I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
I trust trained professionals with years of experience across thousands of patients to be better equipped to diagnose people with mental health conditions than someone online who diagnoses literally half of the people they meet with disorders, yes.
Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.
Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
I never said autism was an excuse not to deal with life.
I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.
Writing a specification for a personal library app in the hopes I can get AppSheet + Gemini to make one for me. I'm working on library science in general, so it will hopefully implement ideas I have about book classification and entity catalogs.
I have found that many areas of human knowledge are massively disorganized. Everything is also siloed; knowledge that could easily apply to other domains is hidden by things like specialized terminology.
I think it is because science is systematic, or step-by-step, and not systemic - lacking a "whole system" point of view. Both perspectives are needed to understand a reality made of systems.
Thanks to both of you -- parent and grandparent posters -- for the very honest posts. The world is complex, and I'm grateful whenever people help me to see a new edge of that.
"True CPTSD" doesn't exist as a diagnosis yet in the DSM. Referring to it that way is highly disingenuous.
I was recently diagnosed as "AuDHD". I noticed that doctors who don't understand anything outside of depression and anxiety were more likely to refer to autism as a "fad".
The DSM isn't the only book, and is not the singular source of diagnosis around the world, so believing that because CPTSD is not in the DSM and therefore doesn't exist is also disingenuous.
The ICD does have an entry for Complex PTSD, but it may not match what many people think of as CPTSD, which from what I see is closer to what Bessel van der Kolk called "developmental trauma."
> I would expect that, for cultures who's members score below average on IQ tests from the US, an equivalent IQ test created within that culture would show average members of that culture scoring higher than average members of US culture.
I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.
I don‘t think negativity necessarily has something to do with trauma. Negativity bias is very widespread, regardless of previous trauma. Basically everybody flies at negativity.
Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.
I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers
This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.
Or a byproduct of sustained trauma being more prevalent in modern society. There was a large shift in the way children are raised in the past 100 years, from community to individuality. Entire generations of people whose childhoods prepared them for a world that did not exist by the time they were adults. There is no template for raising children in the new world, and no community to fall back on. Many react with anger and resentment, and raise their children accordingly. Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.
> Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.
Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.
Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...
Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.
Many people fall into a trap of thinking "we catch the bad guys now, not like in the old days."
I'm sure people were saying it in the 90s, 80s, 70s...every era of advancement involves experiencing technology before it is widely understood, which can feel very futuristic or magical. The underlying systems we depend on, like the court system, are still stuck in "the old days".
I have a personal bias but suspect this is more prevalent than it's made out to be since I've both lived through it and have not had much opportunity throughout my life to recognize how the two issues were connected until many years later.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I've talked about how intergenerational trauma has affected my family before, although I didn't mention it started in 1918 when my great great grandfather killed my great great grandmother in a murder suicide, leaving my great grandmother an orphan who would one day abuse my grandma. [1]
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
Or byproduct of the fact that we live 2 to 4 times longer depending at which scale/how you want to count it. Ie not so long ago in ancient rome reaching 5yo was slightly above 50% chance gamble.
This is probably also evolutionary. Most species, once safe and sated, tend to calm down and relax, or even nap. But we humans suffer from boredom, which tend to agitate us into action even when there is no hunger or threat. Probably the evolutionary adaptation that allowed our particular lineage to overtake (and parhaps wipe out) other competing lines of homonids and develop civilization.
What? We're more comfortable? What planet do you people live on? People have never been more stressed and uncomfortable. People are literally fighting psychological warfare and vanishing opportunities. Psychologically, we have never been so uncomfortable.
My grandmother, who lived to 90, used to tell me "The only thing which really improved in my life is medicine." She would tell me that people were so happy and society was so safe when she was a child that her family used to sleep with the windows open.
I also observed things only getting worse in my life. So I really don't buy this narrative that things keep getting better. IMO, the only people who think things got better are billionaires and multi-millionaires; of course it got better for them but it didn't get better for the average-luck person. For the average ambitious person who worked hard to improve their situation, things got MUCH worse; there are all these artificial barriers preventing them from succeeding, depriving them of opportunities and then constant gaslighting to blame them for systemic issues (including their own failure to thrive). Low birth rates, high rates of depression, high rates of homelessness, high suicide rates speak for themselves.
The fact that it all gets covered up by social media echo chambers to the extent that some people think life got better, makes it MUCH, MUCH worse, not better. People just don't seem to notice the tent cities, the increased immigration (due to worsening conditions in poor countries), the political division (again, driven by poverty).
I mean the places I've lived in my life I've left the windows open and the doors unlocked and not had issues. Maybe I'm lucky as your grandma.
Of course maybe your grandma like my grandma ignored all the cases of people that had abjectly terrible lives back then because that wouldnt fit her world view of 'make the present the past again'. Birthrates dropped in the US long before we were born. Homelessness was very high in the US before the postwar 'irregularity'.
All those poor countries are still richer than ever historically, it's just that first world nations are that much better.
Just stop the billionaires from sucking up everything and it's not really too bad at all.
This article does not begin to cover systems thinking. Cybernetics and metacybernetics are noticably missing. Paul Cilliers' theory of complexity - unmentioned. Nothing about Stafford Beer and the viable system model. So on and so forth.
The things the author complains about seem to be "parts of systems thinking they aren't aware of". The field is still developing.
"Metacybernetics" is a concept with a small handful of Google hits, some of which appear to be obscure research papers and some appear to be metaphysical crackpottery on blogs.
I think it's worth considering that the theories you're familiar with are incredibly niche, have never gained any foothold in mainstream discussions of system dynamics, and it's not wrong for people not to be aware of them (or to choose not to mention them) in a post addressed at general audiences.
Further, you just missed the opportunity to explain these concepts to a broader HN audience and maybe make sure that the next time someone writes about it, they are aware of this work.
Cybernetics was the birthing place of neural networks. Hardly niche.
I don't think commenters should be expected to provide full overviews of topics just to inform others. Parent gave plenty of pointers beyond metacybernetics, all of which are certainly discoverable. If you are curious, read about it. It's not the responsibility of random strangers to educate you.
Cybernetics is essentially control theory, and many of the methods in neural network research came from there. For example backpropagation can be traced back to Pontryagin in the 1950s.
Training a nonlinear system to behave in a way you want is the raison d’etre of optimal control theory.
But I wouldn’t say it’s the birthing place of neural networks, personally.
It seems odd to me that someone would write such a polished and comprehensive article and yet completely misunderstand the definition of the central topic.
That happens in system dynamics a lot, actually - there are many independently developed theories in many different disciplines that do not intertwine historically at all. I have met multiple people who work with systems mathematically on a professional level who had no idea about these other things.
I've seen this too. In particular there seems to be a huge dividing line between systems research stemming from the physical-mathematical heritage of formal dynamical systems, and the other line mostly stemming from everything Wiener did with cybernetics (and some others who were contemporaneous with Wiener). Both sides can be profitably informed by the other in various ways.
There was some hard to follow explanations in it, but the author tries to connect the history and goals of cybernetics versus modern problems like being unable to get support from a company.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.