Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

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>there is no normal

I mean, yeah there is? There are 7 billion people on this planet. If you could create some score of peoples intelligence, how they react/respond to people, their normal physical movements and put that into a distribution the autistic people would definitely be on the tail end of the curves.

Sure everyone is different in various ways- but a lot of those differences are very small compared to the differences exhibited by autistic people.

I can give you a direct example- my oldest son has.. something. We had him tested for autism when he was younger and were basically told that yeah there is 'something'. He's not technically autistic, or at least not the level where he needs extreme special stuff, but he does exhibit some of the traits of autistic children, just in a more minor way. So for lack of any better term he is "very slightly autistic". At 7 years old he has an insane memory (closest to "photographic" that I've ever encountered) and seems highly intelligent in some areas (but definitely not in others! it's quite incredible actually to see sometimes..). He has some of the physical traits where he can't really sit still, needs weighted blankets, has some of those unique arm movements of autistic people.. but again fairly subtle. A lot of things to him can be more black/white than gray, because he seems to need to fit everything into a very specific bucket in his mind.

Every teacher he has had, including some which work with the more special ed kids, has said "yeah there is... something different about him".

Now conversely, my younger child I would classify as "normal". Why do I say that? Well.. I worked at co-op preschools with both of my boys for years. I saw lots of kids. And when you see a ton of kids and play/interact with them... I mean yeah there is a normal. Normal is how you would expect someone to behave and interact with. There is a relatively normal way you would expect a 7 year old to respond in various situations, etc.

Anyway- sorry for writing a book. I guess I'm putting off work.. I just found it a bit strange to not accept that, well, most people are actually pretty darn similar while a minority of people are very different. I see it every day in my house!

It’s just semantics. There are negative connotations associated with calling someone “normal” versus “abnormal”. I’m sure you’re polite enough to not describe people in wheel chairs as “abnormal”.

The non-controversial terms that people use related to issues like autism are “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent”.

>It’s just semantics

No it's not... I was responding to someone who said there is no "normal". Yeah, there is. Most people behave in a way you would expect. Most people exhibit motor controls the way you would expect. A minority of people, and specifically people with autism, really do think in a "different" way and exhibit strange motor functions at times that most people do not.

I don't think we have to dance around politically correct terms here. I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.

> I’m using normal in the statistical sense

Which is semantics. You’re using a different meaning of the word to fit your point just like the person did in the grandfather comment. You even put the word normal in quotes yourself indicating that you understand how words can be interpreted differently. I wasn’t disagreeing with your interpretation of the term.

>Most people behave in a way you would expect.

This is absurd. How do you have any idea what "you would expect"?

>I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.

First, define "very neurologically similar". Second, "most people are similar" in a normal distribution because that's the way the distribution is defined. It's not some biological coincidence.

Even without being able to consciously explain their expectations, humans are often consciously aware when their expectations have been violated. Experimentally, there are lots of responses that can be tracked. Unexpected stimuli causes slower reactions, longer focus times, and stronger memories. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12292

I don't see the part of that paper that explains that people "expect" the same things; that there's some "normal expectations" in the population, which is what the OP is arguing.

There's a funny thing that happens every time an article on autism comes up on this site where a bunch of commenters state they have some degree of autism. This aligns perfect with the OP's argument: everyone is "normal", but I'm not. I'm special.

It's why "normies" is a thing. Everyone sees everyone else as "normal", but they're different. I wonder why that is?

Ah, when you said > how would you know what "you would expect" I thought you were challenging the idea that people know what they expect from others. It sounds like you were actually challenging the idea that people can know what others expect?

Blond hair is less common in the US than autism, but it would be considered very strange to call brown-haired people "normal" and blond-haired people "abnormal".

> Blond hair is less common in the US than autism

The stats I can find quickly suggest blond hair in the US is around 3%, and autism in the US is around 1.7%.

> If you could create some score of peoples intelligence, how they react/respond to people, their normal physical movements and put that into a distribution the autistic people would definitely be on the tail end of the curves.

Some measurable aspects of human physiology and behavior would fall into a normal distribution (i.e. "bell curve") if you graph it, yes. Bell curves are common enough that there is a lay assumption that all distributions look like that, but it isn't the case, at all. Certain forces are required to lead to that flavor of distribution and in the absence of those, you can get graphs of all sorts of shapes.

For example, if you were to graph "how feminine" a set of people are, you're unlikely to get a bell curve where most people are androgynous. Instead, you get a bimodal distribution where there's a hump on one side for dudes and one on the right for ladies. In fact, graphs of height show a similar distribution.

If you graph how many fingers someone has, you'll probably get something closer to a power law where almost everyone is on the left at "10", a few misfortunate at "9", even few very unlucky at "8", and so on. (Plus a couple of odd points for polydactyly, etc.) This is the famous "long tail" you hear about in economics.

So there is certainly variation in all attributes, but that does not imply that the center of that range is the most populated. And thus, there may not be a "normal" in the typical "average and most common" sense of the word.

What does a normal set of genitals look like?

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