'Noisy' autistic brains seem better at certain tasks
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
So it is a non-science which exists to make people feel better about themselves, regardless of the actual facts?
It is absurd to base research on the presupposition that the result has to have a positive impact on the self evaluation of the readers of the research. What even is this?
The fact that "field" cares about the value judgement of the result is the problem.
What’s more, one single test cannot evaluate multiple things. It must be focused. Historically, the research has started with the bias that autism is a negative. They just start with the bias that autism is a positive.
That they call this out is not important as criticism on the current state of scientific research into autism, but it also allows the reviewers to better evaluate the research to ensure that this bias did not affect the structure or outcome of the research.
It also may spur others to re-evaluate older results to see how the unspoken cultural bias that autism is a negative affected the structure, outcomes, and analysis of that research.
You can’t take human bias out of scientific research, but that is why the scientific method is rigorous and why the review process exists. However, even then, if your reviewers are part of the same culture, cultural bias is still likely to creep in.
Both approaches are ridiculous. Maybe they should try doing science and not set up experiments to provoke an outcome? This is why the replication crisis exists.
> A shift from the medical to a more social model has also seen advocacy for it to be reframed as a difference, rather than a disorder or deficit
If you start from the presumption that autism is a disorder, you're more likely to identify difficulties, and less likely to identify strengths. And indeed, this article focuses on some strengths they identified by taking a different angle.
And the very next sentence after the one you quoted very clearly acknowledges that the strength the article discusses is directly related to a difficulty that autistic people have:
> Psychology and perception researcher David Simmons and colleagues at the University of Glasgow were the first to suggest that while high neural noise is generally a disadvantage in autism, it can sometimes provide benefits due to a phenomenon called stochastic resonance.
Medicine considers disorders which are "bad" because it wants to help. A disorder which people do not consider "bad" is automatically ignored by medicine.
The nice thing about science is that others can then challenge those assumptions, if they think it’s worthwhile.
It is totally disingenuous to claim I am "against science making assumptions". Obviously. Why do you feel the need to lie like that?
Scientists aren’t neutral observers standing outside the world. They have inherent biases and those biases shape the research that they conduct. It is both the scientific method and the scientific review process that are supposed to ensure, despite these biases, that the research was sound and the findings valid.
Setting up an experiment with the goal of demonstrating a hypothesis and then doing everything you can to achieve that goal is exactly how the replication crisis happened. That is why p-hacking occurs.
Of course scientists are biased, but they need to try to avoid it to do research. Embracing bias, "because everyone is biased" is ridiculous and legitimately insane.
Ironically, this belief that science is purely objective and exists outside a social framework is how we arrive at these types of unquestioned faulty assumptions. That’s how we get homosexuality still being in the DSM as a mental disorder until the 70s.
“Maybe autistic people have some unique strengths” is hardly the most biased or ridiculous hypothesis in modern academia.
However much of this social impairment may or may not be a real problem. "special interests" and "obsessing over one topic" is an impairment in social scenerios, but can be extremely beneficial for tasks related to that special interest.
Nothing about us without us.
“‘Noisy’ autistic brains seem better at certain tasks. Here’s why neuroaffirmative research matters”