Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

OP here, autistic, not the author.

I like how this post fights with "scalar fallacy" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8132525, http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2011/01/scalar...), prevalent in popular psychology.

My small nitpicks:

1. IMHO, the gradient (from "a bit autistic" to "highly autistic") makes sense - as long as we treat it as the first principal component of a multidimensional process. I know many people who learned that they are autistic in their 30s, as on ALL axes, their symptoms were relatively mild (especially women, who are vastly underdiagnosed). After realizing they are autistic, they often cried, explaining decades of their life and why they always felt different.

2. While I understand where "Don't assume anything about an autistic person." comes from, I disagree. If we take it literally, the word "autistic" makes no sense (as it is not related to anything). Sure, stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful + there is great neurodiversity among autistic people - "If you've met one individual with autism, you've met one individual with autism". The best antidote is Bayesian thinking - having reasonably wide priors and modifying the posterior with each measurement.

I still don’t get why Asperger is seen as a subgroup of Autism.

It's not.

Now it is not considered neither a separate unit nor a subset of autism. (As there is no meaningful distinction between Asperger Syndrome and Autism without cognitive impairment.)

I didn't understand that - "not a separate unit". What is the relation between Asperger's and Autism?

Asperger's has been eliminated as a diagnosis altogether.

Thanks.

Because when Asperger defined “autistic psychopathy” under the Nazi regime, there was a range between the “good” kind whose “special abilities” were sufficient in relation to their social deficiencies to be valuable to society and the “bad” kind where they weren't; the former were protected for their usefulness and the latter murdered (“euthanized”, officially), often at Asperger’s personal direction and entirely based on the social dangers he warned about from them, by the Nazis. So until quite recently, “Asperger’s Syndrome” persisted as the name for “good” autism.

All true, but there were actual diagnostic criteria that could be used to differentiate the subgroup from the larger one.

As opposed to Asperger seen as a Nazi war criminal?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...

That label seriously offends some people.

We need more sub-types of such a wide-ranging disorder, not fewer. It's likely autism includes combinations of several types of distinct issues anyway.

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