B in US grades) in maths, not for not being able to get an "1", but because I didn't care. (Austrian universities, especially back then worked not by application, but by registration, you chose what you wanted to study, and things like grades, etc were irrelevant if you had your Matura certificate)
1/4
But for abstract thinking my personal benchmark is if a person can understand the concept of nested loops, even in pseudo code.
You would be surprised how many people have problems understanding nested loops even with lengthy explanations.
And for these I don't see a career in software development or STEM in general. Experience suggests is that these people can manage up to a certain level (even entry level uni) by learning by heart, but they tend lack an understanding and 2/4
the ability to apply the principles to new stuff.
(Basically, e.g. our maths course at uni teaches Fourier transforms with an atypical period. The TA even admitted that this is basically because the number of exercises that can be done sensibly without a CAS is limited, so they had to change the exercises somehow to make them un-googleable. 3/4
The point is, the people that can apply the principles can do the exercises, directly, and potentially google the exercise and look for the analogy and how much can be gleaned from it. The people copying hieroglyphs by heart are stuck.) 4/4
Now teach them about recursion 😂
Their heads will explode. And if they don't, then they do not understand stack-frames....
Franchesca@yacc143 @ichbindabomb @isotopp allistic people often struggle to grasp abstract concepts like those required to understand statistics or software engineering. How much is this costing the economy, given the shortage of skills in these areas? 😜
Mark Pauley@yacc143 @ichbindabomb @isotopp stats and probability remain opaque and unintuitive even to experts. The human mind evolved to be a “story machine”, which is to say we natively operate in anecdotes.
Arjen Baars@ichbindabomb this isn‘t true. Quantum physics learned us. If there‘s no "eye“ to see it, it is not more than a possibility that it exists.
gladhon@ichbindabomb Looks wrong. It's not known whether there was more or less autism before
@gladhon
You're playing weird wordgames - the people existed before the word, and they have been called many different words at different times and those words dont always include/exclude the same people.
Look up the history of who's "British" or whos "tall" or hell, even who's "sexy"
Hell, i bet you'd even get different answers if you read a book by a Dutch author, even if it's not written in Dutch
@EndlessMason @ichbindabomb
Yes and No:
Different Times have different Categories for people and the same Category is different defined.
Because of this, even if we humans are the same through the times, we can't say if there is more or less autism.
However because the environment has changed a lot, I think people have also changed. So I think it's likely that there is more autism today, maybe some kind of adaptation.
My previous point is: We don't know!
Yes and No:
Different Times have different Categories for people and the same Category is different defined.
Because of this, even if we humans are the same through the times, we can't say if there is more or less autism.
However because the environment has changed a lot, I think people have also changed. So I think it's likely that there is more autism today, maybe some kind of adaptation.
My previous point is: We don't know!
@gladhon
We don't know if there is even a change to explain... It feels like you're making a huge jump
Ko Simon toku ingoa 
@ichbindabomb I like this post.
But on the topic (I speak as one with autism) can we all please stop saying “everyone’s a bit on the spectrum really” and similar things, because that minimises my/our struggles.
Everyone is quite simply *not* neurodiverse.
I needed to say this somewhere as I was annoyed by someone who should have known better saying it this week.
CC @phil_stevens since I saw this post through your retoot.
I believe that this has to do again with so much ignorance still on the mental health field, rather than actually believing that.
I don’t think that there’s such thing as “normal” just some individuals that are better equipped to adapt to society than others. And no, we are not all a lil bit autistic
Björn ❄️ Starkimarm@ichbindabomb
also about ADHD
also about ADHD
Dark Sheep Arts Has MovedThey're not really exoplants though, they're normal empty space who saw videos about being an exoplanet on Tiktok and pretend to be an exoplanet because they think it's cool...
eri 
@ichbindabomb exoplanets cause autism
@ichbindabomb actually we need to see how many exoplanet researchers have autism, if it's higher than the average for the population, then we can say autism causes exoplanets
Ashley Gay@ichbindabomb this is also about transgender(?)
(10/10 grammar but idk how else to say it)
(10/10 grammar but idk how else to say it)
Turing Incomplete@ichbindabomb Big Telescope industry is causing the exoplanet epidemic! Just say no to lenses!
ohmrun@ichbindabomb This does assume that the reader believes in planets.
Expertenkommision CyberunfallBUT PLUTO!!!!1!eleven!!
Trillion Byter@ichbindabomb And we didn't just discover it. We just gave it a new name. History and myth are full of references to people being excitable, of varied temperament, and dictionaries' worth of other adjectives.
People have always been different, both within the realm of "normal" and outside it.
√-ʇoɾəuɐnɾ (Etaoin Shrdlu)@ichbindabomb With all the ways to be in the world, don't be an RFKJr.
Jargoggles@ichbindabomb
Back in my day, exoplanets did their business in private so we didn't have them carrying on for everyone with a high-powered telescope to see. How am I supposed to explain this to my undergrads?
Back in my day, exoplanets did their business in private so we didn't have them carrying on for everyone with a high-powered telescope to see. How am I supposed to explain this to my undergrads?
Proto Himbo European@ichbindabomb A good chunk of this "autism epidemic" talk is probably people (a) with a political ax to grind like RFK or (b) invested heavily in a very specific way of pathologizing autism. However, some might just be people who didn't get the memo on research over the past 20 years.
In the early 2000s there was still (IIRC) uncertainty about why empirically recorded autism rates were increasing so quickly (and it's been very, very quick, historically speaking). I think everyone even a little scientifically involved with this understood (and many wrote about) the multiple possibilities for the increase, including increasingly accurate and representative diagnosis largely stemming from increasing public awareness and acceptance. However, there was still the very real possibility that autism rates were climbing partly due to actual prevalence/incidence increasing alarmingly.
That might seem odd to some people, but we've seen this with things like ADHD, with findings that environmental toxins (e.g., chemicals in food) might play a part. Even the vaccine theory was worth checking out, though it has been so thoroughly debunked that it's not even worth mentioning at this point. This is how science works: you check out all plausible possibilities, and even some that aren't plausible.
My take (note: not my core area) on the research since about 2000-2005 is that basically all of the observed autism rate increase is currently understood to be best explained by increasing awareness and diagnosis, not actual increases in the rates of autistic people. And most people, I'm guessing, who talk about an "epidemic" have a political motivation whether they are aware of it or not. But there could be some people who just never updated their knowledge.
And those people should get exactly one chance to update that knowledge if they start saying these things in conversation. If they fail to go get better information, they've indicated that it's not about reality for them, so it's not worth discussing with them.
Just a Mr Bill@ichbindabomb @micahflee That can’t be true because planets can’t have autism.
william.maggosalso there's 3x as many boys with autism than girls and it's higher in minorities than whites, while vaccination rates are similar among the sexes and it's lower for minorities.
Andy Wootton@ichbindabomb We should keep a list of when we discover all these epidemics: left-handed people, left-brained women, gay men, gay women, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, dyslexics, bi-polar, ADHD...