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. 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? None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. They all share the same hunger for mathematics, and if you get to know those who seem normal on the surface, you find out that they have some interesting hobbies as well. Posted on June 15, 2020 by Scott Alexander. Interesting. 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. 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. do people predisposed to have autistic kids tend to have them later? FWIW, Ive only ever heard biological females apply the term genderqueer to themselves. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/race-class-contribute-disparities-autism-diagnoses/. If youre trying to compare the IQs of parents and children, you need to have both the parents and children, and be sure that the parents are in fact the parents of the children in question. 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. Maybe the pattern is something like this (calling rare IQ/autism boosting alleles IQb): They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high. When people came to our defense, it was generally with an idea I didnt like too much: that maybe there were different types of intelligence and if we sucked at [x] we must surely be good at [y]like life was an RPG character generator or something. How much of this could be IQ tests failing to effectively measure g in autistic individuals? I am simply saying that when you encounter lots of GS11+ people they are exactly like Comey. 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). a sort of arrangement where if you pick up to four of them you get enhanced intelligence, five or six and you get high-functioning intelligent autism, and seven or more and your brain crashes on boot-up and the autism stops you from functioning. If were gonna sit down and make Smores, we need marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and a crackling fire. 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. Most successful businessmen. Some of the genetic diseases of Eastern Eurpoean Jews are correlated with intelligence, IIRC, but I dont think they have mental effects. 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. Autism measures may miss more women with autism.. -.-). The genes that control the development of that definitely dont do so in a linear or easily explainable way. Karpinksi et al. Intelligence and social aptitude dont seem to be positively correlated, at least not very strongly, but theyre definitely not negatively correlated. (my son was a Caesarian delivery) but that was because his head (=brain?) Yes, of course. Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. 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. In Projections, and elsewhere, Deisseroth suggests that a major component of autism is as a bias or preference to information predictability, which anecdotally jives with what many people . 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. Its also a chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion. This meant that theyd routinely turn them off. The talented ones dont seem to put extra effort into being impressive for others sake. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. Dammit, I was nodding along until you threw in sports-watching. 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. 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. I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. 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. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. There is yet more. Ok, I just got to the end of the comments and no-one else has brought this up yet: Isnt the finding that 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. Slate Star Codex Tag Archives: iq Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know Posted on November 13, 2019 by Scott Alexander [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. Further (indirect) confirmation of the autism-IQ link comes from evolutionary investigations. There simply haven't been any large, decent-quality studies showing that children in ABA show significant improvements over children not in ABA. That should give us more geniuses, but not a shift in the distribution where now we get a Gauss/von Neumann/Newton/Kant/Einstein born in every town. Id say the people in my field are shifted about half a sigma toward introverted, toward socially awkward, and toward tending to become obsessive about their interests/hobbies, but that leaves a lot of people whod seem pretty normal in most ways. The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. What do you guys think of the recent research linking autism to gut bacteria? Dunno, but you dont need to know the exact structure of the genotype to phenotype map to check whether the assumption is empirically correct. Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. Pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if part of the link between autism and high intelligence mightnt be explained by a non-linear relationship akin to that between arousal and performance. As an example of the latter there was a time when I was in math class when wed started learning about simple equations with variables (4n + 2 = 3n + 5 or whatever) but we hadnt yet learned about adding things to both sides (I think we were just supposed to guess and check). 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. 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. If anything, theres a slight positive correlation between the two. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. The damn thing has basically come true! Obviously it cannot be 100%, but I have not yet encountered one that isnt a narcissist or what the internet calls an autist. 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. Our 2nd, 4th, and 5th children are not autistic, so parent age doesnt seem to have played a role in our case (though we were both relatively young even for our fifth, at 36 and 35.). I.e. Preoccupation with whats normal and whether you are normal is a sign of mediocrity in my experience (though its not terminal). Keep in mind, my sample size is small. Titrated use of alcohol in pregnancy and general precautions regarding healthy eating during pregnancy. too many CAG repeats and the area destabilizes and you get runaway anticipation that wipes out later generations of your family. I am not, but we both initially bonded over (I dont know a way to put this delicately or more exactly) being objectively very smart people that dont perform intelligence very well, albeit different ways. 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. Plenty of people are both smarter and more charismatic than us. Thank you for introducing me to him. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, [1] a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, [2] under the pen name Scott Alexander. And that finds that only 15% have intellectual disabilities. 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? (1) genes that promote autism are correlated with IQ and 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. because it is in line with the current prevalence of autism diagnoses in children, but a bit lower. So I doubt that trans feelings require an opposite-sex brain. If this is good, then by definition, more at the margin will be better. She was born with the cord around her neck, and we had respiratory specialists on hand to assist. This makes a very strong auditory learner. These questions interest me because I know a lot of people who are bright nerdy programmers married to other bright nerdy programmers, and sometimes they ask me if their children are at higher risk for autism. 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. Intelligence seems much more similar to personality than height in terms of complexity and diversity of manifestations. > (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 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. Lazy googling yields claims around 80% narrow-sense (additive) heritability for height which is comparable to the total heritability of IQ. Intelligence may be very much the same way. You could compare those estimates for IQ to those for height. 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. (Or did, 20+ years ago when I last took an IQ test.) 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. Drink your Brawndo! But dont take my word for it, check out the excellent 2016 lit review by Waterhouse et al which concludes: No unitary ASD brain impairment or replicated unitary model of ASD brain impairment exists. autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high. What do SSC readers think? 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. The bit about Comey honestly just seems like partisan sniping to me. As a practical matter of course these disorder clusters can easily overlap and often do, as seen in the most recent DSM when they allowed co-diagnosis of autism and ADHD for the first time (by popular demand pretty much!). Since autism is a polygenic disorder, it suggests a Gaussian model, with traits for autistic thinking normally distributed in the population, but at the tail end of the curve the hyper-systematizers cluster, and beyond a certain threshold of expression lie the autists. 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. However, I couldnt beat the Sophomore at 130 who was my workout partner in the weight room and only had 5-10 lbs on me in most lifts. Overall scores could continue to rise due to the Flynn effect even as intelligence is being selected against on a genetic level, which is what the evidence is suggesting. 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. He has the making of a superb engineer. This one comes from Gardner et al (2019), which measures the cognitive ability of the fathers of autistic people and disaggregates those with and without intellectual disability. Naive, narcissistic, completely detached from human interaction. I think this was also true for some genes supposedly predisposing to ADHD and Schizophrenia. Im reminded of the Simon Baron-Cohen theory about autism being like an extreme male brain in some sense. Their intelligence tends to be more imbalanced than neurotypicals, so IQ tests (which rely on an assumption that most forms of intelligence are correlated) are less applicable. It really made a difference for him to get to a school where he fit with the other kids. (*), 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. For example, they are not extremely aggressive, but tend to be gentle individuals. 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. Humans have been selectively breeding themselves since the dawn of civilization, even if we werent consciously aware of it; reproductively speaking, the traits that are selected for in an organized society are bound to differ than those that wouldve been selected for in the wild. paternal IQ/ autism seems pretty much decorrelated, which is strange given the 100% confidence that autism genes are IQ boosting. There are plenty of incredibly smart and simultaneously charismatic people out there. One other effect of this change in labelling, is that studies of autistics before and after the renaming cant be combined into any kind of meta-study, unless they are both much more detailed in their description of the grouyp they are measuring, and happen to target the same people. But it adds the concept of a "safe starch" - where the classic paleo diet has a zero tolerance policy toward carbohydrates, the Perfect Health Diet allows certain carbs like rice, potatoes, and lots of weird things like "taro" and "sago". 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.) The reason is that interacting with those students always feels the same, it doesnt matter how weird they seem at first. There is then a threshold effect with enough perceptual ability and intelligence, the developing brain finds ways to route around the broken normal processes to get stuff done. Perhaps it will help if I ask a question. I dont know why, but my prior is that the mothers age matters more. I would say that 80% of them carry a fair amount of weirdness with them, which shows in speech impediments, idiosyncratic/shitty clothing styles and obsessions with bizarre topics. (*) to complicate matters, in normal usage, Im autistic, but in many usages I wouldnt be described as having autism. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ the non-verbal. Is it the reverse of that? Normality is just too vague to be quantifiable. I hesitate to make anything out of this, but whenever theres a study that links pre-natal stress to autism, my ears perk up a little. 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. 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. So far, this is still 70% wish-casting to 30% reality-aligned. Hood got his M.D. But one of his trainers actually had an explanation: A lot of people who casually work out dont exercise all of their muscles equally, so even if they appear to be as strong as him, there could be some muscles that arent as developed as others. Some good story make much more in our appreciation of who is a genius than anything else. Could you elaborate? This can lead to bullying and social isolation, which in the long term can cause depression and the failure to learn social customs. Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. By the same rationale, you could say that no one is normal, and everyone is simply running a mental emulation. Im really curious, how many people identify with this statement? As a result, we could have similar imbalances. I have a possible explanation for the observed distribution of intelligence in autistic people. It would explain the association of genes for intelligence with autism (holding foundation strength constant, the taller the tower, the more likely a failure). If Im not, that suggests one of three things: 80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6013750/, Increasing repeat length was associated with higher GAI scores up until roughly 4041 repeats. So one model is that we should see two things happening at once, as a result of the assortative mating by IQ thats been going on for a couple generations now in the US: a. This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). (And maybe theres some kind of subtype of autism > size of correlation thing happening, too. No ICU or anything that severe, but still something that differentiates her from the other children. They propose that the reason evolution favors autism genes is that they generally increase intelligence. The reality is that weight training only increases strength in the motion of the lifts that you do. Note that billionaires in America are still vulnerable to (using a topical example) wealth taxes, and abroad billionaires in Russia / China must play the cuddle up to Putin / Xi or die / get put in a camp game. In most GWAS studies there has been little evidence of heterogeneity of association across phenotypic subgroups. The entire idea of a gene for intelligence is just as silly as a gene for running fast. There are genes which have lower-order effects, and intelligence or running are higher-order capabilities that emerge from the lower-order system in complex ways (indeed, theres probably several more layers than that.) Do a lot of super smart people play the game? It's kind of sick. I am not particularly confident in the theory either in its parts or in whole. I was getting my disorders mixed up, yes, but this is the one I was thinking of. He used to claim that he had an advantage in the ring because his muscle was all-natural, which made him stronger than people who got equally buff from working out. High-functioning autism looks more like the same polygenetic soup one finds with other complex personality characteristics like intelligence or Big Five character traits. Its a small sample (156) and its 10-14 year olds, not adults. Low IQ fathers are less likely to be available due to death/imprisonment/not being around anymore/maybe not even knowing who the father is. Also, if we do get to a bold new future of hyper-intelligent unilaterism, would the hyper-intelligent even want to sign up for it? And we know that theres differential infant mortality rates. This model predicts something I believe is true many low functioning autistic people have real talents lurking in there, it is just really hard for them or others to access those talents because of all the broken stuff. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. Yes. One just needs to consider a model where a brain is a complicated object whose organization and function depends on changes in the genetic blueprint in non-monotonic ways, and it is likely that all combinations (attainable via sexual reproduction) of genes that are beneficial alone or in some particular arrangements are not even more beneficial together; some of the potential arrangements are bound to be non-optimal or even catastrophic. Ive heard stories of autistic children sometimes regressing in development around 2 years old, e.g. 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. 1), in which the genetic architecture of ASD seems to be different from one individual to another (Huguet et al. A reasonable guess there is that the smartest engineer on the pyramid project was not much dumber than the smartest engineer working on the Apollo projectthey came up with brilliant one-off solutions to their problems, which didnt stick around because there wasnt much use for them in day-to-day building problems. The population mean for many of those parameters is off from the optimal value for thinking, perhaps because theres some tradeoff encoded there that doesnt matter as much now as in the past. Maybe specific areas for different such quirks of processing have some optimal Goldilocks zones for their values, which if all fit might give you some sort of the upper bounds of human intelligence-maybe there are multiple such optimal/viable configurations, however hitting all the targets simultaneously must be relatively rare, and some of the targets might be smallish, others might be essentially fixed without some de novo mutation for likely good evolutionary reasons. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. The specific way the model plays out may be through perceptual intelligence out of balance with verbal and rotational intelligence causing autism (3% confidence), (The post is awesome, heres a few errata, feel free to delete this after reading.) For this reason, they dont tend to hang out with normal people much. 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. One of psychiatry's many embarrassments is how many of our drugs get discovered by accident. I guess it depends on how you define weirdness; I define it as having interests, beliefs, or though processes that are significantly different than most people I dont think Ive encountered any extremely intelligent people for whom none of the above are the case. At least part of the story is that there are at least three different causes of autism. 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. Fortunately, at home, I can act how I want, which recharges me significantly.
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